Master of Plagues: A Nicolas Lenoir Novel

by E. L. Tettensor

  Lenoir paused.

  “Headache?” he asked, as neutrally as he was able.

  “A bit, yeah.” Kody had paused too, before he answered, a silence as swift and shattering as a lead ball.

  Lenoir’s breath quickened. “If you are feeling ill, Sergeant, you should report to Merden immediately. We cannot take any chances.”

  Kody met his gaze, and there was something in his hazel eyes that made Lenoir go cold. “Sergeant . . .”

  Kody swallowed, looked away. “I was going to tell you,” he said quietly. “As soon as we were through here. Now, I guess.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Kody said nothing.

  All the little pieces started to fall now, remembered images drifting through Lenoir’s mind like the ragged bits of a torn painting. Kody sweating. Kody rubbing his temples. Kody in a foul mood, brooding and snapping . . .

  “Are you . . . Sergeant, do you have . . . ?” Only a tremendous act of will prevented Lenoir from taking a step backward.

  “Seems like.” The reply was barely audible.

  “Are you certain?”

  Kody hitched a shoulder. He gazed out over the bay. “Merden thinks so.”

  “You’ve spoken to Merden about this?”

  “Last night. I started feeling pretty bad about this time yesterday, so I thought I should check in . . .” Kody’s voice had gone dull, as though he had spent every ounce of emotion he had.

  Lenoir’s blood roared in his ears. He has it. Plague. Kody has plague. It did not seem real, no matter how many times he repeated it in his head. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He should be furious. He was furious. Kody had put him at risk. Had put the public at risk. But another concern took precedence, and before Kody could answer, Lenoir asked a different question. “Did he give you the tonic?”

  Kody nodded. “I’ve been taking it, and some other stuff, every hour, or at least as often as I could without you seeing. Doesn’t work, though. Merden says I need the other treatment. Today. Without it . . . Well, you know.”

  The words battered Lenoir like hailstones, swift and hard, leaving an icy feeling sliding down his spine. He could not believe it. That it should be Kody, of all people. He would have thought he was long past being disappointed by the injustice of the world. Not so, apparently. He could taste the outrage at the back of his throat, bitter as bile.

  “I was supposed to go back this afternoon,” Kody went on, “but then the shooting . . . I broke my promise. He’ll have told Crears by now.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, I guess.”

  Lenoir took a breath to compose himself. He could not afford to give in to fear or fury, not yet. The sergeant deserved better than that. “We must go,” he said. “Immediately.”

  Kody held up a hand. “Thanks, Inspector, but you don’t need to come along. You’ve got things to do. Besides, I don’t think I even believe in . . .” Kody trailed off, his gaze going somewhere over Lenoir’s shoulder. He frowned into the distance. “Look at that.”

  “Whatever it is, it can wait!” Lenoir snapped. “We need to get you to the Camp now.”

  “I know, it’s just . . . Awful lot of smoke over there.”

  Lenoir glanced instinctively over his shoulder. “Never mind that, it is not our . . .” Now it was his turn to trail off, momentarily distracted by the magnitude of what he was looking at. In the midst of the general haze, a dark cloud swelled like an angry thunderhead. It was difficult to be sure, but he thought it was coming from near the market square. It was most certainly not coming from a chimney. “That one is out of control,” he admitted.

  “A whole building, by the looks of it.”

  Even as they watched, the cloud continued to grow, thick and malevolent. A bad one, Lenoir thought. A strange glow appeared over the rooftops, as if the buildings themselves were made of coal.

  “It’s really going,” Kody said, his frown deepening. “I wonder if anyone— Shit!” A tongue of flame leapt into the sky, as brief and fierce as a flash of lightning. “I think we’d better check it out, Inspector.”

  Lenoir almost laughed out loud. “Have you lost your mind? You have other matters to attend to.”

  “Yeah, but look at that. It’s bad. There are hardly any hounds in the city. They’re gonna need our help.”

  “Then I’ll go. You head to the Camp immediately.”

  “Just as soon as this is done. I’m not feeling too bad. You saw how I chased that bloke down on the pier. I can help.”

  “You can, but that does not mean you should.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? It’s my job. If I wasn’t ready to die for it, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Lenoir could not believe what he was hearing. Commitment to one’s duty was well and good, but this . . . “This is not heroism, Kody. This is foolishness.”

  “I’m not trying to be a hero. I’m trying to be a hound.”

  “Go. That is an order, Sergeant.”

  Another flash of lightning, and this one came with thunder, of a sort—a distant boom sounded, as of something collapsing. The smoke rose higher, tumbling over itself. A glow like the inside of a forge soaked the sky.

  Kody’s eyes were pleading. “You know I’m right. You know it, Inspector.”

  Lenoir swore viciously. “Very well,” he started to say, but Kody was already moving.

  CHAPTER 22

  They pounded up the boardwalk for the second time that day, but this time, there was no criminal to catch, no weapon to hand that would be any help. Technically, this was an affair for fire brigades and watchmen. But with most of the Metropolitan Police force manning the barricades, watchmen would be few and far between. Every pair of hands was needed. Even Kody’s.

  After a few blocks, they could hear the bells, shrill and urgent. Lenoir hoped he was right about it coming from the market district. At least then, some of the shops would be insured, and therefore protected by a fire brigade. Judging by what they had seen from the docks, however, the fire was already beyond the help of buckets and hoses. It must have started hours ago, while Lenoir and Kody were busy chasing the phantom shooter. They will be at the fire hooks already, he thought. He wondered how many buildings would have to be pulled down.

  The closer they drew, the more difficult the going became. Streets that had been deserted a few hours before were now full to bursting. Fear of the plague could not possibly compete with something as titillating as the drama unfolding in the market district, and gawkers and gossips choked the narrow alleys. People stretched out of open windows like snails reaching from their shells, calling out to one another as they described the scene, real or imagined, in the distance. Lenoir and Kody jostled their way through the press, shoving and swearing and issuing the occasional threat. As if that were not bad enough, the way soon grew even more clogged as people fleeing the fire began to trickle out of the market district, only to become tangled up in the flotsam and jetsam of onlookers. Lenoir tried to imagine how a fire engine, even the hand-pulled kind, would negotiate its way through. They will not, he concluded. If they had not already arrived on the scene, they would never do so now.

  “There.” Kody pointed, and they banked west. Or at least they tried to; a small wagon stood in their way, the horse stamping and muttering agitatedly as its owner loaded up his belongings.

  “Get this thing out of the road,” Lenoir snapped. “The way must remain clear!”

  The man barely glanced at him. “I’m almost finished. I’ll not have everything I own burned to ash. I have six children to feed.”

  “The fire is blocks away,” Lenoir said.

  “You feel that wind? It’ll be headed this way soon enough.”

  Kody grabbed the horse’s bridle. “You heard the inspector. Move this cart now, or I’ll move it myself.” He gave no hint of illness now. His bearing was as straight and strong as always. It was as if the win
d had filled his sails once again, however temporarily.

  The man glared at Kody, but he did not dare to argue. Instead, he called up to an open window, and moments later, his family appeared. He loaded them into the wagon and trundled off down the alley.

  “He’s right, you know,” Kody said. “The wind is going to blow the fire this way.”

  “All the more reason why the roads need to remain clear for the fire brigades.”

  A distant roar filled the air, as if a giant bellows had been stoked. Smoke rolled over the rooftops.

  “Something just took light,” Lenoir said. “Highly combustible, by the looks of it. A glazier, perhaps.” There were several in the market district, including Willard’s, a boutique famous throughout Humenor for its elegant glass chandeliers. Technically, glaziers were illegal within the city walls, along with foundries, smithies, and other businesses that stocked flammable materials. In practice, however, they were tolerated—an indulgence the city of Kennian might rue after today.

  A few more twists and turns and they came upon it at last, a scene that would stay with Lenoir for the rest of his days. A towering inferno engulfed the entire row of buildings on one side of the street. The heat of it stung his cheeks, and an unpleasantly warm breeze ruffled his hair. For a moment, he could only stare, transfixed by the sheer enormity of it. It was as if he looked upon the below itself, at the flaming prisons every God-fearing man was taught to dread. Only instead of the souls of the damned, these flaming prisons trapped living souls. Lenoir could see at least three groups of them, perhaps eight people in all. They leaned out of windows, waved frantically from above parapets. Where are the ladders? It was a desperate, irrational thought. Lenoir could tell at a glance that most of the buildings were too far gone. Leaning a wooden ladder against them would simply be adding another log to the fire.

  “Holy Durian’s ghost,” Kody breathed. “Where do we even start?”

  The fire brigade seemed to be equally at a loss. A fire engine mounted on a skid pumped a feeble stream of water, but the tank was too small, the hose too short, to do much good. A pair of watchmen presided over a bucket line, but this too was an exercise in futility. The heat prevented them from getting too close; most of the time, the water did not even reach the flames. When it did, it hissed out of existence as though it had never been. Meanwhile, firemen scrambled around with ladders and blankets, trying to find a way to get to the people trapped inside. They are already lost, Lenoir thought grimly. Most likely the firemen knew it too, but they had no choice but to try. Lenoir squeezed his eyes shut in a vain attempt to banish the sting of smoke and despair.

  Flames leapt into the sky, reaching precariously close to the jetties leaning out on the far side of the street. It was only a matter of time before the fire leapt the gap. Already, the lower floors of a building on the eastern side of the street had taken light, probably ignited by debris from the explosion that had blown out the windows on the ground floor of the building opposite. A great gaping maw fringed with broken glass was all that was left of the storefront, but Lenoir recognized it all the same. He had been right about the glazier: it was Willard’s after all. What a shame, some distant, detached part of him thought. It was the only true art in the city. . . .

  “Should we join the bucket line?” Kody’s voice brought Lenoir back to the here and now.

  “No point. It is a lost cause.” In fact, it was worse than that; it was a waste of manpower. As good a place to start as any. Lenoir headed over. “You men—forget those buckets and concentrate on clearing the area!”

  It took a moment for the watchmen commanding the line to realize who he was, but even when they did, they did not exactly rush to follow his orders. “The fire brigade told us to keep at it,” one of them said.

  “Are you blind, or merely a fool?” Lenoir pointed at the merciless wall of flames. “You have not made a dent in that fire, nor will you. It is too late for that.”

  “He’s right,” Kody said. “These buildings are lost. All we can do now is try to prevent it from spreading.” As he spoke, a galaxy of glowing embers swirled above the burning buildings, threatening to blow onto the rooftops opposite.

  “What do you want us to do?” the other watchman asked.

  “Round up these men and start evacuating the adjacent blocks. Divide them into teams to cover as much ground as possible. Go, now!”

  The bucket line began to break up—agonizingly slowly. Most of the men had been out of earshot of the exchange; they were confused about the sudden change of plans. Nor were they the only ones.

  “Hey!” Lenoir turned and found himself nose to nose with a meaty fellow with close-cropped hair. “Just what in the below do you think you’re doing!” He wore the livery of the fire brigade, and had some sort of badge pinned to his chest, proclaiming him chief of the Whitmarch Firefighters.

  “Deploying your resources in a logical fashion,” Lenoir said. “The buckets are a waste of effort.”

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “I am Inspector Lenoir of the Metropolitan Police.”

  “I don’t care if you’re the sodding King of Braeland! I’m in charge here, and I say where and how my men are deployed!”

  The watchmen were officers of the Metropolitan Police, and Lenoir had every right to give them orders—but it would do no good to say so. He needed this man’s cooperation if he was going to achieve anything. “I apologize,” he said. “But surely you must agree that it is too late for buckets. Our only course now is to begin making firebreaks.”

  The man scowled, and for a moment Lenoir feared he was one of those officials with more pride than sense. Then he said, “I’ve already sent my men for gunpowder. In the meantime, all we have is fire hooks.”

  “Then why are you not using them?”

  “We are, on the other side of the block, where it meets Kingsway. But we don’t dare start pulling things down here. The streets are too narrow—we’d just end up burying ourselves in rubble.”

  He is right. Lenoir swore under his breath and rubbed his jaw. “How long will it take for the gunpowder to get here?”

  “Not too long. Our warehouse is down at the docks.”

  “The docks?” Kody echoed in dismay. “But aren’t you from Whitmarch?”

  “It’s illegal to store gunpowder anywhere but the docks. Thought a police officer would know that. Anyway, it’s not that far away.”

  “Farther than you think,” Kody said. “The streets are jammed with people.”

  “And the more the fire spreads, the more wagons and handcarts there will be,” Lenoir added.

  The fireman shook his head in disgust. “Dammit, if people came to lend a hand instead of fleeing like a bunch of rats from a sinking ship . . .”

  Lenoir was only half listening, distracted by a sudden scramble along the facade of one of the burning buildings. The firemen had finally found a place to lean their ladder, and were hustling a woman and her two children out of a window. Thank God for that. As for the other trapped souls, he could no longer see any sign. Either they had found a way out, or they had already perished.

  Lenoir started to ask whether the rest of the block had been evacuated when he noticed a new tendril of smoke—on the wrong side of the street. “Look there.”

  Kody and the fireman followed his gaze, and they both swore. “There goes another block,” the fireman said. “Damn this wind!”

  “Can’t you turn your hose on it?” Kody asked. “It would do more good up there than down here.”

  “Not enough water pressure. Can’t get past the second floor.”

  “Buckets?”

  “Not without more manpower. Goddamn it!” The fireman stormed off—to what purpose, Lenoir could not imagine.

  “It’s heading east,” Kody said. “And we’re not far from the poor district . . .”

  At least in the market
district, most of the buildings were made of stone and brick. Many had illegally built wooden jetties on top as a way of stealing an extra few feet of space, but at least the skeletons of the buildings could withstand the flames. The poor district, with its cramped jumble of wood and thatch, was little more than a pile of kindling. And beyond that lay the docks. Hemp and timber, tar and pitch, whale and linseed oil—a hundred substances just yearning to be set aflame, to burn hotter than the flaming pits of the below. And then there is the gunpowder . . . enough for the entire royal navy. “The fire must not reach the docks,” Lenoir said. “If it does, this city will burn to the ground.”

  “All right, what do we do?” Kody asked. A sheen of sweat had broken out on his brow, soaking the hair at his temples into gentle curls. It was more than the heat of the fire.

  He is getting worse, Lenoir thought grimly. The exertion was costing him. And if he was showing it, he was suffering it tenfold, for Lenoir had learned by now that Bran Kody was very good at concealing discomfort. He started to say something, then thought better of it. The decision had been made. There was no going back on it now.

  “We need to clear the streets,” he said, “and evacuate a wider perimeter.”

  “But how do we do both? If we evacuate, the streets will be even more clogged. The gunpowder will never get through, and then we won’t be able to blast out firebreaks . . .”

  Lenoir squeezed his eyes shut and tried to concentrate, to block out every thought that did not belong—of Kody, of plague, of regrets and rash decisions.

  Think, Lenoir. Think!

  He mapped out the area in his head, just as he had done that day in Evenside, when he had been chasing down the art thief. The memory gave him an idea. “We will route them toward Kingsway,” he said. “The avenue is wide enough to accommodate plenty of traffic. We will keep Aldwich and Baker’s Lane free.”