Master of Plagues: A Nicolas Lenoir Novel

by E. L. Tettensor

  Lenoir debated lying to him, but he sensed the sailor would not believe him anyway. “No, I will not just let you go. I will arrest you.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Lenoir took a long, steadying breath. If he let his frustration boil over, it would get him killed. “Listen . . . what is your name? Nash?”

  The man blinked. “Who told you that?”

  “I have an excellent memory when I need to. It comes with the job.” What made you think of Nash, when I was asking about Ritter? Lenoir had asked the question at the Duchess, moments before the gun went off. He remembered the scene with perfect clarity now that he understood its significance. “It does not matter that I know your name. None of it matters, because it’s over. Surely you can see that.”

  “It’s not over.” Nash’s knuckles went white against the butt of his gun.

  “Of course it is. Even if you manage to kill me, you gain nothing. We have seized the cargo of Fly By Night.”

  “Yeah, we know. Must’ve been real proud of yourselves, but it makes no difference to us. We got lots of product.”

  “Product that will be worth far less in a matter of hours. We are making our own tonic, you see. Gallons of it, to be distributed for free. Soon, there will be no one to sell to, and no money to be made. It is over.”

  “It’s not over.” There was a hint of desperation in Nash’s voice. “There’ll be plenty of buyers, more than anyone can satisfy. You think you’ve stopped us? All you’ve done is forced us to move faster.”

  “Nash—”

  “Shut up, hound. I’m done talking.” The tremor was back in Nash’s arm. It no longer mattered whether it was fear or excitement; they were equally dangerous now.

  Lenoir’s finger twitched on the trigger. If he pulled it, he was dead. If he did not, he was dead. There was no doubt in his mind that Nash was going to fire. Flintlocks were inaccurate and unreliable; there was a chance Lenoir might miss, or that his gun might misfire. Nash obviously preferred to take his chances with the flintlock than find himself in Fort Hald, and Lenoir could not blame him.

  Something clicked.

  For a split second, Lenoir thought it was the tumbler in Nash’s gun releasing. Then a familiar shape strode into his peripheral vision, and he nearly swooned in relief.

  “I usually prefer a crossbow, but it doesn’t have that handy noise.” Kody cocked the second barrel of his pistol, illustrating the point. “I wanted to make sure you understood your situation.”

  Nash opted for bluster. “Put it down, or he’s dead.”

  “Let me help you out with the maths, mate. Between us, the inspector and I have four barrels on you. Unless you’re real talented with that one barrel of yours, you’ve got a problem.”

  “It’s over,” Lenoir repeated.

  “Put the gun on the ground, nice and gentle,” Kody said. “Then back away.”

  Lenoir could see the whites of Nash’s eyes. His lips pressed together. He twitched.

  Lenoir fired.

  The ball took Nash in the skull, shattering it into a red mist. The body went down like a sack of flour.

  “Shit,” said Lenoir.

  Kody frowned down at his boots. “Well that’s just great.”

  “We have bigger problems than your boots, Sergeant.”

  Kody ignored him; he was too busy wiping the toe of his boot on the underside of a windowsill.

  Lenoir knelt beside the body, but he knew it was pointless. Nash was dead before he hit the ground. “We will not be getting anything more from him.”

  “You did the right thing, Inspector. He was going to shoot. If you hadn’t pulled the trigger, I would have.” Kody let down the hammers of his pistol and shoved it back in its holster.

  Lenoir put his own gun away. “The woman you went after?”

  “Took me a minute to figure it out, but every time I got close, they’d round another corner. Seemed a little too convenient, like I was being led on. Then I remembered the shooting at the docks, how it was all a diversion.” Kody gave him a wry look. “It helped that I still had your voice ringing in my ear, telling me to question my instincts. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “No. Coincidence is not irony, though it is commonly mistaken for such.”

  Kody rolled his eyes.

  “Nash must have paid them.” Lenoir nudged the dead man’s knife with his boot. “He hoped to take me out quietly, then wait for you to come back.”

  “Then I’d get a knife in my belly.”

  “For you, Sergeant, I think he would have used the gun.”

  Kody gave a wan smile. “Wouldn’t have needed to.” He sagged against the wall. “One of the reasons I got suspicious was that I wasn’t running nearly as fast as I wanted to. I couldn’t.”

  Lenoir glanced at him. “Can you continue?”

  “Are you kidding? When we’re this close? With this one gone, that leaves the Inataari and the man in charge, assuming they’re two different people.”

  “They are. The man in charge is Ritter.”

  Kody frowned. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “The ex-purser of the Serendipity.”

  “That’s it. So we’ve been on the right track for a while now.”

  “Perhaps, but that is not good enough. Even the name is not good enough, not anymore. We are running out of time.”

  “We can get a sketch of him done pretty quickly.”

  “It will be dark in an hour. A sketch will do us no good until morning, and besides—the odds of finding him that way are slim. He knows we are onto him.”

  “You sure?”

  “When I told Nash we had seized the cargo on Fly By Night, he said, We know. Presumably, we includes Ritter.”

  Kody sighed. “He could be halfway to Berryvine by now.”

  “I don’t think so. I think Ritter is making one last push before he goes into hiding.”

  “Oh yeah?” Kody inclined his head at the dead man. “Something he said, I take it?”

  “He was convinced there were still more than enough buyers for his product. More than anyone could satisfy, he said.” Lenoir closed his eyes, trying to dredge up every detail of the conversation. “All you have done is forced us to move faster.”

  “What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “There will be plenty of buyers, he said. There will be.”

  “Future tense.” Kody sounded wary now. “That’s odd.”

  “Indeed.”

  It did not take long for Kody to draw the inevitable conclusion. “Oh, God . . . you don’t think . . .”

  Lenoir opened his eyes. Something cold and heavy had settled at the bottom of his stomach. “Why not? He created a market for himself already. Why should he hesitate to expand it? It would be so easy.”

  Ritter had been careful the first time. He had chosen the Camp because it would be easier to contain the spread of the disease. After all, it would not do to kill off too many of his prospective customers. Now that he had been discovered, and there was no longer any question of holding on to his monopoly, Ritter had no incentive to show restraint. On the contrary, the more panic he could create, the easier it would be to move his product. And the best way to sow panic is to sow death.

  “He is going to seed the city with corpses. Just like he did in the Camp, but with more bodies in more places.” So easy . . . And once it was done, there would be no undoing it. It would take weeks, maybe months, for another shipment of angel wort to arrive. By then, it would be too late. Kennian would fall to the plague, and the rest of the Five Villages with it. And after that, the neighbors. Sevarra and Kirion, and then Arrènes . . .

  Kody was upright now, eyes blazing. “We’ve got to find him. There’s got to be a way.”

  Lenoir scanned the horizon, smudged with dusk and the lingering smoke of the great fire. Lig
hts winked on in the distance, streetlamps and lanterns coming alive on hundreds of streets, in thousands of homes, as far as the eye could see, and beyond. Kennian had never seemed so vast. We don’t even know what he looks like.

  For a moment, Lenoir stood paralyzed, overwhelmed with despair. He had come so close to breaking this thing. So close to vindicating his life, to honoring the compact he had made, however unwittingly, with the Darkwalker on a cold autumn night. They had found a cure, had enough stock to keep the plague under control while another shipment made its way across the Grey. Cases outside the Camp were still relatively isolated, and Kennians were staying off the streets. The only people braving the outdoors were medicine salesmen and their desperate clients. That, and the corpse collectors . . .

  Lenoir paused.

  The corpse collectors.

  Masked. Anonymous. And few.

  “The station,” Lenoir said, “quickly. Let us hope the chief is back.”

  “The chief? How’s he going to help?”

  “I’m not sure he can, Sergeant, but we have no choice but to try.”

  The fate of an entire city depended on it.

  * * *

  “I will take any spare capacity you have, Chief.”

  Reck scowled. “See any spare capacity on your way in, Lenoir? Because when I came in, all I saw was an empty kennel.”

  “I need men. Urgently.”

  “You and me both. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been having a spot of trouble out there.”

  “I know who he is, Chief. The mastermind behind all of this. I can find him, if you just give me the manpower.”

  Reck sighed impatiently. “Look, I want to see this bastard hang as much as you do, but I’ve got bigger worries at the moment. I would’ve thought you of all people would understand that.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Lenoir slammed his palms down on Reck’s desk, upsetting an ink bottle. “This is not just about catching him. This is about stopping him. If we do not, thousands will die. Tens of thousands.”

  Reck stared at him as though he had lost his mind. “Kody, do you want to explain to me what in the flaming below has got into the inspector here?”

  “He’s going to do it again, sir,” Kody said. He leaned over the desk too, shoulder to shoulder with Lenoir. “He’s going to spread plague all over the city, unless we find him first.”

  “What do you mean, going to? Hasn’t he already?”

  “No, not at all!” Lenoir could hear how desperate he sounded, how frantic. It did not help his cause, but he could not stop himself. He could feel the seconds slipping through his fingers like fine grains of sand, each one as precious as a diamond. “What he did to the Camp was only the beginning. He wanted to keep the disease contained. It served his purpose to allow little pockets to spring up here and there, but that was all he needed to create demand. It’s different now.”

  “Why? What’s changed?”

  “What’s changed is that we know who he is,” Kody said. “His time is almost up and he knows it, so he’s doing everything he can to sell as much as possible before he makes a run for it.”

  “The best way to sell quickly is to create panic,” Lenoir said, “and if you want to create panic—”

  “You make it look like the whole city has come down with plague,” the chief said. “I get it.”

  “He’s going to do like he did in the Camp, with the corpses,” Kody said. “Only more of them, in more places. And there won’t be a river to separate them from the heart of the city.”

  “My guess is that he will pose as a corpse collector,” Lenoir said. “That way, no one will take any notice of him.”

  Reck swore and got to his feet. “So how do we find him?”

  “If it were me,” Lenoir said, “I would start with the richer neighborhoods. Meadowsmead and Primrose Park.”

  “Makes sense. Folk there won’t struggle to scrape together the coin. He’ll sell quicker.” Reck sighed again. “But even if we’re right, that’s still a lot of ground to cover.”

  Lenoir sagged against the desk, the enormity of it weighing him down. “Yes, Chief, it is. If we had the men, we could cover the local apothecaries he sells to. We could tear the docks apart until we found the warehouse with the rest of his stock. We could arrest every corpse collector in Kennian.”

  “But we don’t have the men, so let’s not waste time with fantasies.” Reck rubbed his jaw roughly. “I might be able to scrape together enough to do one of those things, and do it well. No point in spreading ourselves too thin to do any good.”

  “So which one?” Kody asked. “The docks are the surest bet.”

  “And the slowest,” Lenoir said. “By the time he comes back for the angel wort, he will have done his work with the corpses, and we may never find out where he stashed them. If we truly want to stop him, we must go for the corpse collectors.”

  Kody’s mouth pressed into a grim line, as though he had feared that answer. “It’ll be like finding a mouse in a barn.”

  “That’s one hell of a gamble, Lenoir,” Reck said.

  “Yes, it is, but I would rather take a chance on stopping him than be sure of catching him after it is too late.”

  Reck’s gaze dropped to his desk, and for a moment he just stood there, head bowed in thought. Then he looked up and said, “Let’s get on it, then.”

  They headed down the stairs to the kennel. “Where are we going to get the men?” Kody asked, glancing around at the empty desks of the sergeants and watchmen.

  “I’ve got a few off shift, who should be getting a good night’s rest.” The chief made a sour face. “So much for that.”

  “That will not get us very far, Chief,” Lenoir said.

  “No, it won’t. So we’ll be using them as commanders, each one in charge of a unit.”

  “A unit of what, exactly?” Kody asked.

  Reck spread his arms wide. “Behold your army.”

  Kody’s eyebrows flew up. “Scribes? But, Chief—”

  “They are just boys,” Lenoir said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. At least a third of them are women.”

  “Chief—”

  “You got a better idea, Lenoir?” Reck asked impatiently. “You need eyes, and these fine people have ’em.”

  “We also need muscle,” Kody said. “Ritter’s not going to come quietly. Even the real corpse collectors might put up a struggle.”

  “That’s where the off-shift officers come in. Each scribe gets a whistle. They see a miasma mask and a handcart, and they give that whistle a blast. Their sergeant or watchman comes running. That’s it.”

  Lenoir grunted. “That is . . . ingenious, actually.”

  “So pleased you think so.” Turning, Reck addressed the kennel at large. “Listen up, hounds! Drop whatever you’re doing and gather round! You’ve all been temporarily promoted to watchmen!”

  For a moment, no one moved; they just looked at one another, bewildered. A timid voice sounded from somewhere in the back. “What does that mean, Chief?”

  “It means your night is about to get interesting.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The shaft of light swung left to right, like the beam of a lighthouse, setting the cobbles aglow. The alley unfurled before them, a canyon of gloom flanked by rugged cliffs of stone. Above, dark windowpanes stared down, aloof and secretive. Lenoir paused, his lantern aloft, but nothing stirred. Apparently, the neighborhood was too rich even for rats.

  “Shall I go take a look, Inspector?” The scribe hoisted his own lantern; its glare threw his angular face into sharp relief, giving him a ghoulish appearance.

  “No. There is no one here. We move on.”

  The young man nodded. “You just say the word, though. I’m here to help.”

  “Yes, Riley, thank you.” Lenoir tried to keep th
e impatience from his voice. The scribe was overeager, but that was to be expected. He had never been out on patrol before, and though he could not possibly understand what was at stake, he took his role seriously. Lenoir was grateful for that, even if he found the young man’s presence more than a little irritating.

  They moved back into the wan glow of the streetlamps. Still nothing stirred. It was barely past the supper hour, but it might as well have been thin of the clock, so quiet was the street. A growing sense of panic thrummed at Lenoir’s nerves. He could not help imagining how many corpses Ritter might have collected by now, how many he might have distributed. Would he dump them into wells? God forbid, into the river? He shuddered, though the night was uncomfortably warm.

  Something moved at the edge of Lenoir’s vision. He whirled.

  “Oh!” The figure threw her hands in the air, sending her lantern tumbling to the street with a mighty clank. “It’s just me, Inspector!”

  Lenoir was surprised to find his gun in his hand, trained on the startled scribe. He muttered out an apology and slipped the weapon back in its holster. Shaken, the young woman stooped to retrieve her lantern.

  Get yourself together, Lenoir.

  He continued up the street, Riley striding faithfully at his side, as though oblivious to the fact that Lenoir had nearly killed one of his colleagues a moment ago. “We’ll get him, Inspector,” the young man said stoutly. Lenoir’s teeth ground together.

  A shrill sound pierced the darkness. A whistle. In an instant, Lenoir was running. He dove through the shadows, pistol back in hand, blood roaring in his ears. The whistle blasted again. Shouts sounded from just ahead. Please, Lenoir prayed, let it be him.

  No such luck. Lenoir knew it the moment he rounded the corner and saw them: the scribe, shining his lantern full upon his quarry; the corpse collector, arm thrown up to ward off the glare; the handcart, hearteningly, heartbreakingly empty.

  “What’s going on?” The corpse collector’s voice was strangely muffled behind the mask. “Who are you?”

  “Metropolitan Police,” Lenoir said, without much conviction. “Remove your mask, please.”

  The man complied. He had silver hair and deep lines on his face, sixty if he was a day. As though Lenoir needed more proof that this was not the man he sought. “We need you to come with us. This young man will accompany you to the station.”