Master of Plagues: A Nicolas Lenoir Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR DARKWALKER

  “[Darkwalker] is wonderfully weird, fantastically far-fetched, and a riveting read.”

  —Kings River Life Magazine

  “Take Sherlock Holmes’s London, change the name, and place it somewhere else with another cultural group nearby that transects it, and take the dark, dreary factor way up. This is where our story takes place . . . and it is mesmerizing . . . an outstanding debut novel.”

  —That’s What I’m Talking About

  “What a fantastic start . . . a dark fantasy detective story that takes readers on a dark, sometimes disturbing journey. E. L. Tettensor crafts a tale that makes you think even while you shudder—a delightful combination. Darkwalker is brilliant!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “History and mystery spark in this effervescent series debut.”

  —My Bookish Ways

  “A new paranormal mystery series featuring an intriguing main character and rich, thorough world building; once the story takes off, it does not stop . . . surprising and fantastic.”

  —The Bibliosanctum

  “A fantastic debut novel set in a wonderfully realized world.”

  —Nothing but the Rain

  Books by E. L. Tettensor

  Darkwalker

  Master of Plagues

  ROC

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland |Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Copyright © E. L. Tettensor, 2015

  Map by Cortney Skinner

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  ISBN 9781101626108

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Praise

  Books by E. L. Tettensor

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  Maps

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  For Danielle, with thanks for taking a chance

  PROLOGUE

  Drem lurched through the mist, putting one foot resolutely in front of the other, his boots slurping in time with the throbbing of his head. Cold, wet droplets soaked his brow. How much of it was weather, and how much sweat, he couldn’t tell. He raised a hand to his forehead and found what he expected: warm, even through the damp. It’s fever, all right, he thought. Isn’t that just perfect? All he wanted was to lie down, to curl up in a corner of his shack and sleep, but if he didn’t put in his time at the clinic, he wouldn’t eat today. Just a little farther, he told himself. Maybe Sister Rhea will let you rest a bit before she puts you to work. The nun was a kindly sort—you’d have to be, running a clinic in a slum—and she wasn’t likely to be too demanding once she saw the state Drem was in.

  The mist turned to drizzle as he slogged on. Drem started to shiver. The fog swept in, a foul gauze clinging to the cankers that passed for dwellings, the seeping gouges that served as roads. The main avenue, already quiet, began to clear as the slum’s residents fled the weather. A trio of ragged Adali children gathered their pebbles up out of the mud and scattered, bounding away like startled deer. On the other side of the road, a woman selling bread cursed a salty streak as she tried to hustle her wares inside before they were ruined. Summer in the Camp, Drem thought wryly. God, he hated this place.

  He could hear coughing from several of the shacks he passed. Women and children, old men and young, they all sounded the same—gusty, crackling whoops that made Drem’s chest tighten in sympathy. Half the Camp seemed to have it. It’s that damn cough that’s doing it, he thought. Has to be. Nothing but plague could account for so many deaths in such a short span of time. It didn’t explain why no one had come to claim the bodies, but maybe that wasn’t so strange. This was the Camp, after all; a bigger collection of indigent, anonymous wretches had never been. Wretches like you, Drem Eldren. If the cough got him too, would anyone care? Sister Rhea, maybe. Then again, maybe not. The nun had seen so much of death, especially these past few days. Most likely, the sight of Drem’s corpse wouldn’t inspire much more than the usual sigh and shake of her head. Another of God’s children called home, she’d say, as though life were nothing more than the brief distractions of a child, a game of pebbles in the street.

  Up ahead, a shape appeared in the fog: a blood-colored hand reaching, disembodied, through the veil. At last. With the clinic in sight, Drem managed to liven his gait a little. The healer’s flag rolled gently as the rain picked up, the crimson hand seeming to wave him inside.

  The stench hit him as soon as he pushed through the tent flap: sweat and bedpans, herbs and potions, pestilence and decay. Drem should have been used to it by now, but in his fevered state, it was almost too much for him; he had to fight down a wave of nausea.

  “Ah, good.” Sister Rhea glanced up from whatever medicine she was preparing, her warm eyes crinkling at the fringes. “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t see you this morning.”

  Drem scanned the small vestibule, but saw only bloody rags and brown medicine bottles. “Just me today, Sister?”

  “Not quite, but we’re definitely shorthanded. It’s the weather, I think.” The nun meted out a few drops of dark liquid into a glass of water. Her shadow, grotesquely elongated in the lamplight, mimicked the gesture against the stained sheet separating the vestibule from the patient beds.

  “Didn’t see the wheelbarrow outside,” Drem said. He hoped that meant one of the other volunteers had taken it. Let someone else collect the corpses for once.

  “No, thank the Lord, it’s still out back. We’ve not had any reports this morning.
It’s a blessed relief, after the last few days. I was beginning to think we had an epidemic on our hands. So many dead . . .” As she spoke, a tattered cough sounded from the other side of the partition, as if warning the nun not to count her blessings just yet.

  “It’s that cough, I reckon,” Drem said. “Killing ’em left and right.”

  The nun hummed thoughtfully. “I don’t think so. More like the flux, from the condition of the bodies, though that’s not quite right either. The flux doesn’t cause that kind of bruising, and it certainly doesn’t do that to the eyes.”

  Drem shuddered. He’d almost managed to forget the eyes. He had no fear of dead bodies—could hardly work in a clinic if he did—but the ones he’d been collecting lately were different. Those corpses haunted his nightmares. The purple welts, the distended bellies—those were bad enough. But the eyes . . . He couldn’t begin to guess what caused a man’s eyes to bleed like that. He supposed he didn’t want to know.

  Someone moaned from the patient beds, calling for water. Sister Rhea scarcely seemed to notice; she was too busy looking at Drem. Her expression was pinched, unsettling. “Are you all right? You’re white as a sheet.”

  Instinctively, Drem touched his forehead again. Even warmer. “I’m fine, Sister. Thank you.” He needed to put in at least a little work today, or he wouldn’t feel right taking the food. If he’d wanted outright charity, he wouldn’t have volunteered at the clinic in the first place.

  “You don’t look fine.” The nun set the glass of water down on her medicine table. “You’re sweating, and . . . Is your nose bleeding?”

  Drem’s fingers brushed his nostrils and came away smeared with blood. He grunted in surprise. “Looks like. I didn’t know.” He accepted a handkerchief. “Thank you, Sister.”

  “Sit down, please.” The nun gestured at her own chair. “Have you been coughing?”

  “No, Sister.”

  “Pain in your chest? Shortness of breath?”

  “No, Sister. Just woke up with a headache, is all, and now this fever. The nosebleed . . . that’s new.”

  “Take a deep breath, please.” The nun pressed an empty glass between Drem’s shoulder blades and bent her ear to it. Embarrassed, Drem did as he was told, breathing in and out, in and out, until Sister Rhea was satisfied. “Your lungs sound fine.”

  I could’ve told you that. “I do feel a bit light-headed, though.” Even as he said the words, tiny specks of light swarmed in his vision. He felt something warm and sticky on his upper lip.

  “Tip your head back!” Sister Rhea grabbed the handkerchief and clamped his nose with it. Moments later, Drem tasted blood at the back of his throat. Now he did cough, and once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. He hacked until his eyes watered, until he could hardly breathe. Droplets of red spattered the sheet wall in front of him, spreading like tiny ink stains. When at last the spasm subsided, he found himself doubled over and gasping for breath, clutching his nose and wondering how in the below a grown man came down with a gushing nosebleed.

  He was going to ask Sister Rhea, but when he raised his head, the look on the nun’s face made his heart stutter. “What is it, Sister?”

  “Your eyes.” The nun hesitated. “They’re . . . well, I’m afraid they’re bleeding.”

  CHAPTER 1

  The shot almost took him.

  If Lenoir had been wearing a hat, it would have been blown clean off. As it was, he felt his hair move as the bricks above his head exploded into dust, sending a shower of debris down the inside of his collar. Cursing, Lenoir ducked back around the corner of the building, fumbling for his own gun. Fool. You should have guessed he would be armed. Civilians rarely carried pistols, but this was no small-time thief. He had killed before, and left the auctioneer unconscious. Slow down, Lenoir. Think before you act. He would be damned if he got himself killed over a painting—and a crude, tacky, Braelish painting at that.

  Cocking the hammer of his flintlock, Lenoir peered cautiously around the corner, but his quarry was nowhere to be seen. He stepped out from the cover of the wall, his gaze raking every trash heap, every doorway, every shadowed corner. The alley stretched on, empty, for another fifty feet before hitting Warrick Avenue. Lenoir hesitated, puzzled. He cannot have run that fast. Where could he . . . ?

  A sound drew his eyes upward, and he caught a glimpse of movement. The thief was scrambling hand over hand up a drainpipe. Lenoir aimed his gun and fired, but he missed by a wide margin, earning himself a second dust shower. The thief did not so much as flinch, and within moments he was over the parapet and out of sight. Lenoir swore. He could not possibly follow; his body was thoroughly unequal to the task. His mind, though, might do better. He imagined himself standing on the roof, scanning his surroundings.

  Warrick Avenue was too wide to cross from the rooftops. The thief would have to climb down first, and that would take too much time. He had not leapt across the alley, or Lenoir would have seen him. That left south toward Ayslington Street, or west toward Bridgeway. An athletic man might make the jump across Bridgeway—and the thief was obviously athletic, having made short work of the drainpipe. But it would be risky, and Lenoir doubted his man was any more eager than he to get himself killed over a painting, no matter how inexplicably valuable it might be. Ayslington would be the easier jump, for the streets were narrower than the avenues. South, then, he concluded, and sprinted back up the alley.

  He banked onto Bridgeway and nearly collided with a fruit stand. Avoiding it landed him right in the thick of the foot traffic, and he had to put his shoulder into it, bowling a path for himself and ignoring the outraged cries that followed in his wake. He glanced up at the eaves as he ran, but there was no sign of the thief. No matter. His course is clear.

  Just as he reached Ayslington Street, someone blasted into him from the side, throwing him into the path of an oncoming carriage. Lenoir might have met his end right there had he not been wrestled aside by a pair of meaty arms. The carriage rumbled past, so close that the hoofbeats seemed to ricochet inside Lenoir’s skull, drowning out even the cursing of the startled driver.

  “Sorry, Inspector.” Sergeant Kody brushed at Lenoir’s coat in a feeble attempt to right it. “Didn’t see you coming.”

  “Clearly.” Lenoir twisted out of the sergeant’s grasp. He was not sure what irritated him more: that Kody had stumbled onto the thief’s trail through sheer luck, or that he was not even winded from the chase. Lenoir, for his part, had to brace his hands against his thighs to catch his breath. His eyes scoured the rooftops. Nothing. “Damn! We missed him!”

  “I heard a shot, but I wasn’t sure . . .” Kody trailed off as he followed Lenoir’s gaze. “He’s up there?”

  Lenoir ignored the question. He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating. Once again, he mapped out the block in his mind. Bridgeway to his right, Warrick to his left . . . They had reached the boundaries of Old Town, and Bridgeway would soon curve off to the west, leaving a narrow alley to continue on straight, like a tributary of a much larger river. He could make that jump and head west, but . . . Lenoir shook his head. “There is nowhere for him to go.”

  “How do you figure that?” Kody gestured at the rooftops across Ayslington Street. “The end of that block hits the water. He could jump in the river and just swim away.”

  “With a four thousand–crown painting in his pack? I think not.”

  “West, then. He could jump the alley where Bridgeway curves off.”

  “Old Town,” Lenoir snapped. “Peaked roofs.” Then it dawned on him. He turned and bolted back the way he had come, leaving Kody to follow. He could only hope the thief had lost time to indecision, or they might be too late. “Get your crossbow ready, Sergeant!”

  By the time they got back to the alley, Lenoir was fit to collapse, but somehow he managed to calm his breathing as he trained his pistol on the narrow track of sky above his head, cocking the ha
mmer of the second barrel. “Be ready.”

  The sergeant frowned down the sight of his crossbow. “How will we know where—”

  “Quiet.”

  They had only a fraction of a moment to react. The crescendo of footfalls, the scrape of roof tiles, the faintest grunt of exertion—then the fluttering black cloak appeared overhead. Lenoir fired. He knew he had missed the moment he squeezed the trigger, but as always, Bran Kody found his mark. The thief did not scream, but Lenoir knew the bolt had taken him, for the man missed his jump and slammed onto the edge of the roof. He scrabbled at the tiles, but it was a lost cause; he plucked them loose like so many feathers, sending them spinning to the cobbles below, and soon after he followed them. Now he did scream.

  He was still screaming when Kody flipped him over and wrenched his arms behind his back. The feathered end of a bolt protruded from his thigh. Lenoir procured the iron cuffs, but he could not get the man to stop writhing for long enough to get them on; after a cursory attempt, he left the business to Kody.

  “No offense, Inspector,” Kody said, “but I’m not sure why you find these so difficult. They’re simple enough. See?” He demonstrated, as if he were teaching a child how to tie his shoes.

  “No, Sergeant, I’m afraid I do not see. These Braelish devices are needlessly complicated. Give me a T-chain, and I am content. One does not need to weigh two hundred pounds to subdue the perpetrator while one fumbles with one’s keys. A simple twist will do the job.”

  Kody looked at him askance. “Sure will, and crush his wrists in the bargain. Kind of barbaric, don’t you think?” With a final crank, he locked the second cuff and shoved the thief onto his belly.

  “I was not aware the objective was to make the criminal comfortable.”

  “What if the guy’s innocent?”

  Lenoir stooped to retrieve the thief’s fallen pack. “If he is innocent, you should not have him in restraints.” He jammed his hand inside the pack, only to hiss and withdraw it again. A bead of blood appeared on his thumb.