Master of Plagues: A Nicolas Lenoir Novel (9 page)

Kody felt himself tense up as soon as the witchdoctor’s tent came into view. It was just as well he hadn’t gone to bed last night, or he’d have had nightmares about what they’d seen in that tent yesterday. He wasn’t quite ready to admit it was magic, but he didn’t have a competing theory. All he knew for sure was that
something
had happened in there, something that made every hair on his body stand on end. Some of it was probably in his head, but that tugging in his guts—that had been real. He’d nearly puked. And when the candles had been lit and he looked at Lenoir’s face, he knew the inspector had felt it too. If there had been anything less than
thousands of lives at stake, Kody wouldn’t have gone back into that place for love or money.

They threaded their way through the crowd and slipped between the stakes marking the perimeter of the tent. Kody’s shoulder brushed one of the dangling bits of leather as he passed, setting the beads clacking and the bones tinkling. He shivered.

Inside, a single figure stood silhouetted against the washed amber glow of the candles. “Good morning,” the witchdoctor said in his lilting accent.

“Oded.” Lenoir inclined his head in greeting. “I trust you are feeling stronger?”

“As strong as it is possible for me to feel.”

“Are you ready to accompany us?”

A soft sigh preceded Oded’s answer. “I am.”

Something stirred in the darkness. Kody went rigid, his hand straying to his gun as a long, thin sinew of gloom moved near the table at the far end of the tent. A voice sounded from the depths of the shadows. “Interesting.”

Kody cursed under his breath and let his hand drop. How in the Holy Host had Merden crossed the tent without him noticing? The Adal had been standing at Kody’s elbow only moments before.
Witchdoctors,
he thought irritably.

Merden shifted, and now Kody could see him clearly, hunched over the table, scrutinizing it closely. He pointed at something and asked a question in Adali, and Oded responded. Merden held up a bottle and asked another question, and so on. Sharing trade secrets, Kody supposed. He was grateful not to be able to understand a word of it.

“And your patient?” Merden asked, switching back to Braelish.

“Resting with her family.” Oded gave a tired smile. “She will recover.”

“How can you be sure?” Kody asked.

“Experience.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but Kody let it go; the witchdoctor would have to endure more than enough skepticism today.

“If we are through here,” Lenoir said, “let us be on our way. Time is not on our side.”

“No, it is not,” said Oded, “and we are about to waste more. Your physicians will not take my help.”

“They will,” Lenoir said, “if they know what is good for them.”

Merden gave him a wry look. “And if they do not? What will you do, Inspector? Throw them in prison? Threaten to shoot them?”

“I might.”

For the life of him, Kody couldn’t tell if he was kidding.

“Y
ou cannot be serious.”

Horst Lideman gaped at Lenoir as though the inspector had just ordered him to hop on one leg and bark like a dog. Which, Kody supposed, was about what it amounted to in the physician’s eyes.

“I am perfectly serious,” Lenoir said. “From what we have seen, the treatment appears to work.”

Lideman knitted his fingers atop his desk and took a deep breath, as though to compose himself. “I am a physician and scholar, Inspector, and without wishing to give offense, these”—he glanced at the two Adali hovering behind Lenoir—“
traditional remedies
have no basis in science.”

“That is true,” Merden said. “They do, however, have a basis in fact, unlike most of your science.”

Not helping,
Kody thought.

Lenoir agreed; he fired an irritated look over his shoulder at Merden. “This is not a competition. Lives are at stake, and I would hope that healers such as yourselves could put aside your philosophical differences, for now at least.”

Lideman shook his head gravely. “You don’t understand, Inspector. If this were merely a question of
philosophical differences, I might be persuaded to indulge in experimentation. But under the circumstances, it is quite impossible. These patients are under my care, and it is my duty to ensure that they receive the best medical treatment known to science. To do otherwise would be unethical.”

“A curious argument,” said Merden, “since the vast majority of the patients under your care are dying. A man of science such as yourself must surely recognize that repeating the same experiment over and over is unlikely to yield a different result. Your hypothesis is faulty, and it is past time for a new one.”

Lideman turned an ugly shade of pink. “How dare you—”

“There is no point to continue,” Oded put in. “It is always the same. These
physicians
care only for their pride.”

“You know nothing about me, sir,” Lideman said icily.

Lenoir growled and pinched the bridge of his nose, as though he were struggling not to explode. Meanwhile, the Adali and the physician continued to bicker. Kody could feel the conversation slipping away from them, and with it, their only shot. Before he could think better of it, he blurted, “What about the bruises, Doctor?”

“What about them, Sergeant?”

“The other day you said you’d never seen anyone come back from that.”

“So?”

“So we have. Yesterday.” Technically, that wasn’t quite true; they’d
heard
the woman would recover, but they hadn’t actually seen it for themselves. But Kody was pretty sure none of his companions was going to contradict him.

It didn’t matter. Lideman wasn’t buying it. “Is that so? Only yesterday, you say? And how do you know he has recovered, and is not merely experiencing a temporary improvement?”

Oded opened his mouth to reply, but Kody cut him off, determined to make his point before the argument deteriorated again. “How many times have you seen a temporary improvement in a patient who’s that far gone?” Based on what Lideman had said the last time they’d met, Kody was pretty sure he knew the answer.

The physician shifted in his seat. “None.”

“If those bruises are pretty much a death sentence, where’s the harm in letting Oded try to heal one of the patients who has them? He can’t make them any worse, right?”

Lideman sighed, regarding Kody with watery, bloodshot eyes. “Logic like that may sound compelling in the abstract, Sergeant, but these are human lives we’re talking about. Each and every one is sacred. You and I do not have the right to decide who is beyond help, and who is fit to be experimented upon.”

“But surely—”

“Are you married, Sergeant?”

Kody frowned. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no.”

“You have loved ones, I imagine. A mother, perhaps?”

“And?”

“Imagine your mother, God forbid, came down with this dreadful disease. How would you feel if I told you she was beyond help? That I would stop trying to save her, and instead planned to subject her to some heathen ritual that would almost certainly achieve nothing except to terrify her in the final hours of her life? What would you want me to do?”

It was a fair question. Kody didn’t believe in demons, and he didn’t want to believe in magic. He
did
believe in God, and he wasn’t at all certain God would approve of experimenting with witchcraft, however desperate the circumstances. But if it were his mother, and this was her only chance . . . “I’m not sure, but I would at least want to be given the choice.”

Lideman’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. Sensing an opening, Lenoir said, “You are right, Doctor—none of us here has the right to decide the fate of those who are ill. So let us ask the loved ones of a patient you deem to be terminal. Let them decide whether it is worth taking the chance.”

Lideman looked at Oded, his teeth worrying the inside of his cheek. He was hooked, though they hadn’t landed him yet. “How does it work?”

Kody winced inwardly, knowing the answer Oded would give. “It depends,” the witchdoctor said. “For the very sick ones, I must first draw out the demon.”

Lideman’s eyes snapped back to Lenoir, his mouth twisting sardonically. Lenoir held up a hand. “The explanation may not convince you, Doctor, but the results are undeniable.”

Merden
tsked
. “I do not understand you southerners. You believe in an all-powerful God, to whom you routinely pray, particularly when your loved ones are ill. How is this any different?”

“I rarely prescribe prayer, sir, and if I were to do so, it would be for the comfort of it, not the healing properties.”

Merden was undaunted. “And do you ever administer yellowdrum mushrooms for infection?”

“Of course. It is a highly effective treatment.”

“A highly effective treatment that has been used by my people for generations, yet has only recently been adopted on the Humenori continent, when the evidence before you finally became too compelling to ignore. Do you know how it works?”

Lideman didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to; his scowl said it all.

“My people believe the mushroom is a fragment of the ancient god Anadar, lord of the underworld. His tendrils lie just below the surface of the ground, spread across the land in a vast web, always searching for a
means of escape. The mushrooms are his fingertips. Like an earthworm, the god can be severed and segmented and still survive, and when the mushroom is eaten, or its spores spread over a wound, Anadar is taken into the body. If you know a little of traditional Adali religion, you know that the god of the underworld feeds upon the flesh of the dead. That is one of the reasons we burn our departed ones. But Anadar cannot consume the living. Thus, when he is taken into an infected body, he consumes the dying flesh, and when it is gone, and all that remains is healthy, living tissue, the fragment of Anadar starves to death, and he is gone, leaving the patient recovered.”

“Superstitious nonsense,” Lideman declared.

“I am certain you think so, and I am equally certain that your rejection of that explanation will not deter you from administering yellowdrum in the future. Life is full of theories that cannot be proven, and results that cannot be explained. You believe in God, in spite of the lack of tangible proof, and you administer yellowdrum, in spite of the fact that you have no idea how it works. Theory without evidence, and evidence without theory. What does it matter?”

“There is a scientific explanation for yellowdrum,” Lideman said. “We simply have not discovered it yet.”

Merden shrugged. “Perhaps. And perhaps the same is true of Oded’s treatment.”

Lideman grunted, as if he’d just swallowed a hook.

“Let us find someone who is willing to try,” Lenoir said.

The physician sighed and shook his head. “I will take no responsibility for this, Inspector, and if I am asked whether I think it will work, I will tell the truth.”

“That is reasonable,” said Lenoir. He looked relieved, and so did Merden.

As for Oded, he just scowled and said, “We must be quick, then. We have wasted too much time already.”

“There we agree,” Lideman said. “If my calculations are correct, in the time we have spent discussing this, three more people have fallen ill.”

Kody swallowed hard. “How many have died?”

Lideman fixed him with a grim look and said, “You do not want to know.”

*   *   *

It wasn’t hard to find someone willing to try something desperate. The first family Lideman brought them to refused on the grounds that witchcraft was a sin against God, but the second family didn’t share those misgivings. “If God had planned on answering my prayers, He’d have done it by now,” the father said bitterly. “Maybe the Adali gods will do better. Besides, I hear you people can cure just about anything.”

“Medicine is the gift of the Adali,” Oded said. “Even so, I cannot promise for your son. For some, it is too late.”

The man nodded resignedly. He’d already given up.
Poor bastard,
Kody thought. There were thousands of others just like him, and more by the minute.
God, I hope this works.

They set Oded up in a private tent. It was smaller than the one he used in the Adali quarter, but he said it would serve, and anyway, they couldn’t risk moving the boy that far away. Kody couldn’t help grimacing when he saw the kid, covered in great purple welts, his fingers and toes grotesquely swollen.

The witchdoctor looked his patient over ruefully. “This may not work. The demon eggs already are hatching inside. The young are born strong. They will fight.”

“You will conquer them,” Merden said.

“Perhaps, but this will not be good for teaching. It is not . . .” Oded hesitated, searching for the word.

“It is not typical,” Merden supplied.

“We can’t back out now,” Kody said. “We promised those people you’d try to heal their son.”

“And so I will, but what I must do, I cannot teach. Not to Braelish.”

Lideman drew himself up stiffly. “In that case, there is no need for me to be here.”

Oded made a weary gesture. “You misunderstand. For most cases, I can teach. For this . . . it is different.”

“Still,” said Lenoir, “it will have to serve. At least we can see for ourselves whether the treatment works. Not that we doubt you,” he added hastily, but Oded just snorted and set about his preparations.

“To my people, the disease is known as
Hatekh-sahr
,” Merden explained as he watched Oded work. “It means
marks of the demon,
for the bruises covering the body.” The soothsayer’s amber eyes followed Oded’s every move, tracking back and forth like the quill of a scribe, recording everything. Kody couldn’t help wondering if Merden’s fascination was purely intellectual, or if he planned to put what he learned to good use. “Tradition tells us that the sickness is caused by a demon entering the body through the nose and mouth. The bruises are left behind after it grapples with its victim in the dreamworld. Once inside, it lays its eggs, crowding the victim’s organs and causing them to bruise and bleed. The demon spawn feed upon the blood.”

Kody grimaced. “Durian’s arse
,
do we really need all the details?” He wasn’t usually so crude, but really—bleeding organs?

Lideman, though, seemed intrigued; he gave a thoughtful grunt from behind his scarf. “Superstition aside, it is true that when we cut open the first few cadavers, we found massive internal hemorrhaging.”

“What does that mean?” Kody asked, curious despite himself.

“It means bleeding,” said Lenoir. “They are bleeding to death from the inside out.”

“So we agree, roughly, on the cause of death,” Merden said.

Lideman gave him an incredulous look. “Very roughly indeed, sir. The College of Physicians does not consider that the disease is a result of supernatural fiends turning the human body into a crucible of the damned.”

“And what does your College of Physicians have to say about how the victim contracts the illness?” Merden seemed to be fully engaged in the conversation, yet his gaze continued to follow Oded’s progress, narrowing every now and then as something particularly interesting caught his eye. Just now, Oded was positioning a cluster of crystals in a semicircle along the boy’s left flank. The sickle shape seemed to be important somehow; it was echoed in the placement of the candles, and in a row of what looked suspiciously like human finger bones.

“It is obviously the air,” Lideman said.

That
tore Merden’s gaze away from the preparations, if only for a moment. He regarded Lideman with an arched eyebrow. “Indeed?”

“Nearly a third of my medical staff has fallen ill, several of them without ever coming into physical contact with an infected person. Bad air is the only explanation. I have ordered miasma masks for all my staff as an extra precaution. They should be ready soon.”

“Bad air.” There was more than a hint of dryness in the soothsayer’s tone. “And what causes this . . .
bad air
?”

“There are a number of theories,” Lideman said, folding his hands behind his back and assuming a professorial manner. “Some think it a punishment from God. Others argue that the miasma is like a storm, simply passing through. Myself, I am inclined to believe that it results from the burning of corpses.”

“Divine punishment, an itinerant weather system, or burning flesh.” This time, Merden’s tone was as dry as those finger bones.

If Lideman noticed, he chose to ignore it. “We have firmly established that the corpses are highly contagious, and it would explain why the plague began in the Camp.
The burning of corpses is common in the Adali quarter, is it not?”

Oded glanced up sharply, wrath brewing behind his eyes. But Merden spoke a few words in Adali, and the witchdoctor subsided, shaking his head and muttering,
“Pala.”
The word sounded like someone spitting on the floor, and Kody reckoned it meant roughly the same thing.

After a bit more fussing, Oded approached Merden, a wooden bowl in one hand, a dagger in the other. Without hesitation, Merden took the dagger and drew it sharply across his hand.