The Red Plague Affair

Chapter Fifteen Much Larger Problems

A thickly painted statue of the Hooded Magdalen smiled pacifically from her knees, beaming at the wooden, writhing holy corpse nailed to the tau above the altar. Clare blinked, his sensitive nose untangling odours – wax, incense of a different type than that perfuming the letter still in his pocket, old stone and damp, the ash of breathing, beating Black Wark close by providing a dry acid tang.

The church had stood before the Wifekiller’s time, and those recalcitrant or conservative enough to remain under the command of the Papacy in matters of faith had preserved it fairly well. Well enough that Valentinelli, Neapolitan that he was, murmured a phrase in his native tongue and performed a curious crossing motion.

Clare caught Vance’s glance at the assassin, and knew the other mentath was storing away tiny bits of deduction and inference. Rather as he himself would.

He turned his attention away, examining the church’s interior. Pews of old dark wood, each with a rail attached to its back for those who chose to kneel, the tau corpse lit from underneath by a bank of dripping candles. The altar was a tangle of dying flowers on a motheaten red velvet cloth; four confession-closets stood along the west wall, empty. On a workaday Monday, the stone-and-brick pile was full only of echoes. Generations of nervous sweat and the effort of pleading with uncaring divinity had imparted its own subtle tang to the still air, warmed by candle-breath. Another bank of candles crouched within a narrow room tucked to the side, under icons both painted and sculpted.

Vance exhaled, a satisfied sound. “Where would you say, old chap?”

Clare caught the first note of unease in the other mentath’s tone. Ah. You are not as certain as you would like me to believe. “Certainly not the basement. Or the tower.” He took his time, enjoying the sensation of pieces of the puzzle fitting together with tiny, satisfying unheard snaps. Not under the altar, either. He turned, smartly, and his steps were hushed as he entered the domain of the saints. Valentinelli drifted after him, and Clare was absurdly comforted by the Neapolitan’s presence.

Vance had surprised the assassin once. Clare did not think such an event likely to occur a second time.

Paintings and small statues, the saints with their hands frozen in attitudes of blessing and the thin crescents or circles of haloes about their heads worked in gilt, stared with sad soot-laden eyes. Clare stood for a moment, thinking.

He is a genius, not a mentath. He is the prey of forces within himself he cannot compass, and they have driven him. The initial impulse came from another quarter, but he made the quest his own. Clare nodded thoughtfully, tapping his thin lips with one finger. Ludovico, well used to this motion, stilled. Vance breathed out softly, perhaps in appreciation of the symmetry of this small room, a tiny gem of proportions tucked away inside the larger church. A pearl of a room, nestled in an oyster’s knobbled shell.

“Only one possible choice,” Clare murmured.

Under the painting of Kosmas and Demian grafting a leg onto one of their hapless patients – spoons and medicine boxes worked in gilt-drenched paint, the sufferer’s mouth an elongated O of pain and the blood faded to a scab-coloured smear – was a shelflike table, its top a rack for a bank of small, cheap candles. The smoke from their tainted tallow was almost as foul as the yellow fog of Londinium’s coal-breath: a miniature cousin.

Clare sighed. It was a sound of consummation, and he twitched aside the rotting cloth skirting the table’s spindle-legs.

There, in the darkness, nestled in its hole, the canister sat. Perfect blown glass, still trembling with the breath of Alterative sorcery that had purged it of contaminants and occlusions, and the top, brasswork chased with charter symbols that winked out as he exhaled, their course run and their charge exhausted. Gears ringed the small perforated spigot at the top, each glowing with careful charm-ringed applications of neatsfoot oil.

“Ah,” Clare murmured. “I see, I see. Here, before the saints of physickers. You are a doctor, after all.”

“Not of Medicine,” Vance corrected, somewhat pedantically.

Miss Bannon would not like you at all, sir. The thought, absurd as it was, comforted him. And how irrational was it, such comfort? To be a mentath was to largely forgo comfort.

Except the older Clare became, the less willing he was to believe such a maxim.

“Not of Medicine, no. But of Biology, that great clockwork of Life itself. Morris believes in the divine hand. He is merely a fingernail-paring upon it.”

“Very poetic,” Vance sniffed. “That is the mechanism?”

It was Clare’s turn to become pedantic. “It is a mechanism. One used to contaminate those who came to pray to the saints of Physickers for aid. There are nine more scattered through Londinium, and there” – he pointed at the clockwork’s bright-shining face – “there, you see, is the reason why we are too late. He set it to exhale just after Mass, when the devout would be praying to their saints. Then they go forth from the church, and carry death with them. The beast is loose.”

“Dear God.” Vance had actually paled. Clare ascertained as much with a swift glance, then returned to studying the clockwork.

To measure off time, rather as one would measure boiling an egg. Very clever. And then… yes, pressurised, and there is the release. And it comes out. Not steam, though. High temperature presumably deadens the effect.

He heard the soft thump and the sounds of struggle, but it was a predetermined outcome. Valentinelli had a matter of honour to avenge, and Clare perhaps should be grateful that the Neapolitan remembered Clare required the damn criminal taken alive.

“Bastarde,” Ludo breathed, rather as he would to a lover, as Vance’s struggles diminished. If a man could not inhale, he could not fight, and when respiration was choked off by Valentinelli’s capable, muscle-corded forearm, even the most canny criminal mentath in the history of Britannia ceased his frantic motions very soon.

“Be careful with him, my dear Italian,” Clare murmured. “I rather think I need his faculties to solve this puzzle.”

“He is a motherless whoreson,” the assassin spat, apparently unaware of the irony of such an utterance.

“That may well be.” Clare sighed and reached forward carefully, touching the smooth, cold glass of the canister with one dry fingertip. “But at the moment, we have much larger problems.”