Darkwalker by E. L. Tettensor Page B

young watchman approached him at the foot of the stairs. “Sergeant Innes sent me to find you, sir. He’s at Merriton’s place.”
    “Merriton?” Lenoir frowned, riffling through his memory for the name. “The surgeon?”
    “Yes, sir. He’s with some nobleman—I think he said his name was Arleas? Anyway, he’s been beaten pretty bad. Unconscious, face like a heap of plum preserve.”
    Sighing, Lenoir nodded. Visiting a surgery was reliably unpleasant. At best it was a place of pain; at worst it offered up some of the most gruesome sights ever beheld. Lenoir would rather watch an autopsy than the work of a barber or surgeon. At least with an autopsy, the poor soul having bits of him sawn off was already dead. Still, he should be grateful for something to do that did not involve listening to Kody drone on about the corpse thief, so he thanked the watchman and headed out.
    He arrived at Merriton’s to find the situation just as the watchman had described it. On a slab in the middle of the room lay a finely dressed man of middle age, or so Lenoir judged; in truth it was difficult to tell, for he had been beaten to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. His face was grotesquely swollen: thick fleshy eyelids the size of a child’s fist, cracked lips, skin a palette of vivid purples and blues. The surgeon, Merriton, hovered above him, whistling softly to himself as he draped leeches across the unconscious man’s bruises. A short distance away, Sergeant Innes loomed over the scene like a gargoyle.
    Innes inclined his head in acknowledgment as Lenoir approached. “Morning, Inspector. Thought you’d better see this, seeing as this fella’s a nobleman and all.”
    “Arleas is his name,” Merriton supplied cheerfully. “I told you that already. I know his chambermaid quite well.” He resumed his whistling.
    Tempted as he was to comment on that detail, Lenoir focused on the task at hand. “Why didn’t you take him to a proper physician?” he asked Innes. Merriton glanced up sharply, but decided to hold his tongue.
    Innes, a great ogre of a man, shrugged his massive shoulders. “Dunno, Inspector. Only I found him not far from here, and he looked in pretty bad shape, so I just figured I’d better get him seen to quick.”
    “And quite right too,” said Merriton. “These wounds need bleeding right away, or the dark blood will infect him.”
    Lenoir suppressed a shudder. He had grown accustomed to living in Braeland over the past decade or so, even if it was considerably less advanced than Arrènes and the other civilized nations to the south. But occasionally he was reminded that this little country was scarcely more than a land bridge to the savage lands beyond, and nothing called that to mind quite so forcibly as medical matters. Situations such as these made it seem as though he had stepped back through time to the dark days before the Age of Awakening.
    The surgery looked more like a torture chamber than a place of healing. The tools of Merriton’s trade were laid out on a long table like an exhibit in a museum of the macabre: saws, carving knives, rasps, and even more sinister-looking devices whose purposes Lenoir could not even begin to guess at. A putrid smell hung in the air, vaguely reminiscent of a butcher’s on a hot day, as though the reek of rotting flesh had somehow seeped into the very floorboards. Or perhaps the smell came from the bloodstained rushes strewn beneath the patient’s slab. The thought caused Lenoir’s stomach to twist over itself.
    He turned to Innes, who was idly swatting at the flies buzzing near his ear. “Has he been unconscious since you found him, Sergeant, or did he say anything?”
    “Nothing, sir, but I found this on him.” Innes held out a letter, unsealed, which Lenoir took. It read simply,
This afternoon, tea time
. Lenoir turned it over and examined the seal. He recognized the family crest immediately, even though he had been half-drunk the last time he saw