The Tasters Guild Read online

  Also by Susannah Appelbaum:

  The Hollow Bettle

  The Poisons of Caux, Book I

  For Harper and Henry,

  the Winds blow just for you

  Contents

  COVER

  OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PREVIOUSLY, IN BOOK I, The Hollow Bettle

  Part I: Templar

  CHAPTER 1 The Calligrapher

  CHAPTER 2 Ink

  CHAPTER 3 Peps

  CHAPTER 4 Thwarted

  CHAPTER 5 The Child of the Prophecy

  CHAPTER 6 Alewives

  CHAPTER 7 The News

  CHAPTER 8 The Tapestries

  CHAPTER 9 Delivery

  CHAPTER 10 The Secret Language of Flowers

  CHAPTER 11 The Deadly Dose

  CHAPTER 12 Dumbcane’s Shop

  CHAPTER 13 C Is for “Crow”

  CHAPTER 14 Scourge Bracken

  CHAPTER 15 The Elevator

  CHAPTER 16 Departure

  CHAPTER 17 Six

  CHAPTER 18 The Cure

  CHAPTER 19 The Charm

  CHAPTER 20 Troubled Waters

  CHAPTER 21 Foul Mood

  CHAPTER 22 A Cautionary Note

  CHAPTER 23 Fog

  CHAPTER 24 The Snodgrass Toad

  CHAPTER 25 No Vacancy

  CHAPTER 26 Rhustaphustian

  CHAPTER 27 Tribunal

  CHAPTER 28 The Gallery

  CHAPTER 29 The Cafeteria

  CHAPTER 30 Farewell

  CHAPTER 31 Springforms

  CHAPTER 32 The True Nature of Plants

  CHAPTER 33 The Uninvited Visitor

  CHAPTER 34 Peps’s Story

  Part II: Rocamadour

  CHAPTER 35 Red

  CHAPTER 36 Gripe

  CHAPTER 37 The Wall

  CHAPTER 38 Mind Garden

  CHAPTER 39 The Sewer

  CHAPTER 40 Down

  CHAPTER 41 Bitter Swill

  CHAPTER 42 The King’s Flower

  CHAPTER 43 Malapert

  CHAPTER 44 The Riddle

  CHAPTER 45 The Reply

  CHAPTER 46 Tea and Sympathy

  CHAPTER 47 Professor Breaux’s Moonlit Garden

  CHAPTER 48 The Ladder

  CHAPTER 49 The Plan

  CHAPTER 50 Something That Grows

  CHAPTER 51 Truax

  CHAPTER 52 Kingmaker

  CHAPTER 53 The Catacombs

  CHAPTER 54 Hallowed Ground

  CHAPTER 55 Capture

  CHAPTER 56 Gloamwort

  CHAPTER 57 The Final Exam

  CHAPTER 58 The Dose

  CHAPTER 59 Shadow

  CHAPTER 60 Arrivals

  CHAPTER 61 Caged Reverie

  CHAPTER 62 The Petition

  CHAPTER 63 The Chapter Room

  CHAPTER 64 Breaux’s Bouquet

  CHAPTER 65 Flight

  CHAPTER 66 Truax

  CHAPTER 67 The Crypt

  CHAPTER 68 Hallowed Ground

  CHAPTER 69 The Pimcaux Doorway

  Part III: Pimcaux

  CHAPTER 70 Not Pimcaux

  CHAPTER 71 Wilhelmina

  CHAPTER 72 A Change of Attire

  CHAPTER 73 The Ribbon Tree

  CHAPTER 74 Four Sisters

  CHAPTER 75 Six

  CHAPTER 76 Klair and Lofft

  CHAPTER 77 Thin Air

  CHAPTER 78 Clothilde

  CHAPTER 79 The Grange

  CHAPTER 80 Mr. Foxglove

  CHAPTER 81 The Masquerade

  CHAPTER 82 Reunion

  CHAPTER 83 The King

  CHAPTER 84 The Thorn

  CHAPTER 85 The Ring

  CHAPTER 86 Caucus

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Previously, in

  BOOK I

  THE HOLLOW BETTLE

  The Deadly Nightshades were cruel and villainous rulers, and in that they took great pride. They enjoyed misery, so naturally they perpetuated mistrust and deceit among their subjects. Replacing Caux’s long traditions of scholarship and healing, King and Queen Nightshade preferred instead to use herbs to poison rather than cure. To dine in their uneasy realm of Caux was to take your very life in your hands—indeed, you were unlikely to survive your next meal without a Guild-accredited taster by your side.

  Poison Ivy did not need a taster at all—she was a poisoner of some skill and therefore quite well suited to detecting it. Yet, somehow, she got not one taster—but two. The first, Sorrel Flux, tried to kill her. Flux was idle and, Ivy would soon learn, a servant of the evil forces bent on her destruction. The second, Rowan Truax, was escaping the powerful Tasters’ Guild, and its evil Director, Vidal Verjouce. But with Rowan’s help, Ivy would eventually make it to Templar—and hopefully to Pimcaux—to fulfill a secret and ancient Prophecy.

  There was once a time when poison was not the way of the land. It was a time long ago—of earlier, magical kings. Caux’s wisest sages still whispered of this great Prophecy, which told of the coming of a child who would cure their King—their one, true King—the Good King Verdigris, who lay ailing in a self-imposed exile in the sisterland of Pimcaux.

  The Noble Child of the Prophecy, as it turned out, was Poison Ivy, whose penchant for making exquisite and deadly poisons—with her vast knowledge of herbs—also lent itself to healing. On the run in the ancient land, Ivy and the taster Rowan were pursued by a gruesome Outrider—a tongueless servant of the Tasters’ Guild. Ivy left behind her uncle’s tavern and her beloved crow, Shoo, taking only her red bettle—a hollow jewel with the power to ward off poison.

  The pair traveled deep within the ancient forests in search of her missing uncle Cecil, an apotheopath, or healer. With the help of The Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux, her friend Axle’s masterwork, they reached the walled city of Templar, where the Deadly Nightshades were taking refuge from the Windy Season.

  There, Ivy discovered the Doorway to Pimcaux in the Nightshades’ castle—but too late. The Winds slammed it shut, leaving the corrupt Sorrel Flux and her mother, Clothilde, on the other side, and Ivy to fend off the murderous impulses of the Guild’s Director on her own.

  But her hollow bettle hatched—it was in fact something of a butterfly—and, indeed, all the bettles in the land followed suit. Vidal Verjouce retreated to the Tasters’ Guild to plan his revenge while all of Caux celebrated the end of the evil Nightshade regime.

  Yet there still remained the great and ancient Prophecy.

  Ivy and Rowan must together enter the foreboding city of Rocamadour—and the Tasters’ Guild itself—a city that no outsider has ever successfully penetrated. There, the two must find the only other Doorway to Pimcaux.

  Part I

  Templar

  Plants—all plants—have secrets. To unlock them is power, as the apotheopaths knew.

  —The Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux

  Axlerod D. Roux

  Chapter One

  The Calligrapher

  Hemsen Dumbcane’s withered skin was pasty from a lifetime of library work. He was a sour man whose eyes had long gone rheumy and uncooperative, and he routinely wore a powerful magnifying lens clipped to his thick spectacles. He preferred his small, unobtrusive shop empty, and for most of his long career, he had only one client. But what a client he served! Hemsen Dumbcane was a master calligrapher to the secretive Tasters’ Guild—producing the majority of its inscrutable documents—trusted with its most top-secret work and given access to its very private Library.

  Although it was newly unfashionable, the royal seal of King Nightshade still hung over the dusty front door of Hemsen Dumbcane’s shop, on the busy Knox bridge, right beneath th
e large, pointed quill indicating his trade. He figured the unpopular royal seal kept his store quiet, which was how he needed it to be in order to practice not only his calligraphy but also his more secretive, and highly lucrative, secondary trade. For Hemsen Dumbcane was a crook of enormous proportions—stealing and forging ancient, highly valuable, and oftentimes enchanted documents from Caux’s libraries and private collections and then selling them on the black market.

  Hemsen Dumbcane had been slowly relieving the land of its ancient maps and pictorials, testaments and charts of odd, indecipherable symbols for his entire career—one spanning many long years. That was a lot of missing paper, although for each he would toil to replace the original with a clever fake, copying it perfectly and returning the counterfeit undetected. Since many of the ancient tableaus were considered to be irreplaceable magical texts, Hemsen Dumbcane was distinctly responsible for the dilution of the ancient wisdom of earlier—and more respectable—kings than his most recent benefactor, King Nightshade.

  At present, in his quiet shop, a drop of perspiration hung threateningly at the tip of his nose. Pausing, the calligrapher wiped his face with his damp kerchief, catching the offending droplet in the nick of time—lest it sully his work on the desk beneath his gaze. Before him, his final forgery.

  A masterwork.

  He had stolen it from its hiding place in the very chambers of the Guild’s fearsome Director, a scroll of such beauty and value that he could not bear to be without it. At great personal hazard, he now toiled to produce a counterfeit before his transgression was discovered.

  He heard nothing of the little bell that now rang from the front of the shop, a signal of the unusual presence of a customer. He continued his work, though burdened by a great nervousness that had settled upon him in the middle of the night. For the past week Dumbcane had found himself distracted mightily from his sleep, from his shop duties, from everything. And today brought no relief. He tried to clear his mind and complete his final task, concentrating upon the dark weave of images amid the strange text. His shaking hand attempted to duplicate the sheen of the golden serpent before him.

  There was quite a lot of traffic on the Knox bridge this morning, owing probably to some festivity, a festivity that Dumbcane—if he chose to acknowledge it at all—would find entirely uninteresting. The town had turned out for some mindless event, and compounding the traffic was an annoying amount of construction on the bridge. He had little to do with the life of the city—having long ago aligned himself with the thieves and scoundrels that made up his network of contacts, and the darker sides of Caux from which he profited.

  The little bell rang again sourly—indicating that the door had shut once more. Presumably, someone now awaited him. This time Dumbcane was alerted, and he sat bolt upright, upending a small pot of black ink, a few pages before him scattering to the floor. Quickly he wiped the ink blot with his elbow—a lazy swarm of dark fruit flies escaped his arm just in time, only to come together again and settle hungrily on the stain.

  Peering about the dark room cautiously, he craned his neck toward the door, his earlier nighttime anxieties returning. One large eye—magnified by his calligraphy lens—regarded the shaded room fearfully.

  “What?” he hissed. “Who’s there?”

  “Hemsen Dumbcane?” came a nasally response.

  “Who wants to know?” Dumbcane leaned out a little further into the gloomy room. With a start he relieved himself of his ever-present magnifying lens—flipping it upright quickly—but not before he was afforded the shock of one of the biggest noses ever to grace a face, a nose that indeed marked its wearer’s lineage.

  A nose as long as a sausage could only belong to a Taxus.

  Dumbcane at once regained his composure. A half smile even made an appearance across his sallow face. Although he had had dealings with the Taxus family over the years, these two before him were new. But he knew the type.

  “What, gentlemen, can I do for you today?” Dumbcane asked.

  “We are looking for a certain document,” the elder and larger of the two Taxuses responded. This was Quarles Taxus, a man who really never achieved much in his life by respectable means. In fact, over the family’s long and feuding history, there had been but one Taxus upon whom any amount of success had been visited. That was Turner Taxus, and he was now dead. Turner Taxus had risen through the ranks of the Nightshade army to a respectable position, only to consume for his last meal some poisoned soup.

  Quarles and his cousin, the more diminutive Qwill, had in their kinsman’s early demise found their particular calling. And that was to deliver vengeance upon the irksome taster who was the cause of Turner Taxus’s poisoning. (The contract and subsequent rules between taster and charge are arcane and intricate, but call for the taster’s surrender should he be responsible for the untimely end of his employer.) The Estate of Turner Taxus approached this task with uncharacteristic dedication—the tenacity of a dog with a bone. There was, of course, a sizable reward offered for the capture of the renegade taster, and this reward was, in Quarles’s eyes, nearly theirs.

  “We have it on good authority that you have in your possession a document belonging to us.” Quarles indicated the ordered stacks of Dumbcane’s archives, pointing, seemingly, with his long and crooked nose.

  The small, dark hairs on the back of the calligrapher’s thin neck rose up in alarm, and he was overcome with a fit of coughing.

  “I hardly think that’s possible,” he told the pair as soon as the distressing rattle in his lungs stopped. “You see, I’ve never met the two of you, er, gentlemen, nor had the pleasure of any business dealings with you, so, you see, it would be simply impossible that I might have something of yours.” He looked over the wire rims of his glasses to see if the two Taxuses were convinced. “So, if you’d excuse me, I’m in a bit of a hurry—”

  “Dumbcane.” Quarles somehow doubled his girth while lowering his voice several octaves—a talent gleaned from years of tavern brawls. “How would you know you don’t have it when you don’t even know what it is? And don’t you worry. It’s not one of those old maps here of questionable ownership—”

  Dumbcane blanched, his hand at his mouth in horror.

  “And nor do we care to discuss that subject further—do we, Qwill? Unless … unless we are forced to. If you cannot produce our Epistle, we will report your doings to the proper authorities—and seeing as you currently lack royal patronage, you would surely be held accountable for all your crimes.” Quarles looked around the dim room, satisfied. “Besides, I’m not leaving without it, and since it seems that you have travel plans yourself …” There was indeed an overstuffed satchel at Dumbcane’s feet, from which a mass of scrolls and parchments protruded beside a tidy purse stuffed to the seams with minims and scruples. “You’d better get busy looking wherever it is that you keep these, er, things.”

  “Epistle?! Epistle?!” Dumbcane’s voice broke, and with it he relinquished all attempts at remaining calm. “What Epistle? What sort of Epistle do you want? There are thousands of Epistles. You have to be more specific before I can even begin to help.”

  “We want the Epistle of the taster Rowan Truax. It belongs to us under the rules of the Tasters’ Guild—since he was responsible for the death of our dear, dear cousin Turner.”

  In Dumbcane, there was suddenly the distinct impression that no familial love existed between the departed and these two, but having to produce for them such a minor document made him nearly shake with relief.

  “Oh, yes, why didn’t you say so? Quite a common Epistle, yes, indeed. A taster receives his Epistle in a special ceremony at the time his training is complete, along with his robes. A signature required, I do believe. The taster and the Director. I should—yes, I think I do—have it right back here in my files. Truax you say? With a T? If you’d be patient—I shan’t be long.”

  Indeed, Dumbcane’s filing system rewarded him greatly with the proper form—everything was meticulously alphabetized with
a highly ornate font. Abandoning any of his usual orderliness, he calculated that he would just have time to finish his endeavor if these two irksome visitors would only leave.

  So it was that, with shaking hands, he quickly found the Truax file. But in his haste and elation, as he placed the handsome document upon his worktable and kicked closed his drawers, he failed to notice that upon retrieving it, he had inadvertently grabbed a second, more tattered page. These both he then delivered to the two distant relatives of Turner Taxus, who left immediately thereafter—but not before the larger of the two took notice of the calligrapher’s error.

  Quarles eyed the odd page—for it was much older and printed upon the finest parchment, and showed distinct signs of having survived a fire.

  Chapter Two

  Ink

  Evidence of a fire upon such an ancient document might not be notable to a Taxus, or similarly to one who mistook his history lessons for naptime. But in Caux, there was at one time a notable fire—a truly evil fire—at the foot of a steep tower in the ancient town of Rocamadour. The fire was sparked by the wicked King Nightshade and overseen by the Director of the Tasters’ Guild, the notorious Vidal Verjouce, and the fuel that fed it was the many majestic tomes and charts of a dying King. This fire, it was thought, was the end of all but a very few magical texts—books capable of delivering the reader much more than a history lesson.

  Dumbcane cursed this fire—for very few ancient works survived it.

  In the splendid Library at Rocamadour, before most of Caux’s masterworks were reduced to ash, Dumbcane purported to be performing the work of a scholar. He examined tome after splendid tome, and when something pleased him, he would simply take it. This he did by secretly unwinding a thin silk thread from under his tongue, which he would then lay across the page of interest, nestled near the binding. Closing the book, he would occupy himself for a matter of minutes, and when he returned, the page would tear completely free. He would then hurry back to his small shop to begin to duplicate his pilfered goods, and return the forgeries to the place of the originals.