The Tasters Guild Page 10

  “How?” she wondered.

  “Some plants are helpful, and these you can harness and use for the good of all. They will come to your aid in a time of need and gladly do your bidding.”

  Ivy thought of King Verdigris. There was an old saying that he led with an army of flowers. “And the others?”

  “The others—well, let’s just say some are controlling, mean-spirited, and bent on destruction. They are better off forgotten.”

  “Scourge bracken?” Ivy guessed. By Axle’s silence she knew that she was right.

  Ivy looked at the sleeping form of Rowan. A hawthorn had nearly enslaved and strangled him today. Could this have been her fault? Is this what she should expect when Axle spoke of the awakening of the deeper natures of the plantworld? She liked it better when such behavior was blamed on the tapestries. She would have to be very careful from here on out.

  The cessation of the bleak rain brought with it two things: freezing cold and a new, discomforting silence. Ivy now realized that their entire trip had been one of much noise: the slashing rain and tumbling waters, the tearing hawthorns, and the slapping of the paddles of the skimmer. As she lay down to rest, there was nothing but the muffled brook at the end of the small clearing.

  Still, she fell quickly into fitful dreams, ones of knotty trees and hairy vines encircling their camp. Ugly, mocking birds shouted down at her awful things, and although she could not understand them, she knew they were singing of her destiny of failure.

  She wrenched herself awake.

  The wood was silent, the clearing desolate. Her companions slept, unmenaced. There, in the dark, she thought of Cecil. She longed for their old life at the tavern, a simpler time, when—after a nightmare—she could scurry down the low hall to take comfort in her uncle’s calming words. Occasionally she would find him still in his workshop, poring over notes or wrestling with his messy bookshelf. Together they might throw open the window and contemplate the stars, or he’d distract her with stories of the more colorful regulars. Always in these moments he would tell her to never be afraid—that in her dreams nothing could harm her.

  But, as she contemplated just this, Ivy heard something. A small something, but in the new silence of the forest, it was magnified. Ivy strained to hear it again.

  It was a crunch, followed by another tentative one, and Ivy was now certain she was hearing footsteps.

  “Axle!” Ivy whispered urgently in the darkness, but a trestleman can sleep the sleep of the ages, as Axle was currently demonstrating.

  The footfalls were quickening now as she turned instead to wake Rowan, and she had little time to shake her friend before the unwelcome arrival was upon them. She felt about her side for anything with which to defend herself, finding nothing more than a long fork that had previously been used to toast Axle’s dinner.

  “Who’s there?” she shouted in a voice she hardly recognized, waving the dinner fork. It was, however, enough to wake Axle, and so it was that in the dim light of the morning, the three travelers faced a startling sight.

  For an odd moment, Ivy thought she was still sleeping. In the way of dreams, she knew Axle to be by her side—but also there he was, standing, cut and bleeding from a crosshatch of deep scratches, at the edge of the clearing. She was seeing double.

  “Peps!” Axle sputtered. His brother stood before them, a living statue, as pale as his marble bust.

  Axle sprang from bed stammering a litany of questions at the mute trestleman, none of which expressed much pleasure at the reunion.

  “Did I not tell you to under no circumstances attempt to follow us?” He stamped a little foot. “What were you thinking? You might have been discovered!” Axle looked around for any signs of such, finally gazing uneasily at the stark sky through the knit of thorns. “There are eyes everywhere,” he said with a scowl.

  Rowan sneezed, and the noise of it reverberated in the uneasy silence that followed. Indeed, it seemed that Peps was not alone. Quite silently, stepping out on twelve front toes, came Peps’s companion.

  “Six!” Ivy cried.

  The tomcat settled himself before the smoking fire pit, while together Rowan and Ivy brought Peps one of the cots. Axle attended to a small enameled teapot while muttering under his breath.

  “I don’t know what you were thinking—you have endangered us all!”

  After a moment in which Six began an awkward preen, Peps finally spoke. “Trindle’s dead!” he whispered. “Poisoned! While he slept!” He fell again into a bitter silence as Ivy looked nervously around.

  “Poisoned?” Rowan asked, alarmed.

  “There, there.” Axle’s voice took on a note of kindness. He handed his brother something that smelled suspiciously like brandy. “A nice cup of tea.”

  “And the rest of them—Rhustaphustian, everyone—all gone!” Peps took a long swig from the delicate cup and held it out for more. “Poisoned, every last one!” he howled.

  “Who did this?” Axle asked sharply.

  Peps paused miserably. “They wore the robes of the Tasters’ Guild, but red,” he squeaked. “They were Watchmen.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Peps’s Story

  The storm in which the three had left had prevented Trindle’s houseboat from departing—much to Peps’s disappointment. After a brief moment of despair, the trestleman resolved to make the most of the delay and create as much of a nuisance of himself as possible at the Toad, a task into which he delved with characteristic aplomb.

  Finally tired from his mischief, he made his way below the hotel to the houseboat, where, because of the late hour, he retired without seeing Trindle. As Peps tried to sleep, the enormous cat crept up on the bed—as was his habit. As Peps drifted off, he was vaguely aware of losing the battle for space with Six but was too tired to care. He rescued a pillow from Six’s clutches and crept down off the mattress, falling into a deep sleep beneath the bed.

  “That cat saved my life!” he said, and after a short pause, he indicated he would enjoy some more of Axle’s brandied tea.

  The Guild’s assassins had boarded the boat and fanned out to quickly dispatch the captain and crew. Seeing only a mangy cat in Peps’s quarters, they continued on their appalling errand.

  “Assassins?” Ivy was horrified.

  Peps continued. He had listened until he was quite sure they were gone, and only then did he emerge from beneath Six. He rushed to the captain’s quarters, but he was too late for Trindle. Dismayed, the trestleman scrambled to the elevator in the pitch black, feeling about desperately for the lift switch.

  At the Snodgrass Toad, he shouted until he was hoarse, but no one answered.

  “The selective-hearing tribunal!” Ivy gasped. “They couldn’t hear you!”

  Peps nodded. “But the assassins could—and I was nearly captured!” He looked around dramatically. “I ran to the grand hall with Six and up the stairs—the ghastly Watchmen right behind us. I never thought I’d long for the time of Outriders, but these were dreadful men. Sinister, calculating—completely organized. They would have had me, too, had I not earlier in the day—in a stroke of genius—untacked the entire stairway carpet. As the Watchmen pursued us up the marble steps, the rug slipped out from under them, and they landed in a heap at the bottom! Six and I escaped to the roof tracks.”

  The cat swished his ragged tail as Ivy scratched him behind the ear.

  “And so you see,” Peps said somberly, “there was nothing left to do but follow you.”

  “It’s awful news,” Ivy said sadly. “Trindle. The others. So many poisoned.”

  “A moment of silence, please, for Trindle. A fine ferryman, chef, and friend. Let his death not be in vain,” Axle said somberly.

  Silence did follow in the small clearing—with the exception of Six, whose raspy purr was either a fine tribute (thought Ivy) or deeply insensitive (thought Rowan).

  “If you ask me,” Peps resumed, “those worthless old men were of little help to us, and they got what they deserved.”<
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  Quietly, Axle looked at the fire. Finally, he spoke. “There are things more enduring than grudges to be upheld, Peps. There are traditions.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Soon we will return to the Toad. But for now we must keep moving on.” Axle poured the remains of the tea on the embers.

  “Where to?”

  “This stream should take us right to Rocamadour, and the Tasters’ Guild,” he replied. “It won’t be pretty, but it will suffice.”

  “How so?” Peps wondered.

  “Oh, well.” Axle cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It has its beginnings beneath the city. Specifically, in the sewers.”

  Part II

  Rocamadour

  To truly heal, one must know grave illness.

  —An ancient apotheopathic truth

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Red

  Vidal Verjouce sat behind his stone table, quite still, musing—oddly, for a blind man—on the color red. It had been his favorite. At once the color of life (a delicate flush in a maiden’s cheek) as well as death. Here, in his self-imposed world of darkness, Verjouce was proud to still be capable of imagining the brilliant color, producing it in the black palette of his mind.

  He ruminated on a cardinal, its red wing, its fearless disadvantage. He saw the intrepid bird, blood-red, on a snow-white plain, a streak of black a mask across its face.

  “Director,” hissed a small, potbellied man in scarlet robes, a man with an odd scrunch to his posture that marked him as impish and pitiable. It was the subrector named Snaith, who could at any given moment be found at the dark Director’s side.

  The cardinal vanished, and in its place—in the void of color—was a stab of anger, a dark hunger for more. A black hunger. A blind man lives with a gnawing wish to return to the world of light and hue, but within Verjouce this wish was magnified and distilled into something akin to ferociousness.

  He turned his fierce face—with its deep pits where his eyes had been plucked from their sockets by his own hand—to the exact place where the hunched Snaith stood.

  “We have him,” Snaith said proudly. “We have the calligrapher. Hemsen Dumbcane.”

  “Ah, yes.” Vidal Verjouce mused on the weaselly scribe. For years their relationship had been one of discretion. Dumbcane had been retained to perform the work of a scholar—searching out and cataloging various manuscripts. The Director had entrusted Dumbcane with the ancient works under great pains of secrecy and for this had been repaid with deception and thievery—the scribe had replaced the stolen works with nearly perfect fakes, polluting the Guild’s collection with his forgeries. And worse yet, a truly precious document—one that the Guild’s leader valued above all others—was now missing from the secret drawer in his private desk.

  Well, Dumbcane was about to discover what treachery would buy him. Verjouce sat back, lacing his long, pale fingers together, and ordered Snaith to show the scribe in.

  Dumbcane soon made his appearance, trembling before the fearsome leader of the Tasters’ Guild. He had been caught by Snaith’s red-cloaked Watchmen as he made his way over dusty highways, stooped from the burden of his stained canvas sack. Today he stood with the iron grip of Snaith’s men on either side, a collection of flies gathered about his head.

  With an imperceptible nod, Vidal Verjouce indicated that his trusted servant should relieve the prisoner of his bag, and Snaith, shuffling over with his crablike gait, snatched the tattered sack and emptied its contents upon the stone floor.

  “It’s not here, Director.” Snaith leered at Dumbcane.

  “Not there?” Verjouce murmured.

  “No.” The subrector unrolled and tossed aside the various contents of Dumbcane’s bag, unfurling parchment after parchment. “Just worthless maps and charts, nothing else. Oh—”

  “Yes?” the Guild’s Director sat forward, eagerly.

  “There are a few tins here. Four. Appear to be ink of some sort.” Snaith waved his billowing sleeve over the gathering of flies that had suddenly, greedily, moved from the calligrapher to the small canisters.

  Verjouce sat back, disappointed.

  He turned his grimace to his guest.

  “You know what it is that I seek, Hemsen?” His voice was smooth, oiled, and coldly polite. It breathed a bitter chill into the calligrapher’s very soul.

  Dumbcane paused, torn. If he admitted to knowing about yet somehow not having the thing his captor so eagerly sought, would it be worse than if he denied any memory of their last, secret transaction? He finally settled on the first option and found himself nodding—then, in a swift reversal, violently shaking his head. This silent indecision continued for some time, to the amusement of Snaith, who finally broke the dizzying display with the following question.

  “Well, which is it?” he hissed. “Do you have the scroll, or don’t you?”

  Verjouce leveled his empty gaze at him, the dark pits of his eyes emptying the prisoner of any last resistance.

  “I—I do not,” squeaked the tortured man.

  “How disappointing,” concluded the gruesome Director. “How terribly disappointing, Hemsen. Disappointing for me, yes. But mostly for you.”

  And with an offhanded wave of his arm, Vidal Verjouce signaled the Watchmen to take him away.

  “Wait!”

  The scarlet-clad Watchmen—the Guild’s assassins and, in every way, Verjouce’s eyes—paused in the doorway.

  “I know where it is! I am certain!”

  “Yesss?”

  “I was recently visited by two members of the Taxus Estate. They came searching for the Epistle of a graduate of yours, a taster called Truax. Rowan Truax, if memory serves. I must have given them the scroll in error—in my haste!”

  “Taxus, you say?” Snaith demanded.

  “Yes, Taxus. I am sure. This Truax taster broke his sacred Oath, and the Estate demanded the Epistle. Please—with the Guild’s resources, it shall be easy to discover them. They surely know not what it is they possess—”

  “Thank you, Hemsen,” Verjouce interrupted.

  And if the scribe thought that he had bought himself a pardon, his hopes were soon dashed.

  “Hemlock.” Verjouce flashed his gravestone teeth. “The weed grows wild by riversides. An efficient poison. It begins as a heavy coldness on the soles of your feet, moving upward, in numbing stages. To your knees. Your thighs. You will feel it keenly, but you are helpless against the creeping paralysis. Your mind is clear to the very end. By the time it reaches your heart, you are dead.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Gripe

  It was not long after Hemsen Dumbcane was escorted away, sobs reverberating throughout the dark stone halls, that Verjouce’s henchman Snaith decided to take a closer look at the contents of the calligrapher’s bag. He had, after all, gone out of his way to depart the Knox with these scrolls in hand, these rolls of flimsy parchment and thick, sticky inks.

  For his efforts, Snaith enlisted a subrector named Gripe, a man whose position was beneath his own, a favored colleague. Snaith and Gripe had worked together over the years; it had been Gripe, after all, who came up with the idea of experimenting on the poor and indigent in many of Caux’s hospitals, and Snaith found the man quite like-minded and discreet.

  “Why don’t you begin with those,” Snaith suggested, indicating the dented tins of Dumbcane’s ink.

  Gripe nodded and rolled his red robes up to his elbows. Selecting one—he began with a deep, shocking blue—he wrestled with the closure. Like the others, it was crusted with dried, flaking sediment, and Gripe had particular trouble moving the lid at all. A lazy cluster of fruit flies settled upon his hands as he worked. Gripe was a man of much strength and also much patience—a deadly combination in an assassin. Trying the tin several more times, he moved on to another, this one black. Still, no movement. Spots swam about the strong man’s eyes—or were they insects?—and he found himself gasping for breath.

  Across the room, Snaith was oblivious t
o his colleague’s difficulties. He was thoroughly engrossed in the selection of scrolls before him. Examining the documents more fully, he was realizing that Dumbcane’s treachery was far greater than he had previously thought. There were hundreds of scrolls here, each apparently belonging to the Guild. His eyes narrowed at the enormity of the transgression. He knew that the calligrapher had been associated with the Tasters’ Guild long before his own personal rise within the subrector ranks—he had only recently won the complete trust of the Director; for years the man had exclusively associated himself with that bitter, loathsome assistant called Flux. And that could mean that the damage the forger might have done would be incalculable.

  He looked then at his associate.

  Gripe had finally decided that he would pry off the lid with his penknife and was in the process of doing just this as Snaith peered over. The subrector Gripe was in the prime of his life, so, understandably, he had never given any consideration as to what his last words might be. (He had inspired plenty of others’ throughout the course of his career.) The penknife loosened the lid easily, releasing it with a loud pop. The room filled with the odor of Dumbcane’s ink.

  “What is that appalling smell?” gasped Gripe. He looked to Snaith, his face curiously helpless.

  That would be the last thing the scarlet-robed Watchman said in this land, or any other, as the potent ink—ink made from the deadly scourge bracken, a weed dedicated to destruction and dominance—spilled upon the subrector’s hands, and across his broad chest a deep black stain rolled in, a shadow so dark, so entirely pitch-black, that it seemed as if it swallowed up the very sun.

  Snaith donned his scarlet leather gloves and rushed to cap the offending container. He was not sentimental—what assassin is?—at the loss of Gripe; instead, a surge of excitement swept over him. He would wrap up and present this curious new toxin, this mysterious danger that the forger had somehow come upon, and deliver it to the Guild’s Director. He knew if there was ever a man to appreciate a deadly poison, it was Vidal Verjouce.