The Tasters Guild Read online

  At first the magical texts resisted him.

  He seemed perfectly incapable of reproducing the sparkle of life that made the texts at once so desirable and valuable. The originals seemed to practically jump out from the page, while his own tries were flat and lifeless.

  That is, until the recipe.

  In these ancient apotheopathic texts, Hemsen Dumbcane sometimes found handwritten notes in the margins, obscure symbols from an ancient pen. Early in his unlawful career, he never considered these commentaries to be of much value—in fact, just the opposite: he looked upon them as the work of a vandal, sullying the sacred texts. A rude distraction.

  But then he came across one such notation, in the same discreet scrawl as the rest, which described for the scribe the recipe for what would be the secret of his success: the ancient formulation of the special inks that composed the magical works, the very works he so admired. Once the formula was mastered, Dumbcane was free to practice his illicit talents without any fear of discovery, so convincing was the result. Nothing could defy his genius at forgery. He simply learned to ignore the caustic stench and the strange, small flies that seemed perpetually attracted to these new, potent inks.

  He began to expand his repertoire.

  With this ink, he was now capable of great genius. The ink seemed to enchant the page, infusing life across its papery surface. With ease—almost too much—Dumbcane produced one magnificent forgery after the next, beginning simply with the alphabet and from there moving on to spectacular feats of duplication, all the while driven not by creativity but by wicked ambition.

  Ink crusted his cuticles and saturated his pores.

  Now, as Dumbcane readied himself to depart the bridge, he stood and surveyed his beloved shop for the last time. As he did, his eyes settled on his earliest accomplishment, the ornate alphabet he had produced as his very first experiment with the new inks. The letters were tacked to the peeling wall, intricate lines with many showy flourishes. Each was wreathed in a border, and the calligrapher had taken pains to draw various objects that commenced with that letter—in this way, the letter A contained an acorn.

  Over time, dust had been allowed to settle on them all, and the years had been unkind to many—indeed, most. He had to squint at the faded parchments. With a stained hand, he wiped away a veil of dust. A favorite, his early attempt at a capital P, he had painted with a brush made of a single hair from the belly of a silver mink. He could barely make it out. It seemed in fact to be fading before his eyes—the glorious rolling hills of the land of Pimcaux were withering, the landscape darkening as if before a storm. He rubbed his tired eyes as he often did, but the anguish he was feeling merely doubled.

  In fact, the alarm that had torn him from his restless sleep that night returned in full force, and the old scribe found his knees beginning to buckle. He leaned against the wall. Over the past several weeks, he had noticed things, small things—but peculiar, inexplicable occurrences that when totaled together in the dark of night on his lumpy mattress haunted him in a way to which he was quite unaccustomed. His shifty eyes alighted on his drafting table in the corner, in particular, on a haphazard collection of his homemade inks.

  For weeks, Dumbcane had been noticing his stolen apotheopathic manuscripts behaving strangely. The once bright, aligned script of some was now dim and smudged, and the neatly ruled lines at times descended into complete chaos. The text of others, incredibly, seemed to have vanished entirely—as if made from invisible ink. His life’s work—his collection of stolen parchment, scrolls, and charts of untold value—was vanishing before his eyes!

  This curious turn led Dumbcane to the conclusion that either someone was trying to ruin him or some ancient and powerful magic was afoot—or both.

  As he cowered before his beloved alphabet upon the wall, the letter V glinted in the shadows at the tail end of the abecedarium. Vultures circled a shadowy tower. It was always a dark one, drawn in a moonscape and featuring a ring of stars commonly seen in Caux in the winter sky. But as Dumbcane now observed, it seemed at once to draw him in and lash out—and the small scribe felt a potent flash of true terror. Unfathomable, he told himself, that he should be made so fearful by something of his own hand! Something of ink and paper. A trick of the light perhaps. Or of the dark.

  Vidal Verjouce, he thought with a start.

  He must depart—at once.

  And with that, the proprietor of the dim little calligraphy shop on the Knox bridge turned his back on his workshop, unwittingly leaving his last masterpiece unfinished, and departed hurriedly—not bothering with the lock.

  Chapter Three

  Peps

  The bustling Knox was a bridge of much renown, older, perhaps, than even the walled city of Templar that it served. The Knox was wide and stout and as strong as its years, and was home to some of Caux’s oldest and most distinguished proprietors. Where a railing might normally be found, it boasted an eclectic array of precarious storefronts, some even of multiple floors, saddling the bridge itself on either side. These shops roosted above the wallowing waters of the river Marcel indifferent to everything but commerce, while beneath them a long line of trestlemen inhabited the lower level of the bridge.

  That is, until recently.

  Peps D. Roux, who considered himself to be a dashing example of Caux’s rare and ancient race of trestlemen, would point out that it was he and he alone who had braved the tyranny of the Nightshade regime, while all other trestlemen had quietly departed and passed the most recent—and embarrassing—chapter in Caux’s history out of sight.

  This fact seemed important to Peps, as he was being forced to relinquish what had become quite a deluxe apartment for one diminutive man—or man of any size, for that matter. (Trestlemen were of course quite small in height, if not in girth.) Peps indeed had remained loyal to his trestle heritage during the reign of the Deadly Nightshades and, in refusing to leave, had inherited the entire underside of the Knox—a palace by anyone’s standards. In knocking down the walls, he had created, together with his companion the cobbler Gudgeon, an expanse of luxury to rival none.

  And now he was being forced to give it back—or most of it—since many of the exiles (or cowards, as Peps preferred to call them) were returning from their hiding.

  So Peps, characteristically, had come up with a unique solution for himself. As he cast about a morose eye from his mullioned windows, draped on either end with the most luxurious of silk velvet, he saw below him the many houseboats that were moored upon the banks of the Marcel—and from there his discerning eye alighted upon the finest of the fleet, the most tasteful and sedate vessel ever to loll in the slight waves, the boat whose name was stenciled on its blunt stern in fine gold leaf: Trindletrip.

  And Peps decided at once that the boat of his friend, the chef Trindle, would make a fine home for him for the near future, since it met both of the flamboyant trestleman’s conditions: first, that it was an enviable place to lay one’s head, and second, that it would accommodate nicely the parties he was accustomed to throwing for himself. Buoyed by his own clever decision, he neglected to consider the very real fact that only ill fortune awaits any trestleman who chooses to live upon—rather than over—the water.

  And so this day found Peps with a handful of local riffraff he had hired to help him move and an armful of plush pillows he was unwilling to hand over. Peps was shouting orders to the indifferent youths upon the Knox, just as a paler-than-usual Hemsen Dumbcane emerged from his shop and started off away from the city.

  “What’s he up to?” Peps stopped his instructions, seeing Dumbcane’s retreating figure and haunted expression.

  Residing beside Dumbcane for all these years had produced nothing in the form of neighborly courtesy. The two were just as much strangers as they had been on the first day the calligrapher set up shop, and this distrust of each other produced—at least in Peps—an addictive curiosity. Hadn’t Hemsen Dumbcane learned calligraphy by copying his father’s will and liberally writing
himself into it? Peps’s eyes narrowed at the fact that the normally reserved calligrapher had not even bothered to lock his front door.

  The trestleman thoughtfully fingered a satin tassel on one of his overstuffed cushions and took a moment to reflect. Something like this should be reported to Cecil Manx, at the palace. The Steward had warned that these times, while they were awaiting the reappearance of the Good King Verdigris, were treacherous. There was real reason to distrust Dumbcane, Peps concluded, since he was the last merchant on the Knox—or, for that matter, anywhere—to still display the royal seal of the evil King Nightshade, and the collection of dubious visitors to his small shop at nightfall was worrisome.

  But, Peps reflected as he scrutinized his loutish movers, he wasn’t really sure that anything was amiss, was he? Might this wait until a better time, like over aperitifs and finger food at Trindlesnifter’s later? Surely that would be more civilized. He pictured himself with Cecil Manx, the Steward of Caux and famed apotheopath, at a lovely table at Templar’s finest restaurant.

  His gaze returned to the retreating calligrapher.

  Odd. A haze of small, annoying flies was retreating with him. They swarmed about in a daze, pressing on with the diminishing figure of the scribe. And then he noticed something that made his blood run cold. At first the trestleman mistook it for the lazy cloud of insects. But no. It was as if Dumbcane brought along with him a residue of darkness from his shop, a sort of peculiar shadow emanating from his coattails, tingeing the very air a deep gray.

  Dumbcane pulled his hood up and threw his heavy satchel over his bony shoulder. In his wake, the newly planted window boxes and flowerpots of the Knox—all part of the bridge’s face-lift—shriveled and withered, and soon were nothing but an inky black ash.

  Peps turned to run, still with his armload of fancy cushions, his leisurely day of overseeing his move to the Trindletrip forgotten.

  Chapter Four

  Thwarted

  Peps sprinted, watching the receding Dumbcane and his particular dark blight upon the bridge’s potted plants from over his shoulder. Running forward while looking backward never accomplishes much, and indeed, he soon met with the rear end of a large, burly worker—sending his cushions scattershot about him. Yet the man barely noticed the intrusion and continued to peer eagerly ahead into the deepening gathering.

  “Move along!” Peps shouted up at him, but no answer came.

  An enormous crowd clogged the Knox. Peps darted around with great agitation, trying to find a place to squeeze himself through trousered legs, but when he was greeted, it was roughly and he was admonished to wait his turn.

  “Wait my turn?” Peps huffed. “I am on an errand for the Steward!”

  “Errand or not, I been waiting all morning on this lame leg—an’ no one’s busting in to see ’er before me!”

  Appalled, Peps took a measured look about him.

  There was simply no passage.

  Above him, he noticed, was the new and terribly exciting sign announcing the ancient city of Templar’s return to its proper place as capital of the land. Earlier in the day, it had been hoisted high into the air with the help of a thick length of rope and an overworked donkey. Both rope and donkey were an integral part of an elevator system on the bridge, lowering an iron cage to and from the water below. It was meant for passengers—a small few at a time—but more often than not, it was overloaded with supplies and wares arriving from various water routes.

  Peps regarded the plaque for a moment. Gold leaf proclaimed in glorious script:

  Templar,

  Capital of Caux

  It was a celebration of a sign, one signaling the banishment of the evil King and Queen Nightshade. Poison was no longer the way of the land, and the citizens of Caux had reason to be proud—not only of their long heritage in the healing arts but also of recent triumphs over the darker side, the Deadly Nightshades, who had ruled with such greed and spite.

  But this was one celebration that for Peps would have to wait. He noticed that the crowd thinned a bit to the sides, and there Peps spied a rickety wooden ladder leaning against a nearby storefront. He glanced again behind him at the blighted flowerpots—but Dumbcane was no longer visible. With a heavy heart, Peps began heaving himself upon the rungs.

  He was uneasy with heights. There were many of his kind who lived below wondrous trestles that spanned dizzying gorges and glorious cliffsides, but not Peps. Ballads had been written about such men, and in better times were sung at trestlemen gatherings, functions that had ceased entirely under the Nightshade regime. No such ballad existed about Peps D. Roux, and any composer would be hard-pressed to find much adventure in Peps’s personal history. (The song would be brief and celebrate such things as his taste in formal wear and his prized golden tooth.)

  Peps crept forward uneasily atop the thatched roof. It was quite a view—the ramparts of the Templar palace, the carefully executed stones of the walled city, gleaming cobbles of the many twisting streets below. But Peps refused to be distracted from his errand, instead preferring to inch forward on all fours as the memory of the departing Dumbcane bolstered his courage. Coming finally to the source of the congestion, the trestleman peered over the edge nervously.

  A cart, of sorts, met his eye.

  This was not unusual in the daily life upon the bridge in and of itself. But this small, canvas-topped cart was drawing an enormous amount of attention. A line—if it could indeed be called that, possessing neither order nor visible rules—snaked its way across the Knox, twisting and turning and finally boiling over onto a small square where Crossbones and Thrashweed streets collided at the city gates.

  He looked about the crowd gathered below him, a wisp of steam penetrating the chill air. The colorful horde was gathered in every available space, the expectant faces muffled by a patchwork of cloaks and hoods. The people had come in droves, despite the unseasonable cold, and had amassed upon the cobblestones—swaying from lampposts, even dangling off of the small balconies that perched along the plaza.

  Amid the pushing and shoving, small snippets of conversation floated up to Peps. “… Made his warts shrivel right up—every last one of ’em dropped off during that thunderstorm last week! And, where they landed, toadstools grew! I tell you, though—he’s now developed a taste for yeasted bread, and makes himself loaf after loaf from sunup till sundown! We’re buried in loaves, so many he bakes—why, I haven’t seen the cat in weeks!”

  “My cousin Herrick came to see her, troubled by indigestion, and a day later his appetite returned—and with it a strange new ability to call the birds down from the trees and have them entertain him with sweet music all the day long! Only, he was quite soon burdened by their unbearable weight, a whole forest’s worth of birds upon his shoulders day and night—and now it is his great wish that she make them go, and perhaps attend to his ailing back.”

  The tremendous crowd beneath Peps continued in such medical discourse, complaining of their various ailments that they hoped to have addressed, exchanging one story for the next.

  The trestleman began to wonder at how he was to get himself down. He regarded the sky, in which black clouds clotted out much of the daylight. High above the clusters of sloping rooftops, a single soaring bird—a vulture. It circled lazily, lower and lower.

  There was a figure at the front of the crowd, the object of everyone’s attention. It was a familiar one to the trestleman, and he squinted in disbelief. A wormholed plank of wood stretched between a pair of barrels, and behind it was seated his young friend Ivy Manx. She wore, besides her leather workshop apron, a look of earnest determination and a slight frown upon her brow. Her golden hair was tied back with a piece of string, and above her—Peps could just make it out—dangled a small plaque that was even more thrilling to the citizens of Caux than the new Templar sign. The notice was written in the carefree script of a young girl.

  What Ails You?

  Consult the Child of the

  Prophecy

  Mira
cle Healer on Duty

  ∼Donations Appreciated∼

  Chapter Five

  The Child of the Prophecy

  The Prophecy to which Ivy’s plaque referred was a great and ancient one, passed down from generation to generation by a few wise scholars, and until recently had been all but forgotten. Even the parchment upon which it was written was lost—presumed burned in the terrible fire at the Library of Rocamadour. But the Prophecy was known—in full or part—by a select few and predicted that a child of noble birth would heal Caux’s ailing King. This child, as it turned out, was Poison Ivy, a young girl with a penchant for making exquisite and deadly poisons—a talent that, with her vast knowledge of herbs, also lent itself to healing. The King was none other than the Good King Verdigris, Ivy’s great-grandfather.

  The Child of the Prophecy was currently being greatly disobedient.

  It wasn’t that she was practicing an illegal brand of medicine, exactly. True, apotheopathy had once been forbidden under the Deadly Nightshades, punishable by death in the kingdom of Caux. And no one could claim she was a licensed apotheopath—this was a reward for only a select few, after years of arduous study such as her uncle had endured. (Study, it should be said, was not one of Ivy’s strong suits.) But she was, after all, an indisputable expert on herbs and plants, the potencies of which could be used to cure as well as harm.

  And now Ivy was practicing her own secret brand of medicine, working on intuition alone, and, indeed, to the great satisfaction of the citizens of Templar.

  By her side was her good friend Rowan Truax. The errant taster was on the run from the dreaded Tasters’ Guild, where he had learned his trade, only to practice it disastrously—killing twenty of King Nightshade’s men and the man he was specifically charged with protecting. The Tasters’ Guild meted out horrendous punishments to tasters who defied their Oath, and Rowan knew the day would come when his past would catch up to him. But thoughts of Guild retribution—and of its fearsome Director, Vidal Verjouce—were forgotten for today, in favor of remedy and vitality.