The Shepherd of Weeds (10 page)

How was he to leave Rocamadour?

Built by the Good King Verdigris, and intended as a place for apotheopathic learning, Rocamadour possessed defenses both vast and intimidating. The city itself sat against the Craggy Burls, and before it, like a long jagged carpet, were the
ancient spiked hawthorns that made up a thick—and enchanted—forest. The city wall was wide enough to host a dozen Outriders in their maneuvers as they patrolled deftly, silently atop its heights. Guards perched on fortified outposts that perforated the barricade, examining all who dared to bring business below. Beneath the city, in the sewers—once a clandestine entry point—shadowy patrols lurked in every tunnel. Nor was nighttime an advantage for the uninvited, for Outriders—feared servants of the Guild—were at home in the dark, their vision having adapted with their loss of taste.

So, Peps reasoned, if there were to be a means of escape, it would have to be an overlooked one. And, above all, it would have to avoid the forest of hawthorns—for he had sworn never again to enter the dark and treacherous wood.

As the city of Rocamadour became the city of the Tasters’ Guild, horses—lively, majestic beings of the Good King—fell out of favor. Where once the stables were attended by several dozen hands, the most enterprising of whom was given the highest honor of attending to the King’s warhorses, now the job fell to that single, dejected soul, Civer. In this way, the small door beside an unused tack stall at the very end of the stables was overlooked—dismissed as storage, and soon succumbing to the cloak of inevitable straw and grain dust a stable brings.

Still, there were those who had not forgotten the secret
door. Professor Breaux and the dejected Librarian Malapert had handed Peps a bag of sugar candies for the lone remaining horse and showed him the way to the stables. But it was Peps’s own inexplicable courage that in the end allowed him to slip away, unnoticed by the Outriders. He traveled deep beneath the mountains, through the empty bettle storehouses within the Craggy Burls, on his way to find Cecil.

And Peps would indeed arrive in Templar, a glint in his eye, the taste of sugar upon his tongue—bristling for revenge.

he subrector Snaith stood in the blaring heat of the arched doorway—his face orange and flickering with fire, his hunched and ruined back side deep in shadow. He was horrendous to behold. Disfigured from battling the dark wasps that swarmed about the Director before the arrival of the ink monkeys, his skin was lumpy and mottled with scars. The cat Six had torn off an earlobe, and it hadn’t bothered to heal; it had the appearance of a cauliflower and was perpetually weeping. In that fateful encounter his tongue, too, had not emerged unscathed. It had endured a gruesome tear and was now slit very much like a snake’s, resulting in a profound lisp.

But these disfigurements bothered Snaith not in the slightest—he had others, after all. Nothing bothered Snaith about that final encounter in the Director’s chambers—where
he fell prey to the swarm of stinging insects and the Director’s feral beast. Nothing bothered Snaith, that is, but the memory of the girl called Ivy Manx, the girl who somehow had gotten the better of him in the spire. She had escaped.

His life’s work was pleasing his master, Vidal Verjouce, which meant first producing the proper formulation of the ink.

Then he would get the girl.

But while Snaith’s face was illuminated by the scorching production line before him of Dumbcane’s inkworks, it was the path behind him that was of most interest to the Watchman. For Snaith was returning from the depths of the catacombs beneath the city, a place so sinister and fearsome that great courage or great conviction was required to successfully navigate it. The catacombs contained the years of the Guild’s dead—and more. The bowels of Rocamadour were better left to the beings of fire that inhabit shadow, a dwelling place of thankless air and pressing earth; it was a suspect world that did not welcome tourists. For Rocamadour was indeed an ancient city, built by an ancient and magical King, and where the dead left off no one knew for sure what lurked beyond.

Not Snaith—who, for a subrector with teaching duties, had been spending an awful lot of time beneath the ground. Not Malapert—the disgraced Librarian who tossed the flame that consumed all the ancient books in his care, burning the many magical testaments and works of a dying king. Not even
the horrendous Vidal Verjouce, who wandered the maze of crypts without the need of a torch (for what blind man needs light?).

Perhaps the only beings who knew the nature of the underworld were the Outriders, who inhabited the darkest regions of the catacombs. Yet they would not speak of such things—they could not speak of such things. They were without their tongues.

No, the subrector Snaith had been spending a lot of time beneath the city because it was there—in the hallowed ground of a decrepit crypt—that the weed called scourge bracken grew.

Snaith watched now as the forger Dumbcane returned to his production line with a vessel of Lumpen’s water. Procuring a sample with a long ladle, the scribe scurried to a side workstation. He wore thick leather gloves against the caustic ink, which reached above his elbows, nearly meeting his stained smock. But these he eagerly tore off, shedding them haphazardly at his feet.

In a small series of practiced steps, Dumbcane strained and poured, sniffed and swirled, and admired the blue-black vial. The ink had been so refined, the scourge bracken made so potent, it was no longer a mere liquid. It was thick, gelatinous—sneaky, even. It moved unhurriedly, leaving a trail of slime in its wake within the small tube.

Squinting, he carefully tapped the vial with a chipped and
blackened fingernail. He peered in, closer, a beleaguered smile across his cracked lips. There was but one final test. With a shaking hand, he coaxed a single bead into the thinnest of glass pipettes and allowed it to pool at the tip—reflecting a thousandfold the fires that burned behind him. Finally, the droplet oozed into his cupped palm.

The searing pain and resulting acrid smoke were indeed the most welcome events in the scribe’s life. He stifled a cry.

Perfection!

Lumpen’s water had indeed been the missing ingredient. So viscous, it was like liquid shadow. Barely ink any longer, it was fuel for an empire. It was a weapon of tyrannical rule—the ultimate poison. One capable of blotting out the very sun.

Exalted, he raised the vial in the ashen air of the Warming Room—and then, in a moment of temptation, he lowered it, clutching it to his breast secretively, peering about him. The scourge bracken called out to him even now. Wiping his brow with the back of his hand, he contemplated his options. His eyes darted for the arched door. The calligrapher conspired privately—as the scourge bracken ink tore his conscience in two—until a hand gloved in red leather made its acquaintance with his frail shoulder.

There ended any hope Dumbcane had of delivering his personal achievement to the blind Director, for Snaith had arrived to claim the sample, and the credit.

he blind Director did not take any notice of the shards of icy glass that were all that remained of the diamond-shaped window in his chambers, for buoyed by scourge bracken, the Director was impervious to the cold.

The trestleman writer was not as fortunate.

Axlerod D. Roux lay in his cramped cage, shivering, drifting in and out of consciousness. His prison was beside the shattered opening, and his view was of the distant city below, the twisting cobbled streets and Guild offices, the shuttered shops, the towering wall.

He was vaguely aware of a scarlet-clad visitor—not that turncoat Dumbcane, as usual. He recognized Snaith’s crablike scurrying, his soft slippers scraping against the stone floor. There were murmurings, a few sharp words.

The trestleman took this all in—the delivery of a small ampoule, the intense agitation of the ink monkeys, the shadowy look of triumph upon the stained face of Vidal Verjouce. And then he felt a cloying sleep wash over him, the sleep of one so cold that in it are only dreams of fire.

Before he slipped away again, however, there was one other arrival.

At the window—at first the small man thought it was another of those awful monkeys come to jeer at him—was a winged creature of the glossiest black. The crow cawed softly to the trestleman, and while the remainder of the room was distracted by ink, Shoo flew to the trestleman’s side and delivered the following message:

And since Axle knew quite well that crows never lie, he was bolstered, determined to survive. He would begin with the dark, long night ahead.

Axle’s study was suddenly quite crowded. It was home normally to the remnants of Caux’s finest literary achievements—what few books survived the awful fire ordered by Vidal Verjouce, a vast and messy desk, the trappings of a reclusive writer. But it was abandoned, and this showed distinctly in the disorder and chaos—as if the place had been turned upside down and shaken. Yet its intricate pulley system remained and crisscrossed the entire room along the low ceiling, and currently Lola, Fifi, and Gigi were forced to stoop to avoid it
.

And now, with the arrival of their lost sister, Babette, the room had taken on a rather dramatic silence. Beneath the trestle, the frozen Marcel cracked harmonically, like the string of a cello, a hollowish noise of some distinction
.

That Babette—the Mildew Sisters could not have failed to notice—had not experienced the ravages that they themselves had endured was a curiosity. And upon this very topic Lola could not help but comment
.

“I say, Babette, how incredibly
well
you look!”

Babette
did
look well. Especially before the current company. Her eyes sparkled, reflecting the prisms of dew that seemed to coat her cloud-spun ball gown. Her skin was pink in all the right places and her posture the picture of grace and purpose. But Babette’s face was unreadable, and it was this alone that gave Lola pause
.

“
And who is this—your companion at the window?” Lola indicated the small transom, where, quite silently, a large black crow perched, unblinking
.

A moment passed in silence
.

“
Do say something, sister,” Lola urged nervously
.

Babette coughed once, daintily, into her hand—a dry cough, that of coarse wool. And then she spoke
.

“Look at you three,” Babette declared, to which the Mildew Sisters dropped their eyes to the floor miserably. “I thought perhaps to punish you for your treachery, but it seems that you have managed quite well on your own. I suppose being cursed by Nature, abandoned by one’s sisters, and rolled up and delivered to the king has its advantages after all.”

The crow cawed and shook out his wings, shedding a few frayed black threads as he did
.

“I’d say, in the end, you’ve gotten the better of the deal,” Lola managed to point out to a chorus of agreements by the other two. “Preserved in that tapestry for these long years.”

On this Babette concurred. She then turned her attention to the room, the discarded pamphlets and disorderly stacks of manuscripts. It was a place steeped in sadness, a trestleman’s abandoned desk
.

Approaching a hefty tome, Babette ran her otherwise delicate
finger—the tip of which was wizened and rough from her years of tapestry-making—along the book’s spine. But when Babette opened the ancient book, a puff of soft insects fluttered about languidly, an event that was followed with great gasps and horrified expressions from the four trespassers
.

“M-moths!” Fifi stammered
.

“Oh, get them away—horrid creatures!” Gigi complained
.

“Well, of all things!” Lola attempted to quell her shaky voice. “There appears to be one upon my shoulder.…”

“Oh!”

“Here—oh, someone, do something before the thing does damage!” Gigi shrieked
.