The Shepherd of Weeds (26 page)

And something terrible was indeed happening behind the heavy, metal-studded doors of the recessed entrance to Irresistible Meals. Something chilling and horrendous—borne from the depths of the bile that circulated through his soul, a place where normally patience and purity are found. But, in the case of Snaith, what virtue he might have possessed had long ago turned to sludge. Like the boils upon his face, Snaith’s hatred had bubbled up from a place deep within him, a fearsome hatred for all but his master, Vidal Verjouce.

And since Verjouce was occupied with his terrible passion, Snaith had decided to take matters into his own hands.

Over his years of service at the Guild, Snaith had amassed a sort of list, and on it were the various people who had ever—even once—shown him some hint of unkindness, some measure of disagreeability, or perhaps he simply chose to dislike. And then, of course, there were the children—every one of them disappointing in some way or other.

So it was that the remaining students—a surprisingly numerous group, as the Guild had shut its doors quite quickly after the Deadly Nightshades were toppled—and a peppering of uncooperative subrectors had been herded into his lecture
hall, where a vat was waiting. The room of Irresistible Meals.

Snaith, with his curved spine and uncooperative gait, took the lectern and looked around. Goblets lined the long table, glinting in the light of the chandelier.

“Welcome”—he interlaced his stubby fingers, resting them on his paunch—“to your
final
exam.”

umbcane had begun to dream about the bewitching fountain and, in particular, about the horse and woman rider at its center. It seemed to him the cruelest of visions: a drowning woman and her steed, encircled by various onlookers (some quite fanciful and grotesque), helpless before the taunting crowd (and worse still: some of those gathered figures displayed a casual indifference, looking away from her plight—as if a drowning woman might be the commonest of things). The dream each time aligned Dumbcane with these jeering onlookers—and, in the way of dreams, he found himself horrifyingly incapable of action.

At night, Dumbcane thrashed and twitched in the airless room upon his straw pallet; in the day, he sleepwalked through his duties at the inkworks. At times, even, he fancied he heard
a ghostly horse, galloping, urgent hoofbeats echoing off the twisting maze of Rocamadour’s streets and walkways.

The woman, though he tried desperately to see her in these visions, was bathed in shadow. Remarkably—just as the sun shattered upon her dress at the fountain—her skirts were alive with starlight. Pinpricks of scorching light bounced about her as she traveled through the dark passages, jumping the small, greasy waterways with grace and ease. The stars were grouped in strange, unusual constellations from new and foreign skies. (Dumbcane, from his years of forging the Good King’s magical documents, was familiar with them all.) His tiny room was littered with discarded attempts to capture the horse and rider on paper, for he was a man obsessed.

One particular haunting evening, when Hemsen felt feverish and the thoughts within his head echoed in an unpleasant and tinny way, he rose from his familiar dreams to search out his water jug. It was then that he heard it: the distinctive
clip-clop
of a large horse making its way clandestinely through the streets of Rocamadour—and then upon a nearby narrow passage that the scribe knew led up and let out eventually on top of the high wall of the city. The horse’s hooves rendered a noise of stone striking stone, and Dumbcane soon assumed that the carved horse and rider from the fountain had finally come for him.

He raked his ink-stained fingers through his hair and pinched at his cheeks. He determined he was most certainly not sleeping.

Dazed, and not quite willing to trust his ears, Dumbcane wrapped his boiled-wool blanket about him hastily and went out, nightshirt flapping behind him as he ran.

Clothilde and Calyx rode as if there were no unaccounted years between them, rode as if both were fresh and new and the joy of simply being in each other’s company was the greatest of all pleasures. Calyx would perform any maneuver Clothilde requested with enviable intuition—she need not dictate with her reins (and the whip she carried was reserved for other things). Such was his perfect anticipation of his rider, and his trust in her was complete. She had returned. It did not matter why.

They galloped throughout the darkened city on errands and scouting missions she devised, their knowledge of the twisting streets and walkways innate and unfailing. Calyx’s new silver shoes grazed the mossy stones.

When he discovered that the ravishing figure of his dreams was indeed a living, breathing being, Dumbcane gave over any last resistance and devoted himself entirely to her command. He was free to do her bidding, the woman of the stars. Only then did his nightmares cease.

He enjoyed the sabotage he performed for her, for she seemed bent on disruption. She ordered various passages closed or obstructed; waterways were rerouted at her whim. She had an accomplished plan for everything, it seemed to
Dumbcane, who nodded mutely at each order she dispatched. The tarnished doors to the Chapter Room, with its macabre friezes lining the walls, had been flung open, the rooms aired, and a majestic drape mounted on the wall.

This weaving, she had told him haughtily, was from her personal collection, deep within a buried vault. It had held her warhorse Calyx’s saddle for these many years.

Dumbcane unfurled it carefully, with heavy leather gloves. It was the image of a door with a porthole carved into it, through which the scribe saw stars upon a blue-black velvet sky. He had been given a set of warnings. Do not touch the ancient weave without your gloves. And be on the lookout for moths.

The woman was very precise on the placement of the wall hanging—and when Dumbcane was done, she stared at the thing, approaching it confidently. She blew away a speck of dust and nodded appraisingly. Then she spun on her heel, stars bounding about the dark hall and its woven contents like a string of lights on an evening carousel, and was gone.

he ravages of time had singled out for their pleasure the upper chambers of the central spire of Rocamadour. The very room that once held kings had now been redecorated in the theme of evil. Shadows draped the walls like malevolent curtains. Dense cobwebs sagged under the weight of grease and dust, forming small, ghostly hammocks. A carpet of decay and poison covered all else. Empty walls and pitted floors alike were splattered with dark, tarry ink, the stench of which was so cheerless, so desolate, that any visitor would instinctively beg for swift deliverance. Darkness prevailed, for light had been banished by a blind man.

In this inhospitable mess, the trestleman Axlerod D. Roux—arguably the wisest being in Caux—lay in a small gilt cage beside the room’s lone window. His pleasant memories of
this room had long abandoned him. The slight rocking of the cage, suspended by a velvet cord, was all the trestleman had to remind him he was alive, and so great was his misery that he had begun wishing for nothing but stillness. A vast, eternal stillness.

Instead, there was constant noise.

The howling of the wind through the shattered window was like the breath of banshees. But, worse still, were the squeals and chatter of Vidal Verjouce’s scourge bracken fiends, his grotesque ink monkeys. They clustered beside their dark master like nesting bats.

Axle watched as a squabble between two of them broke out beneath his cage. The ugly pair were tormenting a scorpion, plucking its legs off one at a time, and the disagreement appeared to be over whose meal the thing might make. The argument was forgotten when they turned their attention to Axle’s cage, rattling the bars with little leathery fists for amusement. They shrieked mercilessly, baring yellow teeth.

An evil voice drifted over the stale air. “Soon,” it said, “I shall have dominion over all things.”

As Vidal Verjouce repeated his unfortunate promise, Axle was finding it hard to be impressed. To rule over this wasteland, he thought, could hardly be deemed a triumph. But the Director’s words were not for him, Axle knew.

He turned his attention to the ink monkeys before him, the shattered light of the diamond-shaped window illuminating their dark velvety fur. Their nasty faces stared back eagerly,
small horn buds protruding haphazardly above their squinty eyes.

A bucket of ink lay at the Director’s side, and in it he occasionally dipped the spiked tail of an ink monkey perched upon his wrist. The mixture was as thick as tar. Tail in hand, Vidal Verjouce continued his horrible composition—his masterpiece of ruin. The ink was now too caustic for paper, so Verjouce wrote upon the spire’s walls, and where the scourge bracken touched the solid slabs, the stone was etched away.

Like a gravestone
, Axle thought.

Suddenly he was compelled to speak. “What are you writing?” Axle asked.

“Your obituary,” Verjouce responded. “You see—you’re dead. You just don’t know it yet.”

The trestleman watched for a while longer while Verjouce muttered to himself in scratchy whispers. The walls were swirls of sentences, the letters incomprehensibly small at times, vastly oversized at others—all in the old tongue. Entire passages were underlined in places, while huge sections were crossed out with deep, ragged gouges. Yet the language was a familiar one to Axle, and he soon recognized a few key words and fragments.

“The Prophecy!” he croaked.

At the sound of the prisoner’s voice again, the ink monkeys shrieked wildly, clambering upon each other in an attempt to reach his golden cage.

“Silence!” Verjouce commanded. “Can’t you see that I am
concentrating? I do not toil over insignificant pulp, like you. No, I am rewriting the very fabric of life.”

“You fool!” Axle rattled the bars of his cage. Half crazed, the monkeys gnashed their teeth and clawed at the air. “The Prophecy cannot be undone!”

“Now, Axlerod.” Vidal Verjouce spun around, and Axle wished he hadn’t. “We both know that this is not so.” His face—the hollow pits where his eyes once were—was a mask of grim evil.

The trestleman regarded the dire scene before him. But he was not silent. Emboldened—and beyond caring—Axle continued, louder.

“Then you shall fail! For the Prophecy was long ago surrendered to the creatures of the air.”

The monkeys hissed and shrieked at the trestleman.

“All things written can be unwritten. That is the power of this ink,” Verjouce glowered.

he birds of Caux grow restless,” Peps D. Roux observed from the window of Ivy’s workshop in Templar.

“Soon,” came Cecil’s reply.

The pair were peering down at the courtyard, where a strange spectacle was unfolding. There Ivy and Rue had gathered, dispersing a thick carpet of untidy twigs and dried vines. They now stood in the middle, surveying their accomplishment. Shoo flew to Ivy’s shoulder, and she whispered something to the old crow.

“This delay …,” Peps was saying. “For Axle’s sake we must make haste! My men are ready at this very moment. Let us tell them they can go.”