The Tasters Guild (10 page)

Ouroboros:

A serpent consuming its tail. An obvious symbol for Taste, adopted by the Tasters’ Guild as their own, but harking back to a much earlier time.

She had a feeling that there was more to this. She made a
note to discuss the ouroboros with the
Field Guide
’s author at the very next opportunity.

In the morning, Ivy awoke with the edge of the book imprinted upon her face. Something was different. The engines had ceased.

T
here was nothing at first, just the fog. Ivy was huddled on deck now with Axle and Peps when Rowan joined them. Trindle had slowed the boat to a near crawl and was forced to blare his foghorn dully.

Then, as if a giant’s breath blew through, the fog shifted and rolled. It lay still listless on the earth and river, but above, enormous, hulking stanchions of heavy iron materialized as if from the ether. They dwarfed the
Trindletrip
. The passengers craned their necks at the black vertical trusses—the thick metal emerged from a cloud above only to return to it below, disappearing into the impenetrable fog. They were disembodied legs, eerie and immense.

“The Toad,” Axle called to Trindle in the steerage compartment.

Trindle cut the engines entirely and the boat bobbed along as if in a cloud, until in another breath the trestle’s supports were gone.

Ivy heard herself gasp.

From somewhere above, a clanging of metal against metal, and then silence.

They were thankfully treated to another break in the fog, and as the shroud slowly lifted again, here and there blackness replaced the gray. There was now a body to those legs—a body of a trestle on a grim cloud, ghostly and ungrounded. It was completely unreachable.

“It’s enormous!” she whispered.

“Shh!” Axle held his finger to his lips and listened.

Indeed, as Ivy waited, there came a clinking sound—at first very far off, but then definitely on approach.

“Ah. You are in for a treat!” Axle was saying to Ivy and Rowan. “First-class service. Simply spectacular! The Toad is the pinnacle against which all others are judged.”

After what seemed to Ivy like an absurdly long time, a dark object was lowered beside the stern. It was an elevator of sorts, she realized. On it was a note.

It read:

“Go away?”
Peps was incredulous.

Axle was still holding the offending note—written on
impeccable stationery with a fine script atop confirming the sender to be the Snodgrass Toad.

“Who do they think they are?” Peps was working himself up into a froth of insult.

“I suppose it is their right.” Axle shrugged.

“They are a
hotel
, Axlerod. A hotel, no less, for
trestlemen.”

At this, Ivy looked upward with renewed interest.

Axle was feeling around in an inside pocket of his greatcoat for a pen, thinking perhaps a polite missive would gain their entry. A simple misunderstanding, he felt sure, and he would right it by explaining himself. He set about composing.

Peps adjusted a flashy orange scarf, throwing it casually about his shoulders, and polished his signet ring. “Don’t bother! I will investigate this further.”

And with that the small man hopped aboard the elevator.

“No you don’t—not without me!” Axle admonished, joining his brother.

Ivy, too, would not be left behind, and Rowan—Rowan under no circumstances wanted to be left anywhere with Six.

Peps flipped an ancient-looking control, and the entire thing lurched upward.

“Humph,” Peps complained, inspecting the drab inside. “Seems we’ve been relegated to the freight elevator.”

T
he Snodgrass Toad was a majestic and ornate trestle that harked back to an earlier time in Caux, a time when great things were built to last, if not to look at. A trestle hotel, it was big and grand, made from stone and wood and iron. A fancy place—inside. But from the exterior, the stone and wood and iron made up a hulking bridge, which spanned two sheer limestone cliffs in an ungraceful arc. The Toad threatened to either leap up and away or fall into the waters below, depending on the time of day you looked at it.

The architects were baffled. Their designs—all seven hundred pages of them—called for elegant lines and graceful bends, but what they got was a place that would, when completed, look remarkably like a crouching toad straddling the waters below. They tore it down and began again, only to be rewarded with the same vision, only beastlier. It was plain that there was some sort of magic responsible—a spell, perhaps from a disgruntled alewife.

Indeed, since alewives ruled over waterways, everyone knew their blessing was necessary to successfully complete any bridge or crossing. And the builders had neglected this one very important act: obtaining the alewives’ approval.

Upon the trestle’s completion, wild snodgrass grew up in tufts atop its bulging roof, untamable, filling in every last detail of the toad’s silhouette. The sheer cliffs to either side and the waters below formed at this point in the river’s geology a sort of wind tunnel, and the Toad at times was even made to sound as if it groaned. But no matter—if indeed there was a curse from an unhappy alewife, she was thwarted in the end. The Snodgrass Toad became instantly famous and a wildly popular attraction, and soon all the people involved in the execution of the remarkable trestle would imagine that they had never meant it to appear any other way.

As the lift made its slow, incremental progress up the underside of the expansive trestle, the group was silent. The trip was punctuated with worrying pauses, when the elevator would stop its ascent and hang aloft, twisting lazily—and then lurching back downward. Ivy gripped the worn brass rail that ran along the side of the interior, but that did little to alleviate the distress of the ride. There was some sort of thick green moss clinging to the underbelly of the trestle, and their journey seemed to be disrupting it. Large clumps of it dislodged from the damp beams and rained down upon them like sludgy wet beards.

“I see they’ve fallen behind on the upkeep,” Peps sniffed, watching a trail of green slime slide down the old window.

They did arrive, finally—the elevator’s topside alighting with a thud upon a set of spring-loaded trapdoors, and then, in a final crescendo of metal against metal, through the underside of the hotel. With a pop, the old thing reached the lobby, bobbing perkily.

The doors opened to a chamber devoted to stone and mirror. Yet it seemed that at some time previous, light and mirror had quarreled, and light had retreated in a sulk. What remained was mirror and polished stone with little sparkle. It was a remarkable room in that the visitor expected to encounter his reflection at every turn but never did—imparting the odd sensation of wonder at one’s own existence.

Ivy stepped forward onto a rich red rug, and the rest followed. Before them, a desk.

Peps was the first to ring the small attendant bell, which he did impatiently as he looked around the lobby.

“What kind of greeting is this?” he asked to no one in particular, ringing the bell again for good measure. He ran a gloved finger along the tabletop and inspected for dust.

“You know,” Axle began, “I don’t like to think about how long it’s been since I was here last.”

As if to illustrate the passage of time, they were now joined by an impossibly old and brittle trestleman whose uniform had been laundered with entirely too much starch. He looked
as if he wished very dearly to stoop but was being supported in his upright position by the sheer crispness of his attire. This man was the concierge, who, like the hotel, had surely seen better days.

“The card said ‘No Vacancy,’” the old man whispered in a creaky voice. He cleared his throat and, with great effort, repeated himself, but only managed it slightly louder.

“We can read,” Peps replied dryly. “So every one of the hundreds of rooms here is filled?”

“Excuse me.” Axle stepped forward. “Surely there is some place for us? We will take whatever you have. A storeroom, even? We’ve traveled from Templar. Our errand is urgent.”

“Master D. Roux,” the concierge, a trestleman named Crump, began wearily. He knew the face of every guest who had ever stayed at the Toad.

Axle nodded happily.

“Your errand is of no concern to us.”

This was a surprise indeed, and Axle’s smile stalled upon his face.

“If I m-might respectfully disagree,” Axle stammered. “It is of
great concern
to you, and the others, and in fact all of Caux.”

Crump paused. His uniform was losing the battle with his posture, and he seemed to be distracted by his shoe.

“The winds of change have blown, old friend. The Deadly Nightshades no longer rule! The great Master
Apotheopath Manx is now Steward of Caux while his niece Ivy—here—journeys to Pimcaux to restore the Good King Verdigris to full health!” Axle’s enthusiastic speech now stalled.

A strange look filled the entirety of Crump’s sagging features, but not exactly one of relief or liberation.

“Forgive me, sir. But you are wrong.”

“Oh, I think you will soon see—” Axle began. But Crump was not finished.

“You have made it decidedly, horribly, worse.”

There was a stunned silence. Finally, when it became quite clear that Crump had nothing further to say, Axle drew himself up and produced from his waistcoat a small card of thick stock upon which, in raised oxblood ink, was written his name. He thrust the calling card at Crump.

“Announce our presence to Rhustaphustian. Now.”

C
rump shuffled away holding Axle’s card, leaving the mood in the lobby distinctly darker than he had found it.

“How have
we
made it worse?” Peps scoffed.

Axle was frowning, and Ivy began to notice she had an awful feeling in her stomach.

She turned to examine the nearby wall and was introduced to numerous panoramic, sepia-toned photographs. It seemed to be a catalog of Caux’s many trestles and their various occupants. The images populated nearly all available wall space, except where there were obvious absences—ghostly rectangles and lonely nails indicated that several had been removed.

The trestlemen within the dark frames were frozen in an earlier, more innocent time. Ivy peered at the blurred visages, some faces shy and coy, others caught in a moment of exuberant delight. The river beneath them was ever calm; the sun behind them threw a pleasant shadow upon all the gridiron and scaffolding that formed each overpass.

As Ivy wondered at this, she came upon a small picture. This one was somewhat different, she noticed at once—the trestle was of a very simple design, and the photographer seemed to feel the need to enliven the shot. The camera had been placed further away; the woods beside the small arched bridge were more wild, the stream (for it was not a river here but a shallow, rock-studded waterway) more frothy beneath the camera, as if the presence of so much nature would deliver the tiny trestle from its own coarseness. Ivy inspected it closely.

To her great surprise, of the two figures depicted upon the trestle, one was not a trestleman. It was a
lady
—a striking and refined lady, who complemented the trestleman in size quite accordingly. Although she was dressed in a fashion from long ago, she seemed to be well acquainted with good shoes and impressive tailoring, possessing, Ivy noted, a distinct proclivity for pearl buttons. From a ribbon around her neck, Ivy noticed, hung a small, glinting charm. Her hair was a blur in the old print, as if it were made of the same stuff as the stream below.

“Rowan!” Ivy whispered, standing still before the small photo.

The taster turned to investigate.

“I think that’s an alewife!” She pointed, feeling for her own alewife charm around her neck.

“Where?” Rowan peered in.

“There—she’s a bit blurry, but I’d swear it’s so!”

It was then that Crump made what for him was a speedy
return. The concierge addressed Axle, completely disregarding Peps. “Rhustaphustian will see you now.”

The group followed him into the adjoining hallway and eventually to a low, squat door.

“Everyone is gathered,” Crump informed them.

Axle stole a look at his brother, who, for once, was silent—his hand frozen on the threshold. Over the years, Peps had made no secret of his disappointment in nearly all his fellow trestlemen—while profiting from their absence. It would be an uncomfortable reunion.

They entered what at one time was the Toad’s grand ballroom. Currently it was populated with rocking chairs, the preferred seating of the trestlemen of the Toad. The chairs were everywhere, willy-nilly upon the scuffed wood floor. The room’s walls were a dim, mushroomy beige, that is, until they were not—when dramatic red polka dots prevailed. And atop the red-spotted walls was a ceiling of finely carved balsa wood—like a folded fan. Or gills. In fact, Ivy and Rowan were now realizing, the entire room was made to evoke an enormous toadstool.

“Axlerod D. Roux,” spoke a barrel-chested trestleman who sat in the middle of the room on a high-back rocker. “It must be dark days indeed that have made you abandon the comfort and solitude of your own trestle.”

“It’s been some time, Rhustaphustian,” Axle acknowledged uncomfortably.

Ivy stole a glance at the rest of the room. Many of the weathered chairs sat empty, but those that were full were occupied by ancient-looking trestlemen of similar temperament and discouraging expressions. Their only audible contribution to the conversation was a ceaseless creaking of each rocker. Behind them on one wall, the round windows revealed that the fog had lifted.

There was a pained silence punctuated with the elder trestleman clearing his throat.

“To what, then, do we owe this … honor?” He held Axle’s card uncomfortably by its corner.

“Surely news of our travels has reached you here?” Axle smiled ingratiatingly.