The Tasters Guild (14 page)

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.”

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.”

V
idal 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.”

I
t 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 to 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.

T
here was still in the sky a pale smudge of moon—covered with an odd cushion of nightcloud. But it was enough to light what stood before them: the thick-cut stone of the fortifying walls of the ancient city of Rocamadour, an impossible amount of sleek, dark rock and perfect, polished mortar. The stream was but a rivulet now, emerging at its source, a rusted circular grate as old as the stone itself.

Rocamadour, like many ancient cities, had been expertly executed with a series of underground channels. The freshwater circulated throughout the city in coils of thick pipe, within the mouths of gargoyles and blank-eyed statues, eventually terminating at the Guild’s dark pools and bleak fountains. On the way, the freshwater channels passed along cobblestone streets and through tight, twisting paths, occasionally quenching the thirst of the city’s rat population or watering the slippery creeping moss that coated most of the walled city’s interior.

The wastewater was an underground affair. Evacuated from the various components of the academy—the lavatories, the laboratories, the Infirmary—it snaked its way beneath the streets in a series of mystifying tunnels. So it was that one was never far from the sound of running water, or seeping water, or the dank smell emanating from the grates that barricaded the sewer below.

There is no need to detail the components of the soiled debris that made up the city’s sewage; it is enough simply to state that the bleak passages beneath the Tasters’ Guild were a place that very few dared to go. Yet here the group stood, before the terminus of one such underground waste channel. Upon inspection, Ivy noticed a thick slime caught up in the ravaged iron bars, and she did not relish the idea of entering the yawning blackness of the tunnel behind.

Axle was fishing around for a tool in his sack, and Rowan stood apart from the group, neck craned upward in a vain attempt to see to the top of the thick wall.

“There are Outriders posted up there,” he whispered. Ivy motioned for him to be quiet.

It had been a harrowing trip up the remainder of the stream—they were forced to walk the final leg, for the oilcloth of the skimmer had at last become waterlogged. They took turns pulling it—with Six inside, as the cat firmly refused to get his feet wet again. As they approached the stream’s source, the weight of their errand grew heavier. The air was thick with the smell of the greasy water and swamp gas, making breathing—and conversation—an unpleasant task.