The Tasters Guild (15 page)

“Nearly there!” Axle called as they plodded through the mucky shallows while pockets of mist floated above the surface.

Stink cabbages dwarfed the girl, and strange ebony-colored lily pads with long, prowling tentacles floated in Ivy’s way—she shuddered involuntarily as she felt them waft along her leg. The slime was more substantial here, too; whole chunks of it slooshed like gelatin as she shook it free from her waders. Thick, dense algae covered the perimeter of the bog like pudding skin.

Axle produced a favorite tool of his, one with telescoping odds and ends and an extraordinary amount of pincers. Energized, he nodded at his brother and turned to Rowan.

“You are the tallest. Loosen the top of the grate—but by all means, be quiet!”

Rowan waded over and took the complex tool. The grate was an old, massive thing, but no one expected what came next. The years of corrosive waste had been hard on the ironwork, and almost as soon as Rowan began prying at the seam, the thing gave way—followed by an explosively loud splash. The splash was itself followed by a dreadful gurgling and bubbling, and finally, as the last
glub
subsided, the group stood frozen in place before the dark passage.

What they heard next made Ivy’s heart sink. From above, along the thick walls patrolled by the Guild’s Outriders, came a bellow, followed by an incomprehensible command. A rough clanging of the alarm—they had been discovered.

V
idal Verjouce sat perfectly still in his room atop the black spire of the Tasters’ Guild. A shaft of pale moonlight from a diamond-shaped window cut a jagged line across his face, laying dark his absent eyes. This was his moment for meditation, the night, the time when the Guild’s Director withdrew from the challenges of tyranny and domination, and went instead to a very private place within his mind.

This place was born from a childhood memory, and from his desires to remember light and color. Over the years, he had tended it, and it grew with his attention into a vast and impressive garden. A Mind Garden. He carefully imagined each planting and carefully disciplined each shoot and limb into a scene of personal perfection. He had chosen and cultivated a spectacular selection of deadly plants, upon which he willed the sun to shine and the rain to fall. He had fashioned a magnificent folly and envisioned it complete with rare peacocks, the color of shadow, their chilling cries punctuating the silence.

It was to his Mind Garden he would retire at the end of the day, for the Guild’s Director never slept.

Yet today his garden was troubled by a darkness. Never before had he seen such roiling clouds—and since it was a garden of his own imagination, he was quite understandably shocked to discover that he was powerless to send them away. The folly stood empty and ravished, a few ruined feathers of the last birds scattered beneath a broken window. The normally pleasing horizon was vague with chill and cloud, and Verjouce was completely unable to think them into oblivion.

His disturbing meditation was disrupted on the temporal plane by a slight yet insistent knock at the chamber’s doors.

With a flash of anger, Verjouce was forced to leave his garden—and the mysterious encroaching clouds. His attention returned to his body, where it sat straight and still, behind the old King Verdigris’s former table, within the old King’s chambers, inside the very halls King Verdigris had built.

“Enter,” he commanded.

“Forgive the intrusion,” Snaith begged. “But this couldn’t wait.”

Snaith had in his hands the ink. He had been conflicted earlier as to how to report Dumbcane’s seemingly vast treason and had settled on the solution most advantageous for himself: to simply not mention it. Instead, he explained the colorful demise of the subrector Gripe and presented—ever so carefully—his master with the curious tins.

The moment Verjouce touched them, he was struck with a dreadful surge of desire, and for an odd moment, the vision of the churning clouds returned to him. His long, pale fingers easily released the lid of one, and even before it was loosened entirely, the smell of its contents surged out, spilling forth in a choking gas. Verjouce did not flinch. Instead, as his heart began to quicken, its deep, thunderous beat now rocketing and erratic with an implacable dark joy, he inhaled deeply.

Scourge bracken
.

The scribe had brought him scourge bracken.

The only place he knew of that it still grew was in his mind.

Snaith had been prepared this time and had covered his face with his robe against the ink’s stench. He observed with an ugly fascination as his master drew in more of the ink’s scent, feasting on the malevolent odor. Then, to his great surprise, he watched as a cloud of sleek wasps, black as night, descended upon the head of Vidal Verjouce, from nowhere, darting about angrily, each hoping for a chance to drink from the deadly ink in the open tin.

“Shall I test his inks in the usual way?” Snaith asked.

“Yes, by all means. And”—the Director’s nostrils flared—“find the fugitive Truax, this fool of a taster. Initiate the return of my paper.”

Deep within the bowels of the Guild’s catacombs—bordered by the dank tunnels of the sewers—Hemsen Dumbcane let
loose a scream of agonizing proportions. He had long worked with—no, worked
for
—the destructive weed. It had seeped into his pores, crusted his cuticles, and made him rich. Now, as he felt its power leave him, he looked about his prison. The strange, lazy fruit flies that accompanied his daily machinations, the very flies that had shadowed the inks he toiled over, had evaporated. He was now truly alone.

A
shrill, heart-stopping scream greeted the travelers as they bounded into the dark opening, a howl so desolate, so piercing, none could possibly have guessed it to be Dumbcane’s. It was a scream of one destined not to die but to
live
—to live a horrible life when death would be ever so much preferable. The pitch and volume finally ebbed, but the echo remained for a few more moments as the group huddled, pressed against the inner brick tunnel of Rocamadour’s sewer.

“Wh-what was that?” managed Peps, who was the last into the passage and was certainly contemplating a swift exit.

For some reason, everyone looked to Rowan.

“I don’t know.” He tried hard not to let his voice crack.

“A trick of the wind?” Axle offered unconvincingly.

“What wind?” Ivy asked.

“Where are we?” Peps demanded, looking around with disbelief. Six bounded on ahead, at home in the underground territory of rodents.

“The sewer,” Ivy offered helpfully.

“The sewer?” Peps was horrified. “Surely not?”

The passage was not entirely unlit—and Ivy had a hard time deciding if this was a fortunate thing. Bare crooked pipes emerged from the brick-and-mortar walls at uneven intervals, belching out thin, wicked flames. The dingy walls were slick with moisture, and every so often a dark hole opened up above them, a hole from which rats—among other things—emerged. And there was, of course, the smell—one that defined the sewer as a place not meant for lingering.

“We should probably begin walking,” Rowan said, and cleared his throat tentatively. “Because if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that those Outriders will be here momentarily.”

“Yes, but which way?” Peps prodded.

There was a brief section ahead where the tunnel continued, but quite evidently thereafter a decision would be needed—the sewer branched out in various directions as it serviced the city above.

“Axle, surely there’s a map in that book of yours?” Peps demanded.

For a moment everyone looked at the author expectantly. Ivy felt around for her
Field Guide
in an inner pocket of her robes.

“There’s no time,” Rowan whispered urgently, casting a fearful look over his shoulder at the entrance. But Ivy was already paging through the midsection, folding out various
charts and almanacs, finally pointing and nodding to one lonely section in a far corner.

“This will do.” Axle joined Ivy. Together, the author and the girl peered at the shadowy page of his masterwork. In the brief moment of silence that followed, the two conferred over the unfolded page.

“I can’t make heads or tails of it, Axle,” Ivy admitted. The map before her was dense with squiggles, and the light was too low. With a lurch in the pit of her stomach, she heard the dull clang of an alarm, which spread along the rooftops and outer walls of the city, reverberating throughout the tunnel.

“Patience.” The trestleman looked—oddly—not at the map but around the dark tunnel. “Any moment now.”

And then, very faintly, Ivy saw it.

Upon the slick ceiling of the tunnel was a golden arrow, long and feathery, but growing ever more distinct. It emanated from the book in her hands and pointed—quite decisively—to the tunnel to the left.

“Oh!”

“Indeed.” Axle looked quite proud.

“Shall we?” Peps asked in a tone that very much hoped they should not.

“Yes,” Ivy agreed, gathering her wet robes around her with one hand and cradling the open
Guide
in the other.

Thankfully, they heard no more of the gruesome screaming
as they inched forward against all instinct. Having Axle’s map was a fortunate thing, and they followed its projection unfailingly—sometimes the arrow appeared upon a wall, sometimes on the slick floor, even sometimes rounding a bend. Finally, they came to a junction.

One passageway was neatly cobbled and appeared to gradually lead up. The other tunnel was of a grimmer sort. It began with an iron gate of some menacing design and only got worse from there. It twisted and turned and seemed to be headed down, very much down, as if the result of the stroke of a madman’s pen.

“That’s the one.” Axle nodded at the arrow, which indicated the more pleasant of the two.

It seemed a natural choice to everyone but Six, who froze at the opening and for no amount of encouraging would budge. Rowan would have been happy to leave him behind—and just as he thought to suggest this possibility, a strange noise issued forth from the passage. It was a small sound—at first. A sort of rumble, or a scratching, or maybe—and this odd thought occurred to Ivy—the sound a million marbles might make if released down a cobbled hill. Soon the rumble grew, and the group looked around nervously.

Six was a cat transformed. He spat into the darkness, and his hair stood in electric clumps, his tail alive. Ivy leaned in to comfort him but pulled away as he turned upon her, eyes unrecognizing. They stared at each other for a moment, the grumbling sewer punctuated with a steady drip from somewhere nearby.

Then, spilling forth from the passage they came: thousands—no, tens of thousands—of dark and slick rats, a sea of them, in which each drop was a gnashing, unblinking, stinking rodent. Their claws clicked against the floor. Their squeaks assaulted the ear. The walls were instantly blackened with their greasy hides, the floor a series of waves.

In the nick of time, the group fled, following Six. For his escape, the cat took the only passage available to him: he sprinted through the creaking gate beside them, into the yawning, decrepit downward tunnel. The rats flowed onward in the direction of their unknown errand, but a few stragglers followed the group, and these now faced the heel of Rowan’s boot. He stamped his foot menacingly, and effectively, but there was one awful, unforeseen consequence. The barbed iron gate of the battered portal creaked uneasily on its hinges and, with a surprising amount of force, swung shut. The explorers—while rid of the rats—were left to stare at their newest misfortune.

With a click, the gate had locked.

D
ismally, they turned into the darkness. “Axle?” Rowan asked hopefully.

“It appears this, er, passageway is not on the map,” the trestleman replied.

“I see.”

“It must let out somewhere, though,” Ivy offered. “I mean, it
is
a sewer.…”

Similar in construction to the other tunnels they had traveled, this one was made of stone, but by perhaps a more careless hand. The rocks were chipped and jagged and variously shaped. Periodically, portals of iron grid were rammed into crooked side openings that veered off into an uneasy darkness. The slope downward was unapologetic and perilous—with each step there was a very real danger of sliding away into the pitch black.

Axle felt around in his satchel and finally retrieved a telescoping torch; its dull filament was flickery and pale, but a welcome addition to the group.

With one clanging and dejected attempt to unfasten the gate behind them, Rowan turned and sighed. Six was on ahead. Apparently, he muttered, he was now at the mercy of the creature.

The tunnel plunged downward for quite some time, and the travelers were quiet with their own cheerless thoughts. Occasionally a foul wind would blow from a rusted opening, and the group would be forced to fend off waves of queasiness. As their path finally leveled out, the tunnel opened upon an intersection of sorts, where four similar channels met at a deep, brick-lined pit. There was a ladder leading down, although the nature of the business that might take a person into the dark hole was one not lightly contemplated.