The Tasters Guild (17 page)

“What is never hungry but always eating?” Malapert asked, voice loud and obstinate. He directed his gaze at the girl before him.

Ivy had been watching the curious exchange between Axle and the stranger and was caught off guard.

“Er—Could you repeat the question, please?”

The Librarian obliged.

“What is never hungry but always eating?” Ivy reiterated thoughtfully. She turned to Rowan, conferring.

“Pigs eat a lot,” Rowan, the son of a pig farmer, offered. “Even when they’re not hungry.”

“I think it’s something less obvious. It
is
a riddle, after all.”

“Let me think.” Rowan stalled. He tried to recall his years of taster training.

“Malapert—” Axle would not be put off. He tapped the Librarian on the backside again insistently. “Certainly you
must remember me—Axlerod D. Roux? You were always so thorough and knowledgeable—a great help in my research. A true professional. I owe you a debt of gratitude—I always intended to thank you—but, well, in light of the events, I never could make it back to Rocamadour. Pray tell me, how did you come to be … 
here?”

Malapert sighed. It seemed there was no discouraging this tiny man. He looked about the group. The water passing below them gurgled. And in that inexplicable way that enlightenment arrives, as if offered down from above, delivered intact, whole and at once, Ivy suddenly realized she knew the answer to Malapert’s riddle.

“A serpent—devouring its own tail!” she said brightly. “The ouroboros is the answer to your riddle!”

T
he fact that the girl had cracked his riddle so quickly, combined with the insistent small man repeatedly saying his old name, finally brought Malapert to tears. He broke down swiftly, soot and ash streaking his ruined face. He cried bitterly. He cried for so much loss, so long ago.

And then, with a great sob, he invited the visitors to tea.

Malapert’s hut was not designed for guests—it was, in fact, not designed for human habitation—and luckily the small, smoke-stained pile of rocks upon which he brewed his tea lay scattered before the wrecked entrance. In a dented old basin, the Librarian poured some foul water and settled it atop a few burning coals.

Except for the occasional Outrider, the Librarian had seen no one from the world above for the entire Nightshade regime, and since Outriders were not conversationalists, Malapert knew nothing but his own misery. He found now that there
was room in his broken heart for wonder, and he was happy—or, to be more precise, he was not unhappy—to hear what events he had missed after the fire. As Axle and Peps caught him up, Ivy and Rowan had time for a quiet word.

“There—you see it?” Rowan pointed down the awful steps to the small, delicate cinquefoil.

Ivy squinted into the gloom.

“Yes!” Ivy gasped. “Yes, I do! It’s a sign, surely. They grow only in the presence of magic.”

Uplifted, she turned again, examining the haphazard construction of Malapert’s home behind her. It was a teetering disaster, made from unusually fine stone blocks. The Librarian had, inexplicably, hung some dirty rags to dry along a frayed line, and these drooped depressingly to one side of the shack. A vague chill ran up her arms as she realized the stones of the hut were distinctly familiar.

“Rowan!” she cried, grabbing her friend’s arm. “Look! Malapert’s house! It’s made from—”

The pair moved forward quickly, Ivy nearly pulling Rowan along.

“Bearing stones!” the taster realized.

“Yes! I am sure!”

Racing over to the shack as best she could, she ran her hands along the enchanted Verdigris stones. Once everywhere, they were a beacon to those who found themselves lost, pointing the weary traveler in the direction of home. Ivy had come
across several forgotten ones in her travels to Templar, and they had been just as uplifting. She knew the evil King Nightshade had had most of them impounded, feeling anything from the previous King to be contemptible, and Malapert was the inadvertent benefactor of this roundup.

But Ivy knew one thing that King Nightshade did not. It was the magical nature of the stones that as they were moved, so, too, changed the information etched across their smooth sides. Written in a fine script, a scrawl repeated a thousandfold on each and every stone of the Librarian’s hut, was this:

Pimcaux.

Such is the power of a single word. It was written on some stones in small letters and on others quite grandly—here in a dazzling font, and there in plain, practical letters—sideways, upward, and then on the diagonal (for Malapert’s home was not one to follow a clean line). Seeing it now as they did, announcing itself over and over again, the two weary travelers burst into broad smiles.

The visit to Malapert produced one other thing of note.

Axle and Peps listened with wide eyes as the Librarian described his last minutes beside the vast fire—engulfing so
many enchanted and irreplaceable books from the Good King’s reign. As Malapert saw them all succumb to the flames, saw ribbons of angry orange slither across the illuminated pages, he felt in his very soul the wrongness of this act. He saw the dense, magical texts he had guarded for so long turn a sinister, inky black before finally drifting off to ash. And that was when he found his feet working seemingly without his knowledge, for he was suddenly within the awful burning mass, frantically saving what he could and suffering greatly for his regret.

“What little I managed to save I hid in the catacombs,” Malapert confessed. “In the oldest crypt beneath the city. The Book of the Ouroboros is there.”

T
heir murky tea was drunk and the group said their quiet goodbyes. Through another brief tunnel, just as Malapert had promised, they soon came to an iron-rung ladder—not unusual in the sewers, but this one was different. It was splashed with a weak shaft of silvery light.

Rowan was still feeling quite bruised and battered, and a sharp, searing pain was now stabbing at his ribs where the splinter was. As he peered up the hole, it seemed the passage went on forever. This climb would be a challenge, he thought miserably, and he dreaded where it would take them. Suddenly his apprentice robes made him feel wretched and heavy, and he was struck by a memory. It was of the very day it became clear to him that, as a taster, he would never amount to much.

This daunting realization came to him in a theoretical class on taste, taught by an elderly subrector named Professor Breaux. The class, Advanced Taste Theory, was meant for
much more adept students—or at least those with better grades—but somehow Rowan’s application had been approved. Breaux was quite old and stooped, but his voice could reach to the very end of the lecture hall and sound more vigorous than it did in the front row.

The course over the years had not deviated from its curriculum and had thus fallen out of favor with the newer tasters—who dismissed it as old-fashioned and difficult. For this reason, Rowan sat almost alone—his only companion in the back row was a petulant girl named Rue. Rowan knew her as having a reputation for being somewhat thorny, and since she was a year behind him, their paths at first crossed only at Breaux’s lectures.

Rue took no notes that he could see, while Professor Breaux expounded upon the subtler sides of taste and appetite. Rowan, however, knowing quite rightly that he was no natural-born scholar, attempted to fill sheaths and sheaths with scribbled notes, but somehow his talent at note taking never translated into deep knowledge. It seemed more often than not, later, when he was reviewing his work, that the words on the page were not at all right, that he had somehow failed to capture the essence of the lecture entirely. Still he persevered, oftentimes more to prove to Rue that he could succeed—for in his own mind he had invented a competition with a girl who barely seemed to notice him.

While it was the rest of the subrectors’ duties to teach taste in terms of various combinations of sweet, sour, salt, and
bitter—the flavors the tongue is capable of detecting—it was Professor Breaux’s idea to teach taste in a very different way. Breaux added to the list savory—a fifth and controversial taste—and from there, things got even more confusing. Rowan struggled to learn taste as an entire
experience
, as a whole, and this class in particular put him at odds with the rest of the Guild’s teachings. It was as if he were trying to learn two separate but confusingly similar languages at the same time, and the result was a particularly bad mess.

And so Rowan could pinpoint where in his training he knew he would never amount to much of a taster, and it was here, in Breaux’s worn lecture hall, with the afternoon sun catching dust motes in its muted rays. In one way, Breaux’s class planted the seed in Rowan that made him a good companion for Ivy, and an enemy of the Tasters’ Guild. But in another, more practical way, it muddled him up so that he was a danger to himself and anyone he tasted for—and that, of course, had proved fatal to Turner Taxus.

It was well known that Professor Breaux grew a garden of which he was quite proud. It was a moonlit garden, an uninteresting garden in the daytime, but as darkness descended, it came alive with pale blooms, delicate, sweet scents, and glittery surprises. He would host gatherings here in the evening, and when Rowan was invited to attend one—quite an honor—he was surprised to see Rue at home there.

Rowan sat shyly beside the stone fountain and watched as the older students offered up discourse on taste. He hoped he would not be asked his opinion on anything and fretted the entire evening. And, to his great dismay, as his senses wandered to the moonflower and night phlox beside him, he realized his name had been called. Turning, he saw Rue there, holding out her arm.

“More dandelion wine?” she asked again.

“Huh? Oh, yes, please,” Rowan answered, and smiled sheepishly.

“Your first time here?” Rue asked, and Rowan nodded. “I love his class. Don’t you?”

Rowan said that he did.

“I never see you taking any notes,” Rowan mentioned, curious.

“Yeah.” Rue nodded. “I get enough of it at home.”

“At home?”

“He’s my grandfather.” She indicated the Professor. “Didn’t you know?”

“No!”

Rue shrugged.

Rowan looked at her now, her brown hair tied back carelessly with a ribbon.

“I’m glad you came,” she added. “I’ve been working up the courage to invite you for some time.”

I
t was the memory of Rue and her grandfather that finally gave Rowan the strength to begin climbing. For the ascent was to be indeed a long one—Malapert had chosen for himself the very depths of the city as his penance—but all in the group were bolstered by the wedge of moonlight that fell upon their worn and dirty backs. Periodically, Six—strung in a canvas sack, a matted clump of angry fur poking out—would yowl an eerie complaint that echoed down the passage endlessly, as if a thousand forlorn and imprisoned cats had formed a cruel symphony.

The ladder was of an impossible length, uneven rungs that twisted about the tunnel in a maddening way. Still, they noticed a gradual shift—the silvery light grew stronger, until, after many long steps, it shone itself through a long horizontal slit where the tunnel terminated.

“Not long now,” Axle called down to the rest.

After several grunts, he succeeded in moving the heavy grate at the ladder’s end. He climbed out, and then there was nothing.

The nothing was excruciating, but not nearly as excruciating as what came next. There was a shout—followed by several muffled comments, and then again they were left with the sound of the slow seepage of water upon the clammy wall.

Ivy clung to the cold rung in horror.

But Rowan was next up the ladder, and he went freely, without time to contemplate what dangers might possibly await him. In this recklessness, too, was a slight glimmer of a homecoming—Rowan found a rush of emotion at seeing his old campus. He was followed by Ivy and Peps. But what greeted them was not the sinister visage of an Outrider—or Vidal Verjouce himself—but a calm, midnight, moonlit garden, one filled with silver blossoms and nocturnal scents, with twittering nightjars calling in throaty delight.

And, having emerged from beneath a drainage grate beside a tumbling fountain, Peps—small fists swinging and ready for a fight—was completely startled by the sight of his brother and a strangely cloaked man clapping each other on the back like old friends.

Rowan knew at once exactly where he was. He felt an odd surge of happiness—odd, because he was here at the dreaded Tasters’ Guild, but they had somehow emerged within the delicate confines of Professor Breaux’s moonlit garden. There stood the Professor—and beside him, Rue.