The Tasters Guild (24 page)

Instead, a familiar hand.

A warm one, infused with life, not steeped in shadow. In the way that good friends are always the best medicine, the hand pulled her up from the scourge-bracken reverie and seemingly plucked her back into the world of the living. She looked from between her fingers and gasped.

Rowan!

But how was this possible?

Her friend smiled his particular welcoming smile and proceeded to fold his wings. Ivy realized Rowan had somehow managed to secrete away a pair of springform wings, made from familiar linen and tensed wire.

“What fun!” he confided, heart beating a rapid song in his chest. “I’d been waiting to try these out since the forest!” He would, eventually, tell her how his flight against the thunderheads, soaring over the somber city of Rocamadour, had been the achievement of his dreams. But for now, he had seen from his bird’s-eye vantage point a collection of scarlet Watchmen and Outriders disgorge itself from the Library, and he knew time was pressing.

Indeed, a sharp sound of approaching footsteps was heard, and turning, the pair ran on, Ivy never releasing her grasp on Dumbcane’s stolen parchment. Finally, the two arrived in the low-slung Warming Room.

They skidded to a halt.

In preparation for Dumbcane’s ink-making enterprise, the vast chamber was ablaze with an immense fire—the heat hit the children’s faces like a scorching breath. Everywhere lay piles of litter and filth. The great firepit was smoking with thick brush, and an enormous bellows fanned the embers. Clinking, monstrous chains guided the assembly line. Outriders—more than Ivy thought was possible—patrolled the workshop, and Hemsen Dumbcane wandered about testing the contents of various cauldrons, readying coils of copper tubing and enormous sweaty beakers. Now and then the scribe would mutter and call for assistance, beckoning an Outrider to procure more water or produce more heat.

Ivy and Rowan watched the bony calligrapher as he peered into a small vial of gluey green syrup. Swirling it, he then
sniffed at it tentatively and scowled. Cursing, Dumbcane threw the tube against a nearby wall, shattering it.

“What is he doing?” Rowan whispered.

Ivy shook her head. Axle would know, she thought. Axle—still a captive of the awful Director. Her heart sank.

Rowan beckoned her away from the light, and with their backs against the smooth wall, they inched around the horrible operation. Her ever-present fireflies, a halo atop her head, were mere sparks before the bonfire.

Along the sunken hall they crept, and ahead, their destination—the simple steps leading down into hallowed ground. Waiting to guide them belowground—just as Breaux had indicated in his bouquet—was Peps.

T
he ribbon of gloamwort was still there, tacked to the wall as Axle had left it. It was little trouble at all to follow it, even behind Peps’s hesitant steps (because what trestleman in his right mind would return to the land of the dead?). For Ivy, the trip into the darkness was marked by the unnatural brightness of the gloamwort. The string bobbed and weaved, tensed and sagged—seemingly beckoning her along in a dancing line—sometimes taut, sometimes slack. Finally, the threesome arrived deep below the Tasters’ Guild, at the oldest part of the maze beneath the city.

“I’m sure glad something good comes from passing this way,” Peps murmured in the dark. “Breaux paid a visit to Malapert,” he explained. “The Librarian told him he hid the few books he saved right here.”

“Where?” Rowan asked.

“Breaux’s … bouquet … had … 
hedge mustard,”
Ivy blurted. Her head was clearing slightly, but Ivy’s words were
still coming too slowly for her liking. Especially now, in their haste. “But … then it was … vague. Bryony. Buckbean.” She took a deep breath, concentrating.

“Hidden, enclosed room?” Rowan quoted the definitions.

“Yes.”

“Caulwort, de-thorned.”

“What does it mean when it’s de-thorned?” Rowan asked impatiently.

Ivy felt in her robes.

Axle’s impressive
Field Guide
details some of the history of the catacombs beneath the Tasters’ Guild, but there were no known maps of the twisting tunnels. They were in the oldest part of the maze, and there was simply nothing listed about their current location. Ivy knew this because she held in her hand her copy of the book. Yet it was still the best reference for deciphering the more obscure elements of Flower Code—and she bent over her
Guide
.

“De-thorned … caulwort,” she muttered, paging through the long lists at her fingertips. “Um … here we … go. Oh.” She paused, rereading the passage. “Oh, no—” Ivy straightened, looking about the underground chamber aghast.

“Ivy?” Rowan asked, worried.

“I think … Malapert hid the books … there,” Ivy announced, pointing, seemingly, at Peps. It was a great relief to talk sensibly again.

Confused, the trestleman frowned, touching his chest.
“Surely you don’t mean—” Peps began, but stopped himself just as quickly. He paused, turning slowly, and peered into the shadows. Stepping away, Ivy and Rowan were now treated to what lay behind him. A gaping hole in the masonry hidden in shadow and flanked on either side by two lumbering urns.

A tomb.

A giant keystone hung low in the ruined portal. No plaque to mark the dead within. Just a faint breeze, a slight sucking sound of the wind.

Peps cleared his throat. “Couldn’t Malapert have just found a nice, snug cupboard to store them in?”

Rowan dislodged the ancient cobwebs and paused on the threshold.

“Wait!” Ivy called. She clutched the tattered ouroboros parchment in one hand, advancing unsteadily.

Rowan gripped the small torch Peps had provided, and, holding hands, he and Ivy walked up the three uneven steps to the opening. Together they entered the darkness of the hallowed ground.

A
t first Ivy thought it was a trick of the poison within her—making the room lurch as if a dark field of grain were swaying in the wind. But Rowan noticed it, too, as soon as his eyes adjusted.

“What is this? What grows beneath the earth, without the sun?” he asked.

But just as quickly, he knew the answer. He had seen, at Malapert’s, things grow in impossible conditions. But these plants were not cinquefoils and brought with them none of the uplifting joy that the golden flower possessed, the lightness of heart or being. Nor were there blossoms, or buds. Just velvety black spikes and oddly curling leaves that rustled in the ill wind. Their smell at once beckoned and repulsed.

“Oh, Rowan,” Ivy whispered.

“Tell me it’s not what I think it is.”

“It’s a tomb. It grows on hallowed ground.…”

“No!” he practically moaned.

“Just find the book—and quickly.” Ivy looked about. “And then we need to replace the page that Dumbcane stole—the ouroboros page. But whatever you do,
don’t touch
the weed!” Her head reeled—the awful growth was coaxing her, beckoning. It seemed to pulse, summoning her.

The books were there—stacked haphazardly in several dark recesses built to hold bones. There appeared to be a few dozen—Malapert had been overcome with regret and saved many more than they thought possible. Their enormous covers were singed, the pages darkened with smoke. Standing on tiptoe, Ivy could just reach them.

“Sweet pea and inverted heather,” Ivy recited for Rowan, who hadn’t gotten a proper look at Breaux’s Flower Code.

“Sweet pea, that’s easy.
Small
, right?”

Ivy agreed.

“Hmm. Inverted heather. Heather means
clarity
, but when it’s upside down, it’s—what
is
it?”

“Disguise.”

“So,” Rowan continued eagerly now, “small and disguise.”

“I think Breaux wants us to look for the smallest book in the collection,” Ivy guessed. “It might be disguised.”

“They’re all the same size!” Rowan moaned. “Look!”

Ivy inspected the Verdigris tomes. They were as she expected—enormous, leather-bound journals with stenciled titles upon their spines, each written in the old tongue. None could be remotely described as small.

Desperately, she looked around the crypt. The floor was a carpet of scourge bracken. Deep in the tomb’s recesses, there was only shadow. Shadow, and more of the ossuaries within the walls.

“Stay here,” Ivy ordered.

“What are you doing?” Rowan’s voice nearly cracked.

Taking a deep breath, Ivy planted one foot in front of her, entering the dismal growth.

“Ivy?” Rowan called desperately—but she was determined. “You said not to touch it!”

“There is another book over there,” Ivy replied. Although her voice was calm, she was anything but. Both legs were now entrenched in the dark plot of scourge bracken, and it rose sickeningly around her to mid-thigh. “Besides, I will be fine—I survived eating it in Irresistible Meals, didn’t I? This could hardly be any worse.”

It was a reunion of sorts. Although Dumbcane had extracted the worst elements of the weed and concentrated them in his inks a thousandfold, the scourge bracken beneath her feet made Ivy feel as if she had been thrown down a deep well—the world of shadows again reared up on her. Snaith’s paunchy visage swam before her eyes. A look of triumph played across his face as he sharpened his awful knife.

The smell was stronger, of course, and as she made her way through, she wisely held her breath. It was the smell of decay, coming impossibly from something alive. And its touch was sticky, soft, and velvety. A deadly caress.

Her halo of fireflies was rejuvenated, dancing around the room—but this time they lit her way. Against the far wall, with the purple-tinged light from the insects, she saw it.

A lone book. But what book was this? It appeared to be an outdated instruction manual for barrel-making.

“Foxglove,” Ivy gasped. It was the last element to the bouquet.

“Foxglove?” Rowan repeated. “Foxglove is … what
is
it?”

Ivy steadied herself. She needed to breathe and wondered if she dared.

“Foxglove:
false
and
insincere!”
Rowan cried out. “A small book …” He puzzled. “A small book, disguised under a false cover!”

Ivy grabbed the manual and sprinted back.

“It’s about the right size,” Rowan assessed as Ivy caught her breath.

Its binding was sagging, the gold-stamped letters of its title twinkling in the light of Peps’s torch. Ivy reached for a better look. She blew away years of dust, revealing a plain, nondescript cover.

“Let’s see,” she said, unfurling the ouroboros parchment beside it to compare.

She opened the book tentatively, and as she did, a shower of golden petals rained down upon the tomb’s entrance. They tinkled like crystal, tiny amber stained-glass windows as they touched the stone floor.

“Cinquefoils!” Ivy and Rowan said together.

The book was filled with the dried, pressed flower of the King.

T
hey emerged quickly with the book to the comparatively bright tunnel, where Peps nervously waited.

Although the cover promised to teach the many intricacies of cask construction, the inner pages told another story. It read:

B
OOK OF THE
O
UROBOROS