by Greg Keyes
It was almost over before Annaïg realized what was happening, that it was Glim attacking them. She struck toward him as he confronted Toel.
She saw the water around Toel stir, and Glim was suddenly thrashing, choking with pain. Toel steadied himself in the water, and the familiar look of self-satisfaction on his face was suddenly more than she could bear, much more. As she approached, his lips curled up and he started to say something, but something he saw stopped him.
What he saw was her.
She felt the blade snick out from her arm, and she acted on instinct, slashing clumsily with the invisible knife. Toel managed to get his arm in the way, and the blade sliced cleanly through the joint of his elbow. She felt a terrific shock, and her lungs stopped working. All she could see was his face.
“I was wrong about you,” Toel gasped. Then his features seemed to blur into light and dark arabesques that made no sort of sense.
She came to herself again in Glim’s arms. They were still underwater. The two skraws were looking on in shock at Toel’s body, which besides missing a forearm, was now mostly decapitated.
“Glim,” she murmured.
“I didn’t know who you were,” he said. “I might have killed you. What the kaoc’ are you doing down here?”
“He made me come,” she said. “He was furious—wanted to set an example, or something.”
She looked back at the destroyed body. “Oh Stendarr, Glim, what did I do? I’ve never—”
“Neither have I,” he said.
She felt flimsy, like wet paper. She could see the dead bodies, the dark blood swirling in the water, more black than red, like chocolate.
But none of it seemed real. She had just been talking to Toel. She had kissed him!
“What do we do?” Wert sputtered. “You killed a chef! That’s almost as bad as killing a lord!”
No, no, Annaïg thought. No one is dead. It’s a mistake. You weren’t supposed to be here …
“The first thing,” Glim said, “is we clean up.”
That sank in a little. Yes, they had to do that, didn’t they? What a mess.
“But he’s going to be missed,” Wert went on. “They’ll send more divers to look for him.”
“Right,” Glim said. “That’s why we’re going to fix it so they don’t find him. Or any of them.”
“How can we do that? Even if we cut them up and put them in a midden, a sniffer could find them.”
“Don’t worry,” Glim said confidently. “I know what to do. They won’t be found.”
“Then they’ll start interrogating us.”
“The four of us are the only ones who know what happened,” Glim said.
“What do you mean by that?” Cilinil asked, swimming away a bit.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” Glim said. “That’s not what I’m getting at.”
Something suddenly fit together inside Annaïg’s head.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Just listen. No one knows the skraws are involved, right? Each kitchen will think the other killed Toel. We don’t need to get rid of the bodies—they need to be found. But they need to be found hidden in Phmer’s midden. Everything here—and I mean everything—must be cleaned up. I can make a scrub that will scour this place as if we were never here. Then you can make it look like Toel was killed trying to invade Phmer’s kitchen, you understand?”
Glim’s membranes filmed his eyes and then drew open again.
“Did you—” he began, then stopped.
But he didn’t have to finish. She knew what he was thinking.
“No, Glim,” she said. “I didn’t plan this. It never occurred to me to—you know. But if we play this right, it can work. For all of us.”
“They’ll suspect you,” Glim said. “The only survivor.”
“Everyone who knows I came down here is right here,” she replied. “When Toel can’t be found, I’ll be as surprised as anyone as to where he went in the first place.”
Glim seemed to sort that for a moment before nodding.
“If you think it will work.”
“It’s a gamble,” she admitted. “We could be found out. We could die horribly. But that was probably going to happen anyway, right?”
“I suppose so,” Glim agreed.
“Well, then,” Annaïg said. “Let’s go do what’s needed, and try to live until tomorrow.”
And so they began doing that.
ONE
It happened around midday, beginning as a murmur ghosting up from the pantry and swelling. Toel’s underchefs—Intovar and Yeum—got into a shrill argument in the hall.
When Lord Irrel came down, everything hushed.
Annaïg had never seen a lord before. She had supposed they looked like everyone else, possibly in finer clothes.
She was right about the clothes. Irrel’s robe seemed to be made of black smoke within which winked thousands of tiny sparks. The form-fitting garment beneath might have been made of liquid iron.
Irrel himself was somewhat translucent. When he turned his head, flashes of skull showed through his fine, long features. His large eyes glowed with a soft purple light that shone through his lids when he closed them. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the room.
“Toel is dead,” he said. His voice was soft, but it carried easily to every corner of the kitchen. “Who is his second?”
Intovar and Yeum glanced at each other, and then Intovar stepped forward.
“I am, Lord Irrel.”
Irrel nodded. “The contest tomorrow. Can you win it? Tell me now, and do not dissemble.”
Intovar cleared his voice softly. He looked terrified, and Annaïg could see his fingers shaking.
“Lord, without Chef Toel, our chances are much diminished.”
“Much diminished?” Irrel said, raising an eyebrow. He gestured—as if flicking something from his finger—and Intovar shrieked and dropped to his knees before falling on his face. He didn’t move.
“I’ll ask the question again,” Irrel said. “Can we win it?”
“N-No,” Yeum stuttered. “We cannot, lord. Not without Chef Toel.”
Irrel nodded, and Yeum flinched.
“There,” he said. “A simple answer to a simple question. Thank you.” He sighed. “It is an unpleasant inconvenience to withdraw, but better that than to look foolish.” He turned and took a step toward the door. Annaïg closed her eyes and pushed back her fear.
“We can win, Lord Irrel,” she said.
A little gasp went up around her, but she kept her gaze focused on the lord.
“And you are?” he asked.
“Annaïg, lord,” she replied.
“Ah. Toel’s whimsical inventor.”
“Yes, lord.”
“I have been pleased with many of your creations,” he said. “But that does not make you a chef.”
“We can win, lord. The menu is planned, the preparations are made. We will not make you look foolish—we will make you proud.”
Irrel glanced at Intovar’s body, then back at Annaïg. “It would irritate me greatly to learn this is false bravado,” he said.
“It is not, lord,” she replied forcefully.
“Very well, then,” he said. “We’ll just see.”
No one uttered a word until he was out of sight and presumably out of earshot. Then it began.
“Are you insane?” Yeum shouted. “You’ve just killed us all!”
A chorus of agreement went up from the staff.
“What did you think was going to happen anyway?” Annaïg asked. “Irrel must have a kitchen, and he must have a good one. Did you think you were going to be made chef, Yeum, for telling him we aren’t—you aren’t—competent? He would have brought in a new chef, with a new staff, and most of you would end up in the sump.”
That struck home—she could see it, so she pressed. “We can do this. We don’t need Toel. If you agree to follow me, cook what I say the way I say to, we can win. I know it.”
“I don’
t understand,” Aelo—one of the dicers—said. “You’re probably right about what would have happened to us—all of us except you. Any chef would be pleased to have you. Now, if you fail—”
“I’m tired of being passed around,” she said. “If we win, Irrel will make me chef, I’ll keep all of you, and everything will be fine.”
“But I’m the senior cook,” Yeum protested.
“No, she’s right,” one of the others said. “You can’t be chef now, Yeum. It has to be her.”
“No, she’s crazy,” Yeum retorted. “Irrel wouldn’t …” Her eyes wandered over to Intovar’s body, then she shook her head. “Sumpslurry,” she sighed.
Yeum looked back at Annaïg. “Fine,” she said. “What are we cooking?”
“But this is absurd,” Loehsh asserted as Annaïg looked over his shoulder at his preparations. “Rhel is a lord—he will not eat the raw flesh of an animal, no matter how prettied up with froths and suspirations.”
“He will,” she replied, “and he’ll like it. Just—stop. Give me the knife.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you’re cutting it wrong,” she snapped, repositioning the fat-veined slab of meat on the table and cutting paper-thin slices from it.
“It won’t matter how thin it is,” Loehsh muttered.
“Loehsh,” Yeum’s voice piped up from behind. “You see how she wants it done?”
“Yes,” he said sullenly.
“Then do it that way,” Yeum replied. “Would you have questioned Toel this way?”
“Of course not. But he—”
“Is dead. Unless you wish to join him before even the rest of us do, I suggest you stop asking questions and do things as Annaïg says to.”
“Very well,” Loehsh said sourly. He returned to his task, this time cutting the meat properly.
“Come on,” Yeum said to Annaïg. “We need to talk.”
They went into the little room where Toel used to work on his menus.
“You need me,” Yeum said.
“How is that?”
“You know how to cook—I look at the menu and I’m amazed, I admit. Maybe we do have a small chance of coming through this. The problem is, you don’t know how to be a chef.”
“What do you mean?”
“You try to do everything yourself. It’s impossible. You have to delegate, and you have to do it with authority. You haven’t the most basic idea how to go about it.”
“What are you suggesting, then?” Annaïg asked.
“That we work together,” Yeum replied. “I know how to give orders and spread the work around. I know how to get things done. You know how to make them right.”
“Work together,” she considered. “I worked together with Slyr and she tried to kill me. Why should I trust you?”
“Because I’m not stupid like Slyr. It’s impossible for me to steal credit for this—Irrel was right here. He knows whose dishes these are. I’m only asking that if we succeed, I get to stay here as your underchef.”
Right, Annaïg thought. So you can find another time to slip a knife into my back.
“That’s reasonable,” was what she said, however.
“Okay,” Yeum replied. “In that case I have some recommendations concerning the preparations.”
“I should like to hear them,” Annaïg said.
Yeum paused, and a sly little look passed across her face.
“What?” Annaïg asked.
“Did you kill him?” Yeum whispered.
“What?” Annaïg felt a little chill in her vertebrae.
“The chef. Did you kill him? It was made to look as if Phmer did it, but I can’t imagine her being that sloppy. If, on the other hand, you set it up to look like that—”
“I’m not going to dignify that with a denial,” Annaïg said.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Yeum went on. “If that were the case, you would have nothing but my admiration. Do you know how many people Toel murdered to get here? It’s how things are done.”
“Well, it’s not how I do things,” Annaïg snapped back. She was outraged. Yes, she had killed him, sort of, but it had been an accident. She wasn’t what Yeum thought she was.
Yeum shrugged. “Anyway,” she said.
“Do you have those recommendations or not?”
“I do.”
She slept a scant three hours that night; even with Yeum’s organizations of the kitchen, there were hundreds of details that only she could handle.
Rhel, fortunately, was not like Irrel, who preferred up to a hundred distinct dishes at a meal. From what she had learned, Rhel considered himself more essential than that, and thus she only prepared three, each to be served in a separate course. She scrutinized each plate as it went to the servers.
First came the quintessences of sulfur and sugar, congealed into a glutinous web that held suspended drops of human blood and denatured snapadder venom, which glittered pleasingly—like tiny rubies and emeralds. The web stretched over the cavity of a halved and hollowed durian fruit, whose sweet, garlicky scent she had enhanced with metagastronomics and infused with the lust of a monkeylike creature from the Fringe Gyre, killed just as it was about to mate.
Next came the thin, translucent slices of raw bear loin, collected like the durian from the world below. She had turned the fat of the bear into a room-temperature vapor that clung to the tiny bits of meat, which were pillowed on a nest of glassy yellow noodles that, when bitten, would erase the taste of everything else within a few seconds, but leave deep longing to remember what had been lost.
An hour passed after the second course went up, and Annaïg began to feel nervous. The third course—a complex preparation based on the smoke of clove, cardamom, cumin, mustard, pepper, hornet, black widow, and rage—would begin to mellow and lose its edge if it wasn’t served soon.
The servers finally came a half hour later, a few minutes too late for the smoke to be at its best, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
When the final dish went up, Annaïg wiped her brow.
“I’m going to lie down,” she told Yeum.
“We did well,” Yeum said. “I wonder about your choice to include so much carnal matter, but what you did with it—Toel could not have done better.” She hesitated. “Do you still believe we will win?”
“I don’t know,” Annaïg replied. “But I’m too tired to worry about it anymore. If I’m going to die, I want a little rest first.”
She wasn’t sure how long she dozed, but when she woke, at first she thought it was Lord Irrel standing there, for he had the same translucence. But then she noticed the slow, constant shifting of color beneath his skin, the squarer face and voluptuous lips.
“Lord?” Annaïg said, coming shakily to her feet.
“Rhel,” he murmured in a detached manner, as if he wasn’t so much speaking to her as recalling the conversation out loud. “How did you know?” he asked.
“Know what, lord?”
“The first dish made Lord Ix vomit, which I much enjoyed, and it made Ghol laugh, which is extremely pleasant. Each dish was for me perfect, but affected my companions in ways that I very much appreciated. How could you have known all of these things? Are you able to pick into my mind? I sense no such talent in you.”
“Does this mean we won?” Annaïg asked.
“Yes,” Rhel conceded. “And yet in doing so you have raised questions, you see.”
“I can’t explain it, lord,” she lied. “It is my art, that is all. When it comes to food, I know what people want. I believe one of the gods must have blessed me.”
His gaze settled for a moment, and then he blinked.
“You are from below—from the world we travel through.”
“Yes, lord.”
He smiled. “I think I shall enjoy your world, when we are done.”
“Done with what, my lord?”
He waved his hand.
“Oh, never mind that. You are my creature now, and I value such a
s you. I look forward to the day that you have full access to the goods of your world, rather than just the smatterings the taskers bring up. In any event, Irrel will have to find another chef.”
“And my staff?”
“Keep those you wish—dismiss the rest. Three days from now you will cook another meal, this one for Umbriel himself. I will be interested to see if you can please him as much—and as specifically—as you did me.”
“Thank you, lord,” she said. “I endeavor to do my best.”
“Of course,” he replied, and then left.
She passed a terrified-looking Yeum as she left the kitchens for her quarters.
“We won,” she said. “You’ll stay. We begin preparing tomorrow.”
Then she found her bed, and slept more soundly then she had in a long, long time.
TWO
Mere-Glim was finishing off a sheartooth steak when Wert burst into the chamber they shared with four other skraws, a damp stony room grown up in phosphorescent moss. He had an agitated look on his face, even for Wert. Oluth came in right behind him.
“They’re coming for you,” Oluth gasped. “You have to go.”
“What? Who is coming for me?”
“Guards from one of the lords—Ix, I think. They’ve been questioning people. They broke poor Jith. I know he didn’t mean to—”
“You have to hide someplace until they’re gone,” Wert said.
“That will only put you in more danger,” Glim replied. “If they’re after me, they probably know you’re my second. I’m not going to leave you here to face them.”
“I’ll run, too, just in a different direction,” Wert said. “Glim, we need you. The skraws need you, especially if they’ve caught on to us. You know how to think about these things—we don’t.”
“It’s just I don’t see how they found out,” Glim said. “It was supposed to look like the kitchens were doing it to each other. It was working, I’m sure of it.”
He saw Oluth start at that, but before he could say anything, Wert began trying to push him into the water.
“Go,” he said. “Go someplace deep.”
He saw them as soon as he was in the water. They were smart; they probably had sent someone to run him down in the caves, but figured he would come out here—and he had, right into their hands—if not their net, which he saw descending from above.