The Tasters Guild

by Susannah Appelbaum

  Ivy rounded a showy tuft of silvery grass and was surprised to find her host alone in the moonlight, sitting beside his staff in a forgotten corner of the garden.

  “Professor Breaux?” she asked, approaching.

  He put a finger to his lips, quieting her.

  Even though his was a residence—one acquired in advanced age and seniority in the subrector ranks, a safe house of sorts for the travelers—it was, after all, a part of the larger Tasters’ Guild, and the walled ramparts of the city weren’t that far off. From here the two watched as several guards patrolled it. On the other side of the high stone wall that encompassed Breaux’s home and garden was a cobbled walkway, and on this Ivy now heard footsteps plainly receding.

  “Join me?” he asked in the silence that followed.

  Ivy nodded and did so.

  “I envy your travels. Pimcaux! Although it is not in my future to see it again, I do so wish I might.” He paused. “There is something I must tell you, though. It is of grave importance to your return.”

  Ivy glanced at the Professor quickly and nodded.

  He reached beside him and plucked a night lily from its stalk. She smelled its thick perfume, the rare flower a small joy to her beside him. His fingers were crooked and lumpy with age, but he had no trouble crushing the beautiful blossom. The air smelled bruised and thick. He opened Ivy’s hand and placed the ruined thing within, closing her fingers over it.

  “We are a land born of the earth, of things that grow—both good and bad. Great wisdom is found in the forests—great power is there for those who seek it. But plants must be used wisely, not against their natures, or they will turn upon us. They will harm instead of heal. They will poison. You speak the Language of Flowers, Ivy. In this lies your destiny. Whosoever speaks to the trees speaks to the King.” The Professor was silent for some time.

  Then he said, “Getting to Pimcaux—that is but half the journey. To return, that requires something else. In order to leave Pimcaux, you must bring with you something of the earth, something that grows from the soil of Caux. Otherwise, there is no way back.”

  Ivy nodded and the Professor relaxed, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. She bent forward and opened her hand, curious, peering down in the moonlight. Within her small fist, the fragile night lily was reborn—with not a sign of trauma at the old man’s hand.

  She slipped the lily behind her ear.

  “So it is true.” He nodded. “I have now seen it for myself—plants are awakening again. Your uncle worked some ancient magic when he roused the Verdigris tapestries. But what is more potent is your own effect upon that which grows.”

  Ivy thought of the hawthorn tree, of its evil desire to imprison her friend. She shuddered. Apparently all plants were awakening—not just the good. How many people must suffer because of her?

  There was a crunching nearby, a dried leaf underfoot again on the walkway, and Ivy froze. Through a veil of creeper, thin iron bars faced the narrow street, a vertical peephole, and it was here that Ivy thought she saw something move. Looking out again on the sliver of dark cobblestones, she was certain now. A splash of scarlet—but then there was nothing.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Truax

  Since Snaith had given his master Dumbcane’s notorious inks, Verjouce had become ever more bitterly empowered with wrath—a cold, omnipotent wrath that seemed to consume him. His master’s new intensity was disconcerting, even for the assassin, and the furious black wasps that now haloed his master’s head were vicious things, bent on guarding the inks that Verjouce toyed with and—it seemed to the subrector—keeping him at bay.

  At all times of day, the Guild’s Director could be found behind the great stone slab of his desk, the burnished surface covered in a stenciled leather, drip- and splatter-stained. Ink crusted the great man’s nostrils, and Snaith found the thick air foul and unbreathable.

  The Director had given him a task, though, and that was to discover the errant taster Truax. With Truax they could barter with the Taxus Estate for the missing document. This would be an easy enough task, and he began to doggedly pursue it. The Guild’s meticulous records had him placed with Turner Taxus shortly after completing his studies. He worked in Templar and then, interestingly, took a small trip north to a tiny tavern where Taxus was to issue a commonplace repossession notice. It was there that Truax had failed his charge—and, worse yet, broken his solemn Oath to stay by him until representatives of the dead man’s Estate could claim him, as, according to Guild law, the taster was now their property to do with as they wished. Such disregard for the Oath was punishable. And it was here that the trail of the taster went cold.

  But what Snaith found to be most interesting was the name of the pitiful tavern. He found it written in the meticulous scrawl common to the Guild’s many dossiers: the Hollow Bettle. The Hollow Bettle. He knew it to be the tavern wherein Vidal Verjouce’s former assistant, Sorrel Flux, had stayed at the Director’s insistence, and the very tavern where the Noble Child was hiding. And the taster Truax had disappeared along with the Prophesied One.

  And then Snaith had a marvelous thought—one that sent a shiver of excitement up his hunched and ruined spine. Perhaps, Snaith reasoned, they traveled together. A prize indeed it would be to discover the two of them.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Kingmaker

  Not since Axle had holed up in the famed Library, researching and composing his masterwork, had the city seen any of his ancient race. Now there were tollhouses and guarded gateways, and, for that matter, a hawthorn forest more thick and impassable than any moat.

  Rocamadour, fashioned by the great hand of King Verdigris, was built as a place of learning, a place where all matters might drop away before the earnest desire for knowledge. Only it was never the Good King’s intention that what would be taught was the dark and shifty subject of poisons, nor that the teachers would all answer to his former and traitorous advisor. The Tasters’ Guild, like the tasters it produced, was a symptom of a sickness, a lawlessness in the state of the natural kingdom.

  The city was built into the side of the mountain, and the stone that made up every brick, every pillar, every keystone, was as black as pitch. Blanketing this stone was a glaze of fine moss, growing nearly everywhere along the damp passageways and carpeting the fine cloisters. At its base there were cobbled streets and a few shops, all Guild-run, providing the student tasters with supplies. The lecture halls, the offices, and the Library, a former pinnacle of learning now mostly empty, were above. But the catacombs—and Dumbcane—were below. Far below.

  It was decided that Axle and Peps would make the trip to these catacombs, and while this sort of outing had none of the flavors that might inspire Peps D. Roux, he was eager to redeem himself for being an uninvited stowaway on the larger excursion. Together they donned the drab robes of the students, Peps’s fancy shoes peeping out from beneath the rolled hem.

  “Scourge bracken,” Peps was whispering as he and his brother shuffled along in the shadows of a twisty cobbled street. “What is all this talk of scourge bracken?”

  “Shh!” Axle admonished, stopping. “Do not be careless again with that name.” His eyes flashed. “Especially here.”

  “Well!” Peps was taken aback. “A fine way to speak to your brother, that is.”

  Axle stopped peering about for the moment and looked at Peps, softening.

  “I’m sorry. You’re right, of course.”

  “I just meant, before, when I was asking about scou—”

  “Peps!” Axle menaced.

  “I, er, when I was asking about that thing. I just meant that it seems like there’s a whole lot of fuss over this one particular thing. A weed, no less.”

  “Indeed. There was a time it was known not by that name but by another. Before King Verdigris banished it, it used to be called Kingmaker.”

  “Kingmaker?”

  “Yes.”

  “That hardly sounds like a bad thing.”

&n
bsp; “Until you realize that it will stop at nothing, it will exhaust all resources. Kingmaker will leave the fields burnt and smoldering, the forests blighted and crumbling, the rivers, well, the rivers poisonous and black, and then—as you stand amid the rubble—only then will you be king.”

  “Oh. I see,” Peps said. “However did that Hemsen Dumbcane get his hands on any?”

  “That, my dear brother, is what we’re going to ask him ourselves.”

  The pair set off again, discreetly maneuvering through the dim streets and taking cover at the sound of any footfalls. Axle had concealed his blunt beard, and from afar the undersized pair could be mistaken for any first years.

  Above them was the bleak tower wherein lay Vidal Verjouce’s awful, inky chambers, but the trestlemen were headed in a different direction. Down. Very much down, through the Warming Room, past its great fire and chimney, and beneath a series of archways, each a little less extravagant, as if even their ancient sculptor had given up all hope.

  Finally the passage deteriorated into a simple tunnel, living rock chipped away with trembling hands. Here began the land of shadows. At the end, a wooden trapdoor. There was no lock—for why would they need to lock away the dead?

  Chapter Fifty-three

  The Catacombs

  Vidal Verjouce was alone with his thoughts—always alone. Well, not entirely. If truth be told, he hosted a vast array of sleek black wasps, and just the other morning he was vaguely surprised to feel beside his hands—how distant they seemed to him these days—an army of leeches slithering upon his stone table, slowly circling the last of Dumbcane’s ink. But alone or not, his thoughts were of one thing only: scourge bracken.

  If he were a person of sight, and cared to present himself before a mirror, he would feast his eyes upon a man transformed. The furious buzzing in his ears was taking form—the wasps huddled in thin air around the blind man’s head in the shape of a spiked crown—an extraordinary, living, angry crown. From the inks, the skin upon Verjouce’s hands had darkened to a deep black, and his face was streaked and filthy. He had abandoned his strict attention to outward appearances and began instead to look within, to consult his most dark places. To cultivate his Mind Garden.

  Yet, with the entrance of Kingmaker into his lurid existence, Verjouce’s Mind Garden had become overgrown. The threatening clouds he witnessed upon the horizon had indeed moved in, and with them a storm of such ferocity that most of what was lovely was ripped from the earth and stamped out as if beneath a giant’s heel. In its place grew dark, wiry things—black, scabby leaves that cast enormous shadows. Strange nubbly fungi, like bat wings.

  Only in his Mind Garden did scourge bracken flourish, and as far as he knew, the weed grew nowhere in Caux. And this was the very root of the trouble in which the Guild’s Director currently found himself. For Dumbcane’s inks were perilously low, and Vidal Verjouce needed to feed his desire for more.

  So, driven by his appetite, Verjouce rose suddenly—a large albino bird in his corner cage hissed with displeasure but settled back down as the Director felt for his walking staff. It was dark, but the blind man did not need light.

  The catacombs were home to the Guild’s outcasts: the Outriders. Axle knew this—Axle knew most everything there was to know, after all, about Caux. Peps did not. In the interest of not alarming his brother until truly necessary, Axle had avoided this topic. Until now, that is, as they pulled back the heavy trapdoor and stared at the dusty stone steps that greeted them.

  Peps was satisfactorily alarmed.

  “The thing about Outriders,” Axle continued matter-of-factly, “is that without their sense of taste, their sight has adapted. They see quite well in the dark.”

  Peps’s eyes grew even wider.

  “But,” Axle continued, “we have an advantage. They tend to rely on their remaining senses and not their intellect.”

  Peps looked as if he had tasted something sour. Finally, he shrugged. “Fine. What’s your plan?”

  “The catacombs were built over many years, each generation of subrectors leaving their mark. If I am correct, Dumbcane is being held in the deepest, oldest part.”

  “Of course,” Peps muttered. “I suppose you have a map?” Peps thought of the sewers earlier, and the Guide’s illuminated arrows.

  “The catacombs are uncharted,” Axle said brightly. “I’ve been waiting for this chance for many years.”

  Peps groaned while Axle produced a long line of gloamwort twine—a fine silken cord that was vaguely luminescent—along with a jingling sack. “We’ll need to leave a trail of thread as we go. That way, there’ll be no getting lost.”

  Peps stood mutely as Axle outfitted him in a leather belt with several brass rings upon it and, from his clinking sack, removed a carabiner—an oval-shaped clip that clicked on to the belt neatly and disengaged just as quickly. Axle donned a similar belt and looked about, satisfied.

  “All right!” Axle rubbed his hands enthusiastically. “Off we go!”

  Peps wondered if he should remind his brother that they were headed into the Guild’s burial ground.

  The narrow steps down twisted about on themselves, and the pair’s small footfalls echoed uncomfortably in the dark. When the ground leveled out, Axle felt about the wall for a chink in the mortar, and quickly and expertly nailed the frayed end of the gloamwort thread to the wall with a brass tack. After attaching his own belt, and then his brother’s, to the gloamwort, he began feeling his way forward, with the intention of stopping every so often and securing their line to the wall behind them.

  They went on like this for some time, in the dark, against the cold, smooth wall. But eventually the wall gave way to an open chamber, and Axle paused to record his progress on paper. He did this quickly and quietly, as it was a great risk to light his small lantern.

  But as Axle lit his lamp, the flickering light caused wild shadows to play about the chamber, and with mute horror Peps saw that they were in a crypt of sorts, a burial ground for the Tasters’ Guild. Ordered stone plaques depicting various names, ranks, and achievements adorned the wall, seemingly forever. Signs in the old tongue announced elaborate lineages. Puddles of oily water reflected Peps back upon himself—his pale look of fear mirrored about the death chamber in ghostly pools and lent the illusion that the ground was quite thin and insubstantial, and at any moment might give itself over to this watery existence. He thought of drowning.

  In the very center of the room, atop a mound of stones, was a large statue—an enormous hooded figure of a man, arms spread wide, a champion for the dead.

  Peps shrank into the corner, trembling.

  Across the vault, ordered bones were perched along the length of a high shelf.

  “This way.” Axle pointed, to Peps’s disgust, in the very direction of the bones. “Just through here—I’m almost certain.”

  He then extinguished the light.

  “Almost?” Peps squeaked.

  “We’ve been walking due east—I’m pretty sure.… It is hard to tell in the dark.”

  “Well, leave the light on, then!”

  “Shh!” Axle was suddenly alert.

  A breeze blew the faint gloamwort thread in the dark.

  “Someone’s coming!” Axle whispered urgently.

  The two trestlemen pressed themselves—just in time—against the wall, like dead leaves. In the dark they heard them. Quiet, still, deadly. A grouping of Outriders passed them by—swiftly. Mercifully, the Outriders were on an errand of the utmost importance and were not aware of the unlikely pair of tiny men cowering in the dark. They accompanied their master, their blind master, to visit the newest prisoner.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Hallowed Ground

  Hemsen Dumbcane sat in his squalid cell in the bowels of the catacombs wishing with all his might that he’d be given the chance to steal away his past—not refute his misdeeds but reclaim his inks and scrolls and make a swift exit to anonymity. He had been on his way to a quiet retirement when he was
apprehended, and he now cursed that fact, too. The years of working with the deadly plant had taken their toll on the prisoner, who, accustomed to the uplifting effects of the bracken, could now barely muster the energy to scratch the lice from his brow. He sat in a clump of dried swampgrass, in a swoon, and it was only after much prodding that Vidal Verjouce managed to convince Dumbcane he was indeed not a specter of the dead. Behind him, a row of Outriders glared wordlessly, eyes gleaming in the semi-darkness.

  The Director stood tall and frightening while Dumbcane rubbed the grit from his eyes.

  “Hemsen Dumbcane. Do you know why I’ve come?” Verjouce addressed the scribe, his voice hollow and commanding.

  Dumbcane grunted. A flash of envy curdled his spirits further. Verjouce had appeared heralded by his crown of sleek wasps, which pulsed with a mean purple glow—a bitter reminder of what the calligrapher had lost.

  “Kingmaker. Tell me all,” Verjouce ordered.

  Dumbcane swallowed. Plainly, this was a dilemma. If he admitted all, then his worth to the Director was diminished and his life practically forfeit. Yet, under the threat of the barbed cane currently being brandished before his temple, it hardly seemed intelligent to be casual with the truth.

  “I—Er. Perhaps I could show you?”

  Verjouce thought. “You will tell me,” he commanded after a minute. “And if you speak the truth, then I shall reward you.” The wasps whipped about his head in a frenzy.