The Tasters Guild (2 page)

At present, in his quiet shop, a drop of perspiration hung threateningly at the tip of his nose. Pausing, the calligrapher wiped his face with his damp kerchief, catching the offending droplet in the nick of time—lest it sully his work on the desk beneath his gaze. Before him, his final forgery.

A masterwork.

He had stolen it from its hiding place in the very chambers of the Guild’s fearsome Director, a scroll of such beauty and value that he could not bear to be without it. At great personal hazard, he now toiled to produce a counterfeit before his transgression was discovered.

He heard nothing of the little bell that now rang from the
front of the shop, a signal of the unusual presence of a customer. He continued his work, though burdened by a great nervousness that had settled upon him in the middle of the night. For the past week Dumbcane had found himself distracted mightily from his sleep, from his shop duties, from everything. And today brought no relief. He tried to clear his mind and complete his final task, concentrating upon the dark weave of images amid the strange text. His shaking hand attempted to duplicate the sheen of the golden serpent before him.

There was quite a lot of traffic on the Knox bridge this morning, owing probably to some festivity, a festivity that Dumbcane—if he chose to acknowledge it at all—would find entirely uninteresting. The town had turned out for some mindless event, and compounding the traffic was an annoying amount of construction on the bridge. He had little to do with the life of the city—having long ago aligned himself with the thieves and scoundrels that made up his network of contacts, and the darker sides of Caux from which he profited.

The little bell rang again sourly—indicating that the door had shut once more. Presumably, someone now awaited him. This time Dumbcane was alerted, and he sat bolt upright, upending a small pot of black ink, a few pages before him scattering to the floor. Quickly he wiped the ink blot with his elbow—a lazy swarm of dark fruit flies escaped his arm just in time, only to come together again and settle hungrily on the stain.

Peering about the dark room cautiously, he craned his neck
toward the door, his earlier nighttime anxieties returning. One large eye—magnified by his calligraphy lens—regarded the shaded room fearfully.

“What?” he hissed. “Who’s there?”

“Hemsen Dumbcane?” came a nasally response.

“Who wants to know?” Dumbcane leaned out a little further into the gloomy room. With a start he relieved himself of his ever-present magnifying lens—flipping it upright quickly—but not before he was afforded the shock of one of the biggest noses ever to grace a face, a nose that indeed marked its wearer’s lineage.

A nose as long as a sausage could only belong to a Taxus.

Dumbcane at once regained his composure. A half smile even made an appearance across his sallow face. Although he had had dealings with the Taxus family over the years, these two before him were new. But he knew the type.

“What, gentlemen, can I do for you today?” Dumbcane asked.

“We are looking for a certain document,” the elder and larger of the two Taxuses responded. This was Quarles Taxus, a man who really never achieved much in his life by respectable means. In fact, over the family’s long and feuding history, there had been but one Taxus upon whom any amount of success had been visited. That was Turner Taxus, and he was now dead. Turner Taxus had risen through the ranks of the Nightshade army to a respectable position, only to consume for his last meal some poisoned soup.

Quarles and his cousin, the more diminutive Qwill, had in their kinsman’s early demise found their particular calling. And that was to deliver vengeance upon the irksome taster who was the cause of Turner Taxus’s poisoning. (The contract and subsequent rules between taster and charge are arcane and intricate, but call for the taster’s surrender should he be responsible for the untimely end of his employer.) The Estate of Turner Taxus approached this task with uncharacteristic dedication—the tenacity of a dog with a bone. There was, of course, a sizable reward offered for the capture of the renegade taster, and this reward was, in Quarles’s eyes, nearly theirs.

“We have it on good authority that you have in your possession a document belonging to us.” Quarles indicated the ordered stacks of Dumbcane’s archives, pointing, seemingly, with his long and crooked nose.

The small, dark hairs on the back of the calligrapher’s thin neck rose up in alarm, and he was overcome with a fit of coughing.

“I hardly think that’s possible,” he told the pair as soon as the distressing rattle in his lungs stopped. “You see, I’ve never met the two of you, er, gentlemen, nor had the pleasure of any business dealings with you, so, you see, it would be simply impossible that I might have something of yours.” He looked over the wire rims of his glasses to see if the two Taxuses were convinced. “So, if you’d excuse me, I’m in a bit of a hurry—”

“Dumbcane.” Quarles somehow doubled his girth while
lowering his voice several octaves—a talent gleaned from years of tavern brawls. “How would you know you don’t have it when you don’t even know what it is? And don’t you worry. It’s not one of those old maps here of
questionable ownership—
”

Dumbcane blanched, his hand at his mouth in horror.

“And nor do we care to discuss that subject further—do we, Qwill? Unless … unless we are forced to. If you cannot produce our Epistle, we will report your doings to the proper authorities—and seeing as you currently lack royal patronage, you would surely be held accountable for all your crimes.” Quarles looked around the dim room, satisfied. “Besides, I’m not leaving without it, and since it seems that you have travel plans yourself …” There was indeed an overstuffed satchel at Dumbcane’s feet, from which a mass of scrolls and parchments protruded beside a tidy purse stuffed to the seams with minims and scruples. “You’d better get busy looking wherever it is that you keep these, er, things.”

“Epistle?! Epistle?!” Dumbcane’s voice broke, and with it he relinquished all attempts at remaining calm. “What Epistle? What sort of Epistle do you want? There are
thousands
of Epistles. You have to be more specific before I can even begin to help.”

“We want the Epistle of the taster Rowan Truax. It belongs to us under the rules of the Tasters’ Guild—since he was responsible for the death of our dear, dear cousin Turner.”

In Dumbcane, there was suddenly the distinct impression
that no familial love existed between the departed and these two, but having to produce for them such a minor document made him nearly shake with relief.

“Oh, yes, why didn’t you say so? Quite a common Epistle, yes, indeed. A taster receives his Epistle in a special ceremony at the time his training is complete, along with his robes. A signature required, I do believe. The taster and the Director. I should—yes, I think I do—have it right back here in my files. Truax you say? With a
T
? If you’d be patient—I shan’t be long.”

Indeed, Dumbcane’s filing system rewarded him greatly with the proper form—everything was meticulously alphabetized with a highly ornate font. Abandoning any of his usual orderliness, he calculated that he would just have time to finish his endeavor if these two irksome visitors would only leave.

So it was that, with shaking hands, he quickly found the Truax file. But in his haste and elation, as he placed the handsome document upon his worktable and kicked closed his drawers, he failed to notice that upon retrieving it, he had inadvertently grabbed a second, more tattered page. These both he then delivered to the two distant relatives of Turner Taxus, who left immediately thereafter—but not before the larger of the two took notice of the calligrapher’s error.

Quarles eyed the odd page—for it was much older and printed upon the finest parchment, and showed distinct signs of having survived a fire.

E
vidence of a fire upon such an ancient document might not be notable to a Taxus, or similarly to one who mistook his history lessons for naptime. But in Caux, there was at one time a notable fire—a truly evil fire—at the foot of a steep tower in the ancient town of Rocamadour. The fire was sparked by the wicked King Nightshade and overseen by the Director of the Tasters’ Guild, the notorious Vidal Verjouce, and the fuel that fed it was the many majestic tomes and charts of a dying King. This fire, it was thought, was the end of all but a very few magical texts—books capable of delivering the reader much more than a history lesson.

Dumbcane cursed this fire—for very few ancient works survived it.

In the splendid Library at Rocamadour, before most of Caux’s masterworks were reduced to ash, Dumbcane purported to be performing the work of a scholar. He examined tome after splendid tome, and when something pleased him,
he would simply take it. This he did by secretly unwinding a thin silk thread from under his tongue, which he would then lay across the page of interest, nestled near the binding. Closing the book, he would occupy himself for a matter of minutes, and when he returned, the page would tear completely free. He would then hurry back to his small shop to begin to duplicate his pilfered goods, and return the forgeries to the place of the originals.

At first the magical texts resisted him.

He seemed perfectly incapable of reproducing the sparkle of life that made the texts at once so desirable and valuable. The originals seemed to practically jump out from the page, while his own tries were flat and lifeless.

That is, until the recipe.

In these ancient apotheopathic texts, Hemsen Dumbcane sometimes found handwritten notes in the margins, obscure symbols from an ancient pen. Early in his unlawful career, he never considered these commentaries to be of much value—in fact, just the opposite: he looked upon them as the work of a vandal, sullying the sacred texts. A rude distraction.

But then he came across one such notation, in the same discreet scrawl as the rest, which described for the scribe the recipe for what would be the secret of his success: the ancient formulation of the special inks that composed the magical works, the very works he so admired. Once the formula was mastered, Dumbcane was free to practice his illicit talents
without any fear of discovery, so convincing was the result. Nothing could defy his genius at forgery. He simply learned to ignore the caustic stench and the strange, small flies that seemed perpetually attracted to these new, potent inks.

He began to expand his repertoire.

With this ink, he was now capable of great genius. The ink seemed to enchant the page, infusing life across its papery surface. With ease—almost too much—Dumbcane produced one magnificent forgery after the next, beginning simply with the alphabet and from there moving on to spectacular feats of duplication, all the while driven not by creativity but by wicked ambition.

Ink crusted his cuticles and saturated his pores.

Now, as Dumbcane readied himself to depart the bridge, he stood and surveyed his beloved shop for the last time. As he did, his eyes settled on his earliest accomplishment, the ornate alphabet he had produced as his very first experiment with the new inks. The letters were tacked to the peeling wall, intricate lines with many showy flourishes. Each was wreathed in a border, and the calligrapher had taken pains to draw various objects that commenced with that letter—in this way, the letter
A
contained an acorn.

Over time, dust had been allowed to settle on them all, and the years had been unkind to many—indeed, most. He had to squint at the faded parchments. With a stained hand,
he wiped away a veil of dust. A favorite, his early attempt at a capital
P
, he had painted with a brush made of a single hair from the belly of a silver mink. He could barely make it out. It seemed in fact to be fading before his eyes—the glorious rolling hills of the land of Pimcaux were withering, the landscape darkening as if before a storm. He rubbed his tired eyes as he often did, but the anguish he was feeling merely doubled.

In fact, the alarm that had torn him from his restless sleep that night returned in full force, and the old scribe found his knees beginning to buckle. He leaned against the wall. Over the past several weeks, he had noticed things, small things—but peculiar, inexplicable occurrences that when totaled together in the dark of night on his lumpy mattress haunted him in a way to which he was quite unaccustomed. His shifty eyes alighted on his drafting table in the corner, in particular, on a haphazard collection of his homemade inks.

For weeks, Dumbcane had been noticing his stolen apotheopathic manuscripts behaving strangely. The once bright, aligned script of some was now dim and smudged, and the neatly ruled lines at times descended into complete chaos. The text of others, incredibly, seemed to have vanished entirely—as if made from invisible ink. His life’s work—his collection of stolen parchment, scrolls, and charts of untold value—was vanishing before his eyes!

This curious turn led Dumbcane to the conclusion that
either someone was trying to ruin him or some ancient and powerful magic was afoot—or both.

As he cowered before his beloved alphabet upon the wall, the letter
V
glinted in the shadows at the tail end of the abecedarium. Vultures circled a shadowy tower. It was always a dark one, drawn in a moonscape and featuring a ring of stars commonly seen in Caux in the winter sky. But as Dumbcane now observed, it seemed at once to draw him in and lash out—and the small scribe felt a potent flash of true terror. Unfathomable, he told himself, that he should be made so fearful by something of his own hand! Something of ink and paper. A trick of the light perhaps. Or of the dark.

Vidal Verjouce, he thought with a start.

He must depart—at once.

And with that, the proprietor of the dim little calligraphy shop on the Knox bridge turned his back on his workshop, unwittingly leaving his last masterpiece unfinished, and departed hurriedly—not bothering with the lock.

T
he bustling Knox was a bridge of much renown, older, perhaps, than even the walled city of Templar that it served. The Knox was wide and stout and as strong as its years, and was home to some of Caux’s oldest and most distinguished proprietors. Where a railing might normally be found, it boasted an eclectic array of precarious storefronts, some even of multiple floors, saddling the bridge itself on either side. These shops roosted above the wallowing waters of the river Marcel indifferent to everything but commerce, while beneath them a long line of trestlemen inhabited the lower level of the bridge.