The Tasters Guild (22 page)

They had reached Breaux’s garden wall.

“Quickly,” Rue urged. A noise in the distance startled her, and she gripped Ivy’s arm tightly.

Finally, the doorway swung inward, and the pair entered into what was previously an oasis but now brought Ivy no relief. The world was reduced to light and shadow, with no middle tones. Brightness burned into her pupils; blackness brought a deep, wrathful peril. Spiky weeds had invaded Breaux’s paradise, unseen by all but her. They menaced the silvery blooms and tugged mercilessly at their roots.

Suddenly, before her in a sea of phosphorescence, the figure of Breaux—his robes aswirl with moonlight and shadow—a pattern like ancient writing upon them.

“Ivy?” he asked, as he knelt down to inspect her.

“Two parts crabgrass, a pinch of saltgrit, and a suspicion of seadew,” Ivy answered, reciting the recipe for an obscure tea.

“Hmmm.” The Professor bent forward holding her chin, turning her face this way and that, inspecting. “Rue?” he asked. “What happened here?”

“Snaith,” Rue whispered. “Irresistible Meals.”

“Not enough can be said about the necessity of a good mortar and pestle!” Ivy added inexplicably.

“She
looks
well enough,” Breaux assessed finally.

“I told him I was taking her to the Infirmary,” Rue added.

What person in Caux might say they were spared the
effects of poison? Not many. But Ivy was unable to speak of her experience directly, for every time she opened her mouth to complain, she found herself speaking a strange litany of recipes, unguents, and obscure inks. Her mind was completely aware of her odd behavior but powerless to intercede.

“Snarewood!” Ivy cried. Her doom settled heavily upon her shoulders. The Prophecy—Pimcaux—what would become of them now?

Rowan and Peps were there suddenly, battling the shadows of the garden as Ivy watched, appalled. As the foursome exchanged a meaningful, worried look, Ivy tried again to explain herself but was capable only of reciting an elemental table from her apotheopathic studies.

She finally gave up speech and agreed to be led by Rowan to the relative comfort of a back room, where she sat dully, ignoring a cup of tea beside her.

The Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux
does not attempt to offer advice to those who have been poisoned by scourge bracken. Indeed, because the plant was believed to be extinct, very little was known about its lethal legacy. The book, however, did offer the girl a certain measure of comfort, and as she held it close to her, she wondered what its author would say about her current predicament.

Before her tea had even cooled, Snaith’s Watchmen
appeared at Breaux’s door, banging with confident authority. They acquainted themselves with the idiosyncrasies of the garden ramble, and thereafter the house, swept past the flustered Rue, and soon enough, the scarlet-clad group found both Ivy and Rowan.

They took the outlaw pair into swift custody.

I
t was with great expectation that Vidal Verjouce prepared his playground—the Guild and the city of Rocamadour—for the production of Dumbcane’s scourge-bracken inks. The Warming Room had been given over entirely to this new venture, and even the massive round firepit was not enough for the bed of coals the Director wished ready. He had ordered his subrectors and many of the advanced students to forage for all burnables—nothing was sacred.

All that was needed was the weed.

The vast iron-studded portals of the old city were flung open to the hawthorn wood beyond, the impenetrable overgrowth hacked away at, revealing an old, ghostly road. Great axes clanged against cobble and the thorny path, and the bramble was gathered and hastened to ash. Outriders poured from the city, searching every grave.

Dumbcane was given a leather apron and a reprieve, and allowed to supervise the preparations. The stinging scent of
char replaced the damp, and from his chambers high atop the city, Vidal Verjouce sat and waited.

He was not alone.

Upon his lap, matted and ink-stained, a set of large claws gathered the boiled wool of his cassock. They drew in the stiff threads, snapping a few, finally piercing the thick fabric effortlessly—and releasing. Purring haughtily sat Six, and Six and Verjouce were waiting for word from the Outriders that their beloved scourge bracken had been found.

A different sort of word came, however.

“Director.” A subrector named Mimp cleared his throat. Mimp’s duties were few that led him to personally set eyes upon the Director, but here he was now. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Verjouce, the horrible wasps that circled his head, his posture of tense expectation. That cat.

“You have visitors, master. I explained that you are not receiving anyone at present, but, well, they will not go away. They insist—”

Verjouce fixed his potent stare on the nervous man.

“Have Snaith see to them.”

“Snaith, er, cannot be located currently, Director.”

There was a moment of silence in which Mimp wished to be anywhere—even overseeing the enormous bellows that fired the cauldron’s scorched air—other than here.

“Who are they?” asked Verjouce, stroking the matted cat.

“They are called Taxus. They wish to file a petition.”

“Taxus?” Verjouce intoned in a throaty voice, one not often used to ponder the unknown.

To the subrector’s great surprise, the Director stood, not menacingly but hungrily, eagerly, the awful feline falling ungracefully from his lap with a hiss. Mimp wondered fleetingly whether he should mention the discarded clumps of cat hair that occupied the blind man’s lap—but thought better of it.

“Yes. Show them in.” The Director gestured to the door, the wasps shifting lazily and instantly regrouping.

The subrector bowed and departed quickly, and quite soon there was another knock.

“Enter,” came Verjouce’s voice, and if given a choice, most would do well not to obey.

A
xlerod D. Roux, famed trestleman and guardian of apotheopathy, sat, very cramped, in a filthy gilt cage. The cage’s owner, a surly albino vulture Verjouce had raised as a hatchling, knew no other home—and since he was displaced, he crouched atop a nearby urn. He directed an evil grimace at his unlikely usurper and occasionally pulled his head back, emitting a low hiss at the small man, shaking his feathers into spikes and spreading his wings wide.

For the trestleman, this room held a great many memories. Ignoring the bird, Axle drifted off into a quiet, caged reverie.

The walls were lit with mirrors and crystals, and the shadows had yet to take up residence. Rocamadour was still the school King Verdigris intended it to be—an academy for healing, for apotheopaths. Axle saw before his eyes the chamber transformed into the welcoming beacon it once was. Years of misuse peeled away in his mind’s eye. The floors were scrubbed of
the recent ink stains, the black splashes upon the walls and ceiling vanishing in a mist to be replaced with rich carpets and woven tapestries. Sumptuously pigmented murals returned to their rightful place within the paneling. Only the stone table and diamond-shaped window remained the same. The bare, pitted walls had been replaced with ornately carved shelving. Huge and impressive as the cabinetry was, it was of no comparison to what it held. For lined along the room’s four walls were glorious, leather-bound books, the Good King’s own writings, and they were currently being attended to by a tall and quiet man—a man who, it was quite obvious, possessed in him great respect for the books he handled.

Malapert.

Axle remembered him now as a somber, learned man in his youth, before the fires had ravaged his body and mind. He paged through one enormous tome, lovingly, eagerly. Finding finally that which he sought, he turned, revealing a companion, and with great satisfaction displayed the page to this cloaked figure, a man in a long robe of silver, and one well known to the trestleman. He nodded, reading. And Axle was strengthened by the vision of his old friend and Master Apotheopath, Cecil Manx, as a younger man.

A new scene materialized.

The room shifted to shadow, but Cecil was still there. Behind the stone table sat Vidal Verjouce, his face vague in the
dimness. Smoke filled the air. Ash drifted across the floor. Cecil gestured angrily, arms wide, staff midair, as the moon, battling smoke and flame from outside, made its abrupt appearance through the angled window above. The weak light now splashed across the Director’s face—revealing a new, terrible feature. His face was freshly bruised, and where his eyes had been that morning, there was nothing.

Cecil Manx grew quiet—appalled. Verjouce said something, but Axle was distracted by a door opening. In the square of yellow light, there was framed the slight figure of the Director’s new servant. Although a younger incarnation, Axle recognized at once the particular stoop to the man’s silhouette—the long and haughty nose, and tatty, unkempt robes.

Sorrel Flux neglected to bow—for who needs to bow before a master who is blind?—and, with fresh bandages in his arms, made his way over to where Verjouce waited.

With a jerk, Axle awoke from his vision.

The jerk was delivered by a velvet rope that attached Axle’s housing to the Director’s wrist.

It was fortuitous timing. The Director was preparing to greet the Taxus Estate.

T
he Taxuses were a pair of stout fellows, one tall, one not, and as they entered the room, they carried themselves—even in this devastatingly grim environment—with confident swaggers. Yet as the elder, Quarles, greeted the Guild’s Director and looked into Verjouce’s pitted face, his voice faltered and failed him. When he realized that the man wore a crown of what seemed to be vicious stinging insects, he stopped dead in his tracks.

“What is your errand here?” Verjouce asked in the silence, leaning forward on ink-stained hands. The meager daylight from the diamond-shaped window found his face now, and the Taxuses took an involuntary step back.

“I—uh—we are here with an Epistle.”

“An Epistle.”

“W-we wish the taster Rowan Truax—as is our r-right.”

“So it is.” His crown droned loudly.

The elder of the two Taxuses stammered his appreciation.

“A petition. For a graduate named Truax. So … 
disappointing
to hear the Tasters’ Oath has been broken. We have such severe deterrents, you see.” The Director turned to the silent subrector without the aid of vision.

“Have you examined their paperwork?”

Mimp held a tidy ribbon-clad scroll. “The Epistle is here, Director, and all appears in order.”

“Is there, perhaps, any other paper there, besides the Epistle?”

The Taxuses exchanged a tense look.

“No, Director. Just the Epistle.”

Verjouce contemplated.

“Should Truax make an appearance here, I would prefer to carry out my own form of justice upon him,” he began. “I assure you—it is very effective.” Verjouce paused, thinking terrible thoughts.

“Um, there is the small matter of a reward, Director.”

“Ah. A reward. Still—I feel this matter should be concluded … internally.”

The Estate sagged. Their business did not seem to be concluding in their favor.

Scraping footfalls could be heard, approaching on soft slippers.

“Ah, Snaith,” Verjouce sighed, even before the subrector appeared.

Snaith craned his crooked neck about the busy room, but
his eagerness to deliver his message was tempered by his surprise at finding the chamber thus occupied. He skittered over to his employer, and as he leaned in, the persistent wasps parted. Verjouce listened, his face expressionless, and when Snaith was done, the Director addressed the Taxus brothers.

“Taxus Estate, should you somehow produce the other paper you received from the calligrapher—an old and worthless scroll, I assure you, and of no use to you or your family—I might be more amenable to an exchange. I will give you some time to think about it. I am nothing if not generous. Snaith—perhaps the Estate would like a tour of the catacombs? I find it has a way of stimulating the memory.”

D
on’t feel so bad.” Rowan smiled weakly. “I failed Irresistible Meals three times.”

“I did not simmer the moonstone on the wrong heat!” Ivy protested.

No matter how she approached it, Ivy could not discuss the topic of scourge bracken, Snaith, or her experience at the final exam. She was seeing that the nature of this particular poison was one that was determined to be deeply private. Greasy-looking fireflies bobbed and reared around her field of vision, but oddly, with their arrival, she began to feel some strength return to her limbs—as if the insects fortified her.

Snaith and the other scarlet-clad Watchmen had deposited her and Rowan in the Chapter Room—she knew this because Rowan had told her so. He was clearly alarmed. The Chapter Room was in fact a large, carpeted chamber that featured an ancient-looking wooden table scattered with dripping, smoking candles. It served as the Guild’s epicenter, hosting general meetings, demonstrations, and important
visitors. It was a place for elders, and Rowan knew it as such, but most of all, Rowan knew it for all its horribleness. For it was also where punishment was meted out, with an audience.

There were decorative carvings in a banner that circled the entire room. The markings reminded Ivy of much of what she had seen at Dumbcane’s shop. To the casual observer, they were mere woodcuts—stories of foragers and thick forests, patterned leaves, berries. Adorable stray children and woodcutters’ cottages. But the scourge bracken within Ivy called forth the worst of the shadows, and the shapes took on a nightmarish quality: huntsmen brandishing axes and cauldrons boiling unnamable things—tales of madness and disease. Rowan was oblivious.

In a recess of the room, a lone Outrider stood guard, but as Ivy peeked at him, his cloak and mass of hair spewed a deep, swirling darkness that threatened to overtake the chamber’s dim lights. Watching him, too, was Rowan, and the taster felt the hairs on the nape of his neck rise, but for a different reason. He realized he was seeing his future—captured, he now faced certain punishment. For his crimes he would lose his tongue and be forced to serve the Guild’s most deadly desires.