The Tasters Guild Read Free

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 thateither 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.

Chapter Three
Peps
    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