The Tasters Guild Read Free Page A

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.
    That is, until recently.
    Peps D. Roux, who considered himself to be a dashing example of Caux’s rare and ancient race of trestlemen, would point out that it was he and he alone who had braved the tyranny of the Nightshade regime, while all other trestlemen had quietly departed and passed the most recent—and embarrassing—chapter in Caux’s history out of sight.
    This fact seemed important to Peps, as he was being forced to relinquish what had become quite a deluxe apartment for one diminutive man—or man of any size, for that matter. (Trestlemen were of course quite small in height, if not in girth.) Peps indeed had remained loyal to his trestle heritage during the reign of the Deadly Nightshades and, in refusing to leave, had inherited the entire underside of the Knox—a palace by anyone’s standards. In knocking down the walls, he had created, together with his companion the cobbler Gudgeon, an expanse of luxury to rival none.
    And now he was being forced to give it back—or most of it—since many of the exiles (or
cowards
, as Peps preferred to call them) were returning from their hiding.
    So Peps, characteristically, had come up with a unique solution for himself. As he cast about a morose eye from his mullioned windows, draped on either end with the most luxurious of silk velvet, he saw below him the many houseboats that were moored upon the banks of the Marcel—and from there his discerning eye alighted upon the finest of the fleet, the most tasteful and sedate vessel ever to loll in the slight waves, the boat whose name was stenciled on its blunt stern in fine gold leaf:
Trindletrip
.
    And Peps decided at once that the boat of his friend, the chef Trindle, would make a fine home for him for the near future, since it met both of the flamboyant trestleman’s conditions: first, that it was an enviable place to lay one’s head, and second, that it wouldaccommodate nicely the parties he was accustomed to throwing for himself. Buoyed by his own clever decision, he neglected to consider the very real fact that only ill fortune awaits any trestleman who chooses to live upon—rather than over—the water.
    And so this day found Peps with a handful of local riffraff he had hired to help him move and an armful of plush pillows he was unwilling to hand over. Peps was shouting orders to the indifferent youths upon the Knox, just as a paler-than-usual Hemsen Dumbcane emerged from his shop and started off away from the city.
    “What’s he up to?” Peps stopped his instructions, seeing Dumbcane’s retreating figure and haunted expression.
    Residing beside Dumbcane for all these years had produced nothing in the form of neighborly courtesy. The two were just as much strangers as they had been on the first day the calligrapher set up shop, and this distrust of each other produced—at least in Peps—an addictive curiosity. Hadn’t Hemsen Dumbcane learned calligraphy by copying his father’s will and liberally writing himself into it? Peps’s eyes narrowed at the fact that the normally reserved calligrapher had not even bothered to lock his front door.
    The trestleman thoughtfully fingered a satin tassel on one of his overstuffed cushions and took a moment to reflect. Something like this should be reported to Cecil Manx, at the palace. The Steward had warned that these times, while they were awaitingthe reappearance of the Good King Verdigris, were treacherous. There was real reason to distrust Dumbcane, Peps concluded, since he was the last merchant on the Knox—or, for that matter, anywhere—to still display the royal seal of the evil King Nightshade, and the collection of dubious visitors to his small shop at nightfall was