Ryan Eric Dull - [BCS317 S02] Read online

  A Feast from Tile and Stone

  By Ryan Eric Dull

  Chef Gastel Dillegrout had been awake for three days. He swayed at the front of the enormous kitchen, his eyes not quite focused, and tried to remember all the things he still needed to accomplish. The soup, the glaze, the labyrinth— All around him, cooks shouted, pots clattered, kindling crackled in ovens. The soup, the glaze— People called his name and he ignored them. He pressed his hands into the work table and shut his eyes. The soup, the glaze, the labyrinth, the duke’s ring—

  Gastel took a ragged breath and plunged his head into the bucket of cold water he kept beneath the table. Three days without sleep, or was it four? The banquet was supposed to begin in an hour. He still had to raise the labyrinth, glaze the aqueduct, get the soup upstairs, tour the temple. He should make sure Bruet wasn’t panicking, ask if Civvey might be willing to work tonight, see if Mastic needed more bakers. The windows, he still needed to slice fruit for the windows. He had the duke’s heavy ring in his pocket and instructions to hide it somewhere in the temple, where fortune might guide it to the Lord or Lady of the Feast. Gastel didn’t trust fortune. What if a child found the ring? What if someone swallowed it?

  Around the work table, the duke’s household cooks had begun to cast uneasy glances. Gastel had been underwater for a long time. They nudged one another, murmured concern. Gastel’s cooks, the cooks of the Golden Damson Feasting Company, did not look up from their work. They knew all about Chef Gastel and his bucket.

  The Golden Damson Feasting Company had been in Marudoro three months. Three months for a single dish. The Duke Agrano—a tasteless man, a roast and potatoes man, a boob—was celebrating some family milestone, the centennial of some battle. The duke wanted to make a real show of his magnificence. Centennials didn’t come by very often, and Marudoro’s coffers were full.

  After much grave consideration, the duke had decided to throw the grandest feast he could imagine. There was only one worthy dish; the most famous, the most elaborate, the most technically demanding recipe in the known world: Egardouce’s Last Pudding. “There is a proper way,” he told his astonished household, “to mark an occasion.”

  For months, the duke had described the dish to his peers. Did they know that only four such puddings had ever been successfully served? That Guillame Egardouce himself, legendary chef of chefs, had prepared it only once and refused to make another, though the Emperor offered him a barony, a barony for a single dish? That the last recorded attempt, eighty years ago, had collapsed, injuring dozens of nobles and resulting in the hapless chef’s exile, physical deterioration, and ignominious death? The duke’s advisors had mulled the cost and fretted. They would need to raise a herd, or several. They would need to expand the great hall. They would need every oven in the city and a hundred more besides. Duke Agrano had waved them off. “There is a proper way,” he said as he signed Chef Gastel Dillegrout’s contract, “to arrange a feast.”

  Gastel jerked his head from the bucket and whipped his body up and back, arcing a spray of water across the ceiling. He breathed slowly and held himself still. There was a proper way to avoid crumbling under stress at a banquet. Water dripped onto his apron, the table, the floor.

  He had arrived at the apex of his profession. He would never get a better commission than this. He was the era’s most famous chef, preparing the world’s most famous dish. His crew was unequaled in craft or passion. For years, ever since his apprenticeship, he’d imagined what he might do if he ever got the opportunity to prepare an Egardouce’s Last Pudding. He had a suite of flourishes, a whole program of innovations that he hoped would cast new light on the hoary old recipe. Marudoro was swelled to bursting with noble guests, their retinues, their carriages, their appetites. Every guest room was occupied; every tavern was full. Outside the town gate, a vast tent city had filled with freeholders and craftspeople from all over the region, gustatory pilgrims from halfway across the empire, and tinkers and merchants and gamblers and thieves chasing a crowd. Tomorrow morning, after the official banquet had ended, this swarm would pour through the great hall, devouring the leftovers and the spectacle. Their stories would spread across the world. They’d carve statues of Gastel after this.

  “Hey! Chef! Mastic needs you!”

  Mastic meant pastry. Gastel ran.

  He swept past dozens of the duke’s cooks in green and orange livery, past his own scattered handful of cooks in Golden Damson grays, past butter cakes and berry tarts waiting for garnishes, pot after enormous pot of bubbling soup, cauldrons and pans that caught the dim light in copper and oiled iron, scullions slicing carrots into roasting pans already loaded high, through the vast kitchen and out the door to the bare patch of garden where they’d built their pastry oven.

  Sheet pans the size of stable doors were scattered across the lawn. Each held an immense panel of hot pastry, billowing steam. Gastel counted four dozen, and maybe a hundred more out of their pans and stacked between towels near the rear door to the Great Hall. Not nearly enough.

  “It’s the pans,” said Mastic Porrey, Gastel’s red-eyed head baker. She nudged a nearby pan with her boot. “They’re thin. If we go too fast, they’ll bend.”

  The pans were an ongoing concern. The duke’s blacksmiths had never been asked to hammer anything so wide and so flat. They’d experimented for a month, and in the end, they’d had to drag eight anvils together. The pans were the right size and tolerably smooth, but they were also unwieldy, unstable, and monstrously heavy. A gang of sweating household bakers used long hooked poles to haul the pans in and out of the oven. The bakers grunted and the pans groaned.

  “What did Civvey say?” asked Gastel.

  “She said to talk to you,” said Mastic.

  “Where are the frames?”

  “Inside. The pastry won’t fit through the door upright.”

  “Then send these ones in. We need to get them mounted,” Gastel said. “Keep them coming, even after the banquet starts. I’ll find you more workers.”

  Mastic nodded. “Have you eaten?”

  Gastel couldn’t remember. He was always tasting, rarely eating. “No.”

  Mastic hummed concern. “How’s the glaze?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to the Friaress.”

  Mastic hummed.

  “Worry about the pastry,” said Gastel. “Or, no, don’t worry.” He took a breath and shook out his head. “You are as steady as a river. You are an army of a cook. I have the utmost faith in you.”

  Mastic gave a weary bow, then cleared her throat. “They’re saying there’s going to be a betrothal announcement.”

  “Tonight?” asked Gastel.

  Mastic nodded.

  Gastel let his upper body collapse. “Why not a funeral? Why not a seven-act opera right before dinner? Who’s announcing? We’ll drug them.”

  “The duke’s son.”

  “Saboteur.”

  Matic shrugged. “You don’t throw a banquet without an occasion.”

  “The banquet is the occasion, Mastic. Everything else is ambiance. God above the sky, they’re trying to destroy me.”

  “Well, I’ve also heard that someone might kill the duke’s son before he can announce.”

  “They’d better not. The soup is bright red. Who would eat it after that?”

  Gastel had a lot riding on the glaze. It wasn’t a part of Egardouce’s original Last Pudding, but it did have some history. Ancient accounts of the great Imperial feasts described a glaze that would render bread impervious to liquid for hours. In the court of Trulian the Sixth, guests had spent an entire evening on a tall ship made of glazed dough, afloat in a vast shrimp bisque. A myth, so
me chefs now argued. A lost art from a better time, others despaired. While his peers had argued and despaired, Gastel Dillegrout had nurtured relationships with unscrupulous third-hand book dealers. And so when an ancient tome of recipes went missing from a cathedral basement in Oglia, it made its way, gradually and at great expense, into Gastel’s hands. He couldn’t read a word of it, but it didn’t take long to find an expert.

  The Friaress Penidia was a research cleric in the service of Aballas, the providing face of God. Gastel had enlisted her from a friary outside the city to interpret ancient texts and to return a lost and powerful glaze to the world. For months, she had been boiling stones and unfamiliar plants in a lonely corner of the kitchen where she’d hoped her books would be safe from stray flecks of gravy. It was poor form to spill soup on an illuminated text, even if the illuminated text concerned soups.

  “Gracious sister,” said Gastel, “I’m told they’re ready to lay the aqueduct. How fares the glaze?”

  “This batch has done well,” she said, gesturing to a bowl of soup on the counter. “The word ‘Essend’ must mean a kind of wine vinegar. Some Kilderkin manuscripts use ‘esseg’ to describe verjus, but we hadn’t thought verjus was used in the Kenemlands until the reign of Hausgume...”

  She went on like that. Gastel had no head for archival mysteries. The bowl, he saw as he leaned close, was made of glazed pastry. Its interior caught the fading light from the window. He lifted the bowl and turned it, letting the thin soup run from one side to the other. The shine on the bottom of the bowl was pristine, smooth and hard as fired porcelain. “When did you pour this soup?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “How much glaze did it take? Our aqueduct is as long as the great hall.”

  “Less than a spoonful.” Penidia smiled beatifically. They must teach the clergy that smile, Gastel thought, that guileless cheer that just skirted pride. He wondered how it might look on his own face.

  Gastel set the bowl back on the table with care. “You are a gift,” he told Penidia. “You are a blessing given flesh and set to walk among the unworthy. May I have the cauldron brought upstairs?”

  She nodded. Gastel shouted for help. He turned back to Penidia and lowered his voice. “And I wonder, would you be willing to give a blessing when we open the temple?” At the look on her face, he said, “A brief blessing. A few words.”

  She shook her head, face open with nerves. “I have no experience.”

  “No, of course. No, but you must at least let me introduce you to the guests, and thank you for—”

  She was shaking her head again.

  “Will you attend the banquet at all?”

  “I should get my notes in order,” she said.

  Gastel sighed. “You are a gift,” he repeated, and smiled and stalked away. A shame. A blessing to Aballas would have been just the thing to set the tone. And if Gastel had introduced the Friaress to the guests, that too-rich, wine-warmed throng, they would have surely buried the friary in charity. But some people just weren’t made to stand before a crowd.

  What did they have, half an hour until service? Gastel walked with enormous strides, practically leaping across the kitchen, his head swiveling for a new crisis. He wanted to try one last time to convince Cassiette Briscaban, his Marshal of the Feast, to work the banquet. He found her by the corridor that connected the kitchen to the great hall, answering panicked questions from Bruet Flummery, one of Mastic’s apprentice bakers and tonight’s stand-in Marshal of the Feast. What if someone offered him a drink, but he didn’t know their rank? Cassiette recited the Gratitude-For-A-Stranger toast.

  Cassiette was the runaway heir of a proud noble house, the Lilies of Briscas. She had a lifetime in court, a voice as soft and rich as gold, the physical gravity of an opera star. She could silence an outdoor crowd of thousands, command the hushed attention of wild children and drunks. It was Gastel’s firm belief that Cassiette could, by announcing an entrée with clarity and conviction, improve its flavor at an alchemical level. Bruet was a massive, earnest oaf with two seasons of courtly training who didn’t know anything about anything. A baker’s son, he was afraid of nobles, and concealed that fear, as he concealed all his fears, behind a bright, obliging countenance that suited his big, fleshy face. He had Marshalled feasts before and had been passable. The thought that any part of tonight’s feast should be merely passable made Gastel’s teeth itch.

  The trouble was that Cassiette had developed some notoriety in this part of the world as a runaway. Noble children ran away from time to time, but when an heir did it, it created a lot of anxiety. For two years now, the Lord and Lady Briscaban had dragged a three-quarter-length portrait of their daughter from banquet to banquet for peers and servants to memorize. Her face had become quite famous on this side of the Kenembes River. Cassiette had vague plans to one day return home, but only after she had lived a hundred lives under a hundred names and seen every corner of the world. She would not show her face on this side of the Kenembes River for pride or duty.

  Bruet asked, “What do I do if I spill soup and the duke slips on it and breaks his neck?”

  “You’ll be thrown in prison,” said Cassiette. “You won’t have to do anything.”

  “Good,” Bruet said. “That’s easy.”

  Gastel stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Bruet!” he said. “That jacket! You’re a vision. Cassiette, have you given any more thought—?”

  “My cousins are on the list,” said Cassiette.

  “Civvey says she could build a kind of rolling statue. We could hide you inside—”

  “My cousins are on the list,” Cassiette said again. “They would know me at the first syllable.”

  Gastel frowned and nodded. He pivoted to Bruet and took him by the shoulders. “You will be wonderful. Have no fear whatsoever. Be enthusiastic. Whisper to some people and shout to others. They love contrast. And remember, they’re all going to be drunk.” He nodded to Bruet and then to Cassiette. They seemed all right.

  Half an hour until service. Gastel ran.

  Deep in the kitchen, Gastel called across a work table to the thin man splitting time between four huge pots. “Orach! How’s the soup?”

  “It’s soup,” Orach, eyes still on his pots. He ladled a little into a bowl and set it at the center of the table. Gastel waited to reach until Orach had turned back to the stove. It was mortally important to avoid touching Orach. He was one of the Untarn people from up in the Grouma Hills, where he’d gotten himself into some kind of grave moral trouble. Fladen Cogner, the Golden Damson sommelier, swore that it had been a revenge killing—a farmer’s bull had gotten loose and killed Orach’s brother, so Orach had strangled the farmer with a cloth. Or maybe Fladen was telling tales. In any case, Orach had taken a four-year vow of no-contact and exiled himself from the Gouma Hills for the duration. He had not touched another human being in two-and-a-half years. Around his neck, he wore a wide red band to warn the rest of the world away.

  Gastel sipped the soup and shuddered. “Orach,” he said, “your godawful personal tragedy is the best thing to happen to soup in five hundred years.”

  Orach sighed. “I was set in this world to suffer and to teach the low country how to use vinegar.”

  Gastel finished the soup and strode away. Not too much left. Civvey could handle the labyrinth. Probably, Gastel had enough time to cut fruit for the windows.

  He was in the larder piling fruit into huge baskets when Fladen Cogner, the company’s sommelier, tromped in from the corridor. “Gastel! Hey, chef! I’m at a moral crossroads!”

  “What?” asked Gastel. “What happened?”

  Fladen poked his head into the small, dim room. When he saw Gastel’s face, he squinted. “Have you eaten?”

  “Fladen, what happened?”

  “My social betters solicited me to commit a violent act.”

  “What violent act?” asked Gastel. “What are you talking about?”

  “They asked me to kill the duke’s ki
d.”

  “Who asked you?”

  “I don’t know, they were wearing a hood. Pulled me into a closet. Made their voice all raspy.”

  “So, a noble,” said Gastel.

  Fladen snorted. “Gave me a trick amulet full of poison to slip in the kid’s wine.”

  “Well don’t bring it in here.”

  “Of course I didn’t bring it in here. I threw it out the window.”

  “Was that prudent?”

  “It’s prudent if the kid ends up dead and they try to frame me. Still, five hundred marks.”

  “Strong offer.”

  “Great offer.” He tugged at the little tasting cup he kept on a chain around his neck. “Hey, chef, be honest: do I look like a killer?”

  “All cooks look like killers to a noble.”

  “You think so?”

  Gastel shrugged. “We travel. We have too much money. They’d kill us for a penny and a cold meal, so they have to believe we’d do the same.”

  “I’ll see if they’ll front me half.”

  “The privy might be a better place to dispose of poison. If it comes up again.”

  Fladen did look like a killer, or at least some kind of temple burglar. He had bulging eyes and hollow cheeks that became pits of shadow in anything less than full sunlight. It was a great attribute in a sommelier, Gastel thought. Respectable people liked to get their wine from someone who appeared to understand vice.

  Gastel threw a plum into a basket so hard the skin tore. He looked at it for a moment and then ate it in three bites. So someone really was after the duke’s son. The boy—Allos? Allan?—was always being threatened. Sole heir to the wealthiest holding east of the Kenembes River, dozens of potential successors. Since the day of his birth, he had never gone four uninterrupted months without facing an attempt on his life. It would be precisely Gastel’s luck if the boy were finally killed tonight and the miracle pudding instantly forgotten.

  He hauled the baskets of fruit to the front table, where anyone in a crisis could find him. He felt a prick of guilt to settle into a mindless chore at this late hour. Slicing fruit was a job for household staff, for a scullion or maybe someone’s child if they were getting underfoot. But if Gastel could find a few unoccupied minutes, he always saved the chore for himself. For a brief span, he thought only about cutting peaches and melons as thinly as possible, as quickly as possible. He set the slices into window frames as he went, brushing them with lemon juice to keep them from browning. Now he held a slice of plum to a candle and watched the thin membrane take the light. They’d need a torch behind each window. It was a spectacle best suited to daylight. But when someone hired Gastel Dillegrout, they expected stained glass, be it blazing sun or dead of winter’s night. There were worse ways for a chef to find fame.