Ryan Eric Dull - [BCS317 S02] Read online

  “Where did you get that?” A large stranger was addressing Gastel, shouting really, although Gastel couldn’t blame him for shouting in a busy kitchen.

  “What?” said Gastel.

  “That blade. It’s a weapon of war.”

  Gastel looked down at his knife. “No, it used to be a weapon of war. Now it’s a fruit knife.” The stranger’s doublet was crisp and faded. He carried a sword. Probably, it would behoove Gastel to be polite. “It won’t leave the kitchen,” he said.

  The stranger frowned and straightened his back. “My name is Raffold Gaufres. I’m a lieutenant with the house guard. I’m going to take that knife.”

  “My fruit knife?”

  “It’s not a fruit knife, it’s—” The lieutenant reached for the knife and Gastel pulled it away. Its dark, marbled surface warped the light. “Is that High Imperial steel?”

  “It is. Good eye.”

  The lieutenant sputtered. “You’re using a thousand-year-old weapon to cut plums?”

  “Fifteen-hundred. You should see how it cuts lamb. Those High Imperials knew their business.”

  “I’m taking it,” the lieutenant said. “You should be glad I’m not asking where a cook got a priceless artifact.”

  “It was a gift. From someone who admired my work.” That was true, although the earl who had gifted it had been, if not insane, certainly gripped by unusual priorities. The Earl Tezelin had demanded brighter and brighter fruit windows, throwing open his ancient armory to find the blade that could make the thinnest slice. Last Gastel had heard, the earl had fallen down a well and his half-brother was on the throne. The new Earl Tezelin ate lamb and potatoes three meals a day and probably wanted his heirloom back.

  The lieutenant chewed his tongue. After a moment, he spoke in a low voice. “We have reason to believe that the duke’s family is in danger.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Gastel. He was slicing more quickly now, rushing through the rest of the basket.

  “I can’t leave dangerous weapons unattended.”

  “I’ll attend it.”

  “You can’t carry a weapon into the great hall.”

  Gastel gestured over his shoulder. “I’ll leave it with one of my—”

  “I’m being polite,” said the lieutenant. “I’m trying to be polite.”

  Gastel spoke slowly and sliced at a hummingbird blur. “This knife is older than our empire. It is older than our language. This knife was two hundred years old when King Trulian was born. If I give you this knife, it will be the most precious thing you have ever held in your hands.”

  “I have two sons,” said the lieutenant.

  “Lots of people have sons. I could go out tonight and make a son by accident. No one has made High Imperial steel in a millennium.”

  “I’ll put it in the duke’s vault. You can have it back tomorrow.”

  Gastel sliced his final peach, wiped the blade, inspected it, wiped it again, and handed it to the lieutenant. “You are a credit to your profession and to the family you serve,” he said. “Your sons are very fortunate. Please be careful not to stab yourself.”

  Another five minutes to work the fruit into window frames. The sun had almost set now, and a pair of buoyant candle lighters from the household staff floated through to ignite the candelabras. Gastel held a finished window to the light and saw a noble leering back through a hazy pane of fruit. When he lowered the window, he saw that the young man was smiling. A terribly innocent face on him, like some prankster had dressed a wide-eyed farm boy in finery to set him up for a great fall. His coat was a shocking green ringed with far too many tassels.

  “Will you look at the size of this place?” said the young man.

  “Young master,” said Gastel. “What brings you to our noisy workshop?”

  The young man stared into the flickering depths. “I wanted to see the preparations,” he said. “I heard Duke Agrano has hired the great chef Gastel Dillegrout.”

  Gastel squinted. “Might you, in your charming way, be angling for an early meal?”

  The young man frowned. “How would you serve an Egardouce’s Last Pudding early?”

  Gastel spread his arms and raised his voice so the front third of the kitchen could hear. “Well, look at the boy connoisseur! So there’s still some taste left in the Kenemlands. And what do we call the young gourmand, when we share the good news with the other chefs?”

  “Hidromel Galingale,” he said, grabbing at Gastel’s hand, “from Cambens. I was wondering if I might take a look around.”

  The name was familiar. Hidromel was heir of a nowhere family, a couple farms and a pile of rocks on the banks of the Kenembes River. His family could not have afforded Gastel if they’d sold their whole seat. But life had been kind to Hidromel. In his youth, he had been promised to Chiquart Lampern, eldest daughter of an equally poor family with whom the Galingales held ancient bonds. They would have shared a life of happy low-country penury. But when the traitor Earl Ulvos had raised an army in the South, Machet Lampern, the great Bear of the Kenemlands, had outshone a hundred knights, crashing the front on foot to strike down the usurper. The Emperor, in a fit of gratitude, had given Ulvos’s seat to Matchet, and Hidromel now stood to marry into the richest Earldom in the South. A person worth knowing, especially if he appreciated a feast.

  “Of course you may tour the kitchen,” said Gastel, “if that’s truly what you want. But I must warn you, many a young connoisseur has had his dinner spoiled when he laid eyes on its rough and belching origins.”

  The young man swelled. “The most delicate jelly has its beginning in dry bones. I won’t hold your mess against your art.”

  “Look at the wise boy. Bruet!” Gastel called. “Show the wise boy our kitchen.”

  Bruet hustled over, and the two paced through the room, slowing here and there to taste batters and question cooks. All around them, servants murmured. Hidromel’s future father-in-law was among the most famous people in the empire, certainly the most famous at tonight’s banquet. Cooks and servers traded stories about the Bear’s legendary size, the cold set of his eyes, his long hair gone prematurely white when he first saw Ulvos’s standards on the horizon.

  The murmuring abruptly stopped dead. Gastel turned to see what had happened, and his breath caught in his chest. Hidromel was leaning in close to Orach, beaming, his hands clapped firmly on the soup cook’s shoulders. Orach’s face was blank. Hidromel released him, leaned over a pot on the stove, inhaled deeply, and shook his head in gustatory wonder. He clapped Orach’s shoulders a second time.

  Gastel shouted across the distance, “I hate to chase you out, but—”

  “Of course,” said Hidromel, holding his hands high. “I’ll return upstairs to wait and salivate.”

  Gastel let him go with a bow and a thin smile, then crossed the room at a run. “God, Orach,” he said. “God. I’m so sorry.”

  “He touched me,” Orach said. “Twice.”

  “I saw. These country lords—they don’t know anything. No one teaches them—”

  “That’s two years, Dillegrout. Two more years. I can’t embrace. I can’t dance. I can’t see my family. My mother and father are not young, Dillegrout.”

  “I know. I know that.”

  “By rights, I could kill him.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I was wearing the red band. He could see it. I could kill him twice.”

  “I don’t think an Agranan justice would see it that way.”

  “No,” Orach said, and turned back to his pots.

  Gastel tracked down Cassiette, who had hidden in the back of the kitchen when she heard that a loose noble was wandering about. “Cassiette,” he called, “gentle, soothing Cassiette, summer wind of Briscas.”

  “Oh God, what?” she said.

  “I have to get ready for service. Please take care of Orach.”

  She snorted. “How? He won’t talk to me.”

  “Just, be near him. But not too near him, obviou
sly.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you are lavender in the warm night air and to be near you is to feel peace, and because you’re not doing anything else.”

  “I was thinking I could go out in a disguise.”

  “As Marshal?”

  “As a guest.”

  Gastel sighed. “Please help Orach. He’s very upset.”

  “Of course he is. All he does it make soup and suffer.”

  “That’s exactly what he told me half an hour ago. You could start with that.” He turned and left at a canter. The duke’s heavy ring bounced in his pocket. One more thing to think about. How much time was left? It couldn’t be more than a few minutes. Well, they’d delay service. Keep the guests waiting. Build anticipation. It’s what Egardouce would have done.

  As he neared the great hall, Gastel slowed and stopped. Two days ago, he had walked through the floor plan with his sous chef, Civvey Mullein, who was working architect and chief mason on the Last Pudding. When the first brick had come out of the oven, Gastel had set it in the cornerstone position. He’d been too busy to check back since.

  There was a terrible friction, he knew, any time you dragged something out of a dream and into mortal life. Things ruptured. Things were scraped away. One felt terribly small, living for so long with a vision and finally settling for an earthbound knockoff. Gastel had carried this vision longer than any other. With three slow breaths, he wished it farewell. He turned the corner into the great hall.

  Like many of Egardouce’s latter-day feasts, the Last Pudding was modeled on a miracle. In legend, before he became king, Trulian was chosen by Bartus, the justice-seeking face of God, to rise against the tyrant Pendemain. Things went poorly for a while, as they must in a legend, and Trulian and his friends found themselves under siege in Sutos, a siege so long and merciless that the people of that city boiled their fine boots into soup and sucked the dye from their robes. From the floor of the great temple, Trulian cried out to Aballas, the providing face of God, “Did you raise me up only to starve me in your house?”

  And the great altar spoke, “In my house, all things are good. I will make for you a feast of tile and stone.” And the walls and the columns became bread that Trulian distributed to the people, until all that remained of the temple was Aballas’s altar on a bare hill.

  Egardouce was drawn to stories of hunger and relief. He was the first culinary theorist to propose that if a chef had the will and the antagonistic genius, he could use hunger like any other ingredient. Musicians used silence, so where was the sin? On the night he served his Last Pudding, Egardouce had led his guests into a temple, where long tables had been set with bare plates. He left them there for an hour without serving them, noble men and women driven to a froth of savage rage by the pain in their bellies, the apathy of their host, the smell of rich food taunting them from just beyond the walls. Egardouce had entered to a roar of indignation. With a pair of silver forks, he had pulled a stone from the wall, set it on a plate, and torn it open to reveal steaming beef, mushrooms, and gravy. “Behold!” he said. “I have made for you a feast of tile and stone!” Oh, the shock of plenty in a barren place. It was said that many of the guests had been moved to tears.

  Entering the great hall, Gastel had much the same reaction. He surveyed a brown-gold dream rising toward the murals on the duke’s ceiling. They’d commandeered every oven in every tavern and public bakehouse in the city and many of the larger private hearths, an entire town turning out bricks of stuffed pastry for three days straight, and still Gastel could hardly believe how much they’d baked. The temple was as big as a barn, supported by wooden frames on all sides. The bricks below were cool and stable, the bricks at the very top hot from the ovens and ready for service. Gastel could smell them from across the room, notes of beef and rich gravy beneath the sharper aroma of crisped pastry. Two-tone images in browned egg wash stretched across the temple’s edifice—the duke’s sigil on the left, the Emperor’s on the right, and blessed Aballas above, arms outstretched to welcome her hungry children through the arched doorway below. The roof, for now, was open except for a few long support beams. Footmen on scaffolds were beginning to balance panels of pastry between the beams. Along each of the temple’s exterior walls, torches had been lit to illuminate Gastel’s stained glass windows. He would have preferred to conceal the torches somehow, but he was sure the effect was spectacular from inside the building.

  They’d even gotten the spire up. He could weep. This morning, he’d been sure they’d never get it stable enough, not without drilling through the duke’s floor. But here it was, a finger raised in triumph, almost scraping the ceiling. The icon at its tip was a vast globe of candy, turned out yesterday from an enormous mold. It caught the candlelight like holy inspiration. The guests didn’t know anything about candy. They’d have to think it was a gift from heaven. Gastel knew more about food than anyone alive and working, and he wouldn’t disagree.

  But in the shadow of the temple there was an unholy mess. Tables and pastry panels were cluttered in a huge flotilla near the garden corridor. “Hey!” Gastel called to the room. “Service starts five minutes ago! We need a labyrinth!”

  Civvey appeared in the archway of the temple, and Gastel’s chest caught again. The temple dwarfed her. In the flickering light, it might have been standing here for a thousand years. “We’re waiting on pastry,” Civvey shouted.

  “The pastry’s slow. They’ve got bad pans. How short are we?”

  Civvey took a dismal look back at the clutter. “Half?”

  “Well, we have to put out something. Simplify it. You can add the missing panels as they come in.”

  “We can’t change the maze during the banquet. People will get lost.”

  “It’s a maze. They’ll feel shortchanged if they don’t get lost.”

  Civvey squinted as Gastel came near. “Have you eaten?”

  “Of course. A plum.” He hefted a nearby panel with more force than he’d intended. The pastry shook like a heavy curtain but remained fixed in its frame. “Light,” he said.

  “Will anyone eat these?”

  “I’m sure the swarm will tomorrow.”

  Civvey pinched the edge of the pastry and tested the texture. “And what do you think these will look like by then? Giant crackers, or giant soggy crackers?”

  “I don’t much care, as long as they’re beautiful tonight. Make sure that the first time the guests see the temple full on, they’re looking at it from the front.” He leapt back and spread his arms. “From tile and stone! Civvey, you’ve raised a miracle. People will show etchings of this dish to their grandchildren. Are you prepared to be an etching?”

  “I’m holding out for oil paint,” said Civvey.

  “You? Impossible. You’d have to stand still.” Another few panels lurched through the far corridor, still steaming from the oven, footmen sweating beneath. Civvey hurried off to direct them.

  There were a few household servants in the temple lighting candles and arranging place settings. Gastel hoped that all of the household staff would have a chance to see the tableau before the nobles rumbled through, soiling it with fistfights and wine vomit. But why should he grumble? Look at this spire, tall as a ships’ mast. Look at these bricks in the wall, each one washed in gold and brown with the careful mark of a local baker eager to join their craft to history. Even hayseed gentry like the Bear would know to hush their voices in a place like this.

  Gastel had decided not to give the temple an altar. You never wanted to invite people around an unconsecrated altar, especially if, sooner or later, they would try to eat it. In its place stood a high serving table. Gastel took his position behind it and looked out through his temple, into the echoing hall where men and women in livery were positioning and repositioning enough pastry to bread a small forest. The silverware and plate runners reflected orange, purple, green from the windows. Somewhere nearby, an eight-piece string ensemble was tuning up. Gastel had convinced them to perform from a cl
osed section of the labyrinth, so that their music would seem to drift from nowhere, louder around every corner but never quite visible. After all these years, he had finally managed to imprison a gang of musicians, if only in puff pastry.

  Across the hall, Bruet rang the bell for final preparations. Gastel needed to dress. He’d long felt that chefs should wear outrageously stained aprons and sweat-soaked toques to better contrast with their delicate art. But nobles seemed disinclined to agree, especially at a banquet, and especially when they were paying Gastel enough to buy himself a very nice village. He lingered in the archway and glanced back into this empty, perfect room. But the panels ahead of him were being pushed into rows, and if he didn’t leave now, he’d be lost in the maze. He ran.

  When Gastel returned to the great hall, there was a labyrinth. Civvey had sent him directions, how to get from the kitchen to the grand doors, from the doors to the temple. Standing in the corridor of pastry that ran from the grand doors into the maze, he could see bits of the temple roof and spire cresting the panels, but only bits. The smell and the mystery would draw guests inward.

  Gastel cracked the grand doors and stepped into the waiting hall beyond, where a crowd of glittering, hungry guests were packed too tightly to comfortably lift their wine glasses. The duke’s plump, eminently killable son stood in the front row. Gastel tried to guess who in the room he was set to marry, and who was trying to prevent it.