Ryan Eric Dull - [BCS317 S02]

by A Feast from Tile

  The duke stepped forward, his glass empty and his eyes bright. “Gentle people,” he said, “the man who will relieve our hunger, Gastel Dillegrout.”

  The tapping of impatient hands in silk gloves around the stems of wine glasses was perhaps the smallest sound that could be called applause. Gastel waited until even that muted rhythm had fallen to absolute silence. “Worthies,” he said, “follow me.” He threw open the doors and vanished into the maze before anyone could think to chase after him.

  He hoped he could keep Civvey’s directions in his head for at least a few more minutes. Two lefts, a right, middle, middle... He slowed after the first few turns, now deep in the tangle. The nobles were all wearing heels. They would not follow too quickly.

  Music hummed in from some hidden place; gentle, pointless music that didn’t insist upon a mood. Gastel was surprised how much sound the pastry swallowed. His footsteps didn’t seem to echo, although the floor was stone and the ceiling so high it deserved cloud banks. He couldn’t hear any of the half a hundred servants he knew to be prowling the room with hors d’oeuvres. The snacks were a concession to the duke, who couldn’t quite bear forcing a mob of hungry peers to traverse a maze for their supper. What if someone got lost and, famished, fainted? Wars had started over less. Fussy nonsense, to Gastel’s ears. Anyway, Bruet would be patrolling the maze with Civvey’s map. He’d make sure no one got too turned around.

  There were finger-width gaps between the panels, and several times Gastel thought he could see something moving in a neighboring corridor. The first time he turned a corner and saw a servant, they both jumped. She was nestled in an alcove, attending a pyramid of glasses and a table of stuffed figs run through by tiny silver lances.

  There was no way, Gastel knew, that anyone would beat him to the temple. Still, when he passed beneath the arch, when his eyes adjusted to the low, flickering light and he saw that it was only himself and a few busy servants inside the great pudding, he felt relief. He was breathing hard, air as heavy and rich as a cream soup. He pressed his hands into the service table and rested. From here, he could see the full stretch of his design. Soon, the courtyard outside the temple would be packed with hungry pilgrims.

  Gastel shifted back and forth and tried to keep his energy from fading. A genius chef was not allowed to be sullen. Wrathful, yes, or manic, or corpulent and absentminded and jolly. But a chef was not a poet or a painter, and there were certain emotional registers his art could not touch, lest they taint the meat. Well, so what? Silly, to envy somber artists. What was better, in all of humanity’s wild invention, than a good meal? Who had ever seen an exquisite painting and not wished they could devour it?

  Gastel had eaten a painting once, a pretty good oil painting he’d bought in Oglia. It had been a landscape, some of those big, misty cliffs they had up there. Canvas, it turned out, was as tough as tree bark. All night he’d chewed the stubborn thing, washing down damp clumps with a very acceptable Courmin wine. When he’d explained to Civvey why he was sick the next day, she’d been horrified. Apparently, paint was usually poisonous, one toxic oil swirled into another. Scandalous. People hung these things in their homes. People showed these things to their children.

  A few servants passed through the courtyard. One was clearly lost. Another marched with great confidence and a tray of tiny galantines. A noble emerged from the maze with two wine glasses, both empty. Gastel recognized him from a wedding as the Count Wethery. Seeing no table, the count set his glasses on the floor next to one of the panels. He glanced in all directions, straight into the temple where Gastel stood in shadow. Confident that he was unseen, he stood on his toes to tear a stretch of pastry from the top of the nearest panel. He wiped his wine-red mouth, tipped the panel toward himself, and threw his makeshift napkin into another corridor. Only then did he look up at the temple edifice, grunt, and wander back into the maze. Gastel prayed that Aballas would send the count something bitter to choke on, and soon.

  Gastel hailed the next servant who passed into the courtyard and instructed him to wait outside and tell any guests who emerged that they weren’t allowed in yet. Over the next half hour, the courtyard filled with gawkers, tipsy lords and ladies staring up with much more appropriate awe. Gastel kept them waiting until they were ready to eat the maze, the floor, the servant guarding the archway.

  The untutored layperson, upon hearing about Egardouce’s Last Pudding, generally assumed that its great challenge lay in its size. You could only stack food so high. Beef and pastry and soup were not at all like wood and nails and stone. Anyone who’d ever tried to build a little log cabin from the carrots on their plate could imagine the nightmare of trying to construct a free-standing building out of dinner. No wonder chefs balked. No wonder the dread things always collapsed.

  Of course, any chef could see that the real struggle was logistical—to serve so much food at once, to cook elements that could remain beautiful and sturdy and edible for long hours, to render an art form that was usually the work of months or years in just a few days. Egardouce’s bricks were designed for stability and his pattern for stacking them was reliable. That infamous collapse—and there was only one recorded collapse, eighty years ago—had come when a chef tried to cheat the logistics, experimenting with a new stacking pattern that let him cut out a few hundred bricks. Civvey’s brickwork was impeccable. So long as the glaze held and the guests didn’t charge the walls, it could stand for days.

  But the guests didn’t know that. They gazed uneasily into the dark of the temple.

  Gastel had spent years using arcane theatrical techniques to train his diaphragm. Nobles loved it when artists shouted. It let them know which parts were important. Gastel shouted now, a thunderous call that shook the gravy-thick air. “If you hold your life dear, stand back!”

  The guests pressed back in an awkward clump. Hard to tell how far the wreckage might fly.

  “Loose the supports!” A gasp from the crowd. What reckless courage from Gastel, to stand alone inside this trap, to live or die by his craftsmanship. Outside, Civvey would be leading the final push. Footmen on the scaffolding would be lowering support frames off of the walls, cutting through the superfluous taut ropes they’d added to make the scene look more dangerous. After a few long moments, the crowd began to applaud. That was it, then.

  Gastel shouted, “All who revere Aballas are welcome in my shrine!”

  The nobles processed in with slow, somber footfalls, pausing every few steps to taste the air or lean close to examine some exquisitely baked detail. The individual effect was great dignity, but together, they massed under the arch, squinted in the dark, jostled and slowed and looked at everything but their neighbors. They spoke low, but they all spoke at once, so that no one could quite be heard. Soon, they were shouting. Gastel waited until they had packed the room all the way to his table. He craned his neck upward so that everyone followed his gaze to the ceiling, and he called, “What need have we for a roof when Aballas is our shelter?”

  Footmen on the scaffold pulled pins from supports, and one by one, the panels of pastry that composed the roof slid down along the beams. The footmen caught the panels and lowered them to the floor. They left behind a gentle snowfall of pastry flakes that irritable nobles shook from their hair and more game nobles tried to catch on their tongues. The temple brightened beneath the light of the great hall’s chandeliers.

  “Who will thirst when refreshment pours from on high?”

  With the roof gone, nobles could now see four colossal, steaming pots perched like gargoyles over the corners of the temple. At Gastel’s signal, footmen heaved the pots forward, casting a wave of deep red soup into gutters of glazed pastry. The soup ran around the rim of the temple, trickled down clever ramps in the walls, and pooled in a wide, glazed trough that ringed the temple at waist height. Whenever possible, Gastel preferred to feed nobles from a trough.

  The footmen on the scaffolding began to lift bricks from the top of the wall and pass them down the ladders at
Gastel’s back. Gastel received the first brick on a silver plate and brought it to the high serving table. He raised his knife and sliced through the brick, releasing a cloud of steam and a rush of jus. A brief, theatrical pause. He turned the plate and lifted it to the crowd. “Behold!” he said, “A feast of tile and stone!”

  The applause was enthusiastic, but no one wept.

  They hadn’t prepared enough table settings. Gastel had assumed that after the initial spectacle, some portion of the guests would return to drinks and hors d’oeuvres, others would carry plates out to the small private tables hidden in the alcoves of the maze, and only a few hundred would want to eat in the crowded temple. Civvey hadn’t even given them seats, on the suspicion that sitting led to lounging and clogged up the whole operation. But the guests were ravenous. They pushed in, standing hip to hip, two and three people’s plates balanced precariously on each runner. Nobles jostled for ladles at the soup trough. Hundreds more waited impatiently in the courtyard. Conversation was minimal and damp. As fast as the footmen could raze them, the walls came down.

  Gastel plated the bricks as footmen brought them to his table. Each one had to be sliced and artfully arranged, which meant that each of the hungry, tipsy nobles got a few private seconds at the front of the line with the famous chef. They rambled gratitude, spoke vaguely about future banquets where he might be hired, tried to sound erudite. Gastel answered everyone with, “Perhaps,” delivered laughingly or musingly as the prompt dictated. Ambiguity was the only safe stance with nobles. It didn’t take any work. They already assumed that everyone believed as they did, and there was no profit in challenging that assumption.

  Every dozen patrons, Gastel would beg a moment to examine the state of the wall and shout instructions up at the footmen. “Leave that one where it is or you’ll bring down the whole barn!” or “I want artful gaps! Artful! Like an Imperial ruin!” It was mostly for the nobles’ benefit. The footmen seemed to know their business, but there was a proper way to administrate a banquet.

  A soreness was building in Gastel’s back, a knot from simultaneously keeping straight for the nobles and bending low over the table. The word “perhaps” had lost all meaning. He squinted out to see how many hundreds of guests were left in line and made eye contact with Bruet, who was wading through the crowd, face rent with panic. He seemed to be headed in Gastel’s direction. Probably, he had forgotten the name of a spoon.

  Gastel served another three people before Bruet was close enough to lean in and hiss, “Chef, something has happened.”

  “I’m sure you can handle it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Ask Cassiette.”

  “It’s a problem of a, uh, violent nature.”

  Gastel finished a plate and bowed to the next guest in line. “My apologies. I’ll only be a moment.” He set his serving knives down with a flourish and led Bruet to the corner where the extra plates were stacked.

  “I found a body,” said Bruet. And then, lower, “A dead body.”

  Gastel tried not to show panic as he surveyed the room. Everywhere, guests were staring, wondering about the holdup. He pulled Bruet further into the corner and whispered, “The duke’s son?”

  Bruet shook his head. “The one who touched Orach.”

  “Oh, the Galingale kid? Hidromel? Are you sure?”

  “I only saw him from behind. But he was wearing—” Bruet gestured to indicate tassels.

  “Who else knows?”

  “No one, hopefully. He was in the maze. Someone left him all bloody, sealed up behind the walls. That’s how I found him—I was trying to get to the butter tarts, but the map wasn’t right.”

  “You left him there?”

  “I moved the walls back. No one will go near him.”

  “The walls are puff pastry. Soon these drunks will be tumbling right through them. Have you spoken with Orach?”

  “No. Should I?”

  A beat. Gastel struggled to think. “No. No, I’ll talk to him.”

  “What should I do?”

  Gastel glanced across the room. Guests were staring. “I’ll make sure it’s Hidromel. Stay sharp, we might be leaving early. You said he was near the butter tarts?”

  “Between the butter tarts and the eel pie. But people are moving walls everywhere. All sorts of dead ends. It’s a mess.”

  “I’ll find him. You can serve?”

  Bruet looked uncertainly at the line of nobles. “What face am I supposed to make? Do I smile?”

  “Set your jaw. Like you’re at a stranger’s funeral.”

  It was a great undertaking to make a young noble. Two families had to navigate factions and feuds, history and land rights. They had to bribe the right people, draw half the empire to a wedding, and hope that their young champions were healthy and happy. And once the child was born, if a child was born, there were nurses, cooks, tutors, oracles, dance instructors, riding instructors, hunting instructors, guards, physicians, poison-tasters, dozens of people spending good portions of their lives raising this child, and hundreds, thousands more in the workshops and the fields, working for the lord’s table and the lord’s wealth. A nineteen-year-old noble boy, even a poor one, was a vast store of work and love and duty. They ought to wear suits of armor to the breakfast table. They ought to be wrapped in pillows. But they jousted and dueled and waved knives in the dark at parties. What a waste. A wildfire in Cambens, at least, would have been over in a season. It would have left ashes behind.

  The butter tarts were easy enough to find. Mastic’s bakers had flamed a preserved lemon peel on each one, and Gastel could navigate by the odor of burnt citrus. Why were they near the eel pie? The duke’s servants, no doubt. Gastel had been so worried about the Pudding, he’d left the lesser arrangements in the hands of towel-folders and candle-lighters. The smellscape was a wreck.

  The labyrinth, too, was beginning to fray. Evidently, Count Wethery was not the only feral guest who’d decided that the pastry made an inviting napkin. Golden-brown scraps littered the floor, some of them bearing boot prints. Brightly glazed hors d’oeuvres plates lay abandoned along the edges of the corridor. In the corners of many panels, guests had carved initials, insignia, obscene glyphs.

  If this entire hall were to sink into the earth, not twenty worthy lives would be lost.

  Everywhere, people were arguing or embracing, peeking between the panels, hoarding cakes and bottles, whispering in alcoves. They all stared when Gastel turned a corner, deer caught at a salt lick. Immured in some unseen place, the musicians sawed on.

  The butter tart table was abandoned—just a few scattered confections left for any opportunistic scavenger. Perhaps the servant responsible for the table had left to find more tarts. Gastel began to walk toward the eel pies, tipping panels to look behind them as he went. He moved methodically, and then painstakingly, and then plain slowly.

  He had not been given enough time to bask. He had not lived long enough in this moment where he had accomplished a world-historical feat of planning and taste; where he had invited a horde of jaded people to stand inside his art and left them speechless. Under the best conditions, a banquet was a fleeting thing. It had been plans and scaffolding this afternoon, and it would be ransacked by the swarm tomorrow morning. A mayfly at leisure had time enough to watch the spectacle from start to finish. What a waste, to leave it early. What a slog, this new and pressing moment with a cooling body hidden in the walls, with one of Gastel’s crew implicated, the hasty midnight flight, the probable ignominy that would hound him to an unmarked grave.

  This would be his last banquet. Even if he gave Orach over to the duke’s justice—an unthinkable betrayal that would no doubt lose him half his crew on the spot—Gastel would be a pariah. A chef, a cook, a food-handler one degree removed from a noble assassination. There would be no more commissions, no more audiences, no more art. A painter could render genius in anonymity. A poet could seal her work away to be discovered and adored centuries hence by some new, compassionate bre
ed of humanity. But a banquet fouled in hours, its only hope for longevity in the stories passed on by guests and servants and the swarm who surveyed the wreckage.

  And here it was, a stretch of rearranged wall that concealed a wide, sealed-off space. At its center stood a second, smaller enclosure, mercifully undisturbed. Gastel checked that he was alone, edged a panel inward, and approached the mausoleum.

  It was tiny—four panels dragged together into a square. Around its base, the floor was clean. Any blood that might have pooled had been wicked up by the pastry, which was soggy and deep red where it grazed the floor. Gastel took hold of two panels and pulled them apart, opening the space like a wardrobe. Blood, yes, and green velvet ringed in tassels, and a tangle of dark hair.

  There was a moment, Gastel knew, that slumped in after catastrophe, when the vague fears and imagined disasters that haunted ordinary life settled into a single, solid shape. There was a hesitance to understand that anything terrible could be real, or that anything terrible and real could belong to you. Gastel stared at the body for too long. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Alright.”

  There was blood, quite a lot of blood. That seemed interesting. Fladen always said Orach had strangled his brother’s killer with a cloth. Gastel had assumed that a murderer would stick with a method, once he found that it worked.

  Gastel tore a length of pastry from the wall and used it to cover his hands as he turned the body. Young Hidromel, face slack, mouth slightly open as though in surprise.

  And here was a new catastrophe, with understanding trundling along too slowly behind it: a few feet below the messy wound in the boy’s chest, down in his left thigh at the center of a smaller, neater ring of blood, Gastel recognized the ancient hilt of his fruit knife.

  Several long moments passed. When a thought finally reached Gastel’s mind, it kicked the door off the hinges. Someone was trying to frame him. Well, that made everything simpler, morally speaking. He guessed he owed Orach an apology. You got in all kinds of trouble, jumping to conclusions.