But more than self-preservation, Gastel was thinking about his banquet. If there was going to be a tragic murder, he didn’t want it to seep out in confused dribs and drabs. That would diminish the evening. Gastel thought he could see a way to elevate it. The refrain he couldn’t knock out of his head was There is a proper way to frame a lord for murder at a banquet.
Lord Courmi was in the temple, leading a debate about the great painters of the day. He was perched at one of the awkward standing tables with grace and ease, as though he’d never eaten a meal sitting down. By happy circumstance, in the entire temple, only Gastel, Bruet, and a few footmen were not visibly drunk.
Gastel approached Bruet from behind and took his elbow. Bruet jumped. “Find our people and get them to the carts,” said Gastel. “We’re leaving soon.”
“But, service—” Bruet gestured vaguely at the service table. His collar was ringed with sweat.
“You’ve done a beautiful job. You’ve fed a thousand people and livened a thousand hearts. Yes?”
Bruet took a breath and nodded.
“Good. Go. And tell the footmen to get off the scaffold.”
It was not difficult to convince Lord Courmi to accept one of the elaborate display bricks from the edifice. He was a dignified man, and there was a proper way to accept an honor at a banquet, no matter how crusty. While Lord Courmi ate, Gastel made himself busy at the other table. A clutch of tipsy gourmands was trying to figure out how Gastel kept the pastry from going soggy. Gastel fielded their hypotheses with good humor but kept the mystery intact. He was just about lost in the conversation when across the room, Lord Courmi bit down hard on the duke’s signet ring. “Who has done this?” he asked, as a trickle of blood wet his lips. “Who has done this?”
“Aha!” cried Gastel. “Lord Courmi, tonight you are blessed in Aballas’s sight. You have found the duke’s lost ring.”
Lord Courmi examined the pastry-flecked ring, his face clouded.
“Where is the duke?” Gastel asked. “Tell him we’ve found our Lord of the Feast!”
Lord Courmi’s eyes went wide and he pointed one long, gloved finger at himself. Gastel nodded. Lord Courmi took a breath and finished his glass of wine. He bowed to his neighbors and finished their glasses of wine. Several civic-minded guests further down the table donated their glasses, and Lord Courmi drained them in turn.
Gastel trotted into the courtyard, where the duke was holding court. “We have found your Lord of the Feast!” said Gastel, and the duke broke off with a thrilled leap.
When they got back to Courmi, he had his eyes closed and the fingertips of his left hand pressed into the table. This was a delicate moment. There was a proper way to achieve apotheosis at a banquet, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you got to practice. The Lord of the Feast had emptied himself of himself. Now the guests waited to see what might fill him. All around him, faithful partiers were praying. It would be an awful thing to lose the feast now.
Lord Courmi’s eyes opened. He seemed lost. With great rolling movements of his head and eyes, he took in the temple, lingering on wine, meat, precious comforts he seemed to recognize in an otherwise strange place. He kept his neck stiff but he let his arms float, and his spine listed at the waist. He reached high and drew his hand in a long arc down, down to a wine bottle held by a young servant. He lifted the bottle with great delicacy, using only the pads of his fingers. Under the eyes of all assembled, he poured a few inches into one of the many glasses gathered at his place.
He took a cautious sip, lifted the glass high, and gazed at the mouthful that remained. He looked to the guests. They were three-deep now, filing in from the courtyard and the far table. “Tell me,” said Courmi, “is this wine, stored away for long years and now happily poured to gladden hearts and loosen laughing tongues? Could this be wine?”
The people shouted that it was.
Lord Courmi finished the wine. Before it reached his belly, he had forgotten it, eyes fixed on his neighbor’s entrée. He reached for the plate with both hands and dragged it across the table. Jaw set, he lowered himself to the meal and sniffed so deeply that the pastry warped. “Tell me,” he said, “is this meat, patiently nourished and artfully prepared, to strengthen the body and quiet the temper? Could this be meat?”
The crowd was adamant that it was. “And the walls, too!” someone shouted, and they pointed and prodded with knives to show their lost lord that it was all meat, a paradise for any appetite. Lord Courmi gazed across his temple in wonder. He returned, at last, to his eager mass of guides.
“And you,” he said. “Tell me, with your fine costumes and your fine spirits, with your voices offered so generously, am I right to call you good company?”
He was right, and they offered their voices very generously indeed.
Lord Courmi threw his arms open. “Then this must be a feast!” shouting the last so that soup trembled in the trough and pastry quaked in the eaves. “I am home!”
It was some minutes before the crowd was quiet enough for the Lord to continue. “And who is responsible for this blessed feast?”
A small hiccup from the guests at the faux pas, to ask such a question with both the genius and the host in earshot. Lord Courmi must really be taken. Gastel made his face pleasant and resolved to keep it that way, come praise or silence. After a beat, the crowd tittered vague enthusiasm in Gastel and the duke’s general direction. Both men bowed, the duke with great flamboyance, Gastel more humbly.
The lord swept past the duke to embrace Gastel. Gastel jerked up as the lord pivoted outward, his arm around Gastel’s waist, and stage-shouted from the temple, “All honor and thanks to my most favorite servant. Tonight, you have built me a heaven from lowly things.”
Gastel spoke to the crowd directly. “It was our lord the duke who built it. Our lord’s cellars, our lord’s orchards, our lord’s herds. It has been my great honor to arrange it prettily, but that is all.”
The crowd murmured appreciation and applauded them once again, the duke for his feast and Gastel for his decorum.
“Nonsense,” said Lord Courmi. And again, letting the nnn hum across his hard palate, “Nonsense! Wine is wine and meat is meat, but you have given us a miracle. People will speak of this until the world is cold and all your guests are names in crumbling records.”
It was a moment before Gastel could think of a response. The guests grew fidgety. “By then, we will all be seated at Aballas’s table,” he said at last, “and this humble offering will seem the barest shadow. Please excuse me. I have pots to scrub.”
He bowed to the duke and left the room at a long, brisk stride. Behind him, the duke tore a length of pastry from the tablecloth and laid it across the lord’s shoulders as a cloak. “Feast!” cried the duke.
“Feast!” shouted the lord, even louder. And everyone feasted.
There was an old chef’s adage about critics: “Praise them when they praise you; scorn them when they scorn you.” Your supporters had to be geniuses and your detractors had to be fools. Gastel grumbled as he walked. It seemed an awful waste to frame a man for murder when he had just spoken of the feast so glowingly. Ah, well. Hopefully the guests were a pious bunch, prepared to distinguish between the dour slaver who had killed Hidromel and the fine-palated spirit that was making temporary use of his body. It didn’t seem likely.
The quince tarts, by now, were browning, or else just beginning to cool. These last rounds of confections wouldn’t be eaten until morning. Their purpose was to show that the cupboards were never bare. The guests had done their best to exhaust the duke’s hospitality and they hadn’t come close. Probably, the swarm tomorrow wouldn’t do much better. It troubled Gastel to think how long the temple might stand. Food survived longer in the memory the briefer it lingered on the tongue. Another chef’s adage. Gastel didn’t know any sage epigrams about leaving a mountain of beef to rot in a banquet hall. Maybe he ought to start composing his own adages.
How long until Cassiette started screaming?
Minutes, he hoped. Moments, he feared.
The clearing where the nobles had been dancing was empty except for a few drunk pairs walking along its perimeter. Gastel ducked back into the labyrinth and turned corners until he found a table. No servants, no guests, and a perfect charlotte royale, three feet tall and round as a globe, halved to reveal the duke’s profile baked clean through in green and orange sponge. It had taken Rennet a day to get that mold right. Gastel supposed they’d leave the mold behind. It wouldn’t do them much good outside of Agrano. No one liked to see a stranger baked into their charlotte.
He eased the cake to the floor and climbed up between the glasses and the serving dishes. The table was low, and Gastel’s head only just peaked over the labyrinth wall. From up here, he could see: the Lady Savarin’s plumage, sagging somewhat, but still grand enough to crest the panels; two different territories where the maze appeared to have collapsed, although Gastel could not assess the damage from this distance; the honorable duke and the red-mouthed Lord of the Feast, dancing on the scaffolding of the temple and sloshing bowls of soup into the courtyard below; and a tuft of white that Gastel very much hoped was the verticalmost wisping of wild hair on the head of the Earl Ulvos, the Bear of the Kenemlands.
Gastel leapt from the table and made directly for the Bear, picking between panels and brushing past inebriates. He turned a corner and was blocked by a noisy procession. Dozens of nobles all marched together, cheering and toasting. After a few moments, the duke’s son and a beautifully dressed young woman passed, hand in hand. That would be the betrothal announcement, on their way to the courtyard. They’d have to be quick if they wanted to beat the murder announcement. Gastel squeezed through the mob.
He stumbled into a still-sealed chamber filled with haggard musicians. They stared. He brushed between them without a word. But no, that wasn’t right. He stepped back and said, “Beautiful work, all of you. Tireless geniuses. The soul and spirit of the feast. I couldn’t ask for better accompaniment. Now let’s have a few fast ones, I think. Get them back on their feet.” The musicians nodded their weary heads and lurched into a tarantella.
An extravagance, with so little time. A tiny concession to artistry. Gastel ran.
He found them all together, the Bear and his wife and their once-future-in-laws, laughing quietly and nibbling at cakes and trying to decide if they had strength left to give the song its due. Every few measures, the Bear let his feet idly complete the step. The Galingales were less game, leaning on one another and already half asleep.
At the sight of them, Gastel halted, the whole evening lodged in his chest. He watched this family, this almost-family, live out the last moments of this easy span of their lives, when their son was alive and their future was warm. Gastel felt acutely that he was the wrong sort of person to deliver this message. He felt, also, that this was a terribly small and petty thing to feel, as though he had any right to complain about carrying this burden for such a short distance when these people would be carrying it for the rest of their lives. As though anyone in the world was qualified to bring annihilating news to happy people. Still. He had spent his life learning to give pleasure. Somehow, it seemed like he ought to be excused from having to give pain. But time was short, terribly short.
They saw him approach, and they were congratulating him before he could speak. “A wonderful evening! A magnificent thing!” Gastel bowed low and set his face in the grimmest shape his jolly features would allow. He rose, and his guests fell silent.
“I’m so sorry.” He paused. It was an instinctive pause, his theatrical training taking over, and he broke it, horrified, as soon as he realized what he was doing. “Hidromel has been killed,” he said, rushing now. “Your son. Stabbed. One of my people found his body hidden in the labyrinth. Found it only just now. We haven’t told anyone else. We don’t want a panic. But—”
He stopped. It looked, from their expressions, like their worlds were changing very slowly if they were changing at all. They were waiting for more, for a firm ending, as though any other facts Gastel might divulge could make a difference. If Gastel just kept talking, talking about different kinds of soup and the price of barley in Oglia, they would keep listening, silently, until all five of them starved. If he turned and left, they would keep waiting, frowning and squinting but never really moving, lodged in the tiny runnel of knowledge that connected the old world to the new. But Gastel said again, “I’m so sorry,” and the world changed.
Lady Cambens wanted to see the body. Lady Ulvos thought they should tell the duke. The Bear wanted to bar the doors and begin shaking people. Lord Cambens said nothing but blinked a great deal, his face tensing and relaxing at odd intervals. Gastel nodded at all of this, nodded and looked sympathetic and said nothing. A long way behind and above, the duke and the Lord of the Feast shouted and danced. Gastel glanced over his shoulder at them, just for a moment, and twisted back to the bereaved, apologetic. He waited.
When Cassiette’s voice came, it came from many rooms away. It bumped through twisting hallways and wedged beneath doors, jostling loose consonants and syllables in its urgency to be heard now, right now, even as a wordless howl. Gastel was listening for it and heard it first, but the scream rose and guests throughout the maze began to turn. Room by room, the voice drew near. Excitement rose. It was just the thing, at this late hour of the banquet when spirits were beginning to dip. The drunk and bold clambered onto serving tables, ears cocked. And when the voice broke clean into the hall and finally resolved into one word, “Murder!” a mob of elegant persons gasped. Perfection.
In front of Gastel, the world changed again. The Lord and Lady Cambens had mourned in private for less than the length of a song. Now their loss would be contested ground, an object of intrigue and gossip, retribution and plunder, more violence, more loss, perhaps—some dozen or a hundred collisions from now—a small war. They listened, shoulders low, for the details of their new lives.
Gastel thanked the Lord of Song for Cassiette’s breath and for the long-dead acoustic geniuses who had built this hall. Her voice carried like a bell in the winter. Every guest who wasn’t passed out or shouting heard, “A bloody knife! In the Lord Courmi’s chambers! Someone has been killed! Courmi is a killer!” And on and on. Guests were searching the floor for bodies or looking up at the oblivious Lord Courmi, who was still shouting on the scaffold, his cuffs stained with soup.
The Bear did not hesitate. Some dormant thing in his heart awoke and swelled and drew all the heat away from the rest of him. He ran for the temple. Where there were panels, he charged. Where there were tables, he smashed. Where there were wide-eyed guests, they leapt aside or he knocked them aside, and they held themselves fortunate that he had not looked at them longer.
The Bear reached the temple and began to climb. He was every bit as strong as he’d been fifteen years ago, but he wasn’t half as nimble, and the temple edifice would have stumped an acrobat. Wherever he gripped, pastry slid over meat and gravy. His knees scraped pastry from the wall. But he was in a black fog. He pushed against the wall until bricks shifted inward and he found purchase. He stepped up and flailed at another set of bricks a few feet higher. The neat line of bricks around him warped and jutted at awful angles. High above, the spire teetered.
The betrothal parade arrived in the courtyard and was immediately pulled into the spectacle. The space filled with shouting spectators, more even than had gathered to see the temple opened. They pushed over panels and tromped through fallen delicacies, red and green and orange soup soaking into ostrich-skin dancing slippers. Slowly, slowly, the Bear ascended. Lord Courmi stared down in terror and confusion.
In the entire hall, only Gastel had his back to the Bear. He was striding to the kitchen, loosening his evening dress as he went. It was hard, some nights, to tell when a banquet had ended. How nice to have clarity.
The kitchen was, for a kitchen, clean. The cooks had packed up their own tools and scrubbed the duke’s. A final smattering of pies cooled near th
e corridor on the off-chance that someone might leave the chaos at the temple with an appetite. Gastel ignored the confused roar that echoed from the great hall, down the corridor, into the kitchen. He had been awake for three days, or four. He had barely eaten. He was prepared to ignore almost anything.
He was two steps from the garden door when Lieutenant Gaufres called his name.
The lieutenant’s voice rang down the length of the kitchen. “I’d hoped you would stay to prepare breakfast.”
“Leftovers, I think,” said Gastel. “To help the guests remember the feast.”
“I’ve seen a few who won’t remember much.”
“That won’t stop them from telling stories.”
The lieutenant snorted and squared his shoulders. “If you’ll wait here, I’ll send someone to retrieve your knife.”
“That’s very kind, but I’ve decided to leave it behind.”
“Are you sure? I’m told it’s precious.”
“Safer, I think, to leave it in the duke’s vault,” said Gastel. “I’m told it’s dangerous.”
The lieutenant paused. “You haven’t heard? It’s not in the vault. We found it in Lord Courmi’s rooms, stained with blood and splattered with soup. The whole room was. What do you make of that?”
Gastel hesitated. “I suppose Courmi must have tried to eat his soup with a knife, and the inevitable happened.”
The lieutenant grunted but didn’t smile. “Of course, you’ll have to wait a few days if you want it back. There’s going to be a trial. Murder.” He gave Gastel a long look.
“It’s too precious for a cook,” said Gastel. “I prefer a knife that’s content to cut fruit.”
Gastel was fairly certain, as he bowed his head and slowly turned for the door, that Lieutenant Gaufres would order him to stop. Maybe the lieutenant was trying to frame him, or maybe he truly believed Gastel was involved in the murder. Either way, Gastel was headed for a spectacular execution. But if the lieutenant felt guilty, of complicity or carelessness or whatever else, might he let Gastel go?
Ryan Eric Dull - [BCS317 S02] Page 5
