Thirteenth Course, Part III:
Confectionary Catastrophe
“We need to reach the warehouse.” Aja dashed from the palace. “It’s got to be our way out.”
“Does it?” The swordsman jogged beside her.
“We came in that way. Maybe the magic carpet will carry us back.”
The guests ran behind her. With a glance back, Aja saw they left a pattern of foot indentations in the chocolate street. Puddles of pink and orange gelato covered the boulevard. They mixed together into the colors of vomit. Aja jumped over them all.
The heat of dragon blood burned in their hearts, and Aja leaped onto a rooftop for a straighter path. She landed with a cutting pain in her belly. The cramping of her stomach slowed her to a jog.
“Isn’t it that way?” The swordsman pointed toward a dome.
“No, past the glass spiral.” Aja guided them to the left of a workshop tower. The rooftop stuck to their feet with squishing noises, and it stank of dates.
“Have a care.” Solin’s crutch hooked over her shoulder.
Aja stopped in front of a sagging rooftop. The supporting beams of toffee had stretched, and the date treat bowed downward in a pit. The roofs sweated sugar above the glaring sun.
“Must be melting.” Aja jumped over the dip. She landed with a gasp. Her stomach felt made of jagged glass.
“The Chef didn’t think of the sun? Oof!” The swordsman clutched his belly and puffed out his cheeks.
The guests huffed their way over the rooftops in the rising heat. Aja took the stairs instead of hopping down. The drop would only upset her stomach more. The chocolate road squished between her toes.
“Ah,” the swordsman said, “here we aren’t.”
Aja had hoped to see the sliding warehouse door as it had been, of wood and brass. The one before them was of pecan tart and honeycomb. It oozed. The swordsman lifted a foot to kick it down.
“Don’t do it.” Aja hopped in front of the door. “We’ll need to close it behind us. Then it’ll open on the right city.”
“Think that’ll work?” The swordsman braced himself against the side of the door.
Aja prayed it would. Please, merciful gods and pitiless maths. Let it be possible. She watched as the swordsman shoved, and the door stuck, then stretched outward. The honeycomb broke. The planks of pecan tart bent and crumbled in a mess. How nasty and terrible!
“So,” the swordsman said, “what else will work?”
Aja scrambled over the broken door. The pecans clung to her legs with their sugars. The inside of the warehouse had changed, too. She could see no sign of the Chef or the djinn’s fire. Balls of dough were stacked to the ceiling, the mounds greasy with syrup.
“The carpet might be buried in there,” she said.
“I might be able to clear it.” The swordsman held her back, sucked in breath, then heaved out a swirling orange and red gust of dragon fire.
Dough balls shrank in the flames to black sludge. It reeked of candy. More stacks of pastries sloughed downward to fill the opening.
“How’d you do that?” Aja could not feel any heat inside her now.
“Comes naturally.” The swordsman filled his lungs again. He breathed out, but instead of dragon fire this time he only wheezed smoke. He held his belly. “Knew I shouldn’t have eaten that third bucket of ice cream.”
Aja waded into the wall of dough, scooping her way forward. “We have to dig through.”
The other guests helped, except for the lord. He stood in the street with his back to them. Janny did the work of two by squashing the balls and shoving them into her mouth. Between slurpy bites, she said, “Why am I still eating? I’m far too sober for this to be a good idea.”
The swordsman plowed forward with sweeps of his arms. He chomped down the pastries at head level. “There’s nowhere else to put these snot balls.”
Aja plunged her head into the treats and scrounged for the carpet. Her nails scraped grooves in the chocolate floor. When she floundered back to her feet, the treats pulled at her hair and clung.
“I don’t think the carpet is here.” Breathing hurt Aja. Her stomach clubbed her, and fright clamped down on her chest.
“Whoa!” The swordsman dipped out of sight. Sugary glop tumbled over him. The mound heaved, and he struggled back into view. He pointed a finger to his feet. “Found the stair down.”
“The cellar door will lead to the kitchen.” Aja dug at the dough balls. Her fingers stuck together with syrup. “It has to.”
All five of the guests excavated the stairs, one dark-chocolate step at a time. The pastry balls tumbled down after them, threatening to bury them. Aja and the others attacked the treats, smashing them and scarfing them down.
“I’ve struck door,” the swordsman said.
“Is it metal or candy?” Aja could not see through the gloom.
“Won’t break this one,” he said. “Gotta clear the base.”
Aja scrabbled beside the empress. They pawed the rubble of sweets aside. Aja tossed sugar globs over her shoulder.
“Found the handle,” the swordsman said. “Step back.”
Aja heard a slurping of syrup. “Did you open it?”
“Afraid so.”
There was no kitchen light. Aja shoved a hand forward, past the doorway. She touched a wall of something cool and soft like mud. She pawed at it, and clumps fell on her that smelled of moist chocolate.
“Fudge,” the swordsman said.
“This shouldn’t be here.” Aja felt sticky on the outside and gross on the inside. “This can’t be—”
The ground rumbled, and dough blobs rained onto their heads.
“Earthquake.” The swordsman hoisted up Aja. He carried her outside into the light. “Oh, you’re not the empress.”
“Cake quake!” The empress said. She stumbled out after them with Janny and Solin.
The sixth guest faced them. The lord cast three shadows, each with its own hideous head. “The Chef baked a perfect city. Perfection must always be fleeting.”
He pointed, and Aja followed the red streak of his sleeve to the palace. Its dome caved inward with a wet sound of sucking mud. Slender towers folded down after it with splattering booms.
The sun blazed destruction on the candy city.
Rooftops swayed over the guests. Aja choked on a dust of coconut shavings. The quivering ground turned the white chocolate to liquid. It trapped Aja’s feet, and she fell.
“We need high ground.” The swordsman scooped up the empress.
Another tower crumpled.
“Make that clear ground,” he said.
The lord glided above the white swamp. “If there’s a safe spot in this city, it’ll be a trap.”
Solin helped Janny, leaving Aja to slog for herself. She could have managed better, but her stomach was a dead weight. A building’s wall tipped over her. The pressure of date sweets slammed her into the muck. She inhaled chocolate. It tasted of death.
Slapping, flopping, pushing, Aja escaped. Her robes clung to her. The morass of street was too narrow, with the walls swaying on either side. The ground was too gloppy.
“Wait!”
The guests must not have heard her over the smacking crash of another palace crumbling. Aja fell further behind. The sugar miasma in the air gagged her. She bent over to vomit, but nothing came up. Everything inside her felt too tightly packed.
The others disappeared around a street corner. Aja knew she would have to climb over these buildings to meet the guests on the next lane. She dug handholds into a wall. A windowsill sagged under her feet. She should be able to jump over this block of homes. Where had her dragon powers gone? She was helpless as a bug. Again. Sugar glass folded inward, and the building buckled. Aja fell into an oozing cavern, with the ceiling lowering to crush her. She swam-paddled her way out of the sticky rubble and back onto the street.
She couldn’t draw breath. She was too full.
Aja feared she would never catch up. The others neede
d to wait for her. They should notice she was gone. Friends would see she wasn’t there. A family watched out for each other.
The guests never looked back. They had abandoned her.
Ahead of them a spire fall. The glassblower’s tower was a twisting pinnacle like a long seashell. Its spiral teal and pink design had to be made of crystal sugar. It still shattered like glass. The explosion gusted outward with glittering haze.
The guests had stopped at a crossroads and covered their faces with their arms. A storm of sugar shards rushed past them and dug into Aja’s skin, piercing her robes. Crystal spears slurped into the chocolate. She slipped and stumbled up to the other people. She was with them again, but she couldn’t say if they were with her. Sugar cracked underfoot as they headed toward the city wall.
“After the Chef told us to relax, I knew this would be a cataclysm,” the lord said, his coat still unstained. “There’s nothing so scary as reassurances.”
Ahead of them the city wall convulsed. Cracks opened in its marzipan.
The swordsman stopped, swaying in time with the wall. “It’s coming down.”
Aja searched for another possibility of escape. No, no—Wait, who was that beside her? The guest had long hair of grey. The woman’s double chins bounced with each stride. A muck of dessert splattered her paisley dress. Janny now looked as old as when she had she arrived at the Banquet. She had worn a turban then.
“Your hair is grey.”
Aja had not meant to say it aloud, but she must have. Old Janny clutched at her locks, pulled at them, and started to scream. Her voice fell to a groan. Her fingers dented the bulge of her belly. “What’ve they done to me?”
“Watch out!” The swordsman pulled the empress back.
The wall convulsed and toppled. Marzipan avalanched. The flood of sugary almond sludge funneled between buckling buildings toward the guests.
They wallowed away as fast as they could.
“Ah! I shouldn’t have eaten so much,” the lord said. He flickered and became a stooped man with a grimy coat. The next moment he again floated above the wreckage of dessert. “I shouldn’t have eaten anything.”
The tide of marzipan slammed Aja into the chocolate street. The hot goo washed over her. She kicked and swatted and fought against it. She battled to the surface and gasped in air slightly less thick with sugar.
She floundered but could not pull herself free of the marzipan. It thickened around her into rock candy. Her stomach felt twice as large as it should be, and trying to move it was an agony.
Aja scraped her eyes clear to see the day dark, the sun gone. The moon passed in front in an eclipse, leaving no more than a smoldering ring of fire.
The other guests moaned around her. From what she could see, they were all trapped. The lord’s sleeve was caked brown. He had lost his hair. He must’ve worn a wig that had been torn off. Scars lined his scalp, and his ears were mangled stubs of skin. The sound of his wheezing terrified Aja.
Then came the Chef.
He rode through the sky in a bowl of stone, rowing with a thick grinding club. Everything was wrong. Nothing was right. Both the mortar he sat in and the pestle oar were etched with spidery symbols.
“If you feel ready to burst,” the Chef said, “it’s because sugar corroded the magic of the nine-tailed fox. All the food you ate tonight is expanding to its true size.”
One guest objected with a croak. Aja panted. Her guts were stretching. Ow! Ow!
“You were warned of the dangers of sweets.” The Chef paddled overhead with his pestle. “You ignored.”
Aja couldn’t remember when they had been warned. Not in any recent course. It hurt too much to think.
The djinn flew up behind him. She glanced at Aja, and sparks dripped from the djinn’s eyes.
“Tonight’s will be a Banquet like no other,” the Chef said. “This night, five die, and one lives.”
Aja’s body throbbed with food and disbelief. She had to get away. She could only move one arm, and it flopped forward. From somewhere nearby came a high whining sound.
The Chef handed the djinn a vial and nodded. She swooped down to Aja. Flame-warm fingers lifted Aja’s chin and pressed the vial to her lips. Aja twisted her head away.
“It’ll save you,” the djinn said. “It’s more essence of the nine-tailed fox.”
Aja stopped resisting. Gel dribbled from the vial down her throat, and her stomach contracted in a relief of numbness.
The djinn lifted Aja from the muck. The djinn cradled her in front of the Chef in his floating mortar.
Aja’s nerves shivered, but she took hold of herself enough to speak. “I—I’m going to live?”
“Consuming you would bestow nothing on me.” The Chef pressed a hand against his chest, fingers spread in a star pattern. His eyes fell to the five guests encased below. A fat slug of a tongue stuck out from his mouth and slimed his upper lip. “Their greatness is mine.”
“No! You—”
“Take her back to the city,” the Chef said without looking at the djinn. He reached down, then pulled up the limp and swollen empress. Dropping her beside him in the mortar, he stripped off her bird necklace and tossed it to the djinn. “Clean Aja. Give her a few knickknacks to wear. She’ll have a future, if she eats well.”
The djinn caught the amulet. She towed Aja into the sky.
The Chef called after the djinn. “Then meet me back in the kitchen, slave. Today, I become the Lord of the Feast.”
Aja screamed, fingernails outstretched to the friends lost in the blackness below. The empress, the swordsman, Old Janny, Solin, and the lord—everyone she had sworn to save.
Struggling against the djinn seared Aja’s hands. It was like reaching into a fire, white-blaze pain and nothing to grasp. She was dragged into a gateway of stars.
Digesting the Banquet:
The One
A door slammed behind Aja. Her numb feet stumbled up steps. She reeled into the blindness of the day. Any moment her feet would sink into the street’s chocolate slabs. The buildings would soon sag in sugary collapse.
Except they were made not of sweets but stone. The ground wasn’t chocolate but clay. Everything stayed solid, for now. She licked a wall, and it tasted of dusty dryness. The normalness of it all seemed fake.
Sweet scents trickled from carts of merchants selling date bars, and she winced.
People flowed around Aja. Their babble quieted to a hush. The crowd parted around her. Unfocused faces slid by.
Aja felt lost in her home city and alone. This Jaraah was true. These people were real, but all the ones she cared about were back in the candy city.
Her left hand hurt from clenching her robes. She had been holding a knot of fabric. When she tweezed the folds apart, a chunk of speckled white tumbled onto the street. The Cheese of Life. She snatched it up and blew off the sand.
A hope stung her. She could use the morsel to bring one friend back to life.
Aja returned to the warehouse door. It was locked. The windows were high and barred. She could climb the walls.
Her fingers fumbled over the bricks. There were no handholds. Or she couldn’t feel them. She couldn’t stop thinking of the others’ fate. The guests might still be lying in the chocolate mud, stuffed to death.
Each breath was a struggle for them, for her. Aja had escaped, even if her heart still pounded for its life. The Chef hadn’t chosen to kill her. Next time they met she wouldn’t be so lucky.
Aja couldn’t make herself go back. Her hands were slippery and trembling. She couldn’t lift herself to climb. She had eaten a treasure of food, and its weight dragged her down. What good would trying do? They had been so helpless in the candy city. Even if Aja found a way into the kitchen, she could never get past the Chef.
He would find her. He’d change his mind and kill her, too.
No, she had to stay away. Even if she felt miserable abandoning the other guests, she had her own life to think of. I can’t help them.
Some
one asked her, “Are you well, Young Light of Day?”
She shuddered.
Another faceless man said, “May knowledge illuminate your way.”
Their concern and kindness hid judgment. Aja could tell that the strangers only spoke to her because they could see her guilt. They knew she had failed her friends and left them to die. They wished to see her weep.
A man bowed before her, touching his face. He had painted baboon designs in kohl below his eyes. “May this servant of god assist you in any way?”
“Who are you?” Aja backed away. “How do you know me?”
“Forgive me, Blessing of God, but it’s rare to see a woman alone wearing such treasures.” He waved his ringed hand to her chest.
From her neck hung an amulet of turquoise wings, silver beak, and sapphire eye. The heaviness came from the empress’s jewelry. Bracelets of gold shackled Aja’s wrists, and a gemstone belt constricted her waist. Where did the riches come from?
She could only think the djinn had bound Aja with the jewelry. These all belonged to past Banquet guests. The coldness of death clung to the gold.
“I…I just left the Midnight Banquet,” Aja said. She had escaped, and the rest would die. They could be dead already.
“Praise the Founder you live! Is it true what they say, that they serve mandrake root that shrieks if improperly seasoned?”
A boy stepped out of the crowd, her schoolmate, Garid Grease Breath. He had backed away from the Banquet. She couldn’t believe it had been just last night.
“You made it, Roach Legs—er!—what was your name?” He touched her arm. They never touched her. “I’ll share my sesame candy if you tell me what the Banquet was like.”
Bile burned up Aja’s throat. She backed away from Garid and bumped into more people. They were all too close.
“You have to tell us.”
A woman smacked the last speaker. “Show some respect for this young scholar. She’s clearly noble.”
“She could be an enchantress.”
The citizens seemed enchanted by her jewelry and her dining. They all accepted her. Aja had gotten everything she wanted. Her success tasted like vinegar, stinging and sour.
Magic Banquet Page 18
