by Greg Keyes
“No, Glim,” she said. “I didn’t plan this. It never occurred to me to-you know. But if we play this right, it can work. For all of us.”
“They’ll suspect you,” Glim said. “The only survivor.”
“Everyone who knows I came down here is right here,” she replied. “When Toel can’t be found, I’ll be as surprised as anyone as to where he went in the first place.”
Glim seemed to sort that for a moment before nodding.
“If you think it will work.”
“It’s a gamble,” she admitted. “We could be found out. We could die horribly. But that was probably going to happen anyway, right?”
“I suppose so,” Glim agreed.
“Well, then,” Annaig said. “Let’s go do what’s needed, and try to live until tomorrow.”
And so they began doing that.
BOOK TWO
ONE
It happened around midday, beginning as a murmur ghosting up from the pantry and swelling. Toel’s underchefs-Intovar and Yeum-got into a shrill argument in the hall.
When Lord Irrel came down, everything hushed.
Annaig had never seen a lord before. She had supposed they looked like everyone else, possibly in finer clothes.
She was right about the clothes. Irrel’s robe seemed to be made of black smoke within which winked thousands of tiny sparks. The form-fitting garment beneath might have been made of liquid iron.
Irrel himself was somewhat translucent. When he turned his head, flashes of skull showed through his fine, long features. His large eyes glowed with a soft purple light that shone through his lids when he closed them. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the room.
“Toel is dead,” he said. His voice was soft, but it carried easily to every corner of the kitchen. “Who is his second?”
Intovar and Yeum glanced at each other, and then Intovar stepped forward.
“I am, Lord Irrel.”
Irrel nodded. “The contest tomorrow. Can you win it? Tell me now, and do not dissemble.”
Intovar cleared his voice softly. He looked terrified, and Annaig could see his fingers shaking.
“Lord, without Chef Toel, our chances are much diminished.”
“Much diminished?” Irrel said, raising an eyebrow. He gestured-as if flicking something from his finger-and Intovar shrieked and dropped to his knees before falling on his face. He didn’t move.
“I’ll ask the question again,” Irrel said. “Can we win it?”
“N-No,” Yeum stuttered. “We cannot, lord. Not without Chef Toel.”
Irrel nodded, and Yeum flinched.
“There,” he said. “A simple answer to a simple question. Thank you.” He sighed. “It is an unpleasant inconvenience to withdraw, but better that than to look foolish.” He turned and took a step toward the door. Annaig closed her eyes and pushed back her fear.
“We can win, Lord Irrel,” she said.
A little gasp went up around her, but she kept her gaze focused on the lord.
“And you are?” he asked.
“Annaig, lord,” she replied.
“Ah. Toel’s whimsical inventor.”
“Yes, lord.”
“I have been pleased with many of your creations,” he said. “But that does not make you a chef.”
“We can win, lord. The menu is planned, the preparations are made. We will not make you look foolish-we will make you proud.”
Irrel glanced at Intovar’s body, then back at Annaig. “It would irritate me greatly to learn this is false bravado,” he said.
“It is not, lord,” she replied forcefully.
“Very well, then,” he said. “We’ll just see.”
No one uttered a word until he was out of sight and presumably out of earshot. Then it began.
“Are you insane?” Yeum shouted. “You’ve just killed us all!”
A chorus of agreement went up from the staff.
“What did you think was going to happen anyway?” Annaig asked. “Irrel must have a kitchen, and he must have a good one. Did you think you were going to be made chef, Yeum, for telling him we aren’t-you aren’t-competent? He would have brought in a new chef, with a new staff, and most of you would end up in the sump.”
That struck home-she could see it, so she pressed. “We can do this. We don’t need Toel. If you agree to follow me, cook what I say the way I say to, we can win. I know it.”
“I don’t understand,” Aelo-one of the dicers-said. “You’re probably right about what would have happened to us-all of us except you. Any chef would be pleased to have you. Now, if you fail-”
“I’m tired of being passed around,” she said. “If we win, Irrel will make me chef, I’ll keep all of you, and everything will be fine.”
“But I’m the senior cook,” Yeum protested.
“No, she’s right,” one of the others said. “You can’t be chef now, Yeum. It has to be her.”
“No, she’s crazy,” Yeum retorted. “Irrel wouldn’t…” Her eyes wandered over to Intovar’s body, then she shook her head. “Sumpslurry,” she sighed.
Yeum looked back at Annaig. “Fine,” she said. “What are we cooking?”
“But this is absurd,” Loehsh asserted as Annaig looked over his shoulder at his preparations. “Rhel is a lord-he will not eat the raw flesh of an animal, no matter how prettied up with froths and suspirations.”
“He will,” she replied, “and he’ll like it. Just-stop. Give me the knife.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you’re cutting it wrong,” she snapped, repositioning the fat-veined slab of meat on the table and cutting paper-thin slices from it.
“It won’t matter how thin it is,” Loehsh muttered.
“Loehsh,” Yeum’s voice piped up from behind. “You see how she wants it done?”
“Yes,” he said sullenly.
“Then do it that way,” Yeum replied. “Would you have questioned Toel this way?”
“Of course not. But he-”
“Is dead. Unless you wish to join him before even the rest of us do, I suggest you stop asking questions and do things as Annaig says to.”
“Very well,” Loehsh said sourly. He returned to his task, this time cutting the meat properly.
“Come on,” Yeum said to Annaig. “We need to talk.”
They went into the little room where Toel used to work on his menus.
“You need me,” Yeum said.
“How is that?”
“You know how to cook-I look at the menu and I’m amazed, I admit. Maybe we do have a small chance of coming through this. The problem is, you don’t know how to be a chef.”
“What do you mean?”
“You try to do everything yourself. It’s impossible. You have to delegate, and you have to do it with authority. You haven’t the most basic idea how to go about it.”
“What are you suggesting, then?” Annaig asked.
“That we work together,” Yeum replied. “I know how to give orders and spread the work around. I know how to get things done. You know how to make them right. ”
“Work together,” she considered. “I worked together with Slyr and she tried to kill me. Why should I trust you?”
“Because I’m not stupid like Slyr. It’s impossible for me to steal credit for this-Irrel was right here. He knows whose dishes these are. I’m only asking that if we succeed, I get to stay here as your underchef.”
Right, Annaig thought. So you can find another time to slip a knife into my back.
“That’s reasonable,” was what she said, however.
“Okay,” Yeum replied. “In that case I have some recommendations concerning the preparations.”
“I should like to hear them,” Annaig said.
Yeum paused, and a sly little look passed across her face.
“What?” Annaig asked.
“Did you kill him?” Yeum whispered.
“What?” Annaig felt a little chill in her vertebrae.
�
��The chef. Did you kill him? It was made to look as if Phmer did it, but I can’t imagine her being that sloppy. If, on the other hand, you set it up to look like that-”
“I’m not going to dignify that with a denial,” Annaig said.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Yeum went on. “If that were the case, you would have nothing but my admiration. Do you know how many people Toel murdered to get here? It’s how things are done.”
“Well, it’s not how I do things,” Annaig snapped back. She was outraged. Yes, she had killed him, sort of, but it had been an accident. She wasn’t what Yeum thought she was.
Yeum shrugged. “Anyway,” she said.
“Do you have those recommendations or not?”
“I do.”
She slept a scant three hours that night; even with Yeum’s organizations of the kitchen, there were hundreds of details that only she could handle.
Rhel, fortunately, was not like Irrel, who preferred up to a hundred distinct dishes at a meal. From what she had learned, Rhel considered himself more essential than that, and thus she only prepared three, each to be served in a separate course. She scrutinized each plate as it went to the servers.
First came the quintessences of sulfur and sugar, congealed into a glutinous web that held suspended drops of human blood and denatured snapadder venom, which glittered pleasingly-like tiny rubies and emeralds. The web stretched over the cavity of a halved and hollowed durian fruit, whose sweet, garlicky scent she had enhanced with metagastronomics and infused with the lust of a monkeylike creature from the Fringe Gyre, killed just as it was about to mate.
Next came the thin, translucent slices of raw bear loin, collected like the durian from the world below. She had turned the fat of the bear into a room-temperature vapor that clung to the tiny bits of meat, which were pillowed on a nest of glassy yellow noodles that, when bitten, would erase the taste of everything else within a few seconds, but leave deep longing to remember what had been lost.
An hour passed after the second course went up, and Annaig began to feel nervous. The third course-a complex preparation based on the smoke of clove, cardamom, cumin, mustard, pepper, hornet, black widow, and rage-would begin to mellow and lose its edge if it wasn’t served soon.
The servers finally came a half hour later, a few minutes too late for the smoke to be at its best, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
When the final dish went up, Annaig wiped her brow.
“I’m going to lie down,” she told Yeum.
“We did well,” Yeum said. “I wonder about your choice to include so much carnal matter, but what you did with it-Toel could not have done better.” She hesitated. “Do you still believe we will win?”
“I don’t know,” Annaig replied. “But I’m too tired to worry about it anymore. If I’m going to die, I want a little rest first.”
She wasn’t sure how long she dozed, but when she woke, at first she thought it was Lord Irrel standing there, for he had the same translucence. But then she noticed the slow, constant shifting of color beneath his skin, the squarer face and voluptuous lips.
“Lord?” Annaig said, coming shakily to her feet.
“Rhel,” he murmured in a detached manner, as if he wasn’t so much speaking to her as recalling the conversation out loud. “How did you know?” he asked.
“Know what, lord?”
“The first dish made Lord Ix vomit, which I much enjoyed, and it made Ghol laugh, which is extremely pleasant. Each dish was for me perfect, but affected my companions in ways that I very much appreciated. How could you have known all of these things? Are you able to pick into my mind? I sense no such talent in you.”
“Does this mean we won?” Annaig asked.
“Yes,” Rhel conceded. “And yet in doing so you have raised questions, you see.”
“I can’t explain it, lord,” she lied. “It is my art, that is all. When it comes to food, I know what people want. I believe one of the gods must have blessed me.”
His gaze settled for a moment, and then he blinked.
“You are from below-from the world we travel through.”
“Yes, lord.”
He smiled. “I think I shall enjoy your world, when we are done.”
“Done with what, my lord?”
He waved his hand.
“Oh, never mind that. You are my creature now, and I value such as you. I look forward to the day that you have full access to the goods of your world, rather than just the smatterings the taskers bring up. In any event, Irrel will have to find another chef.”
“And my staff?”
“Keep those you wish-dismiss the rest. Three days from now you will cook another meal, this one for Umbriel himself. I will be interested to see if you can please him as much-and as specifically-as you did me.”
“Thank you, lord,” she said. “I endeavor to do my best.”
“Of course,” he replied, and then left.
She passed a terrified-looking Yeum as she left the kitchens for her quarters.
“We won,” she said. “You’ll stay. We begin preparing tomorrow.”
Then she found her bed, and slept more soundly then she had in a long, long time.
TWO
Mere-Glim was finishing off a sheartooth steak when Wert burst into the chamber they shared with four other skraws, a damp stony room grown up in phosphorescent moss. He had an agitated look on his face, even for Wert. Oluth came in right behind him.
“They’re coming for you,” Oluth gasped. “You have to go.”
“What? Who is coming for me?”
“Guards from one of the lords-Ix, I think. They’ve been questioning people. They broke poor Jith. I know he didn’t mean to-”
“You have to hide someplace until they’re gone,” Wert said.
“That will only put you in more danger,” Glim replied. “If they’re after me, they probably know you’re my second. I’m not going to leave you here to face them.”
“I’ll run, too, just in a different direction,” Wert said. “Glim, we need you. The skraws need you, especially if they’ve caught on to us. You know how to think about these things-we don’t.”
“It’s just I don’t see how they found out,” Glim said. “It was supposed to look like the kitchens were doing it to each other. It was working, I’m sure of it.”
He saw Oluth start at that, but before he could say anything, Wert began trying to push him into the water.
“Go,” he said. “Go someplace deep.”
He saw them as soon as he was in the water. They were smart; they probably had sent someone to run him down in the caves, but figured he would come out here-and he had, right into their hands-if not their net, which he saw descending from above.
He only had one way out, and the four figures ahead were blocking it, so he went straight at them with all the speed he had, which was clearly more than they were expecting. He avoided their spears and bowled right through them, diving for the Drop.
He thought he was free when something hit him in the side, hard. He spun down to his right, but after a few yards something yanked him back and sent waves of agony through his ribs.
He looked back into a cloud of blood. His blood, pouring from where a harpoon was stuck in him. One of the men was lashing the other end of the line around a spike of coral.
With a harsh cry, Glim hurled himself back at them, but they were more ready for him this time, three of them setting their spears and the harpooner reloading his weapon, which looked a lot like a crossbow.
He jagged at the last moment, but one of the spearmen managed to shift his point so it hit him in the forehead. He screamed as the tip found his skull and deflected, slicing all the way to his ear. The pain was terrific, but it only seemed to make him stronger as he jerked his way down the shaft and buried his claws in the man’s throat. One of the others gripped him from behind, and then they all had him. He rolled and pitched furiously, smashing them into coral. Two let go, but the other managed
to hold on by grabbing the harpoon, and this time his senses were shattered by the pain, and for a moment he wasn’t sure what was happening.
The next thing that came to him clearly was Oluth, trying to say something. Blood was coming from his mouth. A quick look showed his attackers all dead or too badly wounded to do anything.
“What?” he asked Oluth.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “We did it, the glimmers. We thought it was what you wanted.”
“What?” Glim demanded. “What did you do?”
“They were supposed to know, so they would do something about the vapors. We were proud, proud to be a part of-” He coughed, and a great gout of red poured from his mouth.
“We broke a tree-root feed,” he said. “We left our sign there, the sign of the vapors.”
“Sign of the vapors?”
“Right,” Oluth said weakly. “You wouldn’t have seen it. It’s on the door to the chamber. Four wriggling lines, in a spray.” He closed his eyes. Glim saw the wound now. The knife was still in it.
“Let’s get you fixed up,” he said.
“No,” Oluth said. “More coming. I’ll wait here for them.”
“I can’t let you, not alone.”
“Please,” Oluth said. “Please, for me? If you forgive me, please go.”
Glim cut the line to the harpoon and was trying to pull it free when several figures emerged from the cave entrance. Oluth launched himself forward.
“Go!” he screamed. Glim saw he had the harpoon gun.
More guards came out, seven now.
So he did as Oluth asked and swam deep.
When Glim had put some distance between himself and his pursuers, he found a crevice in the side of the sump, wedged the other end of the harpoon into it, and finally managed to yank the barbed head free. He almost passed out, and for several long breaths he couldn’t swim, but then he started stroking again, trailing more blood than ever.
He couldn’t get Oluth’s last words out of his head. Where had he gone wrong? Hadn’t he explained well enough? And what were they doing breaking a tree-root feed? That hadn’t even been one of the targets he had approved.
