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Authors: Susannah Appelbaum
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host a dozen Outriders in their maneuvers as they patrolled deftly, silently atop its heights. Guards perched on fortified outposts that perforated the barricade, examining all who dared to bring business below. Beneath the city, in the sewers—once a clandestine entry point—shadowy patrols lurked in every tunnel. Nor was nighttime an advantage for the uninvited, for Outriders—feared servants of the Guild—were at home in the dark, their vision having adapted with their loss of taste.
So, Peps reasoned, if there were to be a means of escape, it would have to be an overlooked one. And, above all, it would have to avoid the forest of hawthorns—for he had sworn never again to enter the dark and treacherous wood.
As the city of Rocamadour became the city of the Tasters’ Guild, horses—lively, majestic beings of the Good King—fell out of favor. Where once the stables were attended by several dozen hands, the most enterprising of whom was given the highest honor of attending to the King’s warhorses, now the job fell to that single, dejected soul, Civer. In this way, the small door beside an unused tack stall at the very end of the stables was overlooked—dismissed as storage, and soon succumbing to the cloak of inevitable straw and grain dust a stable brings.
Still, there were those who had not forgotten the secretdoor. Professor Breaux and the dejected Librarian Malapert had handed Peps a bag of sugar candies for the lone remaining horse and showed him the way to the stables. But it was Peps’s own inexplicable courage that in the end allowed him to slip away, unnoticed by the Outriders. He traveled deep beneath the mountains, through the empty bettle storehouses within the Craggy Burls, on his way to find Cecil.
And Peps would indeed arrive in Templar, a glint in his eye, the taste of sugar upon his tongue—bristling for revenge.
Chapter Nineteen
Snaith
he subrector Snaith stood in the blaring heat of the arched doorway—his face orange and flickering with fire, his hunched and ruined back side deep in shadow. He was horrendous to behold. Disfigured from battling the dark wasps that swarmed about the Director before the arrival of the ink monkeys, his skin was lumpy and mottled with scars. The cat Six had torn off an earlobe, and it hadn’t bothered to heal; it had the appearance of a cauliflower and was perpetually weeping. In that fateful encounter his tongue, too, had not emerged unscathed. It had endured a gruesome tear and was now slit very much like a snake’s, resulting in a profound lisp.
But these disfigurements bothered Snaith not in the slightest—he had others, after all. Nothing bothered Snaith about that final encounter in the Director’s chambers—wherehe fell prey to the swarm of stinging insects and the Director’s feral beast. Nothing bothered Snaith, that is, but the memory of the girl called Ivy Manx, the girl who somehow had gotten the better of him in the spire. She had escaped.
His life’s work was pleasing his master, Vidal Verjouce, which meant first producing the proper formulation of the ink.
Then he would get the girl.
But while Snaith’s face was illuminated by the scorching production line before him of Dumbcane’s inkworks, it was the path behind him that was of most interest to the Watchman. For Snaith was returning from the depths of the catacombs beneath the city, a place so sinister and fearsome that great courage or great conviction was required to successfully navigate it. The catacombs contained the years of the Guild’s dead—and more. The bowels of Rocamadour were better left to the beings of fire that inhabit shadow, a dwelling place of thankless air and pressing earth; it was a suspect world that did not welcome tourists. For Rocamadour was indeed an ancient city, built by an ancient and magical King, and where the dead left off no one knew for sure what lurked beyond.
Not Snaith—who, for a subrector with teaching duties, had been spending an
So, Peps reasoned, if there were to be a means of escape, it would have to be an overlooked one. And, above all, it would have to avoid the forest of hawthorns—for he had sworn never again to enter the dark and treacherous wood.
As the city of Rocamadour became the city of the Tasters’ Guild, horses—lively, majestic beings of the Good King—fell out of favor. Where once the stables were attended by several dozen hands, the most enterprising of whom was given the highest honor of attending to the King’s warhorses, now the job fell to that single, dejected soul, Civer. In this way, the small door beside an unused tack stall at the very end of the stables was overlooked—dismissed as storage, and soon succumbing to the cloak of inevitable straw and grain dust a stable brings.
Still, there were those who had not forgotten the secretdoor. Professor Breaux and the dejected Librarian Malapert had handed Peps a bag of sugar candies for the lone remaining horse and showed him the way to the stables. But it was Peps’s own inexplicable courage that in the end allowed him to slip away, unnoticed by the Outriders. He traveled deep beneath the mountains, through the empty bettle storehouses within the Craggy Burls, on his way to find Cecil.
And Peps would indeed arrive in Templar, a glint in his eye, the taste of sugar upon his tongue—bristling for revenge.
Chapter Nineteen
Snaith
he subrector Snaith stood in the blaring heat of the arched doorway—his face orange and flickering with fire, his hunched and ruined back side deep in shadow. He was horrendous to behold. Disfigured from battling the dark wasps that swarmed about the Director before the arrival of the ink monkeys, his skin was lumpy and mottled with scars. The cat Six had torn off an earlobe, and it hadn’t bothered to heal; it had the appearance of a cauliflower and was perpetually weeping. In that fateful encounter his tongue, too, had not emerged unscathed. It had endured a gruesome tear and was now slit very much like a snake’s, resulting in a profound lisp.
But these disfigurements bothered Snaith not in the slightest—he had others, after all. Nothing bothered Snaith about that final encounter in the Director’s chambers—wherehe fell prey to the swarm of stinging insects and the Director’s feral beast. Nothing bothered Snaith, that is, but the memory of the girl called Ivy Manx, the girl who somehow had gotten the better of him in the spire. She had escaped.
His life’s work was pleasing his master, Vidal Verjouce, which meant first producing the proper formulation of the ink.
Then he would get the girl.
But while Snaith’s face was illuminated by the scorching production line before him of Dumbcane’s inkworks, it was the path behind him that was of most interest to the Watchman. For Snaith was returning from the depths of the catacombs beneath the city, a place so sinister and fearsome that great courage or great conviction was required to successfully navigate it. The catacombs contained the years of the Guild’s dead—and more. The bowels of Rocamadour were better left to the beings of fire that inhabit shadow, a dwelling place of thankless air and pressing earth; it was a suspect world that did not welcome tourists. For Rocamadour was indeed an ancient city, built by an ancient and magical King, and where the dead left off no one knew for sure what lurked beyond.
Not Snaith—who, for a subrector with teaching duties, had been spending an
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