Magic Banquet (23 page)

“Do you see it?” The empress gazed down the
street, then up. “Is it on the roof? It smells huge!”

On the city’s skyline, the minaret towers
and palace domes were the same Aja had known her whole life.
Clay-block buildings stacked atop each other, the walls reinforced
with arches. Everything was familiar, yet something had changed.
None of the morning colors seemed quite right.

The air felt thick with sugar, almost
crystalline. An eagerness crackled in Aja for the dessert she could
not see. Where was it? She hopped to her tiptoes.

The streets were empty. The sun crested the
rooftops, and people should have been thumping, bumping, and
shouting by then. She didn’t hear as much as a sea gull.

“Where are all the people?” Aja asked.

“They must be eating our dessert.” The
empress pulled Aja forward.

“Wait.” Aja peered at a whitewashed wall.
The texture seemed too snowy, the color too consistent. She reached
to touch the building.

The painted clay flaked apart. Her fingers
sank in. She pulled out a crumbly chunk. It didn’t feel like clay,
more gooey. Didn’t smell like brick, more tasty. She licked it, and
it was sweet.

The Chef’s deep voice sounded behind them.
“I made the homes of coconut-date bars. The palaces and temples are
marzipan.”

He waved to the skyline and its towers. Then
he scooped a finger downward.

“I paved the streets with white
chocolate.”

The swordsman stomped, and a flagstone
shattered into milky fragments. He lifted one, bit it. “It’s
good!”

Aja could almost float on the sugar scent.
“The entire city is dessert?”

“You should’ve expected nothing less of me,”
the Chef said.

Aja walked to a planter and picked off bark
from a palm tree. It was sweetmeat. She ate a syrupy crust of
almonds with pistachio nuts at its center. “You—you must’ve used
magic to make all this.”

“A tasty alchemy,” the empress said.

“A masterpiece.” The lord strode past them.
His coat had darkened in the daylight to a dusky red. He stopped in
front of a water well. Steam rose from within. “Is that coffee I
smell?”

“The prized Gargantuan Bean,” the Chef said,
“granted extra verve by passing through the digestion of a terror
bird.”

“Just overly decadent enough.” The lord
lifted a jar from the well and drank the hot coffee. He closed his
eyes and sighed. “This is divinity fallen into the hands of man,
and I thank you for it. Come, a round of praise for our host.”

While the others cheered, Aja touched a
glass pane. She licked her finger. So sweet! She shouldn’t break a
window, but she had to know. And, yes, the pane burst into pieces
of sugar crystal.

“This is amazing.” Aja crunched the clear
candy between her teeth. “Just amazing.”

“I’m proud of your work,” the lord said to
the Chef.

“I savor your praise most of all, My Lord.”
The Chef waved to the city. “Explore, eat. Each building contains a
different dessert.”

Aja hung back. It all seemed too inviting.
Maybe she shouldn’t eat. She could keep her mouth closed and eyes
open for danger, but no one could walk through a candy city without
tasting anything.

The door of the first home they came to was
too soft to knock. The empress sang a greeting. No one
answered.

“I don’t think anyone actually lives here,”
Aja said.

They found the door locked, but that only
gave them the excuse to eat through spongy boards of what tasted
like carrot cheesecake. Inside they found furniture sculpted out of
twisty cookies. Elephant-ear pastries hung on the wall where there
might have been ornamental plates. Each treat tasted of the cool
smokiness of cardamom spice and crunched with walnuts.

The swordsman brushed crumbs from his chest.
“Still feels a bit wrong. We’re eating someone’s house. Even if
they aren’t here.”

“Do you think they ever were?” Aja
asked.

“No.” The empress dashed outside toward the
next building. “This city was made for us. I’d lick it all if I
could!”

They discovered a sleeping cot of woven
licorice. On it sprawled a pile of gingered bananas slathered in
syrup. The candied fruits chilled Aja’s mouth, and their spice lit
up her tongue.

Outside, Janny and Solin were strolling down
different streets. The lord had already left. Aja thought she had
better keep the guests together, and she would as soon as she found
out what had made the empress yip in delight. It was a vat filled
with bread pudding. The empress dipped her toes in.

“Ew!” Aja twirled a finger into the creamy
whiteness and raisins. “I wanted to eat that.”

“Me first.” The empress splatted her face
into the vat.

Aja searched courtyards and discovered
garden pools full of coconut-cream custard and caraway pudding. A
fountain pumped lemon syrup over a dome of almond cake. The
swordsman held Aja as she leaned over the rim to grab a bite. They
walked and ate a piece of every street. They had chocolate
grins.

The swordsman kicked open the
honeycomb-reinforced doors of the city treasury. He, the empress,
and Aja ate through chests of sesame squares. They uncovered a
golden wealth of mango ices. Aja swallowed cold handfuls until her
head hurt.

“I’m eating myself rich.” She spoke with her
mouth dripping. “Soon I’ll be a lord, too.”

The lord wasn’t nearby. The three of them
had wandered off. Aja didn’t know where the rest could be. Anything
could happen to them. Not even the djinn was in sight.

“We need to find the others,” Aja said.
“It’s not safe to eat alone.”

Thirteenth Course,
Part II:

Sweets, Assorted and Palatial

The empress sang a note. Someone hooted in
answer from a few streets away. The three traveled in and out of
shadows cast by towers. They found Janny on the Boulevard of
Scholars. Statues of wise men lined the thoroughfare, each a
different hue, from orange to pink.

“They’re all gelatos,” Janny said. She
climbed to her tiptoes to kiss a mint-green statue on the lips. Her
face came away the same color. “Help me eat them. They’re
melting.”

The robes of the statues had a sheen. Their
pointing fingers dripped. Aja ran to one of the women scholars, The
Mistress of the Opal Mind. The statue usually held a globe of glass
with concentric spheres inside it, but today it was full of melon
rounds. Rather than limestone, she was made of papaya ice treat.
Instead of offerings of clay left by devotees, gingerbread men
littered the base of the statue along with candied flowers. Aja
only ate the hem of the scholar’s robes out of respect.

“Enough of this dessert,” Aja said. “We need
to find the others.”

The empress sucked the blueberry-colored
beads off an abacus. She scampered away from the statue and
followed Aja.

“Hoi!” A man called from a rooftop, waving a
crutch.

Their dragon blood gave the guests the power
to jump up the wall. The second level of city stretched in a
landscape of blocky buildings. Solin leaned out from an upper
story.

He tossed something. “Catch.”

The swordsman closed his hands around it,
and cinnamon sticks splayed. He was holding a kind of nest, with a
seagull perched atop it and sculpted of rosewater cake, with sugary
sour feathers. Aja and the empress investigated it with their
fingers and tongues. The imitation bird even sat on a speckled egg
of chocolate.

“The rooftops are full of them.” Solin’s
lips were crusted with honey. His chin sparkled with sugar
crystals. “Strange, isn’t it? Why have birds?”

“The Chef thought of everything.” Aja gazed
over the expanse of rooftops. The distance rippled in the day’s
rising heat. She might never find the lord. Maybe that was for the
best.

Just then a red butterfly flitted out from
an arched stairway. Black eyespots blinked on its crimson
wings.

Aja took a step back. “That’s not made of
candy.”

“The lord sent it,” the empress said. “Time
for a chasing game.”

They followed the butterfly down the stair
and through the glassblower district. Beads of melted syrup
trickled down the windows. Aja and the rest entered the shadow of a
palace. It was the nearby one with the dome. Aja wondered if the
girl still read her book somewhere above. No, that was a silly
thought. The palaces only looked alike. They weren’t the same.

Passing beneath an arch of cantaloupe
squares, the guests entered a vaulted hall. The butterfly landed on
the lord’s shoulder, its hue matching his coat. He picked fruit
from a fresco and broke off pieces of the wall’s marzipan. His
appetite had already opened a window-sized hole in the palace.

The swordsman asked, “Shouldn’t you start
eating a building from the top?”

“The danger makes nibbling the foundations
all the more alluring,” the lord said. “Taste this.”

The palace marzipan overcame Aja with almond
sweetness. Only after swallowing could she appreciate the
aftertaste of orange blossom.

She had never been allowed in a palace. Now
there was no one to tell her to get out. Mosaics of fruit ascended
the walls in interlocking squares and waves. All six guests
explored between the columns, gobbling everything that didn’t look
like it would bring down the roof. Aja saw no sign of the Chef or
the djinn.

“You must see this.” The lord led them
upstairs and through a doorway veiled in honey beads. “Have you
ever witnessed such attention to detail?”

He waved a hand toward a bed. A long cake
lay atop it covered with pinkish sauce. The empress dipped a
finger.

“Oh! Oh! It’s peach.”

“Peach caramel on chocolate soufflé,” the
lord said, “but what is it shaped like?”

Aja squinted at the soufflé, and a needle of
pain pierced outward from her stomach. The dessert took up most of
the length of the bed. It was broader about the midsection and
higher on one end, especially above a pillow of powdered sugar.

Aja covered her mouth. “It’s a person.”

The ground was unsteady beneath her. She
swayed in a gut-twisting mess. The palace wasn’t falling down. It
only felt like it.

“Er.” The swordsman’s chin protruded as he
chewed his upper lip. “You mean, this was baked to look like a
person or…um….”

“Did the Chef transform people into
dessert?” Aja remembered eating syrupy bananas on a cot. Had that
been a human once?

The lord dug his fingers into the head of
the soufflé. Aja grabbed his elbow, trying to stop him, but the
lord’s arm slithered through her grasp. He plucked out an
eye-shaped chunk of chocolate and mashed it between his teeth.
Caramel dribbled down his chin. He sucked the darkness off his
finger.

“No,” the lord said, smacking his lips.
“This was never a person. The men and women of Jaraah were not
transmogrified in their sleep into pound cakes and fondue. This
city was not lost in a sugar apocalypse. The Chef only wanted you
to fear so. He’s a genius at his craft.”

Hardly reassured, Aja stumbled from the
bedroom. She sprinted, despite her side stitch, up into the palace.
Peeking into room after room, she searched for the girl glimpsed
last night reading. How awful if she had been turned into a treat.
Aja couldn’t stop looking.

The scent of sugar cloyed her. She gagged on
it. Each step on the chocolate floor now seemed to tremble with
danger. A palace of dessert couldn’t be as stable as one of
stone.

She froze in front of a room full of
toy-shaped pastries. On a pile of pillow cakes, a book of sugar lay
open. Its pages were fused together. In front of the book, near
blue ribbons of toffee—in the exact spot the girl had sat—lay a
mound of honey wafers. They didn’t look like a person, but Aja
could imagine a young woman’s body turning into the round sweets
and then collapsing into a pile.

Aja could believe it too well. A magical
murder. A dessert corpse.

“
You should’ve expected nothing less of
me.”
The Chef’s words echoed in her head.

Scraping her sticky nails down her face, Aja
swung her head side to side. No, this couldn’t be real. The Chef
mustn’t have cursed the entire city.

The worst part was that even with her heart
and stomach aching, Aja wanted to taste the girl’s remains. Just a
single wafer. It would pop into Aja’s mouth and crunch into
delicious crumbs.

“Ah-jaaa!” The empress’s voice pierced the
walls.

Aja flinched, then ran after the call. She
spiraled downstairs to find the guests waiting for her. Striding
straight to the lord, Aja gripped the lapels of his coat.

“How do you know it’s not real?” Aja
asked.

Instead of answering he stepped past her.
His clothing slipped through her grasp. She had no power to hold
him.

“Tell me.” Aja stood in front of him again.
“This city was my home. You have to tell me.”

“My little cupcake, no I do not.”

The empress hugged Aja’s arm and pointed to
the lord. She spoke in fluting tones. “They’re the same. Him and
the Chef.”

“The same person?” Aja blinked in
bewilderment.

“No,” the empress said, “their magic is the
same. The Chef is angry jealous of Lord Tethiel’s strength. The
lord came to the Banquet butterfly-dance happy, but now he’s
afraid.”

The embroidery on the lord’s coat changed.
Designs of flowers bent and withered in the clawing flames of red
stitching.

“Think of the Chef as a wayward apprentice,”
the lord said. “I wished to examine his work. He has exceeded my
expectations to an inexcusable degree.”

“Oh!” The empress tottered forward to
squeeze his arm. “You’re afraid the Chef’s stronger than you.”

“Why, aren’t you a presumptive little sugar
drop.”

Aja asked, “If this isn’t really my city,
then how did the Chef make all this?”