The Poisons of Caux: The Hollow Bettle (Book I) (4 page)

he Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux
—the perennial best selling reference book that, for obvious reasons, was required reading by anyone alive in Caux wishing to stay that way—lists just one undetectable poison. Oddly, it was sold, with a wink, as perfume.

It was created in honor of—who else—Queen Nightshade, by the Royal Perfumer, a man named Mawn. He called it Aqua Artilla. Befitting the queen, it contained, amid its secret ingredients and cloying scent, a mixture of potent and deadly toxins. The queen not only wore a scant few drops behind her ears and upon her royal wrists, she carried a few drops of it in her favorite hollow ring for her murderous impulses.

It was a great success in Caux. It made a name for the Royal Perfumer and made his fortune as well. And since Mawn touted it as impossible to duplicate without his secret formula, his fortunes grew and grew.

*  *  *

Ivy had come across a bottle of Aqua Artilla only once, not long before Cecil’s departure. But once was all it took.

She set out to crack the secret formula and stayed up late to do so, Shoo pacing the sturdy table alongside of her. Nights passed, but the formula proved harder, or Mawn cleverer, than she’d expected.

Ivy worked feverishly, inspired as never before by the queen’s poisoned perfume, yet her first attempt at Aqua Artilla ended in a thick lacquer. The next, a noxious epoxy. It was a stringy, vicious-looking brown and clung to the sides of the copper pot. In the morning it had hardened and she was forced to throw the entire thing away—hoping that Cecil wouldn’t notice his missing basin. The next day, she managed to produce something akin to chewing gum.

One rude brew after the other boiled and bubbled in her little workshop.

She tried it every which way she could imagine, culling from her garden some of the most truly awful roots and herbs, a choice mushroom, a suspicion of garlic, even some honey from the bees that feasted upon her poisonous flowers. And then, in what she considered a stroke of genius, she snuck into the bar quite late and helped herself to her uncle’s prized brandy from its high perch. It was time to try a different distilling agent.

The coil of golden wire came off the stopper quite easily,
she found, and the stone bettle inside clinked as she poured all of the aromatic contents into the basin. At first she thought she had found the secret ingredient, for now her tonic smelled and looked just right. She poured out a small sample, and holding the vial, she cast about the room eagerly for something to try it out on. With a squawk, Shoo wisely flew out the open window.

The crow needn’t have worried. The syrup smelled just right but seemed to do perfectly nothing. She tossed the small vial aside carelessly, but as she set about stowing the remainder of the infuriating infusion away, she heard Cecil returning to the workshop. Hastily, Ivy returned her failed Aqua Artilla to the very same brandy bottle and artfully restored the golden wire to the bottle’s stopper.

“What are you doing with that bottle?” Cecil’s brow was raised in surprise.

“Dusting.” Ivy smiled, and with practiced distraction, she presented her uncle with the small vial of her failed Aqua Artilla.

“Here,” she said. “I got the smell right this time.”

Away went her pots and pans, and she turned her attention instead to making customers for Cecil.

Now, as an apotheopath, Cecil was indeed an effective healer.

If practiced properly, this illicit brand of doctoring had astounding results. Yet as with everything, there were failures.
And when confronted with one, Cecil believed a patient could be well served by a simple dose of sugar syrup.

Shortly before the arrival of Mr. Flux, Cecil had been making such assurances to one Mr. Rankl, a ruddy pear-shaped man who suffered from a particularly incurable case of gout. None of the ancient medicines was working for Mr. Rankl, and Cecil found himself hopelessly confounded. So, with the cheerless eyes of his patient upon him, Cecil reached for his fail-safe sugar syrup—only in his carelessness he grabbed the wrong vial. This ampoule was the discarded result of Ivy’s Aqua Artilla distillation, the very one she had presented to him not long before.

After administering the potion to Mr. Rankl with his usual seriousness, Cecil soon realized his mistake. The room was thick with the telltale smell of the queen’s perfume! Try as he might to maintain a look of professionalism upon his face, he could not. He soon twitched and spasmed with a morbid anticipation, a fine bead of sweat trailing down his forehead.

Luckily, the goutish Mr. Rankl noticed none of this.

For the first time in quite some years, he was walking about the room without an insipid dagger in his left big toe. In fact, he was such a picture of health he declared himself to feel a man half his age. The patient flushed and sparkled with enthusiasm. He declared his many appetites returned, and talked of taking a wife—but would begin his celebration with a good bowl of the Bettle’s rich soup.

Cecil had no choice but to agree that Mr. Rankl’s incurable case of gout was cured. The results of Ivy’s tonic were nothing short of miraculous, and he resolved to keep the elixir on hand for a time when his medicinal talents might fail him. Since he was a very good apotheopath, he would hardly ever use it.

The same, however, cannot be said of Mr. Flux, who—quite unbefitting a taster—had in his possession a small garish bottle of the real thing. He found it quite easy to administer the Aqua Artilla to the Bettle’s kettle of soup and from there to a roomful of Nightshade sentries.

orrel Flux’s other possession, more befitting a taster, was a copy of the
Guide
, as it was commonly called. The leather-bound book was impossibly thick, edged with gold leaf, and riddled with myriad thumb tabs. There were several sets of ribbons sewn directly into the binding for marking interesting pages, and the contents were helpful and all-encompassing. About the author little was known except—at least according to the book’s cover—that he was a man called Axlerod D. Roux, who over the years had proved to be a recluse of such renown that many had come to doubt his very existence. The
Field Guide
was Flux’s only book, and for the most part it went unread. His mind was not one to wonder at something and turn to a book for an answer. He felt, were he to be asked, that there was little of interest in books at all, and he would not shed a tear if a calamity struck his vision and rendered him unable to read.

It was in this way that for the entire year Sorrel Flux had spent in the tavern, he had no idea that there was a hidden back room. Since the entrance to Cecil’s office was disguised—apotheopaths were punished with death if caught—by the enormous slate chalkboard and since there was no doctoring occurring in Cecil’s absence, there were few visitors to the office for Flux to regard.

If he were the observant type, he might have sensed the upstairs of the mill house was out of proportion—rather much larger than the downstairs. But that might have been easily dismissed by the suggestion of a large kitchen, for Sorrel Flux not once ever deigned to enter the room. His haunts were few and, as we know, concerned either libation or dormancy.

Ivy, meanwhile, was intent on getting away from Sorrel Flux, and from his intimidating companion, as quickly as possible. She scrambled through the twisty tunnel that served as a shortcut from the bar to her uncle’s messy den. She was very certain the bearded man could not follow her—at least this way—since he was decidedly larger than most men and she herself fit snugly in the passage. Sorrel Flux was another story. He was about the right size and gave the impression of being able to compress his body into tight spaces if need be. She could see him fitting himself tidily into a shoe box if it could benefit him somehow.

Either way, it wouldn’t be long before they sounded the
alarm: there were at least twenty of the king’s men and one scrawny taster—make that two—and the odds of their discovering the hidden entrance were in their favor.

She pulled herself out of a cupboard and into the workshop, where she hurriedly searched the tabletop for something in which to stow the brandywine bottle. Small vials of her early failed Aqua Artilla clattered in her wake—several falling to the floor and shattering. The air was suddenly thick and rancid.

Under Cecil’s desk she finally found a tattered black satchel, the type favored by men of the medical profession, and removing a stack of ledgers, she gently placed the brandy bottle—and the bettle—inside. She swept an area clean atop his writing table. Small dusty notes in Cecil’s elegant script scattered to the floor—the result of years of his medicinal observations—along with bits of string, candle remnants, an odd river stone. An upended bottle of ink puddled to one side of it all.

She heard a splintering of wood coming from the passage and, with a start, jumped upon the sturdy desk her uncle’s elbows had polished clean.

“Shoo!” She called for the crow. She looked frantically around, but his usual perch was empty.

It was then, amid the thudding and vague curses Ivy easily attributed to her taster, that she looked down. Beside her foot, in an area of Cecil’s desk that hadn’t seen the sun in a year, Ivy saw it. A small brown case of soft leather, the one from high upon his shelves. It was unmistakable—she had, after all, for
years tried to get her hands on the delicate ampoules. She scooped up her uncle’s medicines, tossing them into the apotheopath’s satchel, and then, with barely a look behind her, stepped out the small window into the early morning, quite alone.

With the appearance of the sentries at the only home she knew, Ivy naturally had some concerns about her future. Leaving behind the Hollow Bettle, she would turn to
I
the help of an old friend. Behind her in the workshop, discarded in her hurry, was Ivy’s own dog-eared copy of the
Field Guide
. It was open to the first page, in which ropy letters and thoughtful curlicues formed the inscription:

he Windy Season was not yet upon Caux’s suffering residents, but that morning a young wind was channeling itself down the valley by way of the river Marcel, slapping errant waves and spewing spray in its wake. It angered Cecil’s old mill wheel, which spun dizzyingly in the rapids. It upturned rows of strange and suspicious potted plants on Ivy’s terrace. The old hickory tree, with its dancing balls of mistletoe, creaked and groaned.

There was one structure, aside from the stone mill house, impervious to this wind. At a narrow part of the Marcel, just down from the mill, sat an old iron train trestle, and it girdled the frothy brew impassively.

It was a small trestle as train trestles go—but a proud one. It had stood there for many years longer than anyone could remember and was part of the rail system that brought trains from the Northward Corridor down along the Marcel and on
to the old capital city Templar. Because the city of Templar fell out of favor with King Nightshade—it was too old and reminded him of the previous monarch—not a lot of trains found themselves crossing this trestle. Except once a year, when the Royal Cauvian Rail was commanded south again to the walled city, where the royal family waited out the dangerous winds in the ancient stone castle.

If you looked very carefully, you might catch the warm light of a lantern underneath the bridge burning at most times of the day or night. For beneath this trestle sat the reclusive trestleman and famed author Axlerod D. Roux. On most days, he could be found working thoughtfully on the thirteenth edition of his famed
Field Guide
, but today he was looking out at the dark air. He was a wise man. He knew that there were great forces at work in his tiny little corner of Caux.

Outside, in the uninvited wind, Ivy Manx discovered she was not alone.

The little window of Cecil’s back room let out on their woodpile—made up mostly of discarded oak casks and a few pallets. The weather brought with it little of the daylight she’d expected to see, and after pulling the apotheopath’s bag through the window behind her, she turned to spot in the dimness someone rounding the corner.

To her great disappointment, this person was clothed in dark tasters’ robes, which were flapping vigorously in the
wind. He was rushing at her, almost frantic in his pace. Ivy only had time to cringe, clutching her uncle’s satchel, fearing Sorrel Flux upon her.

But his dark hood suddenly flew back in his flight, and with it came a shock of brown curls, and she instead recognized the other taster from the tavern, the sentry’s boy. His young features were heightened in his panic. He ran blindly, and he hadn’t seen Ivy at all, nor the stack of old barrels she stood upon. This resulted in his colliding noisily with both of them.

“Shh!”
they admonished each other while looking around the corridor.

Ivy glared at the boy in the moment that followed.

“Why don’t you watch where you’re going—or do you want the entire king’s army coming to see what all the racket is?!”

“I’m sorry, it’s these robes. I couldn’t see anything.” He tried to hug them tighter around him but was thwarted by the wind. He looked simply miserable. “But I think you need not worry about the sentries.”

“Why’s that?” Ivy asked suspiciously.

“They’re all dead—every last one of them. It was the soup.”

“What? The soup! That’s impossible.” Ivy had been making the Bettle’s famed soup for the past year, and she said so.

“Well, you’ve killed twenty of the king’s sentries.”

Here the pair met with their first disagreement.

“I killed twenty—why, who was it that
tasted
it?” Ivy lowered her voice but increased her glare.

The boy sagged.

“You’re right, of course. I’m a miserable taster. I’ve killed my very first charge!”

“Well.” Ivy was feeling bad for the boy. She thought she knew quite clearly who was responsible for the poisoning, and it wasn’t him. “Tough luck.” She sighed. His misery was catching.

“Yes, yes, it is. Do you even know how many years of school I needed to complete to become a taster? And for what?”

The wind groaned, and a cluster of the casks fell from their perch.

“Where are you going?” the taster asked hopefully.

With this question, Ivy was reminded again of the reality of her plight—the sentries were only one part of the equation, where her former taster and his unsavory friend were the worst of it.

“Aren’t you supposed to stay by your charge or something? And wait by him? Isn’t that part of—”

“The Oath.” He sighed again.

At another time, Ivy might have enjoyed talking further to this young man—only the second taster she’d ever known and by far a more promising conversationalist. But at present, the
man her uncle hired to save her life was intent on just the opposite, and that fact alone necessitated haste.

Still, she felt a slight responsibility for his predicament—Sorrel Flux was her taster, after all, and surely the reason behind the poisoned soup. And the boy looked so troubled.

“Oh, fine. Come with me, then. But hurry—and mind your robes!”

It was then that Ivy set out on what was to be the beginning of her astonishing story, accompanied by what very well might be the worse of the only two tasters she’d ever met. Perhaps in some ways she might have been safer with the ruthless Mr. Flux.