The Poisons of Caux: The Hollow Bettle (Book I) (7 page)

he place where the world-famous Axlerod D. Roux did all of his important writing was a place to which even Ivy was not privy. His study was off the main room, with a pleasant view of the water—the river being one of his most favorite inspirations. The room was a largish one, with ample space for any trestleman, were it not for the incredible amount of literature Axle had amassed over his long years. Enormous hulking leather-bound books threatened to collapse their feeble shelves, and stacks of parchment and leaflets created odd pathways around the floor.

But there was a sort of order to things the longer you stayed in the room, or so Axle maintained.

The trestleman was helped immensely by an old invention of his, a crisscrossing system of pulleys and levers so confusing to the outsider—although there never
were
any outsiders—that one might conjure up any excuse at all to remain safely by
the exit. These levers and pulleys advanced several sets of pincers attached to various lengths of accordion-like limbs, grabbing a book or magnifying lens at whim. The result was that Axle was never very far at all from a reference book or anything he might need in his research while he was seated at his handsome, sturdy desk.

Opening the heavy wooden door to Axle’s study, Ivy Manx could not believe her luck. She had always wanted to see this room, and Axle, until today, had never invited her. Rowan, too, was in silent awe and held his breath in expectation. This was where it all happened—where his favorite author wrote! After breakfast they didn’t think things could get any more exciting, but Axle had pushed his chair back from the table and stood—albeit not very high—and announced that he had something to show the children in his study.

“Come, come, come!” he called, making his way with great speed through tall barricades of reading material. He began flicking switches and levers, and the crisscrossing cables on the ceiling hummed to life.

He soon was lost to the towering literature.

“Axle?” Ivy called out, but the ceiling’s drone was all that answered.

Picking her way slowly, she almost collapsed a tall stack of dusty books, which teetered distressingly high above her head and surely would have crushed her had Rowan not caught them in time. The ensuing cloud of dust caused the taster to
sneeze loudly, sending a yellowed stack of old correspondence scattershot through the air. Ivy had hardly recovered when several books came flying by, at shoulder level, the pincers straining with their weight. She managed to dodge the first two—identical, ancient-looking texts easily as big as a trestleman—but the third nearly crashed into her at top speed. With an unfortunate grinding noise and an odd burning smell, the complex pulley system rerouted the book right over her head in the nick of time and off to the oblivious trestleman. At his desk beside the window, Axle received the deliveries distractedly and opened the top one from the stack. He looked over his shoulder impatiently.

“Ivy? Rowan? Do hurry!”

They arrived finally, and Axle began at once to flip through the enormous pages of the open volume. This would be hard going for anyone, but for a small trestleman it was a feat of athleticism. He muttered under his breath, and Ivy had the impression that he did this often. Finally, after resorting to the aid of one of his pincers, he found the page he was looking for.

“You asked me before about my favorite of Verdigris’s creations.”

He unhooked his wire-rimmed glasses from his nose and gestured with them at the open book.

“This one is it.”

Ivy and Rowan peered in wide-eyed. Although the size
of the page was immense, the writing it contained was a tiny, ancient script. It was arranged in columns around a central image: a drawing, in the same hand as the lettering, in pen and ink.

“A door?” Ivy couldn’t help herself. After the tales she’d heard from Axle over the years, it seemed a great disappointment that this might be the Good King Verdigris’s crowning achievement.

Rowan, too, peered in closer.

The drawing of the door was quite well done, very realistic. The ink was a faded brown, and the door appeared to be one of quality, but plain, with very normal doorlike attributes. Wood. A set of insets, a pleasing polish. Hinges. There was a round knocker in the middle, made of metal—painted in what appeared to be real gold leaf. Perhaps the only thing missing was a doorknob, but that hardly made it something to marvel at.

Ivy couldn’t disguise her disappointment. She was hoping for a moment that she might riffle through the rest of this enormous book—perhaps there were better things than doors to see. All the stories she’d heard over the years from Axle, as well as the tall tales from the motley set of tavern regulars she’d grown up with, made Ivy a girl with high expectations. A door, no matter how well drawn, would just not do.

As if reading her mind, Axle directed the pincer nearest to him to turn the page. Ivy’s expectations rose—and then were
dashed. Sure enough, another door. Or was it the same door from a different angle? Ivy scoffed.

“The other side of the door?” Rowan asked. He was more patient, basking in the presence of the great writer.

“Exactly!” Axle couldn’t contain his excitement. He seemed quite satisfied with himself.

“But, Axle.” Ivy couldn’t hold back. “You said that the Good King Verdigris created great things, things to marvel at.
This is just a door!
Show me this Rocamadour place! Got any drawings of that?”

Rowan bristled at the mention of the dark city of the Guild and thought how he’d be quite happy staring at either side of a plain old door instead. He looked in closer.

“Ah, Ivy. You are right—it is just a door. But there is an important question you need to ask yourself.” Axle sighed.

“May I?” Rowan was hoping to turn back the page to get a better look at the first image. Axle nodded and continued.

“What do you think of when you see a door?”

Rowan gave a tug on the cable attached to the pincer, and obediently, the enormous page turned.

“I don’t know. Something that’s locked?”

“That’s odd. There’s no knob. And look—here. The pages after these two are missing! Look at the binding—someone’s torn them from the book!” Rowan announced.

It was true—Ivy saw evidence of a hasty removal. Rowan,
whose favorite possession was his
Field Guide
, was aghast at such disrespect.

“Yes, these books were sadly mismanaged at one point.” Axle returned to the topic at hand. “What else might you think of about a door?”

Ivy thought.

“Where does it
go
?” she asked.

Axle beamed.

“Exactly!”

The trestleman was perfectly satisfied in his response and didn’t seem to notice the children were waiting for him to finish.

After an excruciating moment, Ivy burst out with the question on both her and Rowan’s minds.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Axle, the door. Where does it go?”

“Oh, I thought that was self-evident. To Pimcaux! The door goes to Pimcaux.”

imcaux?”
both Ivy and Rowan echoed at once. Ivy remembered her uncle’s tales of windmills and alewives, its pastures and …But this was impossible! Pimcaux was nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of Caux’s grim citizens—a place filled with all the happy endings their dreary lives were missing.

“Axle, there’s no real place called Pimcaux!” Ivy admonished.

The trestleman merely rocked back and forth on his heels and gestured at the enormous tome.

The children peered in closer to Axle’s ancient book—Rowan still grasping the pincer’s pull cord in his hand and Ivy on her tiptoes for a better look.

Perhaps it was the little cinquefoil—the Good King’s flower—in bloom in the other room, working its magic beneath the trestle. Or perhaps it was the Good King’s very own books at work, causing the cinquefoil to awaken. But either
way—and these are questions for the sages to debate at another time (and Axle would happily oblige)—the two children found the enormous journals of Verdigris to be suddenly rather more than lifelike.

For one, the heavy golden knocker was emitting a shine of convincing reality against the old paper upon which it sat. Ivy reached out before she knew it and found it to be of satisfying weight and proportion in her hand. She held her breath and knocked.

The golden ring at first made a dull sort of noise against the image of the door—the kind you might expect from a paperweight. But when she knocked again, there was a noticeable change in timbre, and as Ivy and Rowan looked at each other in amazement, the knocking began to sound crisper, clearer, less of a thud and more of a rap, until the knocker tapped sharply upon something that looked like paper but very much sounded like wood.

Extraordinarily, Axle and his quaint study were now being taken over by shadow. The fine script on the pages reorganized itself into larger, more familiar letters but quickly dissipated like sand in the wind. This was of little concern to Ivy and Rowan. They heard the sound of whispering now, of a harsh insistent murmur, and in the silence that followed, the pages of the giant book began turning themselves at a devastatingly rapid rate—gone was the realistic door now, replaced with an enormous curtain of shadow.

As they peered still into the now-dark book, Ivy found she was holding Rowan’s hand.

And then, suddenly, the dark shadow was gathered up by invisible hands and there was a brightening in the dimness—but still the scene was achingly hard to discern. A weak shaft of pale light on the side of a wrinkled old face. A hushed, choking sigh. A man seated on a throne of extraordinary beauty but with the posture not of a ruler—rather, of a man in defeat. He slumped, holding his head in his hand, nodding.

Behind him, still very much obscured in the twilight that infused the entire scene, was another man, a tall man. He stood before shelves of enormous books, a library of sorts; the golden letters of each volume glittered even in the low light. He was speaking in hushed tones, counseling his king. The words were unintelligible—harsh whispers on ill wind.

The king nodded, a slight nod, but hardly moved. His advisor straightened, and in doing so a beam of light caught his face. With a start, Rowan recognized him at once. A deep chill passed over the back of the young taster’s neck. He was seeing the Director—his Director—as a much younger man. But even more shocking, he was seeing Verjouce as he was born, before he was blinded into the hideous specter he was now.

Vidal Verjouce’s eyes were pale as water. And Rowan couldn’t help but feel they were searching him out, even in this
vision, scanning the corners of the stately room for eavesdroppers. He instinctually took a step back.

But it was not the children who Verjouce’s eyes finally set upon. In the corner, being dismissed by the king’s sole advisor, was a small group of men—
trestlemen
, Ivy and Rowan realized. There, amid the shocked group, was Axle. They had come hoping to sway the king from his deep sadness, but Vidal Verjouce’s hold upon him was already too tight. It was too late. The children were witnessing the end of the kingdom.

Verjouce counseled the king to send the visitors away, to banish them all—every last one of them—to a place where their particular nuisance could not be felt.

Ivy’s heart ached as she watched.

But now the dark mists returned to the library, and even as Rowan tried his best to steal one last look at the youthful Axle, the vision darkened and soon the pair was once again in Axle’s study—the whir of his pincers and cables above them.

“What sort of book is this?” Rowan managed. “If I had books like that at school, I might have studied more.”

“Ah, but you did. Once, the library of Rocamadour was filled with similar magical books.”

“Oh, Axle!” Ivy cried. “That was you! You were there—with King Verdigris!”

The trestleman was somber.

“What happened? Why did the king send you all away?” Ivy asked.

“The king had just sealed the Doorway. To Pimcaux.”

“Sealed? But why?”

The children were stunned. If everything they’d heard about Pimcaux was true, it was most certainly a place they wanted to visit. But now, to hear that the door was closed?

“But why was he—King Verdigris—so morose?” Rowan wondered.

“He had, at his side, a sinister counselor, among other things,” Axle replied. “He was in mourning, remember.”

“In mourning? For who?” asked Ivy.

“All this history is in my book, children.”

“Begging you pardon,” Rowan said after a pause, “it isn’t.” Rowan was indeed sure that the
Field Guide
contained little if any reference to the old king—certainly not a detailed history, which might be found treasonous.

“Oh, I think you’ll find otherwise.” The trestleman’s eyes twinkled. “You just need to look harder.”

Rowan thought he couldn’t wait to do so.

“Once the Good King went into mourning,” Axle continued on, “he never recovered. He stopped performing great feats of wonder. He had the Doorway to Pimcaux sealed and wiped all memory of it from his thoughts. He allowed no one to see him, except his trusted advisor, the man you saw there just now. Vidal Verjouce.

“But realize this: up until Verjouce, poison was unknown in Caux. Plants were used to heal! They were respected and
rejoiced—not used angrily and carelessly. What a different place it was to live! Caux was a land of apotheopaths, who respected the art of healing.”

Rowan was still shaken from the experience of seeing the Guild’s Director so close, so young. The image of Verjouce’s eyes searching him out would stay with him for many nights.

“With Verjouce at the Guild’s helm, Caux became what it is now. Apotheopathy evolved into poisonry quite quickly—and Verjouce installed himself in the seat of power at Rocamadour. The dark forests were breached, and the more potent herbs were harvested for ill use.”

They sat silently. Rowan was conflicted. Everything he thought he knew—being a taster in the realm of King Nightshade and the years of schooling at Verjouce’s esteemed Guild—was now all muddled.

The trestleman was at his favorite place by the window, with a pair of opera glasses being held to his eyes by one of his pincers.

“The Crown has taken over the Bettle. Nightshade works quickly when it comes to taxes.”

Indeed, reinforcements had arrived and were busy flying the Belladonna—King Nightshade’s purple flag—from Cecil’s rusty old flagpole.

Ivy realized heavily that there was no going home. She suddenly felt quite drained.

Removing the spyglass and replacing his pince-nez a bit askew, Axle turned back to the pair.

“The time has come. Perhaps,” he said, wrapping his small body in his substantial greatcoat, “I might ask you both to meet me in the parlor?”