“Slyr. Take charge of this one.”
Slyr lifted her knife. “Yes, Chef.”
Qijne nodded, turned and strode off.
“She’s right, you know,” Slyr said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
Annaïg nodded, trying to read the other woman’s tone and expression, but neither told her anything.
A moment later a yellowish, sharp-toothed biped with long pointy ears walked up.
“This is your scamp,” she said. “We use the scamps for hot work. Fire doesn’t bother them very much.”
“Hello,” Annaïg said.
“They take orders,” Slyr said. “They don’t talk. You don’t really need it now, so you ought to send it back to the fires. Your hob—” She snapped her fingers impatiently.
Something dropped through Annaïg’s peripheral vision and she started and found herself staring into a pair of large green eyes.
It was one of the monkeylike creatures she’d seen on entering the kitchen. Closer up, she saw that, unlike a monkey, it was hairless. It did have long arms and legs, though, and its fingers were extraordinarily long, thin, and delicate.
“Me!” it squeaked.
“Name him,” Slyr said.
“What?”
“Give him a name to answer to.”
The hob opened his mouth, which was both huge and toothless, so that for an instant it resembled an infant—and more specifically looked like her cousin Luc when he was a child. It capered on the table.
“Luc,” she said. “You’ll be Luc.”
“Luc, me,” it said.
“I’ll be back to get you when it’s time to cook,” Slyr said. “This you’ll do on your own.” She glanced askance at Glim. “What about him?”
“He knows as much about these things as I do,” Annaïg lied. “I need him.”
“Very well.” And Slyr, too, walked off to some other task.
Annaïg realized that she and Glim were alone with Luc the hob.
“Now what?” Glim asked.
“They want—”
“I didn’t understand the words, but it’s pretty clear what they want you to do. But are you going to do it?”
“I don’t see I have much choice,” she replied.
“Sure. No one is watching us at the moment. We could escape back to the Midden through the garbage chute and then …”
“Right,” she said. “And then what?”
“Okay,” he grumbled. “Use some of this stuff to make another bottle of flying stuff. Then down the chute, back away, gone.”
“I thought we were agreed on this.”
“But you’ll be helping them, don’t you see? Helping them destroy our world.”
“Glim, I’m learning a lot, and quickly. Think about it—this is the perfect place for me. If I could have asked for a better chance to sabotage Umbriel, I couldn’t have thought of anything better. Given a little time, who knows what I can make here?”
“Yes,” he said. “I see that. But what about me?”
“Do as I do. Talk to me now and then as if you’re telling me something. Write down the things I tell you to.”
“What about that?” he asked of the hob.
She considered the thing. “Luc,” she said, “fetch me those whitish-green fronds at the far end of the table.”
“Yes, Luc me,” the hob said, bounding away and back, bearing the leaves.
“This,” Annaïg dictated, “is fennel fern. It soothes the stomach. It’s used in poultices for thick-eye …”
She had almost forgotten where she was when Slyr returned, hours later.
“Time to cook,” Slyr said.
Annaïg rubbed her eyes and nodded. She gestured vaguely at some of the nearby equipment. “I’m really interested in distilling essences,” she began. “How does this—”
Slyr coughed up an ugly little laugh. “Oh, no, love. You don’t start there. You start in the fire.”
“But there isn’t any fire,” she complained minutes later as she turned the hot metal wheel. The grill before her rose incrementally.
“More,” Slyr snapped. “This is boar, yes?”
“It smells like it,” Annaïg replied.
“And this goes to the grounds workers in Prixon Palace, and they don’t like it burnt, like they do in the Oroy Mansion, see. So higher, and then send your scamp on the walk up there to swing a cover over it.”
Annaïg kept hauling on the wheel. Sweat was pouring from her now, and she was starting to feel herself moving past fatigue into some whole new state of being.
“What did you mean, about there being no fire?” Slyr asked.