“Really? How interesting.” She wanted to know more about that, but didn’t want her idea to lose momentum. “Anyway,” she pushed on, “a good dish will still balance those essentials, yes?”
“Yes. Or contrast them.”
“So with a metagastrologic, the first taste of the dish will have a certain balance of flavors, but as it lingers on the tongue, they begin to change. Salty is confused for sweet, ah—ethereat for hot, and so forth. And it will keep happening, different each time.”
Slyr just looked at her for a long moment.
“You can do this?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“Such a dish would have to be carefully thought out, so that no matter what inversion of flavors occurred, most would be pleasurable.”
“It would require a chef of some skill,” Annaïg agreed.
“Well,” Slyr sighed, “it will not be boring, at least. I will go work on a foundation.”
Annaïg tried not to watch her depart, but she finally stole a glance to make sure she was gone. Then she closed her eyes and thanked the gods, carefully opened the bottle, and smelled its contents.
“That’s not it either, Luc,” she said. “Keep trying. But—um, I’ll ask you to see them, okay? I don’t want you interrupting my chain of thought. Just keep them in your cabinet.”
“Luc do,” the hob said, and started toward the wall.
“First go and find the chef and tell her we need this snake quickened.”
“Luc do.” He bounded off.
A few moments later he came back following Qijne’s hob, which had the baton. Annaïg placed the viper on the table, put the sharp edge of a cleaver on its neck, and touched it with the baton.
When it twitched to life, it jerked back and nearly slipped free, but its head caught and she put all her weight on the cleaver so the edge bit, then followed the skull back to the neck, slicing cleanly through. The body fell away, twitching, which gave the hobs something to hoot about.
She expressed the venom into a glass vial and set to work.
Hours passed, and so absorbed was she in the task that she hadn’t realized Qijne was watching her.
“Chef?”
“What’s your hob doing going through the cabinets? Everything up there is known to me already.”
“But not to me,” Annaïg answered. “And if I’m to be a proper cook to Lord Ghol, I need to be familiar with all of it.”
Qijne’s expression didn’t change, but her glaze flickered down to Annaïg’s work in progress.
“Not really doing anything you’re supposed to do,” she observed.
“This is for the meal,” she said. “An additive.”
“Explain.”
Annaïg went back over the general properties of the metagastrologic.
The chef tilted her head slowly left, then right. “You’re cooking, in other words. When you’re supposed to be cataloging.”
“I am, Chef.”
“Which is not what I told you to do.”
“No, Chef. But Slyr is worried—”
“Slyr? Slyr put you up to this?”
“No, Chef. It was my idea. We failed last night. I didn’t want us to fail again.”
“No, no of course not,” Qijne said vaguely. Her eyes lost focus. “Carry on. Only know that if it does not please him, I will kill Slyr and cut off one of your feet, right?”
“Right, Chef.”
“That’s not a joke, if you think I’m joking.”
“I don’t think you’re joking, Chef,” Annaïg said.
After the meal went up, Slyr wandered off, her face pinched with fear. Annaïg slipped off, too, and had a look at her locket, but got nothing but darkness. She went back to the dormitory to wait for her meal.
A bit later Slyr rushed into the room.
“Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”
She followed the chef through the winding corridors and great pantries of the kitchen and into what appeared to be a wine cellar—there were thousands of bottles of something, anyway, racked all around her.
“Through here.” Slyr was indicating a sort of hole in the wall just barely wide enough to slip through.
It led into a small chamber illuminated by faint light. Once in it, she could see the light came from the sky—the chamber was at the bottom of a high, narrow shaft.
Slyr handed her a bottle and a basket of something that smelled really good.
“He wasn’t bored,” she said. “In fact, he sent one of his servants to commend me.” She looked up shyly. “Us.”
“That’s good news.”
“News worth celebrating,” Slyr said. “Try the wine.”
It was dry and delicious, with a fragrance she couldn’t quite place but that reminded her of anise. The basket was filled with pastry rolls stuffed with a sort of buttery meat.
“What is it?” she asked, holding up the roll she was eating.