“You need me,” Yeum said.
“How is that?”
“You know how to cook-I look at the menu and I’m amazed, I admit. Maybe we do have a small chance of coming through this. The problem is, you don’t know how to be a chef.”
“What do you mean?”
“You try to do everything yourself. It’s impossible. You have to delegate, and you have to do it with authority. You haven’t the most basic idea how to go about it.”
“What are you suggesting, then?” Annaig asked.
“That we work together,” Yeum replied. “I know how to give orders and spread the work around. I know how to get things done. You know how to make them right. ”
“Work together,” she considered. “I worked together with Slyr and she tried to kill me. Why should I trust you?”
“Because I’m not stupid like Slyr. It’s impossible for me to steal credit for this-Irrel was right here. He knows whose dishes these are. I’m only asking that if we succeed, I get to stay here as your underchef.”
Right, Annaig thought. So you can find another time to slip a knife into my back.
“That’s reasonable,” was what she said, however.
“Okay,” Yeum replied. “In that case I have some recommendations concerning the preparations.”
“I should like to hear them,” Annaig said.
Yeum paused, and a sly little look passed across her face.
“What?” Annaig asked.
“Did you kill him?” Yeum whispered.
“What?” Annaig felt a little chill in her vertebrae.
“The chef. Did you kill him? It was made to look as if Phmer did it, but I can’t imagine her being that sloppy. If, on the other hand, you set it up to look like that-”
“I’m not going to dignify that with a denial,” Annaig said.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Yeum went on. “If that were the case, you would have nothing but my admiration. Do you know how many people Toel murdered to get here? It’s how things are done.”
“Well, it’s not how I do things,” Annaig snapped back. She was outraged. Yes, she had killed him, sort of, but it had been an accident. She wasn’t what Yeum thought she was.
Yeum shrugged. “Anyway,” she said.
“Do you have those recommendations or not?”
“I do.”
She slept a scant three hours that night; even with Yeum’s organizations of the kitchen, there were hundreds of details that only she could handle.
Rhel, fortunately, was not like Irrel, who preferred up to a hundred distinct dishes at a meal. From what she had learned, Rhel considered himself more essential than that, and thus she only prepared three, each to be served in a separate course. She scrutinized each plate as it went to the servers.
First came the quintessences of sulfur and sugar, congealed into a glutinous web that held suspended drops of human blood and denatured snapadder venom, which glittered pleasingly-like tiny rubies and emeralds. The web stretched over the cavity of a halved and hollowed durian fruit, whose sweet, garlicky scent she had enhanced with metagastronomics and infused with the lust of a monkeylike creature from the Fringe Gyre, killed just as it was about to mate.
Next came the thin, translucent slices of raw bear loin, collected like the durian from the world below. She had turned the fat of the bear into a room-temperature vapor that clung to the tiny bits of meat, which were pillowed on a nest of glassy yellow noodles that, when bitten, would erase the taste of everything else within a few seconds, but leave deep longing to remember what had been lost.
An hour passed after the second course went up, and Annaig began to feel nervous. The third course-a complex preparation based on the smoke of clove, cardamom, cumin, mustard, pepper, hornet, black widow, and rage-would begin to mellow and lose its edge if it wasn’t served soon.
The servers finally came a half hour later, a few minutes too late for the smoke to be at its best, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
When the final dish went up, Annaig wiped her brow.
“I’m going to lie down,” she told Yeum.
“We did well,” Yeum said. “I wonder about your choice to include so much carnal matter, but what you did with it-Toel could not have done better.” She hesitated. “Do you still believe we will win?”
“I don’t know,” Annaig replied. “But I’m too tired to worry about it anymore. If I’m going to die, I want a little rest first.”
She wasn’t sure how long she dozed, but when she woke, at first she thought it was Lord Irrel standing there, for he had the same translucence. But then she noticed the slow, constant shifting of color beneath his skin, the squarer face and voluptuous lips.
“Lord?” Annaig said, coming shakily to her feet.
“Rhel,” he murmured in a detached manner, as if he wasn’t so much speaking to her as recalling the conversation out loud. “How did you know?” he asked.
“Know what, lord?”
“The first dish made Lord Ix vomit, which I much enjoyed, and it made Ghol laugh, which is extremely pleasant. Each dish was for me perfect, but affected my companions in ways that I very much appreciated. How could you have known all of these things? Are you able to pick into my mind? I sense no such talent in you.”
“Does this mean we won?” Annaig asked.
“Yes,” Rhel conceded. “And yet in doing so you have raised questions, you see.”
“I can’t explain it, lord,” she lied. “It is my art, that is all. When it comes to food, I know what people want. I believe one of the gods must have blessed me.”
His gaze settled for a moment, and then he blinked.
“You are from below-from the world we travel through.”
“Yes, lord.”
He smiled. “I think I shall enjoy your world, when we are done.”
“Done with what, my lord?”
He waved his hand.
“Oh, never mind that. You are my creature now, and I value such as you. I look forward to the day that you have full access to the goods of your world, rather than just the smatterings the taskers bring up. In any event, Irrel will have to find another chef.”
“And my staff?”
“Keep those you wish-dismiss the rest. Three days from now you will cook another meal, this one for Umbriel himself. I will be interested to see if you can please him as much-and as specifically-as you did me.”
“Thank you, lord,” she said. “I endeavor to do my best.”
“Of course,” he replied, and then left.
She passed a terrified-looking Yeum as she left the kitchens for her quarters.
“We won,” she said. “You’ll stay. We begin preparing tomorrow.”
Then she found her bed, and slept more soundly then she had in a long, long time.
TWO
Mere-Glim was finishing off a sheartooth steak when Wert burst into the chamber they shared with four other skraws, a damp stony room grown up in phosphorescent moss. He had an agitated look on his face, even for Wert. Oluth came in right behind him.
“They’re coming for you,” Oluth gasped. “You have to go.”
“What? Who is coming for me?”
“Guards from one of the lords-Ix, I think. They’ve been questioning people. They broke poor Jith. I know he didn’t mean to-”
“You have to hide someplace until they’re gone,” Wert said.
“That will only put you in more danger,” Glim replied. “If they’re after me, they probably know you’re my second. I’m not going to leave you here to face them.”
“I’ll run, too, just in a different direction,” Wert said. “Glim, we need you. The skraws need you, especially if they’ve caught on to us. You know how to think about these things-we don’t.”
“It’s just I don’t see how they found out,” Glim said. “It was supposed to look like the kitchens were doing it to each other. It was working, I’m sure of it.”
He saw Oluth start at that, but before he could say anything, Wert began trying to push him into the water.
“Go,” he said. “Go someplace deep.”
He saw them as soon as he was in the water. They were smart; they probably had sent someone to run him down in the caves, but figured he would come out here-and he had, right into their hands-if not their net, which he saw descending from above.