The Tasters Guild by Susannah Appelbaum

Author:Susannah Appelbaum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780375896194
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2010-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty-three

Malapert

The Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux contains but a passage on the great and tragic loss of the contents of the Library at Rocamadour. Axlerod D. Roux did not dwell too long upon this sad part of Caux’s history, for his hand trembled and his heart ached too much as he wrote the text.

The ancient fire of Rocamadour that even Hemsen Dumbcane cursed was ordered by the new and evil King Nightshade—but, like many other things, was actually the sinister idea of Vidal Verjouce. It destroyed nearly all the books in the famed Library, and the ancient knowledge that those magical books contained within. It doomed Caux to a fate of sorrow, for without knowledge, one is left only with folly.

The fire was fashioned by Outriders: in their menacing silence, they gathered armfuls of the enormous tomes and threw them in a growing pile. But the flame was cast by the trembling hand of the Librarian.

Oh, to go against one’s character in such an evil act as that! To be charged, as a librarian is, with the caretaking of knowledge—only to be the cause of its demise! It is a betrayal of one’s very nature—a poisoning of the soul.

Deeply ashamed, the Librarian of Rocamadour, a man named Malapert but for whom names had now become obsolete, came to live in the cesspit beneath the city. He sought for himself the most miserable of existences—a penance for his evil deed. He built a small shack from a pile of nearby stones and took up a wet residence beside an underground gulch—finding a certain irony in his proximity to the antidote to fire.

Fire and water. Doomed to this watery existence, the wretched soul of Malapert. The soul of the Librarian.

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