It was the dawn of the age of reason in Italy when Lombard DiMedici, most hated man in all Florence, declared that he would hold a series of banquets over twelve days, at which a different quarter of that storied city would be feted and given small trinkets, so that all might speak well of him. The poor, he said, would be given wooden florins printed with his face upon one side and the first words of the Lord's Prayer upon the other, so they might give thanks to God who gave of his bounty to Lombard, so that he could dispense this to others. The small merchants would be given copper coins on the next day, the richer ones silver, then the minor nobles would receive gold, and so forth...

Alas for dear Lombard, on the very first feast-day, it was the sixth course between two heavy meat dishes heaped high with greased slivers of almonds, a clear soup filled with pearl-like kernels of rice in which he toppled over face-first into his tureen, much to everyone's shock. "Poison!" his sister shouted as the other feasters gave their own plates worried looks. "Summon the cooks! We will know which of them has put the poison into what dish." And so the chefs were brought in shackles and threatened with dire torment if they did not reveal their machinations.

"I cannot tell a lie," Pias said. "I sprinkled a small bit of death's head into the pate. But it was not enough to kill, I swear on the Virgin Mary! It was only enough so that it would build up over the course of twelve feast days, and so he would die before everyone's eyes on the last day..." The next chef however, turned white. "But I too had put a small amount of arsenic into the drumsticks coated with honey and rolled in sesame seeds..." And each chef revealed his own machinations in turn, until the sister had had enough of the veritable banquet of poisons that everyone had eaten -- by this point, several patrons turned green had stumbled to the door. "You shall all be executed," she declared. "And your heads placed upon pikes as examples to all that in Florence, we hold good cooking to be a sacred art, against which you have blasphemed!"

As the feast dissipated, she smiled to herself and used a napkin to wipe off the poisoned lipstick that she had donned before kissing her brother.