A Face Like Glass (33 page)

‘Oh.’ Neverfell felt her eyes grow large. ‘Erstwhile . . . all the water in Caverna comes from the rivers down in Drudgery, doesn’t it? It’s taken up to big tanks
near the surface, and half of it is heated, and then they pour it down into the hot and cold water pipes for everybody to use. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘How does it get all the way up from the rivers to the tanks?’

‘This plan is ten kinds of mad,’ whispered Erstwhile.

A long, dark and convoluted route had brought them to a domed storage bay full of crates and barrels, beside one of the narrow, murky canals. Before them she could see where the canal reached
its final sluice gates, and beyond them the river into which it was yearning to tumble. This however was not a roaring, white-bearded monster or a sludge-filled trickle, but broad, glassy, muscular
and purposeful, its water lucid. The reflections of the wild traps above quivered and flexed in its surface.

A little further upstream, Neverfell could see a huge treadmill like a giant wooden hamster wheel, a dozen or so drudges within it pacing to make it turn. This treadmill in turn seemed to be
moving a vast belt-and-pulley system. The belt ran from a shaft in the ceiling down to the pulley, and then back up the shaft. A series of broad oblong buckets four feet across were attached to the
belt at intervals. As the treadmill turned, the belt was drawn round the pulley, dipping empty buckets into the river in turn, and then bearing them back up the shaft.

‘You ready?’ growled Erstwhile. ‘Wait for the gong!’

The gong signalled the end of one working shift and the start of another. For a brief time, supervisors and workers alike were distracted as chits were delivered, attendance books marked, and
everybody took care that the wheel’s rhythm was not broken as one set of feet replaced the last.

‘Now!’ hissed Erstwhile, giving Neverfell a rough shove in the back.

She took advantage of the moment’s distraction to lollop over to the river’s edge.

The Kleptomancer had it right, she reflected in the half second it took her. Nobody was ever ready to stop you doing things that nobody sensible would even try. Mad things. Like jumping into a
river, grabbing the nearest bucket and letting it haul you up a shaft not designed for human passage.

The water was so icy as to be literally breathtaking. Her clothes soaked almost instantly, and became heavy, dragging and tangling her legs. She paddled helplessly, clinging to the bank. A
bucket hit her painfully in the shin, and as it rose she lunged at it, and managed to get the top half of her body into it. It lifted, dripping, with her hung over it by her middle, legs
frantically cycling.

If anybody looked up, they would see her and stop the treadmill. But the creaking complaints of the bucket did not catch their attention. She wriggled forward and managed to tumble into the
bucket with a slopping splash, and the belt carried her up into the darkness of the shaft.

After crouching in the icy, pitching bucket for what seemed like hours, she glimpsed a hint of light above, something larger than the shaft’s occasional glowing traps. Yes, there seemed to
be some sort of a square hatch floating down to meet her. Perhaps she could leap for it.
I have to be high enough now
, she thought as she readied her numb and shaking limbs.
I must be out
of Drudgery.

The bucket reared angrily beneath her as she rose to her hands and feet, then bucked as she jumped, tumbling through the hatch to land in a sodden sprawl. She seemed to be in a small workshop
with rough-hewn walls, and two men in overalls were staring down at her in frozen-faced shock. Their alarm and surprise was apparently not diminished by the sight of Neverfell’s face when she
pushed back her hair.

‘Hello! I . . . I’m sorry about the puddle. I’m Neverfell the food taster, and I belong to the Grand Steward. He . . . he might want to know where I am. Oh! And perhaps you
better tell people not to drink water from the bucket that went past just now – I’ve been sitting in it . . .’

The next two hours went by as something of a whirl, and Neverfell’s feet barely seemed to touch the ground. She was handed back to members of the Grand Steward’s
household, who interrogated her about the Kleptomancer and his lair until her brain ached. In the end she told them all she knew about the mysterious thief. Although she had felt a strange
camaraderie during her conversation with him, his willingness to wipe her memory had left her feeling disappointed and betrayed. Besides, she suspected she would be pushing her luck too far if her
interrogators saw her trying to protect the very man the Grand Steward wished to see arrested. The Grand Steward might even hand her over to the Enquiry to have answers dragged out of her.

After these questions, she was bathed, given fresh clothes and a new set of finger-thimbles, checked for any lice or ticks she might have picked up in the Undercity, and then examined and her
injured ankle tended.

Finally, a set of physicians and perfumiers examined her more carefully, looking for any sign that she had consumed either poison or antidote. In the end, it was her protestations that she had
eaten and drunk nothing at all that seemed to carry the most weight. More and more people were coming to accept the fact that she could not lie. Just to be on the safe side, however, they gave her
bitter-tasting drinks that made her vomit and left her feeling even more shaky and miserable. Then they stamped a document and declared her ‘undamaged and fit for Court’.

She was not undamaged, however, and she knew it. No food or drink had passed her lips, but she had drunk deep of the Truth, and now it could not be flushed out of her system with bitter
cordials, or washed from her skin, or picked out of her hair. Her suspicions were borne out when she was bundled back to the tasters’ quarters and fell under the eye of Leodora, who instantly
went chalk-pale.

‘Oh no,’ she murmured, gripping Neverfell’s chin and peering into her face. ‘Oh, fire and falling! This is not good, not good at all.’

The other tasters crowded around and craned to have a look, filling Neverfell’s view with the large, pink, staring collage of their faces. She knew then that Erstwhile had been right. She
had changed. The things she had seen had marked her, and now she was carrying them on her face.

‘The scrubbing brush! The scouring powder!’

‘No use!’ Leodora managed to prevent a mass scamper for cleaning goods. ‘This isn’t grime – it’s knowledge. She has seen too much. No! Put that away!
Scrubbing her eyes will not help!’

Neverfell, whose mind had been full of the plight of the drudges, suddenly remembered that her own existence was precarious in the extreme.

‘What . . . what do I look like? What can you see?’

‘Disillusionment.’ Leodora tutted under her breath. ‘Like a great mud spot on your face. It’s all over your brow, and the corners of your mouth . . . I don’t think
this is coming out. Where did you get all this?’

‘The Undercity . . . I was lost in Drudgery . . . I saw the way they treat the drudges . . .’

‘Well, couldn’t you have kept your eyes shut?’ Leodora gripped both of Neverfell’s hands with the fierceness of desperation, and stared into her eyes. ‘Listen
– the Grand Steward has asked for you to attend upon him as soon as you are dressed for Court. Whatever it is you saw down in the Undercity, you have to put it out of your mind. You have to
learn not to care about such things, and you have to learn it very, very fast. Just try putting everything you saw down there in a room in your mind, then closing the door and locking
it.’

She was so fervent that Neverfell nodded. As she changed back into her dress and sash, and while she was being walked through the palace by the white-clad attendants, she tried to imagine
closing the door on her memories of the Undercity. She made it a heavy, metal-bound oaken door, like the one Grandible used to lock out the world. As she stepped into the audience chamber, however,
and saw the Grand Steward, she could feel that imaginary door buckling and bursting into flinders.

His right eye was open, she noticed, and even now it was fixing on her face, her shamefully altered face. What frightened her most was the fact that she did not feel ashamed. She did not know
what she should say, but, worse still, she did not know what she
might
say. Her mind was filled with one thought, that this was the man who held Caverna in his hand, the man who for
centuries had been pampered with the city’s finest luxuries whilst thousands below broke their backs hefting sacks of rocks, or waded the city’s sewage breeding moths, or slept in heaps
like discarded eggshells. There was no way to hide her feelings, short of putting a lantern shade over her head.

The Grand Steward stared at her for a long moment, and she could not help but stare back, while something in her chest galloped heavy-hoofed circuits of her ribs.

Neverfell’s expression was a mirror, and in it Right-Eye saw a clear image of himself, as she saw him.

He saw his own strangeness and age. He saw how life and colour had leached out of him an inch at a time, leaving him dead and precious as the quartz trunks of the petrified trees. He saw the sag
of cruelty through apathy at the corner of his jaw. He saw the emptiness of his one open eye. He was a beach of gems where the living tide had gone out, never to return. He was a pearly shell left
by a long-dead creature.

Nobody in four hundred years had dared to look at him with such disappointment and saddened anger. If she was seen to do so, boldly and without repercussions, then it would make him seem weak
before the courtiers. To seem weak was to bleed into piranha-infested waters. At that very moment, if she had not been the only person capable of identifying the Kleptomancer, he might have ordered
her thrown back down the ember chute.

‘Is this,’ he croaked at last, ‘somebody’s idea of a joke? Who has done this?’ There was the deathly silence of a dozen people hoping that a question was meant for
somebody else. ‘Girl! What Face is this? Explain yourself!’ With frustration, he saw her freeze up in panic. ‘Call Maxim Childersin!’

When the angular master vintner hurried in, the Grand Steward simply waved an impatient hand towards Neverfell. Childersin cast an eye over her face, then drew in a breath through his teeth.

‘Definitely disillusionment,’ answered Childersin. ‘Doubtless something she saw in Drudgery—’

‘When I summon a clockmaker,’ the Grand Steward commented icily, ‘I do not expect a lecture on the mechanism. I expect him to set my clock going. This,’ he gestured
towards Neverfell, ‘is currently broken. Fix it. If she is disillusioned, re-illusion her. Find out what she has seen to make her look this way, and use Wine to remove her memory of
it.’

‘No!’ exploded the girl, face white and aghast. ‘I don’t want to forget! Everybody forgets the drudges!’ She stood there quivering with terror at her own temerity,
staring around in the silence she had made for herself.

‘I saw how the city works,’ she whispered. ‘How the embers tumble down and the water gets hoisted up and the waste is washed out, and where the moths come from, and everything
else. And it’s really clever. Caverna’s an amazing machine . . . but now, when I think of it, all I can see is this giant waterwheel, and the river turning it is made of drudge sweat
and drudge blood. I scrunch my eyes up tight, but I can still hear it, I can still smell it.

‘They sleep all piled up like dirty washing, and their children have legs like hoops and have to carry great sacks up cliffs, and the tunnels are so tight it feels like you’re under
a rockfall all the time, and everything smells sick or stale, and I saw this girl drop into the river and drown, and nobody stopped to look for the body, and they can’t even show what they
feel because they have no proper Faces, only stupid ones that make them look like they only care about their next job! And sometimes people come down and kill them for no good reason! Court people
steal down to try out poisons and practise murders before they do them for real up here—’

‘
What?
’ interrupted Right-Eye.

‘It’s true! The drudges call them “rehearsals”. There’s been another set of them just lately, but nobody bothers looking into it properly, so they’re just
recorded as drudges killing other drudges, but there’s a pattern and nobody’s paying attention!’

She was wrong. Right-Eye was now paying the most acute attention to her every word. He had spent centuries scanning the Court for signs of imminent assassination attempts, and in all that time
it had never once occurred to him to look for those warning signs in the Undercity. If what this girl said was true, then henceforth the drudge districts could become his early warning system, the
crystal ball in which he saw the murder plots against him whilst they were in the planning stages.

‘Is that so?’ he muttered. ‘Things are about to change. These murders will be investigated. Immediately.’

In Neverfell’s face the clouds broke, and her smile came out like the sun. She could not read his mind as he could read hers. She clearly had no idea of the calculations behind his
decision. He could see that she believed he had been overcome by the injustice of the situation and instantly decided to right it. He felt a shock, as if her faith was a golden axe and had struck
right through his dusty husk of a heart. The heart did not bleed, however, and in the next moment its dry fibres were closing and knitting back together again.