A Face Like Glass (4 page)

‘No!’ squeaked Neverfell, wracking her brains to make sure that she had not. No, she had told the beautiful lady almost nothing, all she had done was ask questions and nod
occasionally. ‘I didn’t! All I told her was . . . that I was sorry.’

‘Sorry? Why sorry?’

Because she was nice and you were rude
, thought Neverfell.

‘Because she was nice and you were rude,’ said Neverfell. Then gulped and chewed her lower lip as once again her words galloped away from her.

There was a pause, then her master let out a long sigh and released her chin.

‘Why wouldn’t you give her what she wanted?’ asked Neverfell. Her feet kept up a back-and-forth dance. Timid step backwards, impatient step forward. ‘There’s a
round of Stackfalter Sturton the size of my fist going spare – the one we set aside so we’d know when the bigger one was ripe. Why don’t we give her a crumb or two of
that?’

‘For the same reason that I do not try to pull a thread free from a cobweb and use it to darn my socks,’ growled Grandible. ‘Pull on a thread, and you pull on the whole web.
And then out come the spiders . . .’

Even when Master Grandible answered questions, the result was not always very rewarding.

For the next week, Neverfell was a menace. She could concentrate on nothing. She spooned elk’s spittle on to a Barkbent round instead of reindeer tears, and it protested
with a flood of acid steam, scalding her arm scarlet. She forgot to move the Liquorish Lazars down from the shelf near the cooling pipes, and only remembered them when they started juddering
against the wood.

Strange and wonderful Madame Appeline had said that she might be able to devise a Face for Neverfell that would make her less hideous. The thought filled her with a warm surge of hope, but then
she remembered the Facesmith’s ominous words about the Court and this was replaced by a turbulent and queasy sense of dread. Master Grandible was so stonily immovable, she could no more
imagine anything happening to him than she could visualize living without the rocky ceiling that crowned her world. But the Facesmith had hinted that by hiding away from the Court he was putting
himself in danger and letting others plot against him. Could it be true? He had not been ready with an answer. Could anybody harm her master in his impregnable dairy castle?

‘What’s got into you?’ Grandible growled.

And Neverfell could give him no answer, for she did not know what had got into her. But into her it had decidedly got, for now in the cooking pot of her thoughts she could feel it simmering,
sending up a bubble-string of excitement. She had half an idea, she had a seed of a plan, though perhaps it was untrue to say that she had it, for she felt rather as if it had her. For once,
however, she had a wispy thought that she had not confided to Grandible, for the simple reason that she did not quite know what it was or what to say about it.

‘You see?’ Grandible growled. ‘One look at that woman’s world, one whiff . . . it’s an infection. You’ve a fever now, and you’ll be lucky if
that’s all you get.’ He did not treat her as an invalid, though, and, in fact, seemed determined to keep Neverfell as busy as possible.

Could Neverfell trust Madame Appeline? Again and again her mind strayed back to the last Face she had seen her wearing, the tired and loving expression without gloss. Try as she might, she could
not believe it was nothing but an empty mask.

You couldn’t invent a Face like that without feeling it
, she told herself.

The thought was still at the forefront of her mind three days later when Erstwhile dropped by to deliver several barrels of fresh milk, a vat of clean dove feathers and six
bottles of lavender water that had been used to wash a dead man’s feet. Erstwhile was a scrawny, slightly pockmarked delivery boy, and the most regular visitor to Grandible’s tunnels.
He was about a year older than Neverfell, although two inches shorter, and was often willing to spend time with her and answer her questions, albeit in a rather lordly way. Neverfell suspected that
he rather liked seeing her hanging on his every word and knowing that his visits were important to somebody.

‘Erstwhile – what do you know about Madame Appeline?’ The question was out almost before he had sat down.

Erstwhile did not have any angry or annoyed expressions. Worker and drudge-class families were never taught such Faces, for it was assumed they did not need them. Nonetheless Neverfell noticed
his shoulders stiffen and sensed that she had offended him. He had arrived full of pride and ready to tell her something, and now she had put his nose out of joint by asking about somebody else. He
thawed slightly, however, when she brought him a cup of ginger tea.

‘Here – look at this.’ He brandished something in front of her face for an instant, just long enough for her to see that it was a small, yellowing painting of an overground
scene, then hid it back in his coat. ‘I have to deliver it to a trader in the Crumbles, but I’ll let you look at it for three eggs.’

When Neverfell brought him three preserved eggs, still in their blue shells, he let her hold the picture. It showed a small house peeping wary-windowed through a veil of trees, with a forest
hill rising behind. There was a whitish hole in the sky, brighter than the rest.

‘That’s the sun, isn’t it?’ she asked, pointing.

‘Yes – that’s why there’s nobody outdoors in the picture. You know about that, don’t you? The sun
burns
people. And lots of them have to go out to work in
the fields, but if they’re out too long their skin burns red and painful and then it
falls off
. And none of them can ever look up because the sun is too bright, and if they do it burns
their eyes out and they go blind.’

He glanced sideways at Neverfell as he unpeeled one of the eggs, revealing the fine, snowflake-like patterns across its caramel-coloured surface.

‘Look at you, jumpy as a sick rat. You know, it’s just as well I come here, or you’d go crazy. Grandible will be sorry some day he’s locked you up like this with no
company. You’ll go proper crazy and kill him.’

‘Don’t say things like that!’ squeaked Neverfell, her voice shrill with distress, but also a touch of outrage. She had told Erstwhile too much in the past, and thus he knew
that occasionally she
did
go crazy. Sometimes it was when she felt particularly trapped or hopeless, or when the tunnels were unusually dark or stuffy, or when she got stuck in a
crawl-through. Sometimes it happened for no obvious reason at all. She would feel a terrible panic tightening her chest and giving her heart a queasy lollop, she would be fighting for breath . . .
and then she would be recovering somewhere, shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings.

She could remember almost nothing of her fits afterwards, except a desperation for light and air. Not greenish trap-lantern light or the dull red drowsing of embers, but a chilly, searing
immensity staring down at her from above. Not the ordinary, homely, pungent air of the cheese tunnels, but air that smelt of big and had somewhere to be. Air that jostled and roared.

Erstwhile cackled at her dismay, his good humour restored.

‘All right. That’s long enough.’ He took back the picture, tucked it in his jacket and settled down to cutting his egg in half, exposing its creamy, dark turquoise yolk.
‘You want to know about Madame Appeline?’

Neverfell nodded.

‘Easy. I know all about
her
. She’s one of the best-known Facesmiths in Caverna. Probably about seventy years old now, though she hasn’t aged in forty years. The other
Facesmiths hate her like poison – even more than they hate each other – because she didn’t become a Facesmith through a proper apprenticeship like everybody else. About seven
years ago she was a nobody, just some back-cave feature-twitcher teaching pretty smiles for pocket money. Then all of a sudden she brought out her Tragedy Range.’

‘Tragedy Range?’ Neverfell’s mind flitted to the haggard look she had glimpsed for an instant behind Madame Appeline’s smile.

‘Yeah. You see, before that everybody used to hire Facesmiths because they wanted to have the newest, brightest smile, or the most lordly glare. The Tragedy Range wasn’t like that.
It had sad Faces. Hurt Faces. Brave Faces. They weren’t always pretty, but they made people look deep and interesting like they had a secret sorrow. The Court went crazy over them.
She’s been famous ever since.’

‘But what’s she like? I mean . . . is she nice? Is she trustworthy?’

‘Trustworthy?’ Erstwhile picked his teeth. ‘She’s a
Facesmith
. Everything about her is fake. And for sale.’

‘But . . . Faces have to come from somewhere, don’t they?’ persisted Neverfell. ‘The feelings behind them, I mean. So . . . perhaps something happened to her seven years
ago, something tragic, and that’s why she suddenly came up with all these Faces?’

Erstwhile shrugged. He was bored of Madame Appeline.

‘I can’t sit around nattering all day.’ He dropped the crushed eggshells into Neverfell’s hand. ‘You shouldn’t be sitting around like a great lump either.
You’ve got your precious banquet cheese to prepare, haven’t you?’

The approach of a grand banquet always sent a shiver through the tunnels of Caverna. In some parts, masked perfumiers might be letting a single droplet of a pearly fluid fall
into a vast aviary to see how many of their canaries swooned with the fumes. Elsewhere, furriers would be carefully skinning dozens of moles to produce gloves from their tiny pelts. A thousand
little luxuries were being tested with trepidation to discover which were too ordinary for the Court, and which too exquisite to be survivable.

As far as Grandible and Neverfell were concerned, the banquet meant one thing – the debut of the great Stackfalter Sturton. It was a cheese of monstrous proportions, weighing as much as
Neverfell herself. Sturtons were known for the peculiarity of the visions they induced. They had a habit of showing people truths that they knew already but still needed to be told, because they
had forgotten them or refused to see them. Sturtons were also notoriously difficult to craft successfully and without fatalities, so Grandible and Neverfell dedicated all their energies to making
the Stackfalter Sturton ready for its great moment. It might as well have been a bride being groomed for a wedding.

Every day the Stackfalter Sturton’s dappled white-and-apricot hide had to be painted with a mixture of primrose oil and musk, and its long, fine mosses groomed with a careful brush. More
importantly, the great cheese had to be turned over every one hundred and forty-one minutes and, since it was about three cubits across, this required two people and a great deal of huffing. Every
one hundred and forty-one minutes, therefore, both Neverfell and Grandible needed to be awake.

In the sunless world of Caverna there were no days or nights as such, but everybody by mutual consent used the same twenty-five-hour clock. In order to make sure that there was always somebody
awake in the cheese tunnels, Grandible and Neverfell always slept different shifts, or ‘kept different clocks’ to use the common phrase. Grandible generally slept from seven until
thirteen o’clock, and Neverfell from twenty-one until four. One person, however, could not hope to turn the Sturton alone.

After about three days of sleeping no more than two hours at a time, both of them started to come unsprung. To make matters worse, other orders poured in shortly before the banquet. Those in the
highest circles had heard of the great Sturton debut, and suddenly Grandible’s wares were fashionable. There were small orders from countless illustrious-sounding ladies, including Madame
Appeline, who asked only for a small package of Zephurta’s Whim. Even though the lady seemed to have given up on her request for the Sturton, Neverfell clung to hope like a drowner.

‘Can’t we just send a crumb or two of Sturton to Madame Appeline? Please? Can we? We can send her some of the sample truckle!’ Beside the great Sturton sat a smaller replica,
like the lumpy egg of some ill-constructed bird. This would be opened before the Sturton was sent out to glory, just to make sure that the paste of the cheese was everything it should be.

‘No.’

Eventually things reached crisis point. The other cheeses had noticed their attendants’ favouritism and started to complain at their neglect. Angry bries went on an ooze offensive. One
Popping Quimp triggered unexpectedly and had bounced and crackled halfway down the tunnel before Neverfell could leap on it with a damp towel and smother the flames. Even Grandible’s stolen
moments of slumber were interrupted by the sound of Neverfell shrieking for assistance or desperately swatting butter-flies.

‘Master, Master, can I take apart the mangle? Because then we can put the cheese between two big serving boards and I can make a crank-handle thingy and it will only take one of us to wind
it so it turns over the cheese and so one of us can sleep, Master Grandible. Can I try that?’

And Grandible, who had impatiently batted away a hundred other impractical suggestions, hesitated and scratched at his chin.

‘Hmph. Tell me more.’

As it turned out, the mangle did not die in vain. There were false starts and nipped fingers, but like many of Neverfell’s mechanical experiments the crank-handle cheese-turner eventually
worked. When Neverfell demonstrated it at long last, her master watched her with the most acute and belligerent attention, then slowly nodded.

‘Go to bed,’ was all he said. And he ruffled Neverfell’s nests of pigtails with a hand so large and rough that the gesture almost felt like a cuff. Neverfell staggered off and
dropped into her hammock knowing that, for once, Master Grandible was very pleased with her. Sleep swallowed her like a pond gulping a pebble.

She woke again quite suddenly two hours later, and stared up at the rocky ceiling of the tunnel, eardrums tingling as if somebody had snapped their fingers in front of her face. She knew
instantly that it must be twenty-five o’clock, or the ‘hour of naught’. When the silver-faced clock in Grandible’s reception room reached the hour of naught, it gave a dull
click as the mechanism reset. For some reason, it was this and not the chimes of other hours that had a habit of waking Neverfell.