A Face Like Glass (41 page)

She dismounted, accompanied by the guards, and gave her name at the door. Once again she was examined through the eyeholes in the painted owl.

‘I am sorry,’ the owl told her after a long pause, in the crisp, polished tones of a Putty Girl, ‘but Madame Appeline finds herself extremely busy today. Perhaps if you leave
your name, she can contact you for an appointment?’

Neverfell could barely frame an answer. Somehow she had expected Madame Appeline to sense how badly Neverfell needed to talk to her.

‘Can I . . . can I come in and wait? Just tell her I’m here.’

Another pause, and then the door was opened. Two Putty Girls with matching fashionable smiles stood flanking the door to welcome her in. The guards seemed less than happy about Neverfell leaving
their company, but consented when they were given assurances that the Appeline household would take responsibility for her welfare.

‘Please wait here.’ She was shown to a pleasant little parlour with finely carved walls. ‘I am afraid the mistress will probably not be free for some time – would you
care for some refreshment?’

Neverfell nearly said no, then remembered that she was allowed to eat and drink what she liked now. She nodded, sat down and was brought a silver tray of tea. About half an hour of fidgeting
later, the door opened, but the figure beyond it was not that of Madame Appeline. It was Zouelle’s friend, Borcas, and Neverfell blushed as she realized that disappointment must be flooding
her own face.

To her surprise, Borcas glided into the room, took up a cup from the tray, poured herself some tea and sat down in a chair opposite Neverfell, her expression serene and self-important.

‘I am afraid,’ she said, stirring in the sugar, ‘that Madame Appeline is busy adding brooding to a frown right now. But at least that will give me a chance to talk to you
privately.’

Neverfell was a little taken aback by the short girl’s new confidence of manner. As a matter of fact, Borcas was looking very unlike her old self, and not only because she was no longer
sustaining a painful-looking grimace. Like Madame Appeline’s other Putty Girls, her hair was pulled tautly back and pinned into a bun, and her eyebrows emphasized with kohl. She had lost her
nervous, puddingy slouch and as she sipped her tea her posture was upright and a little queenly.

‘Is that a new Face?’ asked Neverfell, not quite knowing where she was to start the conversation. ‘It suits you. It makes you look less f– er . . . more thin.’

‘You’re looking quite well too,’ Borcas responded smoothly, ‘under the circumstances.’ She smiled and slid elegantly through a couple more Faces, both superior,
knowing and rather expensive-looking. Evidently becoming a full-blown Putty Girl had certain perks. ‘Everybody’s talking about the fact you were nearly executed after the Grand
Steward’s death, and the story you told in the Hall of Gentles. And that’s why I thought we should talk.’

‘Oh.’ Neverfell stared at her, a bit nonplussed. ‘Um, thank you.’

‘You see, something has been weighing on my mind.’ Borcas’s smile, however, was not that of somebody whose mind was particularly heavy. ‘I found something yesterday, just
after you’d left. And I thought you would rather I talked to you about it first, instead of telling anybody else.’ Borcas seemed to be putting a lot of pauses into her speech. Neverfell
could not shake the feeling that these were
meaningful
pauses. After the longest and most meaningful pause of all, Borcas reached into her reticule and pulled out a small silvery object,
which she placed in the middle of her own palm. Neverfell stared at it blankly for a second or two before recognizing it.

‘Oh – it’s my thimble! The one I lost last time I was here! Thank you. Was it somewhere in the guest room?’

‘No,’ said Borcas, as if delivering the punchline to a very clever joke. ‘It wasn’t.’

Silence slowly unrolled itself, and Neverfell had the all too familiar feeling that she was missing something.

‘Oh,’ she said at last. ‘So, where was it then?’

‘That’s the interesting part. It wasn’t in your sleeping quarters, or in the grove, or the exhibition room, or any of the reception rooms. It was upstairs, in the gallery above
the grove. The thing is, we never let guests go up there. Madame Appeline doesn’t like them seeing the traps they use to create the “sunlight” effect. She says it spoils the
mystique. But there it was –’ she turned the thimble so that the light sparkled on its dimpled top – ‘just lying on the floor. So that could only mean one thing.’

Neverfell wracked her brains. ‘That it’s somebody else’s thimble after all?’ she hazarded.

‘No, it isn’t!’ retorted Borcas, her smug demeanour cracking for a brief moment. ‘It has the insignia of the Grand Steward’s household. Besides, the rooms are swept
every day.’

‘Then . . .’ Once again Neverfell suspected she had blundered into a game without any knowledge of the rules. ‘Then it probably is mine. So somebody must have . . . found it
and . . . taken it upstairs?’

‘I think you know how it got there,’ Borcas answered, with a smile of creamy complacency.

‘Pardon?’ Neverfell stared at her, baffled.

‘You see the problem, don’t you?’ Borcas clasped her hands, and put on an earnest Face, No. 23, Gazelle Preparing to Leap Stream. ‘On the one hand, you’re my
friend. On the other hand, I have my duty to consider. Shouldn’t I report this?’

‘Should you?’ asked Neverfell, utterly at sea.

‘Well, let’s talk about something more cheerful,’ Borcas swept on. ‘I’ve been thinking about my future a lot lately. Most Putty Girls are just Putty Girls all their
lives, did you know that? Only a few get to be Facesmiths. But I was thinking, if I had private lessons from somebody with a really unusual and famous face, somebody with thousands of
expressions—’

‘Ooooh!’ The light suddenly dawned. ‘I’m so stupid! You’re trying to blackmail me, aren’t you?’

Borcas promptly lost her serenity, her fan and half the tea from her cup.

‘What? I – that – no! I mean . . .’

‘I’ve never been blackmailed before.’ For a moment it was exciting, then it left a sour crinkly feeling in Neverfell’s belly. ‘So, you think
I
dropped the
thimble up in the gallery, and you’re saying that if I don’t let you copy lots of my expressions you’ll go and tell Madame Appeline I was sneaking around up there without her
permission? Is that right? Borcas, if you wanted to copy my Faces, you could have just asked.’

‘I’m not talking about reporting it to Madame Appeline,’ snapped Borcas. ‘I think the Enquiry will be much more interested.’

‘What?’ Neverfell started to develop a chill feeling in the pit of her stomach.

‘There’s only one time you didn’t have Madame Appeline or one of us with you,’ Borcas went on, ‘and that’s when you went for your “sleep”. So when
we weren’t looking, you must have slipped out without anybody seeing, sneaked up to the gallery and then crept back into your room before anybody saw you. And that’s not what you told
the Enquiry, is it? You told them you just slept in the guest room for a few hours.’

For the first time Neverfell was able to see the rocks under the mellow waves of Borcas’s remarks. The Enquiry had been looking for the slightest hole in Neverfell’s account of
events. Borcas’s story and the thimble in her hand might give them just the excuse they wanted to drag Neverfell off to prison and ‘interrogate’ her.

‘Oh, don’t bother with the shocked and innocent looks.’ Borcas gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘They won’t work on me. The only reason you’re not in prison is the
fact everybody is convinced that you can’t lie without showing it. But this –’ she held up the thimble – ‘is proof that you can, and have.’

‘But . . .’

Borcas rose from her seat, making dainty adjustments to the gleaming pins in her hair with a gesture that reminded Neverfell of Madame Appeline.

‘I would love to stay, but I am supposed to be helping tweak a grimace for a Distasting later today. Mind you, tomorrow I have the whole day free. I think perhaps you will also be free.
Won’t that be nice? I can collect you from the Childersin household at eight, and we can spend all day together.’

Neverfell only shook herself out of her daze as Borcas was leaving the room.

‘Borcas! What . . . what do the stairs look like? The ones that run up to the gallery where you found the thimble? They’re black, aren’t they?’

‘Black wrought iron,’ was Borcas’s slightly impatient response. ‘Decorated with ivy patterns, and grape bunches. Does that jog your memory?’ With that she left the
room, still holding the erect posture that made her look so much older and unlike herself.

Neverfell remained motionless, staring unseeing at the blots of slopped tea as they sank into the carpet.

She had been completely honest with the Enquiry, but there was one thing she had not mentioned to them, since it had not occurred to her to do so. She had not told them of her dream whilst
sleeping in Madame Appeline’s guest room. Now she trawled through the haunted fog of that slumber, trying to remember the details.

In the dream she had taken step after step up a stairway of black vines to a golden balcony . . . or perhaps a wrought-iron stairway ornamented with leaves, leading up to a gallery ablaze with
hundreds of traps. Was her dream showing her the truth through a twisted glass? Was it possible that she really
had
sneaked out of her room and up to the gallery, dropping her thimble as she
did so?

Neverfell realized that there had already been a tingling sense of wrongness in her mind for some time, drowned out by all her other worries and concerns. Nothing powerful, just a niggling
feeling that she had forgotten something small but important, or done something in the wrong order, or started something and not completed it. A sense that the cogs were not quite biting. A vexing
tingle like a loose lash under her eyelid.

She had it. She knew suddenly when the feeling had begun, and why. Slowly she reached down, pulled off one of her little satin shoes and stared at it.

The last time she had visited Madame Appeline’s tunnels she had been exhausted. She had been shown to her little rest room, and she had collapsed into bed without even taking off her
shoes. And then when she had woken she had struggled awake, slipped her shoes back on . . .

That was it. That was what had been bothering her in the back of her mind all this time. She distinctly remembered putting her shoes back on, but she should not have needed to do so. They should
already have been on her feet.

What could it mean? She did not know. The Enquiry had gone over and over Neverfell’s account of her actions between her return from the Undercity and the death of the Grand Steward,
looking in vain for the slightest inconsistency. And all the time there
had
been an inconsistency, a minute hint of something wrong. It was a tiny crack, but through it Neverfell felt for
the first time the chill draught of doubt.

‘Zouelle!’

Back in the Childersin household, Neverfell banged a second time on the cushioned door of the blonde girl’s laboratory. As she stood there, she felt the creeping sensation that the
presence of True Wine always gave her, but more intense than usual. Something beyond the door was aware of her, and ready not to be drunk but to drink her memories dry. Time felt sour. Air tasted
purple.

From within she could hear noises, an occasional shifting of a foot or clinking of glass. There was another repetitive sound, however. It was very quiet, a soft, broken, rhythmic noise that
almost sounded like stifled song.

‘Zouelle, I know you don’t want to talk to me, but this is really important!’ Neverfell followed up with another flurry of knocks.

The soft sound stopped with something like a hiccup, and it was only then that Neverfell guessed what it might have been. Steps approached the door, and it opened to show an impatient-looking
Zouelle in a black apron, a runed, metallic brooch pinned to her top pocket and her hands heavy with rings.

Zouelle’s eyes showed no sign of puffiness or redness.
I must have been wrong about that sound
, thought Neverfell.
She must have been chanting to the Wine or something.

‘Well?’

Neverfell swallowed hard, and leaped straight into the maw of the matter.

‘I think I walked in my sleep back in Madame Appeline’s tunnels. I think I did things I don’t remember.’

‘What?’ Zouelle stiffened to stare at her.

‘Borcas found that thimble I lost up on the gallery above the gr—’

Neverfell got no further before Zouelle grabbed her by the collar and dragged her into the laboratory, slamming the door shut behind them.

‘Have you no sense at all?’ hissed the blonde girl. ‘Saying things like that at the top of your voice!’

Neverfell could barely register her words, so overwhelmed was she by the room in which she found herself. She had expected a cellar full of dusty casks, bottles and the occasional set of scales.
Instead she found herself in a long, arched room rich with glyph-embroidered hangings in purple and silver. The glossy black of the obsidian flagstones was covered in chalk circles and sigils in
white and pale yellow. A cloth-draped cask stood in the middle of each circle.