A Face Like Glass (5 page)

In spite of her exhaustion this click had jerked her out of sleep once more. She gave a small, beleaguered moan and wrapped herself in a ball, but to no avail. She was drenched in ice-cold
wakefulness, and jumpy as a grasshopper.

‘Not fair,’ she whispered as she tumbled out of her hammock. ‘Not
fair
. Please don’t let me be out of clock! Not again!’

Because there was no night or day in Caverna, sometimes people fell ‘out of clock’. Their cycles of sleeping and waking collapsed, and often they could not sleep at all, but drifted
through endless hazy, miserable hours. Neverfell was particularly prone to this.

Doing, doing, doing. What can I be doing?

Her brain felt like a sponge, and everything looked spangly as she tottered down the passages, checking on the slumbering cheeses. She tried sweeping up, but she kept tripping over pails and
leaving little whey prints down the corridors. In the end she hobbled back to the Sturton’s boudoir, knowing that Master Grandible would find something for her to do.

There were only a couple of trap-lanterns set in corners of the antechamber. As their lemony light ebbed and glowed the great cheese almost seemed to swell and contract like a creature breathing
in its sleep. Wicked glints slunk along the iron angles of the mangled mangle. Beyond them, seated on the floor with his back to the wall was Master Grandible, his eyes closed and jaw hanging
open.

Neverfell’s lungs seemed to empty of air, and she managed only a faint squeak of alarm. For a moment all she could think was that somehow her master had suddenly died. Cheeses turned on
you sometimes, even mild-mannered and well-trained cheeses. It was one of the hazards of the profession. And what other alternative explanation was there? In all the years she had known him, Master
Grandible had never slipped, never made an error, never forgotten a responsibility. Surely, even with his exhaustion . . .

Master Grandible’s jaw wobbled slightly; from his throat issued a reverberating snore like a calf in a well. Yes, the impossible had happened. The infallible Master Grandible had fallen
asleep on duty, two minutes before the Sturton needed to be turned.

Neverfell tiptoed over to him and put her hand out towards his shoulder, then hesitated and withdrew it. No, why shake him awake? He needed sleep and she would let him have it. She would take
care of the turning for him, and the next one too if he was still asleep then. He would be proud of her. He would have to be.

She counted out the seconds, then silently set about cranking the handle, and turning the great cheese. After she had turned the tiny sample Sturton too by hand, she grinned to herself as she
tried out her brand-new and unfamiliar sense of self-satisfaction.

There was no point in trying to sleep until exhaustion kicked in once again, and Neverfell set about groggily preparing other orders, the dainties for the market gala, the camel cheese for the
eminent chocolatier and the delivery for Madame Appeline.

Ten minutes before she was due to turn the Sturton again, the bells rang at Grandible’s front door. Neverfell tied her mask on crooked and ran to answer it, almost falling foul of
Grandible’s various lethal traps in her hurry. Peering through the spy-hole she saw a footman displaying a leanness and angularity of jaw usually reserved for lizards.

‘Your business?’ Neverfell tried to imitate Grandible’s brusque tone.

The footman’s smile was instantly charming, whilst suggesting an awareness of his own dignity. His consonants all had a damp sound.

‘If you would be so kind, there is a package reserved for Madame Appeline. If it is ready—’

The idea hit Neverfell like a fist. It hit her so hard that she actually rocked back on to her heels, then stood trembling and trying to decide whether to cry. It was a good idea, a brilliant
idea, perhaps the best she had ever had, better than the mangle-cheese-turner. But it seemed unfair that it should have occurred to her now, just when she was enjoying the thought of Master
Grandible being pleased with her. She deserved to feel that happiness a little longer. But no, now she had the idea and it had her. She gnawed her fingers, and the idea gnawed her, and she knew she
was going to do what it wanted.

‘One moment!’ she squeaked, then sprinted back towards the room where the Stackfalter Sturton lay in state.

At the door she halted, then edged slowly into the room, softening her steps as best she could to avoid waking her master. Not two feet from the great sleeping Sturton nestled the baby sample
Sturton, ragged with its feathery white mosses. At Neverfell’s belt hung a circular steel cutter, designed so that you could push it in through the rind of a cheese and pull out a tiny
cylindrical sample. Hardly daring breathe, Neverfell reached out and picked up the sample Sturton between finger and thumb, wincing as she felt the tender mosses crush beneath her touch like loose
snow.

She pushed her cutter into the base of the little cheese and felt a tingle of fear and excitement as the rind gave way. When she pulled it out with a small round of ripe cheese within it, the
exposed paste filled the room with the scent of wildflowers and wet dogs, and for a moment she was afraid that it would tickle Grandible’s well-trained nose and wake him. He snored on,
however, and she carefully returned the sample to its place, the new hole flush against the shelf so as to conceal her crime and stop the spread of the smell.

She was partly doing this for him, she reminded herself. He needed friends in the Court, and soon he would have Madame Appeline.

Back in the packing room she found the box put aside for Madame Appeline’s order, the pearl-grey round of Zephurta’s Whim already nestling within in its bed of olive leaves.
Neverfell quickly removed the stolen cheese from her cutter and wrapped it in muslin. In a moment of inspiration, she tied the muslin bundle with a piece of black velvet ribbon, so that Madame
Appeline would remember the black velvet mask and realize who was responsible.

Out, out, out
, said her heart with every beat.
Doing this will get me out of here. Madame Appeline will make me a new Face, and I can go out.

Grandible had hidden away the front-door keys once again, but there was a small much-bolted hatch beside the door for receiving small deliveries, and Madame Appeline’s box was narrow
enough to fit through it.

‘Here – sign this!’ She unbolted the hatch and pushed a receipt through it. Once the footman had signed it, Neverfell thrust the box through the hatch, and bolted it again.
‘There! Take it!’ She watched him depart through the spyhole, then leaned gasping against the door.

I can sleep now, I can . . . no, wait! The next Sturton turning!

She sprinted down the corridors to the Sturton room, and flung open the door. One sniff of the air told her that she was almost too late. The fumes from the unturned cheese were starting to turn
poisonous, and her eyes stung as she staggered forward towards the crank. Grandible was already crawling his way across the floor, jowls shaking as he choked on the now overpowering smell of
wildflowers. Holding her breath and closing her eyes, Neverfell cranked the handle and slowly inverted the Sturton. At last it found itself standing on its head, and began to settle.

‘Master Grandible!’ Neverfell ran to his side, all forgotten in her concern. It took a while for his breaths to steady.

‘Child . . . I shall forgive you your wakefulness. If I had slept on . . . the cheese would have been
ruined.
’ This was clearly of far greater horror to him than the prospect
of his own demise. ‘Good . . . good work, Neverfell.’ His eyes rose to her face. ‘Why . . . why are you wearing your mask?’

‘Oh.’ Neverfell felt her skin tingle and grow hot as she removed the mask. ‘I . . . I . . . A footman came for a delivery . . . Madame Appeline . . .’

And, looking into her master’s eyes, Neverfell was suddenly sure that he knew absolutely the reason for her stammer and the greasy cutter at her belt. Somehow he could see right through
her.

‘I wanted to protect you!’ she squeaked, giving up all hope of pretence.

‘Death’s gate,’ whispered Grandible. His expression was grim and dogged as ever, but suddenly he was ashen pale.

‘What have I done? What have I done? I have done something terrible – what is it? I just wanted to help! I thought if I sent Madame Appeline what she wanted it
would make friends for you in the Court . . . I just wanted to keep you safe!’

‘Safe?’ Grandible’s face was still that of a statue, frozen and greyish with suppressed emotion. ‘Safe?’ His voice rose to a roar, tiny flecks of Stackfalter
Sturton falling out of his eyebrows. Neverfell gave a wordless squeak of apology as she was shaken like a doll and then abruptly thrust away.

Master Grandible stared at her, one hand raised as if he were considering striking her. Then he reached out unsteadily and shoved at her shoulder with the flat of his hand. Neverfell quivered
and went nowhere, uncertain whether he wanted her to leave, unsure whether the gesture had been angry or affectionate.

‘A person I could trust,’ was all he said, and gave a small choking sound that she did not immediately recognize as a laugh. ‘That was what I thought. When I pulled you out of
the whey. You were so . . .’ He sighed and cupped his hands as if a small, damp kitten were resting its paws on his palms. ‘What more could I do? I boarded my doors against every
betrayal I could imagine. But there was one I never expected.’ He rasped his yellowing fingernails through his beard with a sound like a toothbrush war. ‘Ha. Betrayal for my own
good.’

‘What . . . what does it mean? What have I done?’

‘You have woken the spiders.’

Master Grandible sometimes had an odd, unbalanced way of saying words that gave them new meanings. When he talked of ordinary spiders of the spindle-legged and spinning variety the word had its
usual ring. But here there was a greater weight on the first syllable, and second dusty and dead, almost inaudible. Spy . . . der.

‘Go and fetch the prune gin. Bring it to the reception room.’

Neverfell ran off to fetch the bottle, her face burning and her stomach acid. She had gone so fast from lifesaver to betrayer that all her words seemed to have fallen out of her. When she
reached the reception room, Master Grandible had dropped into his chair, eyes bloodshot and breath still wheezing. She carried in her tiny tapestry-seat stool and hunched on it at his feet, her
knees pulled up to her nose. He took the bottle, sipped, then stared down the neck.

‘Neverfell – what do you think the Court is?’

Neverfell could not even shape a sentence. The Court was golden, the Court was glory. It was fair maidens and a thousand new faces and her heart beating fast. It was the world. It was everything
that was not here.

‘I know you hate it,’ she said.

Master Grandible leaned forward, and dropped his broad chin down to rest on his fists.

‘It is a giant web, Neverfell, full of bright-winged, glistening insects. All of them full of their own poison, all entangled, all struggling to live and to kill. All of them pull the web
this way and that to favour themselves or throttle each other. And every motion that one of them makes is felt by all the others.’

‘But Madame Appeline . . .’

Madame Appeline is different
, Neverfell wanted to say.
I saw it in her Face.
But she could hear how foolish it would sound, so she let the sentence drop.

‘It sickens me now to say it,’ Grandible went on, ‘but as a young man I had a notable place at Court.’

‘Did you?’ Neverfell could not help leaning forward in excitement, even though she knew it was not how her master wanted her to react.

‘Nobody else had successfully ripened a Wanepilch Milchmaid in this city without their eyes falling out,’ Grandible explained, ‘so, when I succeeded, a round of it was sent to
the Grand Steward himself. And . . . they say that when he placed the first sliver of it into his mouth, he
actually tasted
it.’

‘So . . . it is all true what they say of him, then? That he would be blind, deaf and numb without the very finest luxuries?’

‘Not quite. There is nothing wrong with his eyes, ears, nose, skin or tongue, only the parley they hold with his soul. He can look at a flower and tell you it is blue, but blue means
nothing to him. You can put a forkful of meat on his tongue and he will be able to tell you that it is roast beef, the age and stock of the cow, exactly how long it has been cooked and which type
of tree gave the wood for the fire, but it might as well be a pebble for all the flavour means to him. He can analyse it, but he no longer
feels
it.

‘But what is to be expected of a man five hundred years old? They say he remembers the days when there was an overground city up on the mountainside, and no Caverna, just a set of caves
and cellars where the city stored its luxuries. He has outlived that city, seen it fall into ruin beneath the ravages of war and weather, while its citizens gradually retreated beneath the earth
and dug downwards.