A Drop of Madness
When Neverfell came round, she found that she was shivering. She was lying on something hard and flat, and for some reason she seemed to be wet. Her hair was plastered to her face, and chill dribbles had run in at the collar of her pyjamas.
The memory of her kidnap returned to her, like an army of soldiers marching out of mist. The glisserblinds, the pursuit through the dark, chaotic sounds around her, being gripped round her middle and plummeting through a choking blackness that smelt like ash . . . Gingerly she opened her eyes a crack, and peered out between the damp strands of her hair.
She appeared to be lying on a large table, against the wall of a reasonably sizeable cavern. The ceiling was low and strung with hooks, from which hung a veritable forest of tools, flasks, baskets and sacks, so that her view of the far wall was obstructed. From one hook hung an armoured suit made up of tiny diamond-shaped scales, and further off she could just make out the hanging swell of a tattered hammock of thick wool and sacking. On another table not far away was what looked like a set of alchemist’s equipment, a huddle of bulge-bellied glass flasks and flimsy scales loaded with gold and scarlet powders.
From the other side of the room Neverfell could hear faint squeaks and creaks. Her teeth were chattering, but her curiosity was stronger than anything else. As quietly as she could, she lowered herself down from the table, and crept slowly in the direction of the sounds, taking care not to nudge the hanging tools and sacks or put too much weight on her injured ankle.
Just ahead, she could see a lantern resting on the ground. Somebody was standing next to it, the upper half of his body concealed behind a rack of hanging grain sacks and cooking pots. She could just make out gloved hands unfastening the clasps on a metal suit, prising the armour apart and letting it fall to the floor, to reveal surprisingly drab, brown, work-a-day clothes underneath. Then something large and round was lowered to the ground where it rang like a gong, rolled a little and glared up at her with two droplet-spattered goggles.
She recognized it in an instant from description. It was the Kleptomancer’s helmet.
His hands, now ungloved, were pulling something out of a pocket with a tremulous eagerness. It was a letter, sealed with a strange and elaborate design in purple wax. The figure crouched, holding the letter close to the lantern, and Neverfell saw the Kleptomancer properly for the first time.
She had been braced for a headless man. She would not have been surprised by searing eyes, aquiline mockery or twitching insanity. In fact, she had been ready for anything except ordinariness.
The face upward-lit by the measly trap was wide-jawed and clean-shaven, with a high forehead so that the eyes, nose and mouth seemed crowded in the lower part of it. His eyes were small, his nose short and blunt, his hair nut-brown and close-cropped. It was not a face that would stand out from a crowd. Indeed, given his height, most crowds would have swallowed him altogether.
His expression was perfectly blank. Perhaps there was something a little too even about the central line of his mouth. There were no rises, falls, curls and valleys, just a perfectly straight line. It was not cruel or hard, but level as the surface of still water.
The only remarkable feature was his eyes, the irises of which were black and lightless. As she watched, Neverfell saw him squint at the letter, and rub impatiently at his eyes with the heel of his hand.
The dead black irises had to mean that he had been taking Nocteric to help him see in the dark. Neverfell had never used it, but knew a little about it. They said that one of the common after-effects was snow-freckle, a symptom that flecked your eyes with white and left you with half-blind, mottled sight for an hour or so. If she was right, the Kleptomancer was squinting because his eyes were starting to freckle. Perhaps this could work in her favour.
Stealthily she approached, taking pains to stay outside the lantern’s halo of light. As she watched, he pulled out a pair of tinted spectacles with triangular lenses and tried peering through them at the letter, then gave a short hiss of annoyance. Slapping his letter down on the floor, he ventured uncertainly into the darkness, one arm raised to protect his head from the hanging tools. Ducking to peer, Neverfell could just about see him rummaging in a distant bag, pulling out several pairs of curious-looking goggles.
Neverfell had planned to wait until the Kleptomancer’s sight had thickened further before making her move, but the sight of the unattended letter was too much for her. Holding her breath, she slipped forward as quietly as possible, snatched up the letter and limped stealthily back into the shadows.
A few seconds later she heard a crash. Then there came the sound of hurried, blundering steps and a cacophony of jangling tools as if someone were pushing through them at speed.
Neverfell pulled herself up into the hammock in the nick of time, and hung silently in its belly as the Kleptomancer pushed past, in the direction of the table where he had left her. A moment later, she heard his voice for the first time.
‘Where are you?’ It was a shout, but a strangely passionless one, and his voice had a slight roughness, as if it had gathered fluff through lack of use. ‘I know you have my letter.’
She had to wait. If she could only wait, his sight would dim further, and she would have a chance of making her escape.
The light where she lay was very poor, but with difficulty she could just make out the words written on the front.
To be opened after the successful completion of Operation M331.
Stealthily she broke the seal, and peered at the contents until her eyes ached:
Immediately imbibe blend 4ZZ to erase days 17670 to 17691 and blend 8HH to revive day 35839. Discover all you can from item. Observe rupture for two days. Once all information gleaned, return item exactly as found. Next letter will arrive in three days’ time.
Elsewhere in the room, she could still hear the Kleptomancer crashing around, looking for her. As she listened, however, the attempts seemed to grow more sluggish and desultory. Perhaps he was giving up. Perhaps the snow-freckle was setting in. Perhaps this was her chance to try to escape.
Very gingerly, she let herself down from her hammock, and began edging along the wall, looking for a way out. After a short while she was rewarded by the sight of two double doors. From behind them issued a steady, soulless roar. A taut, thick wire entered the room through the crack where the doors met, and slanted down to tether to an iron ring fixed to the floor. The floor around it was glossy with puddles.
Now or never. She pulled the doors open. The roar became deafening, and a fine spray frosted the skin of Neverfell’s face. Her heart plummeted. She was staring at a solid wall of mashing, white water, a waterfall that could demolish her as easily as a hippopotamus stepping on an ant. There was no escape that way.
She closed the doors again and spun round, only to find that the Kleptomancer had emerged from the hanging clutter behind her. Perhaps he had heard the waterfall’s roar suddenly grow louder as she opened the door.
‘Give me my letter.’ His voice matched the steady line of his mouth, level as still water. Still water wasn’t cruel, and wasn’t kind. It didn’t care whether you swam or drowned.
‘These are orders, aren’t they?’ Neverfell tried to snatch back her wits and courage. ‘Somebody’s giving you orders! Somebody sent you to murder me with snakes – or steal me – or kidnap me! Tell me what’s going on or . . . or I’ll eat the letter!’
The Kleptomancer took a step forward, and Neverfell stuffed the letter into her mouth.
‘’Et back!’ she shouted, somewhat unclearly. ‘I’ll shtart chewin’!’ There was a pause, and then to her enormous relief he receded a few steps. Slowly, heart pounding, Neverfell prised the now slightly damp letter out of her mouth. The thief’s face was still as blank as stone, and Neverfell’s world lurched as she suddenly realized how much danger she was in. She had seen the true and secret face of the Kleptomancer. How could he afford to let her live to speak of it?
Then, all at once, one of the strange phrases in the letter leaped to her mind and began to make sense.
‘Return item exactly as found. The letter says return item exactly as found! The item’s me, isn’t it? You have to return me as found! So, if you hurt me, you’ll get into trouble with your master!’ She dodged a sudden snatch by the Kleptomancer, and darted away at a high-speed lollop. Yes, his aim was now clearly suffering.
‘I’m not trying to hurt you!’ he shouted after her. ‘I just saved your life! Now stop all this . . . running!’
Glancing back at the thief, Neverfell could see him standing in the lantern light, his expression still blank as new slate, one hand rubbing, bemused, at the back of his neck. For the first time it occurred to Neverfell that perhaps he did not know what to do with stolen goods that did not stay where he put them, but instead screamed, ran around and threatened to eat his correspondence. Perhaps he did not really know what to do with people at all.
‘You put glisserblinds through my keyhole!’ she squeaked. ‘What kind of saving is that?’
‘That was the assassin, not me. He was about to kill you – until I stole you.’
Now that Neverfell thought about it, she did remember a scuffle just before she had been dragged down the chute, something that might have been a struggle between two people.
‘Prove it!’ she shrilled.
‘Think about it!’ he shouted back. ‘If I wanted you dead, why are you still alive? I have had plenty of chances to kill you.’
He had rather a good point. Neverfell hesitated still, daunted by the Kleptomancer’s chillingly stony countenance, and then her mind cleared and she understood the reason for it. It was not an attempt to snub or intimidate her at all. She had seen that very Face dozens of times, each time linked to the memory of quiet but busy brooms, bowed heads, soft and attentive treads, hands held out for coins . . .
For once, Neverfell managed to bite back an exclamation of surprise. The famous Kleptomancer, subject of a hundred paintings and poems, was a drudge. He had been wearing a stonily implacable face because it was one of the very few his caste was allowed.
‘How did you know the assassin was coming for me?’ she asked instead, still wary of approaching.
‘Two days ago you went for a walk through the palace.’ He was scanning the shadow, trying to work out where she was. ‘I was following you. So was he. I saw him. He didn’t see me. I started following him and his monkey instead to see if he had a good plan for reaching you. He did. So . . . I let him go ahead with it. I let him put out the lights, deal with the guards and get everybody out of the way for me.’
‘He nearly killed me!’ squeaked Neverfell. ‘How did you know I would still be alive when you got there?’
The Kleptomancer gave a small shrug. ‘Alive, preferable. Dead . . . easier to carry. And not as loud,’ he added with a hint of real feeling.
Neverfell did not feel reassured. ‘Why did you steal me? Who sent you?’
‘Read me the letter,’ the thief responded levelly. ‘I need to know what it says. Be careful – if you change a word of it I will know. But if you read it truly we can trade questions and answers in turn, and I will tell you everything you want to know. If the letter says what you claim, I won’t have a reason not to.’
Neverfell hesitated. ‘And you give your word that you’re going to return me, then, like the letter says? Without hurting or killing me?’
‘You have my word.’
Neverfell felt unhappy putting her faith in the word of a thief, but she was very much aware that there was only so long she could run around holding his letter at toothpoint.
‘All right, then.’
She read out the letter truthfully, and the Kleptomancer listened intently, silently mouthing the numbers under his breath. Then he turned and felt his way to a corner of the room where he unlocked a strongbox that proved to be full of tiny vials. He ran his finger along the rows, evidently counting under his breath, and pulled out two vials, perhaps the ‘blends’ the letter had told him to ‘imbibe’ immediately.
He uncorked them, and Neverfell saw the liquid within stirring in a stealthy, smoky fashion that could only mean they were True Wines. One after the other he drank them down.
She remembered the strange wording of the letter. One blend to erase some days, another blend to revive a day . . . For whatever mysterious reason, the Kleptomancer was adjusting his own memory, suppressing some recollections and reviving others in a peculiarly orderly way.
For a few seconds the Kleptomancer stared into empty space, blinking slowly, and the sinuous smell of the Wine gently filled the room.
‘Hmm,’ he said at last. ‘Interesting.’ He slid down the wall and settled on to his haunches, staring into nothingness and clicking his thumbnail against the vials.
‘You have to answer my questions now – you promised!’ Neverfell dared to venture to the very edge of the circle of lantern light. ‘Who are you working for? Who wrote that letter?’
‘Mmm. The letter.’ Peering forward, Neverfell thought she actually could see speckles of white on the thief’s eyes. ‘I wrote it. I do not remember when or why, but I know I had my reasons. I sent myself to steal you. I issue my orders.’
‘What?’
All her life, Neverfell had suffered the dull, embarrassed ache of the knowledge that she was always the maddest person in the room. Funnily enough, the realization that this was probably no longer the case did not make her feel better at all.
‘You asked me earlier why I stole you. Until I drank the Wine just now, I thought I did so to meet the Grand Steward’s challenge, but it turns out I didn’t. That was just what I wanted me to think for the moment, so I would act as if it were the real reason.’
‘The challenge?’ Neverfell desperately scrabbled for understanding. ‘But . . . but I’m not a cameleopard!’
‘No.’ The Kleptomancer did not smile, though for a moment he sounded as if he might be thinking about it. ‘But you are arguably the Latest and Greatest of the Grand Steward’s curiosities. So now everybody will think that’s why I stole you.’
‘But it wasn’t?’
‘No. I made myself forget the real reason. The Wine has helped me remember it again. I stole you, because I need to work out what you’re for.’
‘What I’m for?’ Somehow everybody always seemed to end up talking about her as if she were an object.
‘Yes.’ He was studying her with his head on one side, and something about his body language reminded her of her own concentration when examining a new clock. Neverfell was suddenly afraid he might take her apart to find out how she worked. ‘Things are on the move in Caverna. Big things. Strange things that don’t seem to be connected to one another, but must be. I keep following threads of oddity, and many of them lead back to . . . you. Somebody is playing a hand and you are one of their most important cards. Somebody has been manoeuvring you into position. And I want to know why.
‘My turn to ask a question. Why did you knock over the Ganderblack Wine at the banquet? Did you know it would interfere with my plans, or were you just trying to attract the Grand Steward’s attention?’
‘No! Neither! Oh, peat and mortar!’ Neverfell wondered if she would spend her whole life with those questions at her heels like hounds. ‘It wasn’t a plan, and it wasn’t orders! I didn’t think about it, I just did it! I just do things! Doesn’t anybody else just do things?’
‘No.’
‘Well . . . I do. I don’t have a big plan, and nobody tells me anything in case it marks my face. If you wanted to find things out, I’m afraid you’ve kidnapped the wrong person.’
‘I think not.’
‘What do you mean?’
There was a silence, and glancing across at the thief Neverfell saw him with his head resting back against the wall, his speckled eyes closed. For a moment she thought he had gone to sleep.
‘Have you ever seen an anthill?’ he said at last. ‘A machine of tiny marchers. Too much motion, you cannot make out the aims in it. But take something away from that anthill – a stone, a leaf, a dead caterpillar – and the ants scurry. You see which ones you have sabotaged, which ones are disturbed and scuttling to prop something in its place.
‘That is what I do. That is kleptomancy. Divination by theft. Find something that is important, something on which you suspect many plans rely, and remove it. Then sit and watch. That’s why stealing you will help, even if you know nothing. Right now, the people who want to use you and the people who want you dead will be in a race to find you before the other does. People in a hurry often show their hand by mistake.’
It was madness, and yet it made a certain sense to Neverfell, or at least the part of her that liked to take things apart to see how they worked, how they fitted together.
‘My turn to ask a question,’ continued the thief. ‘Why was an assassin after you?’
‘I don’t really know.’ Neverfell shepherded her herd of frightened, woolly suspicions. ‘I think it’s something to do with my past. I turned up in a vat of curds when I was five with no memories. We think perhaps I have buried memories, something somebody doesn’t want me to remember.’ Somehow she found herself giving a thumbnail sketch of her early life and her dim, retrieved memories, even her attacks of madness and panic. ‘It’s not the first time somebody has tried to kill me, anyway. When I was in an Enquiry hanging cage, it dropped into the water and would have drowned me if the guards hadn’t come back.’
‘And how did you survive the glisserblinds in your room?’
‘What? Oh. I . . . wasn’t sleeping in my bed. I was up in the canopy . . . I often can’t sleep . . . it looked comfortable . . .’ She trailed off, made uneasy by the way he was staring at her. ‘I just . . . do things,’ she repeated. ‘It’s the way I am. A bit mad.’ Though not as mad as some, she thought, and was relieved that her companion was too mottle-sighted to read her mind in her face. ‘My turn. Why are you doing all this? Why are you hiding behind waterfalls, and poking holes in your memories, and leaving yourself notes and . . .’
. . . and being crazy, she mentally finished the sentence.
‘When I was ten,’ answered the thief, ‘I talked to a Cartographer for six minutes. And then I forgot about my family and ran off with a big coil of string and some chalk, to live in the unmarked tunnels, eating rats and half dead with yellow-eye and scrambler’s knee. I learned how to squeak as the bats do to sense the shape of the tunnels, and gulped down Paprickle until my ears were big as saucers.’
‘What was it like?’ Neverfell’s question was out of turn, but she could not help herself.
‘Cartography?’ The Kleptomancer smiled. It was just a drudge smile, a ‘thank you, miss, happy to serve’ smile, but she could sense another smile behind it. With a pang of empathy, Neverfell guessed that he had little chance to speak so freely. If there was anything she understood, it was loneliness and the desire to talk. ‘Yes. I will tell you if you like. You must understand one thing first. Ordinary maps cannot work in Caverna, and that is not just because the city is not flat. Directions do not always work as they should. Compasses spin uncontrollably or shiver into fragments. I know a few places – not many, but they exist – from which you can climb a ladder for half an hour and end up where you started. Things link impossibly, turn themselves inside out, double back.
‘It draws you in. You twist your mind into new shapes. You start to understand Caverna . . . and you fall in love with her. Imagine the most beautiful woman in the world, but with tunnels as her long, tangled, snake-like hair. Her skin is dappled in trap-lantern gold and velvety black, like a tropical frog. Her eyes are cavern lagoons, bottomless and full of hunger. When she smiles, she has diamonds and sapphires for teeth, thousands of them, needle-thin.’
‘But that sounds like a monster!’
‘She is. Caverna is terrifying. This is love, not liking. You fear her, but she is all you can think about. That is what it means to be a Cartographer. That was my life for fifteen years.
‘And then one day I left it all behind me. You see, I had been exploring the tunnels of my own mind, and my greatest idea had come to me.’
‘What was it?’ Neverfell was fascinated.
‘I do not know,’ the Kleptomancer answered, perfectly phlegmatically. ‘But I am sure I will let myself know when the time is right. You see, anybody who chases a plan, however secretively and indirectly, gives themselves away. After a while you can predict them, work out what they want. So I decided the only way to avoid this was not to know what the plan was, or even the parts of the plan, until I needed them. Nobody could predict me, because I could not predict myself. Nobody could work out what I wanted, because I did not know what I wanted.
‘The whole thing needed planning. Years of careful planning. So I had to be sane. I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.’
There was an uncomfortable pause, during which Neverfell tried in vain to bite her tongue into silence.
‘I don’t want to be rude, but . . . has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re actually still mad? That you’ve always been mad? That perhaps you’re the maddest person in the city?’
‘Yes,’ said the Kleptomancer. ‘But I don’t think so.’ He contemplated Neverfell for a few moments through his freckling eyes. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re sane? That you’ve always been sane? That perhaps you’re the sanest person in the city?’
‘I hope not,’ whispered Neverfell. ‘Because, if I’m sane, then there’s something wrong with Caverna, something horrible and sick, and nobody else has noticed. If I’m sane, then we shouldn’t be sitting around talking – we should all be clawing our way out as fast as we can.’
‘Oh, I don’t think she’d like that,’ the Kleptomancer remarked, with a hint of affection in his voice. ‘She needs us. Without us, there is no her, after all. She is the city, not the tunnels, and so she does everything she can to keep us down here. Sometimes I even wonder whether it is only possible to create True Delicacies here because she gives them their power, as a bribe to stop us leaving. When the Grand Steward declared that nobody was allowed to enter or leave the city, I believe he became her chosen beloved. I will tell you something else, though I cannot prove it. The city grows, and not just through the effort of pick and shovel. She has been stretching, spreading and contorting to make room for us all, and I think that is why geography no longer makes sense.’
The thief’s tone was different when he spoke of Caverna, and Neverfell felt as if she had glimpsed something shadowy and vast under the still water.
‘You still sound like a Cartographer,’ she thought aloud.
‘I am no longer one of them,’ answered the Kleptomancer, and in his tone there was a strange mixture of pride, resolution and loss. ‘I no longer draw up maps – and maps are a Cartographer’s love letters to Caverna, his way of serving and worshipping her. She is in my thoughts all the time, but I am no longer her slave.’
‘Then you still . . . love her?’ asked Neverfell, struggling with the notion.
‘More than ever,’ her companion answered softly.
It occurred to Neverfell that, just in case her sanity was at risk, she had better stop him talking about geography.
‘You said there were big things happening in Caverna, and trails leading back to me. What did you mean?’
‘There are strands,’ answered the Kleptomancer, ‘and I cannot yet see the pattern they form. There has been a string of murders in the Undercity. Drudges killing their nearest and dearest without warning, their parent, child, husband, wife, for no sane reason.
‘Alliances at Court are shifting. The Enquiry is favoured by Right-Eye, and so they have been building their power. But there is a league quietly forming against them, a large and loose alliance with no obvious leader.
‘A food taster dies, and three days later there you are at the banquet for everybody to see, just in time to take her place.
‘And . . . the Cartographers are restless. Usually they are just bothered by the Undiscovered Passage, but now a lot of them believe that Caverna herself is getting ready to grow or shift again, which means that everything is about to change. These are the threads I am following for now, though I cannot have anybody knowing that.’
‘But . . .’ Neverfell bit her own tongue, but could not stop the words escaping. ‘But if it’s so secret, why did you just tell me about it all?’
‘That will not be a problem,’ came the response. ‘I am to return you exactly as I found you . . . which means I will be erasing your memories of the last three hours as soon as I have some more True Wine.’