A Loss of Face
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.
‘Your Excellency,’ Childersin cut in quickly, ‘it would be possible to blend a Wine tailored to remove only this child’s memories of Drudgery, but it would take time – weeks, in fact. We could tackle the matter more clumsily and give her a Wine guaranteed to erase her memories of a specific time period, but then we run a high risk of wiping her recollection of the Kleptomancer. After all, we do not know the precise time that she left her kidnapper’s lair. If I may make a suggestion, fixing her features may be a task for a Facesmith.’
Right-Eye was suddenly bitterly weary of Childersin’s suave explanations. ‘You have seven hours to fix this child’s face, by whatever means you see fit. At nineteen o’clock several grand confections and desserts will reach perfection, and will be brought to me for a grand tasting. If the girl’s face is not mended by that time . . .’ The unspoken end of his threat hung in the air like freezing fog.
As the child Neverfell was led from the room, Right-Eye felt as though the wave of life had gone out again, leaving him again a beach of dead gems.
It was a long time since he had felt so awake. The girl’s smile of unfeigned admiration and joy had thrown into shadow centuries of carefully tailored compliments and flattering portraits. Perhaps, whenever things grow painfully dull, I could do something to summon that look in her face again. Little concessions for the drudges, maybe? A package of extra food now and then? Or safety ropes for the younger climbers?
While he was considering this, Enquirer Treble arrived, her Face a mixture of self-importance, deference and bulldog watchfulness, to report on the latest findings in the Kleptomancer case.
‘My people have located the lair described by the girl,’ she explained. ‘It was abandoned.’ Neither Treble nor the Grand Steward pretended surprise at the master thief’s escape. ‘At least now we may have some insight into the workings of his mind . . . providing Neverfell’s story is true.’ Like everybody else at Court, the Enquiry had originally assumed that Neverfell had been stolen in response to the Grand Steward’s challenge. They were still getting to grips with the notion of ‘divination by theft’.
‘Does her account hold water?’
‘So far. It certainly explains what we found in and around the tasters’ quarters. Aside from the dead guards, there was the corpse by the ember chute. A lean man with Nocteric-stained eyes and a large crossbow bolt through his chest – perhaps the glisserblind assassin she describes. He has been identified as Tybalt Prane, otherwise known in certain circles as . . . the Zookeeper.’
‘A killer for hire,’ muttered Right-Eye, ‘and whoever paid him still lives. Somebody wants that girl dead. And I cannot permit her to die, not while she is our best chance of identifying the Kleptomancer. No, nobody can be allowed to end her life yet, not even myself. Treble, do you remember our previous conversations on the subject of my . . . counterpart?’
‘Yes, Your Excellency.’
Although it would be an overstatement to say that Right-Eye liked Treble, he did not completely dislike her. In her he saw some of his own impatience with failure, and the gleaming rails of a ruthless and well-ordered mind. Even her brute ambition had something healthy and direct about it. Her standing at Court was always far lower when Left-Eye was in control.
‘My other self is . . . unpredictable.’ The Grand Steward unhooked a pouch from his belt, and passed it to the Enquirer. The contents were harmless, but its scent so violently invigorating that it would wake all but the dead. ‘If there should come an emergency – should my counterpart make a decision in which you believe I would wish to be involved – throw the pouch to the floor and I will wake. For example, should he decide on impulse to execute the child Neverfell, whom I have very good reasons for keeping alive, I should be woken. You understand?’
‘Perfectly, Your Excellency,’ answered Treble, dropping a low bow. She did not dare to look up at the slack and sleeping left half of her master, turned away and obscured by shadow. She had the uncanny feeling it might be listening, with inscrutable but mischievous intent.
Neverfell was tired, so very tired. Waiting in her room to learn of her fate, her mind kept dropping away into sleep for numb instants no longer than a blink. Next moment her thoughts would jar her awake again, thrashing and crashing and clattering like a monstrous waterwheel, turning and turning without end or purpose. She jerked and stared and barely knew where she was, dream pieces floating like iceberg shards across her half-waking mind.
Neverfell had pushed through to the other side of ordinary tiredness, and now she was too tired to fall asleep properly. She was out of clock, maybe further out of clock than she had ever been before. She could feel her mind pulling loose like knitting, the neat stitches of her artificial days unravelling to become one mangled thread.
It was almost a relief when at last she received a knock on the door and was told that Zouelle Childersin was waiting in the parlour to speak to her.
When Neverfell entered, Zouelle rose immediately and put her arms round her in a big-sister hug. The kindness of the gesture was too much. Neverfell wanted to cry, but everything that had happened made a big awkward lump in her throat, and all that came out was small frog-like noises. Then, when she recovered her voice, she found herself gabbling out the whole tale of the attempted glisserblind murder, the kidnap by the Kleptomancer and her adventures in the Undercity. Zouelle listened all the while, wearing the warm and comforting Face 334, A Placid Glow in a Homely Hearth.
‘And now my face is spoilt, Zouelle!’ Neverfell finished. ‘And if nobody mends it the Grand Steward will execute us all! I don’t know what to do! I don’t want them to take away my memories—’
‘Shhh.’ Zouelle squeezed her hand. ‘Now, listen to me. Nobody’s going to take your memories away. You’re going to be taught a bit of face control, that’s all, just to smooth out the disillusionment. Uncle Maxim has sent me to take you to a Facesmith, and I’ve persuaded him to let me choose which one.
‘Get ready as fast as you can, Neverfell. We’re going to see Madame Appeline.’
It was half past thirteen. In the audience chamber a silence born of tension settled. The Grand Steward eased back in his great throne, his right eye turning this way and that, making a last-minute inspection of the hall. Then, slowly, almost reluctantly, his right eyelid drooped and closed.
The instant lid touched lid, his left eye sprang open. The servants were too well-trained to flinch, but many of them felt a cold clutch at their heart every time they witnessed the Grand Steward changing his internal guard. He moved his left shoulder slightly, easing out stiffness from twelve and a half hours of inaction, then stretched his left arm and flexed his left fingers.
All around him, the chamber was now in motion. Advisors whom Right-Eye valued were retreating, many carrying scrolls bearing newly stamped orders. Passing them in the doorway were Left-Eye’s favoured attendants, those who had dedicated long decades to interpreting his tiny gestures, and those whom he had chosen for his own inscrutable, peculiar reasons.
Right-Eye had left his thoughts and conclusions neatly ordered at the front of his mind, ready for his alter ego, like so many carefully written pages. As usual, Left-Eye tore through them like a breeze, scattering and discarding most as irrelevant, and chasing a few that interested him.
The ‘rehearsals’ did not bother him as they had his counterpart. Nothing interested him but the new information about the Kleptomancer.
Left-Eye had an uncanny gift for guessing at the secret schemes of others. He noticed a thousand little signs and self-betrayals and saw the pattern behind them, like a fortune teller reading shapes in tea leaves.
But, if the girl was to be believed, this Kleptomancer had made an art of confusing such tea-leaf reading. He created false patterns, scattered misleading clues. He deceived himself in order to deceive others. How could you detect the opposite of a pattern? Left-Eye’s mind flinched from the idea, but then began compulsively trying to turn itself inside out in an attempt to understand the Kleptomancer.
The Kleptomancer, the Kleptomancer. Like a needle stitching over and over in the same place, Left-Eye’s mind struggled with the problem, knotting and tangling itself as it went.
In another cavern-room, a note sat snugly in a hidden pocket. It had already been read and reread many times.
My dearest comrade,
I hate repeating myself, and this is the last time I shall do so. You will oblige me by instantly ceasing all attempts against the life of young Neverfell. Please do not bore me with denials or explanations. Simply desist. You are quite aware of the value I place on that young person, and the plans that her murder would jeopardize. Rest assured, the memories of her early life are buried too deep to surface and threaten you.
We have much to discuss. An opportunity has arisen that we cannot afford to waste, one that will open the door for all our plans. I will need your help, however, if we are to take advantage of it. Delay is now a luxury we cannot afford. An investigation has been launched into certain curious murders in Drudgery, and it would be unfortunate if it were given time to discover anything important.
Regards,
Your respectful friend
It was dangerous to think about Caverna, but he did so anyway, lying on the rocky ledge that tonight served him as a bed, with his hands clasped behind his head. As he tried to corral all the information he had gathered, he almost imagined that he could see Caverna’s needle-toothed smile hanging in the darkness.
‘What are you preparing for, my love?’ he asked aloud. ‘What is it that you know? Something is about to happen. You are excited. I can tell.’
His goggled suit sat beside him like a sentry, and he glanced at it now and then to remind himself who he was. Trying to understand Caverna was an invitation to madness, and he needed all his strength to resist it. Again and again he felt Cartographic thoughts breaking against his mind like waves, trying to find weaknesses in his defences and seep inside.
For three hours he had been staring at the opposite wall of the cavern in which he lay. The change in its appearance had been very slow, so slow that a normal man would have missed it, but he was sure that the central crack had widened, the ceiling risen and some of the stalactites reduced in size, like claws retracted into a cat’s paw.
The Cartographers were right. Caverna was readying herself to move, to grow.
Then map me, came the relentless voice in his head. Draw up the changes in all their glory. Worship me.
No, my love, he answered silently. I will find out what you are doing without scattering my wits on the ground for you to trample. I will not bow to you.