Face Off
Of course the raiders didn’t find Madame Appeline. How stupid of me. They didn’t know she had a secret passage. She could have slipped through the hidden door, waited until they’d finished shouting and looting, then come back.
It was strange, but, staring down the corridor to the tiny, almost imperceptible glimmer of light, Neverfell felt afraid in a way that she had not while facing down Maxim Childersin, or testifying before the Hall of the Gentles. She still felt a sense of connection to Madame Appeline, of linked destiny. Before it had seemed like a bright rope she could cling to, or perhaps even climb to reach somewhere she belonged. Now she knew of the Facesmith’s betrayal the sense of connection was haunted, twisted, a black chain leading away from her down the shadowy corridor ahead.
It almost seemed to be pulling at her, reeling her in. She was just telling herself that there was no reason to venture in alone, that she could wait there on lookout until reinforcements came, when another thought hit her like a brick.
Zouelle.
If Madame Appeline was down there in the darkness, the Facesmith would not wish to dare the streets where she might meet prowling mobs sent by her rivals. Instead, sooner or later, she would flee to her close and secret ally, Maxim Childersin. She would make haste down the secret passageway to the Morning Room, and there she would find a girl she despised. A girl she could blame for her own denunciation before the Hall of the Gentles. Zouelle Childersin, alone, undefended and unsuspecting.
Perhaps she had already had that idea. She could be heading for the secret room and the passage beyond at this very moment . . .
Neverfell wiped her perspiring palms on her clothes, and stepped forward into the corridor. Running off to find the other servants would waste valuable time and leave the area unguarded. The black chain of inevitability hauled her in, step after step.
As she advanced, the few surviving traps glimmered into life and showed her scenes of devastation. The table in the reception room was overturned, the floor crunchy with broken crockery. Neverfell stooped for a trap-lantern and took it with her.
The sight of the once beautiful grove clutched at her heart. Nearly all the millennia-old crystal-trees had been shattered, leaving nothing but kaleidoscopic stumps like broken tusks, and glistening shards scattering the moss carpet. She stooped and picked up one long shard. It was cloudy cream and rose in colouration, streaked like an expensive sweet. It was narrow, sharp and cold in her hand. Neverfell did not know if it made her feel more safe or less.
At one point, she passed yet another broken door, and glimpsed through it into one of Madame Appeline’s treasured galleries, half the alabaster masks still hovering sublime in their lines, the others lying on the ground like so many skittles.
She passed on, and did not notice the furthest of the pale faces let out the breath it had been holding, and slip silently from the line.
It was difficult to find the stairway, so spidery-fine was its outline, but at last her lanternlight gleamed upon the ivy-like whorls. Heart in her mouth, Neverfell climbed the spiral stairs, the metal ringing slightly under her feet. Only then did it occur to Neverfell that she was re-enacting her motions from her dream-that-had-not-been a dream, on the day of the betrayal.
She did not hear another set of feet walking carefully through the shattered grove behind her, making sure that they did not crunch on the fragments of crystal.
As she reached the top, all around her a faint glow started to bloom. She stepped forward on to the gallery, which proved to be a long, metal balcony fixed to the wall, just six feet or so below the roof of the cavern. Clustering on the gallery, the ceiling and the upper parts of the wall were the largest trap-lanterns that Neverfell had ever seen. One of them was about nine feet across, its crusty skin glowing just enough for her to make out the pale rings and honey-coloured blotches. No wonder the false sky of the grove had blazed so brightly, and no wonder it had taken the Putty Girls so much puff to keep them shining.
In her dream, a monkey had led her to the hidden door. Now it was the frail will-o’-the-wisp of reawakening memory that drew her on. Very carefully she edged round the greatest of the traps. It stirred slightly, its great jaws opening like a beast hunting in its dreams, then closing again. She drew her fingertips down the smooth tiles of the wall until they found and tugged at the hidden catch. A door swung open away from her.
The last time I entered this room I went mad. Zouelle had to hold me down.
She tightened her grip on the lantern and stepped into the room.
It was a small room, and there were hundreds of faces in it. Some were moulded in clay or cast in plaster, but most were drawings, rapid but detailed sketches in coloured pastels or charcoal. They were all images of the same woman, Neverfell could see that at a glance, and with a shock of familiarity she recognized again and again expressions from the Tragedy Range.
The woman was not Madame Appeline. Her skin was dappled and her hair long and red. Her eyes were large and grey-green. Her features were gaunt, agonized and infinitely expressive. The pictures seemed to be arranged in some kind of sequence. In the pictures to the left of the door the woman was merely thin, but as Neverfell’s gaze darted frantically through the images around the room, she could see her growing frailer and more haggard. The woman was dying before her eyes. Finally, on the right hand side of the door was what looked like a death mask, the cheeks fallen in, the mouth expressionless at last.
There was another small door set in the opposite wall, but Neverfell scarcely noticed it, because her gaze was drawn to the mural immediately above it. It was a sketch in pastel and tempura, drawn directly on to the plaster of the wall itself. It showed a full-length image of the woman, so that the manacles round her legs were visible. A red-haired child was being wrested from her arms. The faces of both woman and child were full of utter anguish, and had been sketched in the most meticulous detail.
On the floor at Neverfell’s feet were the remains of a clay mask that had been smashed to pieces. To judge by the fragments, it had shown the face of a child, her expression contorted by grief and rage so terrible that one expected to hear it screaming. When she looked at it, Neverfell’s hands and arms throbbed with remembered bruises.
The room seemed to be shuddering, and Neverfell realized that her lantern-hand was shaking. There was a feather-faint noise behind her, and she spun round.
There was one Madame Appeline face in the room after all. It was between her and the door to the gallery, and it was not a mask.
Neverfell flung herself backwards as Madame Appeline’s arm slashed down, and the bodkin aimed at her face missed by inches.
‘You’re not my mother.’ Neverfell could hardly find the breath for words. ‘She was.’ She gestured wildly with her shard at the dozens of images of the red-haired woman. ‘And you killed her.’
‘She was ill when she came here.’ Madame Appeline’s heart-shaped face wore one of the tender Faces from the Tragedy Range, but now that Neverfell had seen the original she knew it for the cruel mockery it was. ‘All I did was let her die.’
‘Why?’ erupted Neverfell. ‘Just so you could draw her expressions, and use them as Faces?’
‘Just? Did you say just? Ebbing away before my sketchbook was the most useful thing she ever did. Before my Tragedy Range, Faces were varnish. I made them into true art.’
Something inside Neverfell seemed to crack with these words. She gave a croak of pure anguish and rage, and lunged at Madame Appeline with her shard of crystal tree. But at the last moment the muscles of her arm seemed to weaken. Although the flesh and bone before her belonged to a cruel and calculating enemy, the expression it wore came from the red-haired woman in the pictures, from Neverfell’s own mother. It was a stolen Face, but Neverfell could not strike at it, and Madame Appeline knew it.
‘You,’ hissed the Facesmith. Her tone was poison. ‘I never asked for you.
‘I had the perfect bargaining position. Maxim Childersin wanted to build a secret shaft to the surface, one that he could reach through the Twister behind his townhouse. So he needed the help of somebody in the Doldrums. My tunnels were ideally placed, so he approached me.
‘I told him my price. I wanted an outsider with a particularly expressive face, one I could study in extreme situations of my choosing. Preferably with green eyes, so that her Faces would suit me well. One outsider.
‘And his agents in the overground found me the perfect specimen. They told her of the oils in Caverna that could cure her illness, and she paid them all she had to smuggle her into the city. But she would not leave her child behind. And when she was lowered down the shaft, there you were, in her arms.’
‘You hate me.’ Neverfell could not understand the icy vitriol in the Facesmith’s voice.
‘I have always hated you. The first moment I saw you, there was something in your face . . . I found uses for you, of course. Your mother managed her finest Faces when you were pulled from her arms, but your face – no child should have looked so angry, so implacable. You made my blood run cold.’
Half-forgotten fragments of memory were whirling into place. The scene from Neverfell’s Wine vision came back to her, now with new clarity.
The same thing, every day. The half an hour in her mother’s arms so warm, so short. Then the dry click of the clock striking naught, and the strong hands dragging her away. Screaming and screaming, losing her grip on the beloved hand one more time and being thrown into the cupboard room . . .
‘Your blood has always been cold,’ said Neverfell, her voice shaking.
‘I have sensibilities!’ snapped Madame Appeline. ‘You bruised them, shattered them. After your mother died, your face became a thorn in me. So Childersin gave me Wine to make you forget everything. I gave you the finest luxuries so as to sketch your reactions, and I bought you a dozen dresses the better to set off your expressions, but all the time I sensed that your vengeful self was just buried. Waiting for its chance. And then one day you vanished from my tunnels. Disappeared completely. That infernal Kleptomancer!’
Another two pieces of the puzzle. It was the Kleptomancer, then, who had stolen Neverfell at the age of five, and left her on some long-forgotten whim in Grandible’s tunnels. And it was Madame Appeline who had offered the reward for the master thief’s capture, desperate to reclaim the child who knew too much.
‘I never forgot you,’ continued the Facesmith. ‘That a child’s face could hold so much rage, so much defiance . . . it did not seem possible. I have created a thousand Faces, and always I feared seeing that one expression of yours pushing through the others. It would be like seeing a ghost.
‘Perhaps you blame me for taking your memories? I left you clean. Purged of all your ghosts. I am the one who has been haunted all my life. Haunted by you.’
The Facesmith made another unexpected lunge, and Neverfell dodged aside, one hand raised to protect her face. The bodkin point traced a painful line across the back of her hand. The dance of stab and dodge had moved the pair of them around each other, so that it was now Neverfell who stood with her back to the door.
‘And then one day I did see you,’ hissed Madame Appeline. ‘Large as life, and in my tunnels. I knew you at once. Maxim promised that you would not live to threaten me, but his assassin failed to drown you. And then when he went to the Enquiry to buy you, he changed his mind and decided to keep you alive. But I knew – knew – that you would only be safe dead. If only the Zookeeper had been worth the fee I paid him!’
‘You stole my mother’s Faces,’ whispered Neverfell. ‘You stole them, and you sold them, and you walked around wearing them, and using them to make people do what you wanted. You used my mother’s Faces on me. And all the time you were her murderess or close enough. All that time you were trying to murder me.’
‘Do not look at me! Not with that Face!’ Madame Appeline was shaking from head to foot, the feathers in her hair quivering like insect antennae. ‘Just as you looked when you were an imp of five. I should have snuffled you out then!’
Madame Appeline made another pounce and slash, and Neverfell again leaped back, the motion carrying her out through the door and on to the gallery. All around, the traps eased into light once more, sensing the frenzied movements and the rush of rapid breaths. Some were blindly gaping, their fangs so fine and pale they looked like fringes of fur.
Madame Appeline struck out with her bodkin again and again like a giant stinging insect. Neverfell dodged, dodged, dodged. All the while the shard was in her hand, and her mother’s tender gaze was before her, pasted on to a murderess’s face.
You’re not my mother
You’re not my mother
You’re not my mother
‘You’re not my mother!’ Neverfell lashed out wildly, scarcely knowing whether she meant to wound or to parry. ‘Take off her Face!’ The shard drew a long oblique line upward, and almost entirely missed. Almost, except for the very, very tip, which just nicked the chin of Madame Appeline’s precious alabaster face, causing a tiny pearl of blood to swell. The Facesmith gave a wail of utter horror, clapped a hand to her chin, and leaped backwards.
It was a leap too far, and in the wrong direction. Directly behind Madame Appeline lay the largest of the traps, monstrous mouth agape. Neverfell had just enough time to see the Facesmith fall sprawling into its maw before its upper jaw descended, the fine teeth meshing like two combs locking together.
An eerie silence fell. In spite of everything, Neverfell’s conscience smote her, and she tried to prise the jaws apart, but in vain. After years fed on grubs, the trap had found prey worth its maw, and it sat there intractable, wearing a grin wider than any the Facesmith had ever designed. There were no signs of life from within.
Neverfell ventured slowly back into the hidden room once more, and stared around her at the hundreds of sketches. They were pictures of pain, but also strength, tenderness, endurance, love.
She was looking at me. The love in all these Faces . . . it was meant for me.
Neverfell took down one of the pictures of her mother, and placed it carefully in her pocket.
The front runners of the drudge army met up with Neverfell just as she was scampering back to her post by Madame Appeline’s broken front door. To her delight, Erstwhile was among them. He was gruff as ever when she nearly squeezed him in two with a hug.
‘It worked,’ he summarized curtly.
It had been, Neverfell now remembered, the part of the plan that had caused the most heated debate. There was simply no way to bring hundreds of drudges to the Doldrums without somebody noticing, even if the Court was in chaos. The plan that was finally concocted was audacious in the extreme. Instead of trying to sneak up from Drudgery, the drudge masses would rise and pretend to attack the palace. Then the drudge army would let itself be ‘put to rout’ and ‘flee’ . . . towards the Doldrums, in just the direction they had wished to go in the first place.
‘They fell for it,’ Erstwhile pronounced with pride. ‘Half the Court – the half that isn’t tearing itself apart right now – is holed up in the palace, hiding. And when we ran away, they thought they’d won. Nobody tried to stop us. They even put up barricades behind us! So now if anybody wants to chase us they got to come through those first.’
‘Did . . .’ Neverfell scarcely wanted to ask the question. ‘Did anyone get hurt?’
Erstwhile looked stony again, then gave her shoulder a short, slightly painful punch. ‘It’s a war, Nev. Everyone knew the odds. And we only lost a couple out of four hundred. Just take us to your precious sky so it’s all worth it.’
Four hundred drudges and their children, all trusting in my plan. Neverfell did not know whether to be staggered that there were so many, or saddened that there were not more. This was not even one-tenth of the population of Drudgery. The others had agreed to rebel, but had not been willing to leave Caverna for the hazards of the unknown overground. I suppose not everybody can bear to give up everything they have ever known, however bad their life is.
The passage beyond the hidden room took a number of twists before coming to a dead halt with a trapdoor set in the roof. When Neverfell pushed this up, she came out under the breakfast table in the Morning Room.
‘Zouelle!’ Neverfell ran to fling her arms round her friend. ‘You’re here! You did it!’
‘Neverfell!’ Zouelle returned the hug. ‘You took so long I thought you’d been caught! My family still haven’t found a way through the hazards I set up in the corridor, but it’s only a matter of time. Let’s hope it’s long enough.’
Drudges of all sizes and ages were pouring out from beneath the breakfast table now, and peering around the room. The white tablecloth, the pristine silver and the crystal dishes only earned a brief glance, however. All eyes were fixed on the ceiling immediately above the table.
Zouelle had unscrewed the large, blue glass hemisphere that had fitted into the ceiling, and left it on the table. In its place could be seen a round hole, some three feet wide, from which a mousey-grey radiance was emitting.
Neverfell clambered unsteadily on the table, and peered up into the hole. The shaft soared up and up, a faint glimmer telling her that the walls were mirrored. It ended at the furthest point in a tiny dull coin of light.
Sky. I can see the sky.
Her spirits took off like a flock of doves, and she almost expected to see them spiral upward towards that dim luminescence in a flurry of white wings. The sense of relief was so intense that she almost collapsed. Only then did she realize that she had been secretly fearing that she had been wrong about everything, and that she might find herself looking up into a nest of trap-lanterns like those above Madame Appeline’s grove.
She looked around at her waiting allies, who all seemed to be holding their breath.
‘It’s the way,’ she said huskily. ‘It’s open. I don’t think the sun’s up yet, but . . . I can just about see the sky. Look! See for yourself !’
Instantly there was a crush of people around Neverfell wanting to crane and peer up the shaft.
‘What’s that smell?’ whispered one of them.
‘Overground.’ Neverfell could feel a smile trying to split her face. ‘Freedom.’
‘Nev – we got to hurry!’ Erstwhile gestured to a machine that three drudges were manoeuvring out of the floor hatch. It looked like a cross between a tripod, a crossbow and a multi-pronged grappling hook. ‘You sure this contraption is going to work?’
‘I don’t know.’ Neverfell stared at it. ‘What is it?’
‘Don’t you remember? The last reprise must still be taking effect.’ Zouelle passed her another vial of Wine. ‘Drink this – that should sort it out.’
Neverfell downed the Wine, and then stared at the device with dawning realization and glee. ‘Oooh! I built this! Hee hee hee hee!’
‘You’re really not reassuring me, Nev,’ growled Erstwhile.
‘No, no, it’ll be fine.’ Neverfell grabbed the contraption and started erecting it on its tripod on the table, directly under the hole. ‘Ah . . . probably. Shaft’s a bit wider than I thought, but, um, the prongs are probably long enough. As long as I get everything symmetrical.’ She checked the inbuilt spirit level, propped one tripod leg with a piece of rag and squinted up the shaft again. ‘Got the rope? Good. Tie it to the thingy. Here we go!’
She pulled a trigger, and six steel strings loosed and thrummed at once. The central bolt was fired upward, unfolding its four prongs as it went, and dragging the rope up with it. Neverfell could hear the shrieks of the prong-tips scraping against the mirrored walls. After the shrieking stopped there was a pause, then a clattering clang. She gave the rope several good yanks, and the grappling device failed to tumble down on her head.
‘I think it’s worked. I think it’s hooked on to the top!’
Erstwhile scrambled on to the table and grabbed the rope. ‘If I fall down, it wasn’t,’ he muttered, and started to climb. After what seemed an age, Neverfell felt a signal of three short tugs on the rope. A rope ladder was tied to the end of the rope, and after a second the unseen Erstwhile started to haul it up.
Three more tugs on the ladder. Erstwhile had made it secure.
‘Everybody – line up and start climbing!’ called out Zouelle. ‘We don’t know how long we have.’
Maxim Childersin was having the most frustrating day he could ever remember in his unnaturally long life.
It had started badly, with the Enquiry’s insistence that the hearing be held considerably before his family’s usual hour of rising, throwing his entire schedule into disorder. He rather suspected that Treble had arranged this on purpose. She seemed to do everything in her power to annoy him, not least by her repeated refusal to be assassinated.
His irritability at missing breakfast and his usual dose of morning light, however, had been eclipsed by everything that had happened since. Try as he might, he still could not quite understand how the hearing had ended in such utter disaster. He felt like a chess-master who, two moves from achieving checkmate, suddenly sees a live kitten dropped on to the middle of the board, scattering pieces.
There must be some way to pull everything back, he told himself as he cleaned his sword and returned it to its scabbard. There must be a way to recover from this. I know there is. Nine times out of ten, defeat is in the mind.
Defeat had certainly been in the minds of a host of his allies that he had encountered fleeing from the Hall of the Gentles. It had required all his charisma and some discreet use of Perfume to rally them. Now at least they seemed to have regained their composure, and it was with a substantial honour guard that he now walked the increasingly dangerous thoroughfares. The coterie of Enquirers who had just tried to arrest him had fared badly.
A change of plan is needed, that is all. A bloodier one, perhaps, but that cannot be helped. We are in too deep to falter. I must rally the rest of my allies, so they do not go to ground, or make cowardly deals to escape justice.
The first people he had to bring into line, of course, were his family. If not, they would doubtless cut each other’s throats in a fit of ambition.
He was pleasantly surprised to see that the mob besieging his townhouse was considerably smaller than he was expecting, with no sign of the formidable Enquiry forces, whom he could only assume were busy dealing with the overall chaos. The besiegers were considerably more surprised to be attacked from behind by a superior force, led by the man they had expected to be skulking inside the townhouse.
By the time the battle was over, the little street no longer looked like an idyll. Plaster was cracked, swing-seats shattered, and bloodstains marred the sugar-sparkle of the housefronts. Childersin stepped over the prone figures that strewed his porch, and gave a coded rap on the door.
His family were overwhelmed to see him and had a hundred things to report. The news that Zouelle was in the house, however, set him striding down the passage towards the laboratories and the Morning Room.
Upon seeing Zouelle’s handiwork in the corridor, he was filled at once with acute pride and intense disappointment. As he had always hoped, his young heir was showing every sign of being a cunning contriver and a remarkable and audacious vintner. However she had ultimately failed to display what he prized above all things – family loyalty.
It was easier to enrage Wines than to calm them. It was easier to create mayhem than to impose order. But Maxim Childersin had been alive for many centuries, and had taught Zouelle everything she knew.
Gently he began to advance a little at a time, performing the calming incantations, leaving his family to chain and roll away the subdued barrels one by one, so that they could follow. He had pressing matters to discuss with his favourite niece.
In a steady stream, the drudges poured out of the floor hatch, and up the rope ladder into the shaft. Time was of the essence, so they could not wait for one to reach the top before the next started climbing. Neverfell’s heart lurched every time the ladder creaked. It was the strongest rope ladder they had been able to find, and even now she wondered if it could cope with so many drudges all climbing it at once.
Not all the climbers were drudges either. Still wearing their neat, serviceable Faces, the palace servants had quietly turned up en masse, taken their place in the queue and disappeared up the ladder. To Neverfell’s colossal relief, Cheesemaster Grandible had also appeared, wincing at the bright light and toting a sack of his tenderest cheeses as gently as if they were infants.
Was she still angry with him? No, somewhere along the line her anger had fallen away, like a forgotten coin tumbling from her pocket. As his grim gaze came to rest on her face, however, she felt her cheeks burn.
‘Yes, I know,’ she said in answer to the unasked, for there was no time for explanations. ‘Yes. My face is spoilt.’
Grandible’s jowl wobbled and creased. Then, for the first time that Neverfell could remember, he changed to a Face she had never seen before, a frown more ferocious and alarming than either of the others.
‘Who the shambles told you that?’ he barked. ‘Spoilt? I’ll spoil them.’ He took hold of her chin and examined her. ‘A bit sadder, maybe. A bit wiser. But nothing rotten. You’re just growing yourself a rind at last. Still a good cheese.’
Neverfell’s eyes misted over, so that she barely saw Cheesemaster Grandible as he vanished up the ladder.
‘Oh no!’ Zouelle had her ear pressed to the door that led back to towards the Childersin household. ‘I can hear my Uncle Maxim! I thought the Enquiry were supposed to arrest him! Why is he here? That block I set up might hold off the others, but it won’t slow him down for long. Everybody climb faster!’
‘They can’t climb any faster!’ protested Neverfell. Many were carrying babies or infants in satchels or papooses, while others bore crippled or elderly relations piggyback as they climbed.
Her words were barely out when there came a sound of confusion from the tunnel below the floor hatch. Instead of clambering out at a careful pace, drudges were suddenly scrambling up into the room with every sign of haste and panic.
‘What is it?’ Neverfell caught at the arm of one of the errand boys. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Map-freaks,’ he gasped. ‘There’s map-freaks creeping in behind us, don’t know where they came from. Dozens of them. Weaving and singing and waving things. We’re piling up furniture behind us to block their way, but they just keep coming . . .’
‘Oh.’ Neverfell clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘Oh no! Why didn’t I think of that?’ Her eyes strayed to the blue glass hemisphere that had once covered the base of the shaft. ‘The Undiscovered Passage! We’ve just removed the seal that stopped the bat-squeakers being able to sense it! Which means now they know where it is, and that means they’ve told all the others . . . Oh, we’re going to have every Cartographer in Caverna here!’
‘Do we have anything to slow them down?’ called Zouelle, her ear still pressed against the door.
‘Perhaps I can talk to them and persuade them to go away!’ exclaimed Neverfell. ‘The palace servants gave me some Perfume. They said it would . . . oh. Draw people to me.’
‘That is very nice, Neverfell,’ Zouelle answered levelly, ‘but right now precisely the opposite of what we need.’
Drudges boiled into the room, and before long it was full.
‘I’m the last!’ shouted a frail drudge woman finally, as she pulled herself out. ‘Close the hatch! They’re coming!’
The hatch was closed and bolted, and dozens of willing hands turned over the breakfast table, laying it upside down on top of the hatch to hold it shut. The dresser was dragged against the door to the Childersin tunnels.
‘Climb! Climb!’
Twenty people waiting to climb. Fifteen. Ten. Two.
The trapdoor under the upturned table started to rattle and even the table jumped a little. Barely a second later, the door that led to the Childersin household shuddered in its frame, as if somebody had barged their shoulder against it.
‘Go!’ Zouelle shoved Neverfell towards the ladder. ‘Climb, Neverfell!’ There was no time for argument. Neverfell grabbed the ladder and started to clamber up into the shaft.
Thus it was only Zouelle who was still in the Morning Room when the door burst inwards with a crash of falling furniture. Crystal goblets shattered, silver platters rolled across the room, and the doorway filled with Childersins, Maxim at their head.
The Face that Uncle Maxim was wearing as he pushed his way through the wreckage of the makeshift barricade was one that Zouelle had never seen before. Instinctively she knew it was reserved for enemies of the family. It froze her to the spot, like a guilty five-year-old. But she was not five years old, nor would any concession be made for her youth.
She had taken on one of the great chess-masters and failed. Of course she had. Now she and her accomplices would be hauled down off the ladder, and his men sent to kill those who had reached the desert. Once too often, Zouelle had tried to play a game too big for her.
And then, just as she was thinking this, the table and several floorboards shattered, flinging up fragments, and through the jagged hole leaped Cartographers, with eyes like fire and sawdust in their hair.
The Childersins were armed with swords and daggers. The Cartographers were armed with nothing but surprise, but really quite a lot of surprise. Thus the Childersins were, for a crucial moment, thrown on to the back foot as the mapmakers lurched towards them, buzzing and mewling, the dim light gleaming on their astrolathes.
‘Cut them down!’ shouted Maxim Childersin sharply. ‘Do not let them talk to you!’ As he slashed at the encroaching Cartographers with his sword, Zouelle remembered how to move, snatched at the ladder and started to climb.
Hand after hand she climbed, expecting every moment to feel a sword through her leg or a halting hand round her ankle. Only when she felt the ladder lurch in her grip did she look down. Fifteen feet below her, she could see another figure starting to climb the ladder. It was Uncle Maxim, her dear mentor and protector. She could go no faster, because of the queue of climbers above her. The rope of the ladder was too thick for her to cut with her pocket dagger.
‘Neverfell! The Perfume! Drop it to me!’
Looking up she could see Neverfell stare down at her in bemusement for a second, then fumble in her pockets. The vial dropped fast from the red-haired girl’s hand, gleaming like a raindrop, and Zouelle nearly lost her balance snatching it from the air.
‘Zouelle.’ Childersin’s voice was soft and reproving. ‘Do you really think my will is so weak that you can talk me round, even with Perfume?
‘No.’ Zouelle pulled out the stopper with shaky hands, and upended the vial so that its contents rained downwards past her. ‘But I think it will work on the Cartographers.’
The Perfume spattered over Maxim Childersin’s head and shoulders. There was the tiniest pause, and then a scuffle of motion. Other figures appeared at the bottom of the shaft, squeaking and gabbling, goggle-clad and groping. They scrambled up after Maxim Childersin, seizing his ankles and coat-tails, pulling him down off the ladder.
Zouelle felt her heart beat harshly as she watched her mentor disappear beneath a heap of Cartographers, his hands flailing at the mirrored sides of the shaft and failing to find a grip. As she started to climb again, her hands slippery with perspiration, she wondered how many Cartographers her Uncle Maxim had killed to hide this shaft, and whether those below had any notion of it.
She was not sure that they would care in any case, even after having just seen him cut down some of their number. Cartographers had no room in their mind for malice or revenge. They would not hate him, or try to hurt him.
They only wanted to talk to him.
Caverna was falling apart.
Enquirer Treble knew it, in every nerve and fibre of her body. She heard it in every fleeting chaotic echo that the twisting tunnels brought to her. She felt it in the tremors of the ground as distant battles let loose with their heaviest weapons, or dissolved into stampede. She found it in every report that floated to her, like scraps of a tattered banner. And still she stormed and shouted and fought the chaos, delaying the moment of utter collapse, forcing her underlings for just a little longer to be more afraid of her than of the descending anarchy.
‘How could you lose an entire rebel army?’
Nobody had an answer. They could only report the facts. The drudge horde had been successfully chased from the palace gates. They had been successfully contained within a set of middle-city passages as planned. Their routes back to Drudgery had been successfully cut off. And then, within an hour, all four hundred of them had disappeared.
‘Well – send scouts! Send a group of . . .’
Treble trailed off mid-sentence. She had, of course, been about to suggest sending a set of drudge runners out into the tunnels to report on proceedings. A fine plan in any situation where the drudges themselves were not the problem.
With every passing moment, she became more and more aware of the thousand ways in which the running of Caverna had relied upon the silent toil of the drudges. Over and over she tried to do or arrange some simple thing, to order a message sent, or debris cleared away, or rubble brought up from the mines to create a barricade, or provisions fetched, only to remember that drudges were not at her disposal. She felt like an amputee, reaching out reflexively with an arm she no longer had.
The drudges, the invisible machinery of Caverna, had ground to a halt. Nobody was clearing away the wreckage of battle or hauling up water. Nobody was bringing up grubs for the lanterns, some of which even now were starting to dim and flicker. And when the stifling darkness came, the Court factions would still be tearing each other apart like fighting ferrets.
‘Go there yourself, and take two men with you. Drudges do not melt away like chocolate. I want a report within half an hour!’
Her men departed, and she guessed that even now they were considering changing their allegiance as soon as they left the palace, if indeed they were not already in the pay of somebody else. She felt a sudden need to be alone, to clear her head for a moment in the one room where fear did not choke the air like smoke. When she reached the Grand Steward’s audience chamber, she found it unguarded and pushed open the door.
All around the walls, the lanterns glimmered into faint life, and the white walls and pillars gleamed like those of a tomb. A tomb for the Grand Steward, and perhaps a tomb for Caverna too.
How did he manage it? How did he keep track of a hundred threads, plots, patterns, conspiracies for so many centuries? Perhaps I am a fool, thinking I can hold together his city after his death.
Motion caught her eye, and she realized that the sharpened pendulums that had been installed to defend the throne were swinging to and fro across the room with silken swishes, just as they had on the day of the Grand Steward’s death. At the far end of the room, she heard the sound of somebody slowly exhaling a carefully held breath. A distant lantern flared into life and showed her that there was a figure sitting on the throne. He was clad from head to foot in scaled armour, his face hidden by a goggled mask. It was the Kleptomancer, and he held a strange bow levelled directly at her chest.
‘I knew you would come here sooner or later.’ The intruder’s voice was perfectly level, like a glass of still water. ‘Like an old hunting dog to bay on your master’s grave.’
After dodging so many murderous blades, Treble cursed herself for letting herself be caught off guard and without a weapon in her hand. No grovelling, she resolved. I have stormed my way through life; I can storm my way out of it.
‘I have no time to talk to thieves or assassins,’ she said. ‘Either kill me or surrender.’
‘I had a third option in mind,’ said the Kleptomancer. ‘I would like to help you save Caverna. You can hear her dying screams. So can I.’
‘And what can you do?’ The hopelessness of the situation descended upon Treble, folding its dark wings around her. ‘A madman with a bow, who cannot even remember his own name.’
‘You are the only person trying to keep order,’ answered the thief, ‘but you have everything upside down. You face rebellion from the drudges, and you try to crush and terrify them back into submission. You face disorder from the Court, and you try to reason with the courtiers, to bring them back into line.
‘Those drudges that still remain in Caverna have tasted rebellion and have nothing to lose but lives filled with misery. Fear will no longer work. You must bargain with them. The courtiers are crazed with their own greed and rivalry. Reason will no longer work. You must terrify them.’
‘How?’ The Enquirer could hardly bear to see a thief defiling her master’s throne, but there was something so calm in his words she could not quite cast them aside as the babblings of a maniac. ‘How should I bargain with these drudges?’
‘Talking to them would be a good start. You will hear their demands soon enough.’
‘And how should I terrify the Court?’ Pride prevented Treble from admitting how sadly the Enquiry was diminished in numbers.
‘By threatening them with something more terrible than the drudge rising, more dangerous than their rivals, more heartless than Childersin and all the other would-be tyrants. Me.
‘Enquirer, right now I have two dozen ways of destroying everybody in the city. I have spent ten years putting them in place a scrap at a time, in between meaningless thefts and shallow shows. At this moment the water-lifting belts do not turn because I have sabotaged them, nor shall they unless I choose to repair them. The palace servants have confided to me all the secret measures put in place by the late Grand Steward, including those that would lay waste to all within. Furthermore, I may not have gunpowder, but I scarcely need it when I have True Cheese. Right now I have wedges of Stackfalter Sturton placed deep in rocky walls where, if they explode, they shall flood whole districts with poison gases, and water from the underground rivers.’
‘You would not do these things!’ Enquirer Treble was driven by outrage to take several steps towards the throned figure, in spite of the levelled bow, in spite of the swinging pendulums. ‘If you destroy Caverna, you destroy yourself, and Drudgery from which you came!’
‘Enquirer Treble, I am what you have called me. A madman. That fact is well known. The Court will believe such threats from me as they would from few others. Drudgery, as I have said, has nothing to lose and everything to gain. And now I will tell you what is happening out in the city that you cannot see. I will tell you who is fighting whom, and how they can be stopped. I will even carry your messages to them. And, faced with our ultimatum, they will crumble.’
‘Our . . . ultimatum?’ Enquirer Treble had halted just before the swing of the pendulums, and against her face she could feel the breeze of their passing. A gulf of madness was opening at her feet, but there was no other path available to her.
‘Yes, ours. The last Grand Steward could be murdered because he could be found. I do not intend to be found. This is the only time I shall sit in this throne, the only time I shall give orders in person. Which means that I shall need somebody to run my city for me, and carry out my commands. You will be my face, my voice and my hands.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you are halfway honest, Enquirer, and it has not killed you yet. Because when you came into this room, it was not to try out the throne. Because you will fight a fight long after it becomes hopeless. And because I can predict you. And that is how I know that you will leave me now, go to your room and read the packet of orders I have prepared for you.’
Treble would have liked to defy his expectations, but in truth she was overwhelmed by a surge of relief. She had, she now realized, entered that room in the hopeless hope of receiving orders that would give shape to her life once more. Now she had them.
After Treble had departed, the Kleptomancer sat for a while longer on the throne of white, considering the situation carefully.
‘Yes,’ he said to himself at last. ‘Yes, I believe I can see how things will go. Everything is secure. My new hunting dog is good enough that she will bring all the hares to ground.’
It was done, then. He had completed his most recent objective, and was now permitted to open yet another of the letters he had left for himself. Pulling it out of his pocket, he broke the seal, opened it and read.
If you are reading this, you have successfully stolen Caverna. Your Great Plan has reached fruition. Enjoy the rewards of your success. Incidentally, your sanity is probably a ruin, and you should avoid drinking any more True Wine for the rest of your life.
He examined the letter for secret postscripts, held it to the light, shook it and peered at the seal, but it yielded no further information. For a long, long time he sat there staring at it.
So that was my Great Plan?
Here he was, unexpectedly at the end of all his machinations. He stared unseeing at the paper in his hand, realization slowly unfolding in his breast like a rose.
Of course. This was why he had become a master thief, to achieve this theft of thefts, this masterpiece of larceny. All the time, fascinating and terrible Caverna had been his goal. Whilst other Cartographers had sighed in vain after the beauty of her treacherous geography, he had decided to win her with cunning and threats.
All along Caverna had been his opponent and his prize, and she had never suspected it for a moment. He had fooled her, fought her and defeated her. She would be furious, no doubt, would hate him, rail against him and look for ways to destroy him, but he had outmanoeuvred her and now she had no choice but to play things his way. Unlike her earlier favourites, he was her lord, not a plaything to be tossed aside when she was bored.
And yet, for the first time in ten years, he found himself at something of a loss.
I have succeeded. I have won. I rule the city.
I wonder what I was planning to do with it?
The pearly light grew brighter and brighter as Neverfell climbed. She did not let herself look up yet, but she could now see the creases in her grimed knuckles, with a starkness that had never been possible by traplight. The air was cold and fresh, and sang in her ears.
Out, beat her heart. Out, out, out.
‘No traps . . .’ Somebody above her was panicking. ‘There’s no traps . . .’ And of course there were no traps in the glassy shaft.
‘We don’t need them!’ she shouted upward, hearing her voice echo tinnily. ‘We’ll never need them again! Haven’t you noticed? You’re breathing! Breathing!’ She was filling her own lungs again and again, feeling a rush of air so fresh that it prickled in her chest and across the skin of her face.
A strange noise echoed from above, a liquid, metallic string of notes, ending in a long and eerie whistle.
‘What’s that sound?’ went up the whisper, and there were a few terrified gasps. Something warm was running down Neverfell’s cheek, and she realized that it was a tear.
‘A bird,’ she whispered. ‘It’s a bird. A wild bird, singing.’
Somewhere above a giant was sighing, yawning and then roaring. The drudges in the shaft dissolved into a clamour of dismay.
‘It’s the wind!’ Neverfell was blind, mad, hungry for the overground, and it was all she could do not to tear her way past the others on the ladder. ‘Come on! I’ll show it to you! I’ll show it to you all!’
And then the dull grey light was growing brighter, and the ladder ran out, and she was climbing out of the mouth of a rocky spout on to a plain of rubble. Above her was no-roof, and no-roof, and no-roof, up and up and up until she wanted to scream for joy, and above that the great lead and silver sky-billows went rolling slow as smoke and vast as a hundred mountains. In among it a little piece of bright silver was washed and tumbled like a fingernail clipping, and she knew it was the moon. All around misshapen rocks lurched and leaned, as if they were craning for a better look at the fugitives. Some rose in unsteady posts and lintels, showing that they were the last crumbling remains of walls long since tumbled and worn away. To one side loomed the huge black mass of the mountain, carving a great expanse out of the sky.
‘Look! It’s . . . it’s . . . look!’
She spread her arms as if she were a plant soaking up the sky. Then she became aware that everybody else around her was hunkering down to the ground, staring about them like hutch-bred rabbits. None of them looked at the sky. None of them dared look more than ten feet away from them. All kept their eyes fixed on the ground.
‘Neverfell . . .’ Zouelle was crouched beside her, clutching at her sleeve, her eyes also fixed upon the ground. ‘Is this . . . is this your overground?’
Neverfell choked back the exultant laugh that had been forming in her lungs. With a wrench, she suddenly saw this dark, looming landscape as her friends did, her friends who were flinching from the incomprehensible wind and the chill gaze of the moon.
‘No – just a bit of it. Just the start. It gets better.’ She raised her voice. ‘You have to follow me. Downhill, this way. And we have to go fast. Whatever happens in Caverna – whoever takes over – somebody will come after us. Somebody will want to stop us escaping.’
Progress was slow. Drudges clung to one another, staring about each other, and Neverfell was aware that a few had turned back, preferring to climb back down into the depths of the underground city. She could not stop them. They were thrown into panic by the rough cries of crows, the booming of buzzards, every mysterious grating and whistle that echoed among the crags.
The light all around was getting brighter, and something inside her chest started to swell until she felt it might float her aloft like a balloon. Colours were showing in the rocks that cracked and crumbled underfoot. There was an amber glow in the sky ahead now, a gleaming crust on the underbellies of the clouds.
‘Everybody! Put on your smoked glasses!’
There was much fumbling in packs, and suddenly hundreds of drudges and palace servants wore spectacles with round, dark lenses. It was part of the preparations made for every fugitive, for who knew how tender, cave-dwelling eyes would deal with true daylight?
And then the first spear of sunlight showed over the rippled horizon, and everybody forgot to flee or cower. The eastern sky lazily paled to peach, with frills of white cloud lost in it, and the wind ceased its restless roaring, freshened and found purpose. The dark and ominous rocks slowly flushed with purples, dark reds, dull golds, blue-greys. Birds were black bullets, too fast to be seen, and air was wide and wild and had somewhere to be in a hurry. There were scents of baked dust and dry dew and the hot-cold smells of a world awakening.
The slope laid itself out before them, jagged as a toothline, descending towards the foothills and then the blue and gold dunes, and somewhere beyond them the world where the trees waved and the brooks ran and the seas champed at the bits of the shores.
And Neverfell led the way down the slope at a run. She slithered and stumbled and fell and recovered and galloped and leaped and there was no wall to stop her and no roof to bang her head. Above her the pale sky was turning fiercely blue like a mermaid’s eye. The wind ran with her, its roaring as loud as the breath in her ears.