A Face Like Glass

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘. . . girl with red hair . . . a face like glass . . .’

  The Enquiry had moved fast. They must have realized that Neverfell had been spirited down the ember chute, and had started searching Drudgery.

  Neverfell knotted her fingers, thinking hard. There was nothing to stop her striding forward right now to place herself in the hands of the Enquiry, and demand that they take her back to the Grand Steward’s palace. Nothing, that is, but the memory of plunging into icy water whilst in an Enquiry cage, and the warning that Zouelle had given her.

  Neverfell, on no account let yourself fall into the hands of the Enquiry, or you will be tortured into confessing all kinds of things.

  Somebody in the Enquiry had tried to kill her, and for all she knew it might be the man in front of her. If she placed herself in his hands down here in Drudgery, it would be child’s play for him to dispose of her and cover his tracks. And even if he did hand her over to his superiors alive, what then? She would be in the power of Enquirer Treble, who distrusted her and wanted to torture the ‘truth’ out of her.

  Keeping close to the wall to avoid notice, Neverfell turned about and headed back along the corridor. Seeing a dented and discarded pail, she picked it up, hoping it would make her look as if she were heading somewhere on an errand. It was full of a greenish slime, the lingering trace of stagnant water, so she scooped up handfuls of it and used it to daub her hair, and conceal its bright colour.

  Where could she go? Who could she turn to now?

  Erstwhile. She had to find Erstwhile.

  Erstwhile had told her that he lived in Sallow’s Elbow. There were no passage signs or signposts, so when she was at some distance from the Enquirer she dared to ask for directions. She was afraid that doing so might show her up as one unfamiliar to the Undercity, but she had no choice, and tugged at a drudge woman’s sleeve.

  ‘Sallow’s Elbow?’ She made her voice a hoarse whisper, to disguise it.

  ‘Third left to the crossways, follow the ladder straight up, carry on straight ahead over three bridges, cross the scoot slope and the lock,’ came the whispered answer. The woman did not look at her, but gave Neverfell a couple of quick and companionable pats on the arm before passing on.

  When Neverfell found Sallow’s Elbow, she could not mistake it. The passage had broadened, and at a certain point it twisted sharply back on itself. In the crook of the elbow, she noticed that the wall was pocked with hollows about three or four feet across, each of which had a blanket or piece of loose fabric roughly pinned over it like a curtain. In some cases she could see a grubby hand or unshod foot dangling out from beneath the cloth.

  As she reached the elbow, one of the curtains was pulled aside, and a boy of about her own age groggily scrambled out.

  ‘Excuse me!’ She caught at his sleeve before he could disappear into the people-river. ‘I’m looking for Erstwhile.’

  He turned and slapped at a black-and-white chequered rag that hung in front of one of the hollows.

  ‘Rise and shine, Erstwhile. Your girlfriend’s come to take you to the opera,’ he called, before disappearing off down the tunnel.

  The cloth was snatched back, and Erstwhile stared up at Neverfell, his face flushed with sleep and creased from resting against his collar. His expression deadened and took on the polite blank look so many other drudges wore, and Neverfell’s heart sank.

  ‘What the sickness are you doing here?’

  ‘You told me to come here! You said I could if I was in trouble—’

  ‘I told you to send messages here, not come yourself! This isn’t a place for you!’ He scrambled out and stood defensively in front of his curtained chamber, trying to pull the rag across surreptitiously to protect it from sight. It was hopeless, and he gave up and pulled the cloth back. ‘Well, go on, then, have a good goggle! Enjoying your tour of Drudgery, are you?’

  The hollow behind the curtain was barely two feet deep. The only objects inside were a tin cup, a worn and lumpy satchel, some clothes folded to serve as a pillow, and his precious unicycle. Far too late, she saw the reason for his stony anger. He had not wanted her to see that he lived like this, perched in a wall dimple like a glow-worm.

  Neverfell wanted to burst into tears. ‘I didn’t decide to come here! I was stolen by the Kleptomancer, and had to escape using one of his suits. And now Drudgery is crawling with Enquirers, and if they catch me their leader will want to torture me. I can’t let them find me, Erstwhile!

  ‘I came looking for you because it was that or give up. You’re the only person in the Drudgery I can trust. You’re one of the few people in the whole of Caverna I can trust.’

  Erstwhile’s expression changed to a look of keen alertness, as if he were expecting her to say more. Neverfell guessed that it was not what he was feeling, but was as close as he could get. In any case, at least he was no longer stonily ground-gazing.

  ‘You stupid little hen,’ he muttered. ‘Didn’t I tell you you were out of your depth? Didn’t I say you’d end up neck-deep in trouble if you went to Court? Stolen by the Kleptomancer – how did you manage that?’

  ‘Oh . . . he’s mad, and it’s all about ruptures and threads and ants . . . and everyone thought it was the cameleopard . . .’

  ‘Still crazy as a squirrel, aren’t you?’ Erstwhile threw a glance up and down the tunnel, then tugged a ragged cloth out of his ‘pillow’ and handed it to Neverfell. ‘Wrap that round your head, and pull it forward so it hangs down over your face. Now, come on, follow me! Sharpish!’

  Following Erstwhile, Neverfell was almost glad she had not been eating well. He thought nothing of squeezing through fissures she had barely noticed before, or wriggling fish-like through the narrowest of holes.

  ‘This is the route I always take up out of the Undercity when I’m – oh, pepper it!’ Erstwhile halted abruptly. ‘Back! Into the crevice! They’ve got an Enquirer waiting at the bottom of the ladders!’ They scrambled back the way they had come, until there was no purple in sight.

  ‘Is there another way up out of Drudgery?’ whispered Neverfell.

  ‘Only a handful. And if they’re blocking this route they’ll be doing the same with the others. No, they’re cordoning off Drudgery. And they’re doing all this to find you?’

  ‘I think so. Or maybe the Kleptomancer.’

  ‘Enquirers in Drudgery. That’s always bad.’ Erstwhile gave her a brief sideways glance. ‘We only see ’em when they think somebody they’re after is hiding down here. And then they do everything they can to make us dig him out and hand him over. Beatings, disappearances. And if that doesn’t work . . . they cut off everybody’s eggs.’

  Neverfell gaped. ‘They cut off everybody’s legs?’

  ‘No! Eggs! Eggs!’ As Neverfell gave a relieved snort, Erstwhile glanced at her, his expression becoming briefly stony once more. ‘It’s all right for you to smirk, you’ve always had as many eggs as you want. Don’t you know that if you don’t get enough eggs down here, you grow up bow-legged and stunted, with lungs like two old socks?’

  Stunned, Neverfell recalled all the times that Erstwhile had asked for favours to be repaid in eggs. She had assumed he just liked them.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said very quietly.

  ‘It’s not the way it is up there,’ Erstwhile continued bitterly. ‘When Enquirers turn up in Drudgery, it’s never to protect us. When they’re chasing up something that affects the courtiers and makers, then we see them here beating down doors. But not when drudges get murdered, no, then we can go rot. You don’t see them roaming the streets after rehearsals.’

  ‘Rehearsals?’ There was something menacing in the very blandness and innocence of the word.

  ‘We call ’em that. It’s a little joke of ours.’ Erstwhile’s voice was about as humorous as a rockfall. ‘See, Court assassinations are important business. Wouldn’t want to mess up your lines on the night, would you? So courtiers come down here to practise, because they know nobody misses drudges. Nobody except ot
her drudges and they don’t count. They try out new poisons, let would-be assassins show off what they can do, practise blade moves or group tactics.’

  ‘They kill people? They just kill them? Innocent people?’

  ‘Just drudges,’ Erstwhile said, the nonchalance of his tone heavy and hollow as a two-ton bell. ‘We can usually spot ’em – a run of weird murders all alike, or suicides, or accidents, or sometimes a “disease outbreak” where everybody dies the same way. That’s what goes down on the paperwork, but we know.

  ‘It’s been happening again, just lately. “Domestic murders”, drudges killing drudges – that’s what the record says. Me? I say somebody’s rehearsing. I can feel it in my bones.’

  Neverfell had no answer. In her mind she looked out across the tangled vista of the Undercity and felt only numb. There was too much to feel strongly about, she was stretched too thin, so she could not quite feel anything about anything.

  Erstwhile glanced at her as they passed a trap-lantern, then paused to peer.

  ‘I guess you’re not such a fuzzy baby bird any more,’ he murmured gruffly. ‘Got something in your head now, have you? Seen some things?’

  Neverfell nodded. ‘You can see that? I’ve . . . changed? How bad is it?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve changed, all right. Your eyes look deeper. Is that bad? I don’t think that’s bad. Don’t know that your owners will agree, though. You’re planning to run back to them again, aren’t you? Instead of going back to Grandible?’

  Neverfell paused, then slowly nodded. ‘I think I have to. There are things I need to know, about myself and my past. And I can’t go back to that life with Grandible. It’s like a baby shoe. It doesn’t fit me any more. In fact, I don’t think it really fitted me for a very long time, and I was getting all scrunched up living inside it.’

  Erstwhile gave a vaguely dismissive sound in his throat, but did not argue. ‘It’s going to be ticklish as lice getting you back up there, if we can’t go through the Enquiry,’ he muttered. ‘But let’s think.’

  As they talked, it became clear that getting into Drudgery was rather easier than getting out of it. Plummeting down an ember or waste chute from the upper strata of Caverna was easy enough. Climbing back up them was all but impossible, if one did not happen to be the Kleptomancer.

  ‘Dozens of shafts,’ muttered Erstwhile, ‘but they’re all down shafts. Nothing is really expected to travel up from Drudgery except drudges. Once we’ve washed our hands.’

  ‘Oh.’ Neverfell felt her eyes grow large. ‘Erstwhile . . . all the water in Caverna comes from the rivers down in Drudgery, doesn’t it? It’s taken up to big tanks near the surface, and half of it is heated, and then they pour it down into the hot and cold water pipes for everybody to use. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘How does it get all the way up from the rivers to the tanks?’

  ‘This plan is ten kinds of mad,’ whispered Erstwhile.

  A long, dark and convoluted route had brought them to a domed storage bay full of crates and barrels, beside one of the narrow, murky canals. Before them she could see where the canal reached its final sluice gates, and beyond them the river into which it was yearning to tumble. This however was not a roaring, white-bearded monster or a sludge-filled trickle, but broad, glassy, muscular and purposeful, its water lucid. The reflections of the wild traps above quivered and flexed in its surface.

  A little further upstream, Neverfell could see a huge treadmill like a giant wooden hamster wheel, a dozen or so drudges within it pacing to make it turn. This treadmill in turn seemed to be moving a vast belt-and-pulley system. The belt ran from a shaft in the ceiling down to the pulley, and then back up the shaft. A series of broad oblong buckets four feet across were attached to the belt at intervals. As the treadmill turned, the belt was drawn round the pulley, dipping empty buckets into the river in turn, and then bearing them back up the shaft.

  ‘You ready?’ growled Erstwhile. ‘Wait for the gong!’

  The gong signalled the end of one working shift and the start of another. For a brief time, supervisors and workers alike were distracted as chits were delivered, attendance books marked, and everybody took care that the wheel’s rhythm was not broken as one set of feet replaced the last.

  ‘Now!’ hissed Erstwhile, giving Neverfell a rough shove in the back.

  She took advantage of the moment’s distraction to lollop over to the river’s edge.

  The Kleptomancer had it right, she reflected in the half second it took her. Nobody was ever ready to stop you doing things that nobody sensible would even try. Mad things. Like jumping into a river, grabbing the nearest bucket and letting it haul you up a shaft not designed for human passage.

  The water was so icy as to be literally breathtaking. Her clothes soaked almost instantly, and became heavy, dragging and tangling her legs. She paddled helplessly, clinging to the bank. A bucket hit her painfully in the shin, and as it rose she lunged at it, and managed to get the top half of her body into it. It lifted, dripping, with her hung over it by her middle, legs frantically cycling.

  If anybody looked up, they would see her and stop the treadmill. But the creaking complaints of the bucket did not catch their attention. She wriggled forward and managed to tumble into the bucket with a slopping splash, and the belt carried her up into the darkness of the shaft.

  After crouching in the icy, pitching bucket for what seemed like hours, she glimpsed a hint of light above, something larger than the shaft’s occasional glowing traps. Yes, there seemed to be some sort of a square hatch floating down to meet her. Perhaps she could leap for it. I have to be high enough now, she thought as she readied her numb and shaking limbs. I must be out of Drudgery.

  The bucket reared angrily beneath her as she rose to her hands and feet, then bucked as she jumped, tumbling through the hatch to land in a sodden sprawl. She seemed to be in a small workshop with rough-hewn walls, and two men in overalls were staring down at her in frozen-faced shock. Their alarm and surprise was apparently not diminished by the sight of Neverfell’s face when she pushed back her hair.

  ‘Hello! I . . . I’m sorry about the puddle. I’m Neverfell the food taster, and I belong to the Grand Steward. He . . . he might want to know where I am. Oh! And perhaps you better tell people not to drink water from the bucket that went past just now – I’ve been sitting in it . . .’

  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 b
itter 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.