A Face Like Glass

by Frances Hardinge

  There was a pause.

  ‘Caramemba,’ muttered the voice in the slow, careful tone of one writing something down. ‘Caramemba from the Beaumoreau Academy. You are lucky – the auditions have not started yet.’

  The human eyes receded into darkness, and the owl’s eyes reappeared in their appointed place. After a series of clicks and scrapes the door opened. Somehow, in spite of her panic, Neverfell had bluffed her way in.

  Beyond the door extended a neat hallway, floors patterned in a mosaic of different crystals, walls covered in ornate tapestries depicting woodland scenes from which multicoloured animals peered coyly. Disturbingly, there was no sign of Neverfell’s interlocutor, so she was left to tiptoe down the corridor alone, watched by the stitched eyes of azure squirrels and purple chamois.

  At the far end two wooden doors swung open to reveal a room unlike anything Neverfell had ever seen. From the ceiling hung a large trap-lantern chandelier, so vast that you could barely see the little black-clad boy crouched upon it, puffing hard to keep the traps aglow. The walls were suffocating beneath pastoral tapestries and framed pictures.

  In the middle of the room was a long table, covered by a white and gold cloth and an ornate silver tea service. Along its length some dozen girls sat stiff-backed, hands nervously twisted in their laps. One of the girls was Borcas. She met Neverfell’s gaze with a bland, disinterested stare, then cleared her throat slightly and looked meaningfully across the room. Following her gaze, Neverfell noticed a servant woman standing next to a little side-table where wrapped and beribboned boxes clustered.

  Realizing these must be the presents that the girls had brought for the Facesmith, Neverfell timidly approached the servant, bobbed a curtsy and mutely offered up her bottle to be added to the rest. Relieved of her burden, she gingerly approached the main table and seated herself on the one stool remaining.

  Most of the girls seemed to be too self-absorbed for conversation. Many were cupping tiny hand mirrors in their palms to examine their own countenances. Some, like Borcas, were carefully holding grotesque or unnatural distortions of their features. Others were cycling so quickly through different expressions that their faces seemed to be in spasm. Neverfell’s bizarre appearance, however, was gradually gaining some attention. Those wearing the same Beaumoreau uniform as herself seemed particularly curious.

  Neverfell had delivered the Wine, just as she had promised. Now, according to Zouelle’s plan, she should be ‘slipping away’ from the other girls to look for the piece of the Stackfalter Sturton. But how was she supposed to do that when so many of them were staring at her?

  A tall, auburn-haired girl to Neverfell’s right scrutinized her for some time before speaking.

  ‘You should probably take off your mask, you know.’

  ‘I . . .’ Neverfell’s mind emptied and her mouth became a desert. ‘I . . . have pimples!’

  ‘Nobody here minds. And how can you audition with your face covered?’

  Neverfell did not answer. How could she, when she could only guess what the audition would involve? She lowered her head and blushed deeply under her mask and got on with clattering her crockery and stirring jam into her tea.

  The exchange had apparently sparked off a small forest fire of gossip and surmise. Neverfell could hear whispered snatches from all around her.

  ‘. . . must have a special Face that she prepared early and doesn’t want us to see . . .’

  ‘. . . probably recognize her if we saw her . . . one of the high-ranking Craftsmen houses . . .’

  ‘. . . wrong side of the blanket . . .’

  ‘. . . notice the smell of cloves? Obviously she’s using Perfume and trying to hide it . . .’

  Neverfell was almost relieved when another door opened, and Madame Appeline swept into the room, glittering like a dragonfly in pleated emerald satin. Just as the Facesmith’s smiling gaze was gliding down the rows of seated girls, Neverfell remembered that Madame Appeline had seen her mask before.

  She had wanted more than anything to talk to Madame Appeline, but now everything had changed. She was an imposter, and had lied her way into the house. Overwhelmed by fear and confusion, she feigned a muffled coughing fit and doubled over, quietly lowering her face into her hands and her napkin so that her mask could not be seen.

  ‘My dears, it is a delight to see such a bevy of fresh, fair and flexible faces.’ Madame Appeline’s voice was just as warm and sweet as Neverfell had remembered. ‘Your schools have picked you out as particularly exceptional candidates, which is why you are here today.

  ‘Now, first of all I would like you to show me what you can do. In a moment you will be shown through that door, and into the light.’ She waved a hand at the doorway through which she had just entered. ‘You will see something . . . very unusual. Unique, I like to think, in Caverna. You will then have half an hour to observe what you find there and prepare a selection of five Faces from your personal repertoire that you think are an appropriate response to it.’

  The door opened, and out of it trooped a string of girls, all a few years older than those seated at the table. These older girls were all dressed in simple, unornamented white gowns, their hair tied back so that their carefully serene faces were entirely visible. Most of them had large, well-spaced eyes, high cheekbones and broad, flexible mouths, giving the uncanny impression that they were members of the same enormous extended family. Neverfell guessed that these must be Madame Appeline’s Putty Girls. Light poured through the door so brightly that it put the chandelier to shame.

  Madame Appeline flashed a last smile and departed the room, leaving Neverfell and the other candidates to file awkwardly into the light. And as she emerged, each girl halted in her tracks as if thunderstruck. As Neverfell’s eyes adjusted to the scene before her, her heart, which had been jerking like a drowning hare, stopped for a beat.

  She was standing in a grove. She had never seen a grove except in pictures, and yet she knew, knew that this was what she was seeing. A path weaved between tall and sturdy trunks, ridged and rugged bark gleaming with tiny beads of dew. From above brilliant golden light turned shifting leaves to blades of green fire. A breeze brushed her face, giving a sudden giddying sense of unlimited distance.

  A grove. A grove, deep in the sunless tunnels of the city of Caverna.

  Only after she had taken a few stumbling steps did Neverfell realize that she was looking not at a miracle but at a masterpiece. For all its brilliant green, the softness beneath her feet was carpet. Somehow she knew that real woodland moss should give, slip and crush more under her weight. The leaves above were chiming softly in the breeze, and she guessed that they must be glass. Spellbound, she reached out a hand to touch one of the dew drops, and found it was a crystal bead. As her finger traced the surface of the bark, she somehow knew that she should be feeling the green down of lichen, and that the bark itself should be crumbling under her touch to reveal pale wood and insects. Somewhere above, hundreds of powerful trap-lanterns must be hanging from the high and unseen ceiling of the cavern to provide the brilliant light.

  The great trunks were the pièce de résistance, of course, for she realized that these must be real trees . . . or at least that they must have been real trees uncounted thousands of years ago. Petrified forests were sometimes discovered deep within the rock, places where the earth had drowned and swallowed hundreds of living trees, and then over the millennia had replaced living, sap-filled wood with quartzes and multicoloured gemstones, a little at a time.

  In this case, instead of mining the trees for the beauty of their pink, gold and green crystal, the diggers had apparently removed only the rock around them, leaving the trees untouched. This forest of jewelled trees was without decay. Every knothole, every ring was preserved with semi-precious precision. It was infinitely valuable and utterly dead.

  For several minutes the audition candidates could only gawp. Then, as one, they glanced at one another, then scattered, mirrors in hand. Nobody wanted to try out samp
le Faces where another candidate might observe and steal ideas. In a space of seconds, Neverfell found herself entirely alone. Which was, she remembered with a jolt, precisely what she wanted.

  She would not have long alone. If she was to track down the Sturton fragment, it had to be now.

  Eyes closed, she breathed deeply and focused upon the smells. There were traces of a dozen soaps and perfumes, body smells, dried flowers and of course the oil of cloves in which she was doused . . . but there it was, the faintest pungent hint of cheese, like a familiar voice in a crowd’s tumult. Having made sure nobody else was within view, she loosened her mask and pulled it slightly away from her face so that she could smell more easily.

  Snuffing like a bloodhound, she made her way through the crystalline forest. At last she came upon a small white stone hut richly carved with images of leaping fish. The faint scent seemed to come from within, so she tried the door. It was locked, but she recognized it as a trick lock of a sort Grandible often used, and soon had it open.

  Within she found an odd but elegant pantry. Wide shelves housed a number of crates, little sacks, bottles and jars. Up on the high shelf was a box that she recognized as the one she had packed for Madame Appeline. She scrambled on to a chair, and retrieved it. It did not appear to have been opened, and when she prised off the lid she found the little crumb of Sturton was still in its hiding place. She plucked it out, and hastily crammed the box back in its place, then jumped down from her chair, just in time to hear the door unlock from the outside.

  There was no time for a plan. As the door began to open, Neverfell threw herself at the gap, doubled over in the hope of pushing past the new arrival’s legs. In the event, her non-plan very nearly worked. She plunged forward, headbutted the thigh of the manservant at the door, and her momentum carried her on past him . . . or would have done had he not reached out reflexively and grabbed her collar.

  She fought and failed, but he managed to hook his spare arm round her waist, and suddenly she was no longer touching the ground. Her loosened mask fell to the ground. She was caught. She was done for.

  But, came the wild thought, I can still save Master Grandible. I can still undo what I did.

  And so, before her arms could be pinned, Neverfell crammed the crumb of Sturton in her mouth. She felt it crumble and melt on her tongue, and this was the last thing she knew before the world exploded.

  It burst apart, and it turned out that it had always been made of music. Not music for the ear, but notes of pure soul and haunting memory. She had no body, and yet she sensed that her nose was a cathedral where a choir was singing full-throatedly, and her mouth a nation with its own history and legends of staggering beauty.

  And then she had a body again, or so it seemed, and she was staggering through a woodland where trees wept soft sap and whispered, and light pooled and puddled like honey, and her ankles tangled in lush stems and a mist of blue flowers that reached up to her waist. All the while there was a warming sense of a presence beside her.

  Then the vision was gone. She was back in Madame Appeline’s grove, and hanging limp from the grip of the man who had captured her. Her mask lay at her feet. In the false woodland all around her stood the other auditioners, the Putty Girls, and Madame Appeline herself. They wore a wide range of expressions, but none of them meant anything. Their Faces were frozen, forgotten, as they all stared at Neverfell’s exposed face.

  Lies and Bare Faces

  It was too much. The eyes were too much. Neverfell was not used to being looked at, let alone by so many all at once. She clenched her own eyes tight, but she could still feel the stares, cold and hard against her skin like a wall of marbles. The stunned silence was dissolving now, and from all sides she could hear cries of alarm, and desperate, frightened questions.

  ‘Cover its face!’ came a scream. ‘Stop it doing that!’

  ‘Impossible!’ somebody else croaked, in tones of utter shock. ‘Impossible!’ It sounded a little like Madame Appeline.

  From all around came the sour smell of fear, and it filled her like a gas, searing away her self-control. Like the rabbit she had tried so hard to catch, she went limp for a moment in the grip of her captor. The next instant she flung herself into desperate, thrashing, unthinking struggles. Through a fog of terror she heard a yelp of surprise, and felt raked skin under her fingernails.

  ‘Quick, wrap it in this!’ The breath was knocked out of Neverfell as she was wrestled to the ground, legs flailing. Something soft and heavy was flapped on top of her, smothering her face and pinning her arms. It took her maddened mind a second or two to realize that somebody was rolling her up in some of the moss-carpet that covered the floor of the grove. Fear of unforgiving gazes immediately gave way to a much more practical fear of suffocation.

  Neverfell wanted to beg, to apologize, to scream at them to stop, but she was beyond words and nobody could have heard her through her mouthful of carpet. She was manhandled and hefted until she was sagging doubled up over something, probably the shoulder of one of her captors. Only fragments of words reached her.

  ‘. . . in the world is it?’

  ‘. . . how did it get in?’

  ‘. . . how was it doing that?’

  ‘. . . the Enquiry—’

  ‘. . . Enquiry will deal with it—’

  Whoever was carrying her was running, and his shoulder jogged into her stomach with every step until she thought she would throw up. She was flung on to something flat that lurched and creaked to the clopping of a horse’s hoofs. She screeched, whimpered and struggled pointlessly, trying to crane back her head enough to give herself a bit more air. The life, breath and wits were being smothered out of her, and terror rose up like a black fountain and swallowed her whole.

  For a long time, there was no thought, no sanity, only rough screams bottle-necking in her throat, and panic like a white fire in the blood. Then a numb darkness fell around her. When she came to, she was lying sprawled, her cheek pressed against something cold and hard. Terror had left her mind as empty as a scooped gourd.

  What had happened? Why? Where? She could not remember. Perhaps she had broken cheeses. Perhaps Master Grandible would be angry.

  Neverfell sat up groggily, and knocked her head against something hard-edged. She steadied it with her hand, and it proved to be a slowly swaying trap-lantern with a sullen glow within. She breathed on it a few times to give it air. It quickly flushed into full radiance, showing where she was.

  Neverfell was in an onion-shaped cage of black iron some five feet across, with bars that bulged outwards at the sides and met at the top. A tin chamber pot and a wooden bowl of water sat beside her. The trap-lantern hung from the ceiling of the cage, and the cage itself hung suspended from a barely visible pulley by a long, thick chain. A couple of feet below the grille of the floor, she could make out the glimmer of black, rippleless water. The cage was suspended above a subterranean canal flanked by two high walls. Running along the wall furthest from her was a wooden jetty a foot or so above the level of the water.

  She was in more than trouble, she realized hazily. She was in prison. What had she done to bring her here? A stubborn little spark suddenly flared up in her, and told her that whatever she had done had not been bad enough for this.

  Her cage was revolving very slowly in response to her motions, and she could see that to her left and right there were other cages hanging above the water. Most of them were empty, but in a few she could see stirring bundles of cloth and life. One offered a long, low despairing bleat that sounded barely human. Another was just a round of sullen back and straggling hair. At either end of the jetty she could just make out what looked like a purple-clad guard standing to attention with a halberd.

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice was tiny and hoarse. ‘Hello?’

  She heard a murmur of conversation, then a door set in the wall opened and three figures stepped out on to the jetty, all clad in deep amethyst tones. Two were men, but the foremost was a woman with steel-grey hair. She had
a stern jaw, a surprisingly athletic stride and a Face that combined austerity, authority and cold scrutiny. Nothing escapes my all-penetrating eye, said the Face, and Neverfell hastily bowed her head.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ The woman had a voice like a cheesewire. Neverfell shook her head, keeping her hands raised to hide her own hideousness. ‘I am Enquirer Treble. You have been placed under Enquiry. Do you understand me?’

  Neverfell gave a whimper as memory of her misadventures finally began to seep back into her head. This was no ordinary arrest. The Enquiry were the Grand Steward’s special law enforcers for peculiar or dangerous cases.

  ‘If you wish to live – if you wish to wish to live – you must answer our questions truthfully. Now – how did you get in? Are there any more of you?’

  ‘Any more . . .’ Any more of what? ‘No, there’s . . . only me. I just went to an audition. They gave me a dress—’

  ‘Gave you a dress? Who?’

  Neverfell’s skin burned. She thought of Zouelle’s beautiful smile, and Borcas’s soft, pink nervousness. She couldn’t bring herself to betray them, but did not know how to lie. She hid her face in her hands.

  ‘Come now! It is obvious what you are and where you come from. Who are your masters?’

  She could not reveal that either. What danger would she bring to Master Grandible if she did?

  ‘Tell me! Who let you into Caverna? How many of you are there? Why were you infiltrating Madame Appeline’s auditions? What is your name? Whose assassin are you?’

  Neverfell continued numbly shaking her head. Half the questions meant nothing to her. At the word assassin, however, her breath caught in her throat. Overcome with fear and outrage she jumped to her feet and clutched at the bars, no longer concerned with covering her face.

  ‘I’m not an assassin! I never wanted to hurt anybody! Never!’

  The effect on the Enquirer was instantaneous and striking. There was no change of expression, but the woman leaped backwards with such energy that her back collided with the wall. For a few moments she stared rigidly at Neverfell, then fumbled a purple handkerchief free from a pocket and began dabbing at her own forehead.