A Face Like Glass

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘How dare you?’ she exclaimed. ‘Stop doing that! Put on something more appropriate! Immediately!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop it!’ It sounded as if the Enquirer were on the verge of losing control.

  ‘Stop what?’ Neverfell demanded helplessly.

  Enquirer Treble bristled for a couple of seconds, then made a gesture. One of the men who had entered with her stepped towards the wall, where Neverfell could just make out a large crank handle. He began turning the handle, and almost immediately Neverfell’s cage began a jolting descent.

  ‘Unless you cooperate—’

  ‘Stop it!’ shrieked Neverfell as the bottom of the cage dipped into the surface of the canal, and water started spilling in between the bars. She scrambled up the lantern chain to pull herself out of the water, clinging to the top of the cage.

  The cage, however, continued its jerky descent into the canal, and Neverfell’s clamberings availed her nothing. Icy water claimed her feet, her calves, her knees, her thighs. When it finally ceased its descent, the cage was all but submerged. With her head pressed against the roof, Neverfell’s chin was only just above the water.

  ‘One more turn of this handle—’ called out the Enquirer.

  ‘I don’t understand!’ Neverfell erupted, through sheer desperation. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about! I don’t understand why I’m here! I don’t understand what I’ve done, or what I’m doing! So how am I supposed to stop it?’

  While she sobbed and shivered, Neverfell could just about make out parts of a murmured discussion taking place on the jetty.

  ‘. . . how can we hold a sensible interrogation with something that looks like . . .’

  ‘. . . a face like glass . . .’

  ‘. . . mask back, perhaps?’

  ‘. . . no, we cannot study this properly if it is covered . . .’

  After a long pause, Neverfell heard the sound of the crank handle being turned once again. To her numb relief, however, the cage did not descend, but was hauled up to its previous position, water streaming out between its bars.

  Enquirer Treble disappeared through the nearest door, then emerged once more and clipped sharply over, gripping what looked like a frying pan with a nine-foot handle.

  ‘Here. Take this.’ Refusing to look at Neverfell directly, the woman extended the ‘frying pan’ until it was touching against the bars of Neverfell’s cage. Looking down, Neverfell saw that something dark and square was resting in the ‘pan’. She lifted it out carefully with slick and shaking hands. ‘Take some time to put yourself in order. When you have a Face fit to be seen I will come back and speak with you again.’

  The pan withdrew, and the Enquirer retreated behind her door once more. Neverfell was left staring at the object in her wet hands. It had a wooden border. The side currently uppermost was covered in dark brown felt, but she could feel that the underside had the cold smoothness of glass. Her fingers started to tremble as she realized what she had been given.

  Neverfell was holding a mirror. If she turned it over, she would see at last the horror that Master Grandible had decided to hide from the world. She would see the face that made people break into a sweat and flee.

  She recalled the phrase she had heard muttered on the jetty. A face like glass. What did that mean? Perhaps her skin was transparent. Perhaps anybody looking at her could see the pulsing of her blood vessels, and the grin of her skull, and her eyeballs through the lids. Perhaps that was why everybody ran away.

  She couldn’t look. She wouldn’t look. She watched with a fascinated sense of helplessness as her hands slowly, tremulously turned over the mirror to present her for the first time with her reflection.

  For a little age she stood staring at the image in the glass. The hungry traplight beside her brightened, but she barely registered that it was doing so only because she was heaving in breath after rapid breath. The reflection in the glass moved a little and she flinched from head to foot. Then she gave a scream that seemed to tear right up through her like a thumbnail through a blade of grass.

  The mirror shattered when it struck the floor, but that was not enough. The lantern struck sparks off the bars and then swung wildly, its light and shadow tipping giddily, the little trap snapping blindly at the air as its world tilted. The barred door rattled and jumped under a torrent of kicks.

  Only when she was exhausted did Neverfell drop to her knees, the dancing traplight glinting on the tiny shards of glass that now starred the puddled floor.

  The skin of the face she had seen in the mirror had been pale, with a dappling of faint freckles like those across Neverfell’s hands. A long face with a full and tremulous lower lip, downy pale red eyebrows, large and light-coloured eyes. It had been wearing a Face. Neverfell had not expected that, for she did not remember ever having learned any. It had been an unfamiliar Face, but it had looked just the way she felt. Then the reflection had changed Face, and the way it had done so had been strange. It had slid into a new expression in a curious, liquid way she had never seen before. But it was not this strangeness that had made her break the mirror.

  Staring at the new Face, she had been able to read the thoughts behind it, even whilst they echoed in her own head.

  You locked me away, said the expression. You locked me away for seven years, Master Grandible. For nothing.

  The face in the mirror was not beautiful, but nor was it ugly. It was not scarred, burnt or disfigured. Aside from the curious shifting of its Faces, there was nothing wrong with it at all.

  Neverfell had expected the Enquirers to come running after this uproar, perhaps with cudgels and chains, but they did not. Instead she was left to herself, shivering in her darkened cage as it creaked slowly to and fro, specks of glass crunching under her each time she moved, drips falling into the canal below.

  She tried calling out, but her voice was a mere mouse squeak in the well of darkness. She had plenty of questions now, but nobody to answer them. If there’s nothing wrong with my face, why does everybody keep running away? And why am I here? All I did was steal a tiny piece of cheese that shouldn’t have been sent in the first place. What am I doing under Enquiry?

  Shivering, Neverfell sank into a sort of torpor, in which after a time she could hardly feel the cold of her limbs. In spite of everything she drowsed, and so it was that later she could not say precisely when it was that the next visitation occurred.

  With a dreamy faintness, she heard the door open and close once more, and the jetty creak under careful steps. But it did not matter because her drowsy fear was receding, leaving her filled instead with a warm and sleepy sense of well-being and safety. She knew that somebody had come whom she could trust. At the same time, the faintest trace of a pleasant fragrance seeped into Neverfell’s awareness, whispering of rosemary, silver and sweet sleep. She could relax now, the smell told her, slide into slumber.

  Neverfell felt the scent stroke across her mind and soul like a peacock feather . . . and flinched in recoil, banging her head against the bars. Something told her that one’s mind should not be touched like that. Now that she was shocked awake, her trained nose told her that there was an undercurrent to the smell, something wrong and ugly.

  In a flash, she remembered Grandible telling her over and over to sniff visitors through the vent before admitting them within his tunnels, to check for mind-enslaving Perfume.

  You’ll know it when you smell it. You’re a cheesemaker. We have a nose for something rotten, even if nobody else has.

  She pinched her nose shut, and instantly the feeling of trust drained out of her.

  Someone was standing on the jetty. It was hard to make out the figure, and Neverfell realized that the lanterns had been hooded. The figure stepped to the wall, and with a freezing of the blood Neverfell heard the metallic protest of the crank handle once again.

  ‘No!’ she bellowed at the top of her lungs. ‘Stop! Stop!’ Her scream echoed to and fro between the walls, like a bird banging around
inside a flue. There was a rushing rattle, and the cage plunged into the water, this time with a splash, and sank within seconds, taking Neverfell down with it. She had just enough presence of mind to take a deep breath before she was dragged down beneath the black, freezing water, her sodden clothes tangling around her limbs as she failed. She heard the muffled, watery clang of the cage hitting the rocky canal bed.

  This is death, was all she could think. This is death, cold and alone and trapped, with no way of calling to anybody.

  And then, just as her lungs were aching for breath, the cage she clung to righted itself again. There was a submerged cling-cling-cling of metal telling through metal, and then her face surfaced once more, allowing her a rippling, lopsided view of the jetty. The cage was being hauled up out of the water again. The hoods on the lantern had been removed. Treble was standing on the jetty now, as were a number of other Enquirers, one of whom was cranking the wall-handle as fast as possible. Once the water had trickled out of Neverfell’s ears she realized that Treble was shouting.

  ‘What the devil happened? Who dropped this cage?’ She strode to the jetty’s edge, and glared out towards Neverfell. ‘Did you see who it was? Did you see who released the mechanism?’

  All Neverfell could do was numbly shake her head as she started to understand what had happened. Somebody had tried to kill her, and not on the Enquiry’s orders.

  From that point forth, a guard watched her cage from the shadows all the time. There was no clock, no change in light, no way of marking the passing of time but by the arrival of food and water, delivered to the cage through the frying pan. Neverfell could not tell how long she had been catnapping in her cage when she was woken by a small polite cough.

  On the jetty stood an unfamiliar lanky figure, looking intently towards her. This man, however, did not hold himself with the stiffness of authority, but was leaning back against the wall as if he had paused mid-stroll. His lantern was dangling from his hand, so she could make out little of him but his shoes.

  ‘Let’s see you, then.’ His voice was not unkind.

  Neverfell obediently breathed on her lantern until it flared and showed her face properly. The stranger regarded her steadily for a long while. His lean figure showed no tremor.

  ‘So it’s true,’ he said quietly after a long pause. ‘That’s . . . genuinely remarkable. Oh – wait a second – this isn’t very fair, is it? One moment.’ He raised his own lantern to his face, and blew on it until it gleamed, illuminating his own figure. ‘That evens things out a bit, doesn’t it?’

  The lantern showed her a long face with a narrow black beard that looked as if it had been painted on. He had deep, watchful eyes and a complicated mouth, a hiding place for secret smiles. He was wearing a Face that combined self-assurance, readiness to be amused and a tiny hint of pity. It was the friendliest Face Neverfell had seen since her arrest.

  He was just over average height and unusually thin, but everything he wore served to make him look taller and thinner. The fingers of his gloves had been extended and padded so that they looked longer and more elegant. His trailing coat of burgundy-coloured moleskin was striped with long, vertical furrows.

  ‘You’re terrified,’ he said, studying Neverfell carefully. ‘You’re bewildered, you’re fighting down a sense of unfairness and betrayal, and you really don’t have any idea what’s going on at all, do you?’ He shook his head and gave a small grim smile. ‘Idiots,’ he muttered. ‘Hiding out and jabbering about the way you “keep putting on terrible Faces”. What were they expecting, with you dangling over Wrath’s Descent like this?’

  ‘I’m not putting on Faces!’ Neverfell shouted in desperation. ‘I don’t even know how I have Faces – I don’t remember learning any! And I don’t know why they change the way they do! I never even saw a mirror before I came here! And now somebody in here is trying to kill me, and I don’t know why! You have to believe me!’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I really do have to believe you.’ Again the small, dark smile. ‘Oh dear. We’re going to have to do something about you, aren’t we?’ He kicked his heel against the wall thoughtfully. ‘Do you want to get out of here?’

  Neverfell gripped the bars, nodded furiously and managed the world’s smallest, mousiest ‘yes’.

  ‘Then I will see what I can do. But you will have to trust me. What have you told the Enquiry so far?’

  Neverfell wracked her brain. ‘Not really anything – they haven’t really asked me much since I broke the mirror they gave me.’

  ‘Well, you will need to talk to them about your history.’ He raised a hand to hold off Neverfell’s protest. ‘I can see that you are trying to protect somebody. However, let me tell you what the Enquirers already know.

  ‘They know that your name is Neverfell, and that you are the apprentice of Cheesemaster Grandible. After the canal water washed the oil of cloves off you, there was nothing to disguise the smell of cheese, and they deduced your trade in one sniff. After that, it was only a matter of time before that black velvet mask of yours was identified by couriers who had visited the various cheese tunnels.’

  ‘Is Master Grandible in trouble?’ Neverfell’s heart plummeted. She had tried so hard to protect him, and now it seemed the scent of her clothes and skin had betrayed him.

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  ‘But none of this is his fault! He didn’t even know I was out of his tunnels!’ Bitter as the shock of the mirror had been, Neverfell could not bear to think of her master taking the blame for her actions.

  ‘That’s not the problem. He’s in danger of arrest for hiding and harbouring you all these years.’

  ‘Why?’ The cold iron of the bars bit into Neverfell’s fingers as she clutched at them, and the most important question burst from her. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘You really don’t know, do you?’ The stranger contemplated her for a few seconds with his head on one side, long enough that Neverfell started to feel a creeping horror of hearing the answer to her question. ‘Do you want to know?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘Nothing’s wrong with you, except that you don’t have Faces. What you have on the front of your head has the usual eyes, nose, mouth, that sort of thing, but your expressions are a sort of . . . window. They show exactly what you’re thinking and feeling. In detail.

  ‘Nobody in Caverna is supposed to look like that. Nobody. Even outsiders can usually manage a few clumsy Faces, though their own emotions tend to leak through. But you? Every time a thought crosses your mind, it crosses your face at speed, like a wild pony. That’s why the Enquirers can’t bear to look at you. Right now you’re upset to the point of shattering, and your expression is too painful for them to see.’

  ‘So . . . they think I’m an outsider?’

  ‘Yes, of course they do. That’s what you are. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I . . . don’t know.’ Neverfell had lost all her moorings. Was she an outsider? Could she have known another world during her first forgotten years of life? A thousand little details and unspoken thoughts started singing together, and her ears filled with a rush. ‘I don’t remember anything before I turned up in Master Grandible’s tunnels, about seven years ago.’

  ‘Nothing at all? Nothing about your life, or how you came to Caverna, or who smuggled you in?’

  Neverfell shook her head slowly. Was it true? Could she really be an outsider?

  All at once she found herself recalling the curious vision the Stackfalter Sturton had given her, the dappled woodland scene.

  The flowers came up to my waist, as if I were very small. And Sturtons tell you things you know but still need to be told, because you won’t face up to them, or because you’ve forgotten them. Is it possible that I did once walk through that woodland, long ago, when I was much younger? Or was it just a dream, and nothing to do with my past?

  She could not be sure, but what she did know was that for seven years Cheesemaster Grandible had hidden her from the world. If she we
re an outsider, and if Grandible had always known it, then that might explain why he had always been so determined to conceal her face. But whom had he been trying to protect, Neverfell or himself?

  ‘What’s going to happen to Master Grandible?’ she asked.

  ‘As things stand, it does not look good. There are strict rules against bringing in or harbouring outsiders – there is the risk of disease and overcrowding, after all. And he must have known at a glance what you were, even if you didn’t. The Enquiry cannot exile him. He is a fully trained cheesemaker, knowledgeable in a hundred rites of dairymancy, and Caverna must protect her secrets. So . . . imprisonment, probably. Or indentured servitude. Perhaps even execution.’

  ‘Execution?’ squeaked Neverfell in horror.

  ‘You really want to protect him, don’t you?’

  Neverfell hesitated, then nodded vigorously.

  ‘All right. There might be a way. Here’s what you should do. Tell the Enquirers that you wish to take full responsibility for your own presence in Caverna, so that nobody else will be punished but you, under clause 149 of the Masques and Infiltration Act. Then tell them everything you can remember about your background. Then tell them how you came to be in Madame Appeline’s arbour – but do not reveal the identity of any accomplices who helped you. Explain that they were chance acquaintances and you take responsibility for their actions as well as your own. It is the only way you can protect everybody – and yourself.’

  ‘Will they really let me do that?’ asked Neverfell, hardly daring to hope.

  ‘In this particular case, I think they will,’ answered the stranger. ‘I do not think that they are looking forward to arresting Cheesemaster Grandible. It would be just like him to refuse to come out and be arrested, you see, which means they would have to besiege him in his lair, which would be . . . messy. But if they let you take on the whole of the punishment, then they can indenture you instead, put you up for sale and actually make good money out of this whole business.’