A Face Like Glass

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘There are heavy black marks against their name,’ the Grand Steward answered coolly, ‘and another small slip will damn them, but they will be safe enough if they are not fools.’

  ‘And they haven’t been taken over by the Ganderblacks?’

  ‘No. Next question!’

  The Childersins were out of immediate danger, and Maxim had returned to his family, which surely meant that the persecution of Zouelle would be brought to a halt. Neverfell let out a breath, and at last could turn her mind to her own situation.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘Today we are hunting for the Kleptomancer, and those who can help us find him. Enough questions – we arrive.’

  Peering out through the window, Neverfell realized that she was back in the long lagoon cavern where the banquet had taken place. The sedan was very carefully lowered into a boat, which was skulled across to the island. A number of figures were waiting on the other side, and Neverfell felt her skin crawl as she recognized the purple garments that marked them out as Enquirers. Their leader hurried to the sedan to give her report, and to her horror Neverfell recognized Enquirer Treble, who had been her interrogator back at the hanging cells. Today the Enquirer was wearing Face No. 312, A Guardian at the Grey Gates, a grave and impressive expression designed to make her look formidable, reliable and respectful all at once.

  ‘We have a clearer picture of the crime now, Your Excellency.’ Enquirer Treble was doing an excellent job of keeping her eye from straying to Neverfell, which was probably just as well. ‘The only time the Stackfalter Sturton was unwatched was whilst it was locked away in an ice room mere yards from this cavern, so as to lower it to the perfect temperature for consumption. The door was guarded, so it was believed to be safe.

  ‘It would seem the thief tunnelled down into the ice room from a little-used store cave directly above it. In the storeroom we found these.’ She held up some grimy beakers, and a tiny, fragile pair of apothecary’s scales. ‘Whoever he is, he knows his Edible Alchemy. We think he mixed some cunning combination of Gnat-wine, Crathepepper and Shrieking Bladdercheese. Whatever it was, it ate through two yards of stone like boiling water through chocolate.

  ‘We also found this down in the ice room.’ She held up a slender metal implement with fork prongs at one end and a handle four feet long. ‘We believe he cut the Sturton up into pieces, and then used this fork to push them up through the hole. No doubt when this was done he was planning to climb back up himself and make away with his prize.’

  ‘So why did he change his plans?’

  ‘We think he had no choice.’ The Enquirer cast a glance across at Neverfell. ‘After . . . somebody spilt the Ganderblack Wine, the servants panicked and decided to bring in the Sturton half an hour earlier than planned. The thief must have heard somebody unlocking the door, and realized that the only place he could hide in time was under the Sturton’s dish cover.’

  ‘Then . . . it wasn’t my fault!’ Neverfell interrupted jubilantly. ‘I didn’t help the Kleptomancer’s plan – I interrupted it!’

  ‘So it would seem,’ conceded Enquirer Treble, with a good deal of reluctance.

  ‘Have you discovered how this thief managed to infiltrate the storerooms in the first place?’ enquired the Grand Steward. ‘Or, for that matter, how he managed to escape after diving into the lagoon?’

  ‘The Cartographers have been looking into it,’ Treble answered promptly, ‘and we have summoned Master Harpsicalian to explain their findings. He is not . . . safe, but he is better than most of the others. He awaits the honour of your attention.’

  ‘Have him brought here.’

  There was a rattle, and Neverfell saw another sedan chair being hefted unsteadily towards them. It was unlike the one in which she sat in almost every way. For one thing, it had no windows, and its door was covered in heavy-looking bolts and padlocks, so that it looked more like a giant strongbox than a means of transport. Even the dark wood from which it was made had a gleaming solidity to it. Even more curious, on the frame next to the door an hourglass was affixed on a central pivot.

  ‘You have another question,’ the Grand Steward prompted her, as one of his men began pulling back the bolts.

  ‘Who’s in the box?’ Neverfell was trying hard not to bite her nails.

  ‘A Cartographer.’

  Neverfell recollected Zouelle’s warning at the banquet. Cartographers suffered from a contagious insanity. They were useful, many of them brilliant, but anybody who talked to them ran the risk of going bogglingly insane.

  The door opened, and the guard immediately stepped to one side, and revolved the hourglass on its pivot so that sand started to pour down through its narrow heart.

  A man stepped out, swaying and bobbing in a frenzy of courtesy. Immediately there was a sniff of the wrong about him, and Neverfell felt herself tensing. She could see all the guards doing the same. His tea-coloured eyes were unusually large, and seemed to wobble slightly in their sockets. His belt bristled with strange gadgets, and a device strapped to his head gave a resounding click every ten seconds, causing him to jerk slightly.

  He was wearing Face 33, Acknowledgement of Gallantry, a mild smile suitable when one had been passed the sugar at important functions. It did not fit the situation, and that made Neverfell nervous, just as it would have done if he had been wearing his jacket backwards or socks on his hands.

  ‘Master Harpsicalion, I wish to know all you have discovered about the late infiltration into the storerooms over there,’ declared the Grand Steward without preamble. ‘I want to know how the intruder got in, where he came from and where he escaped to.’ His eye was on the timer, and he spoke with a new harsh urgency. ‘Speak! Be quick!’

  ‘Ahhh.’ The strange figure let out a long breath, let in a long breath, and then started to speak in a surprisingly crisp and sane-sounding tone. ‘Well, of course I am summarizing the findings of my more skilled peers, but I understand from Peckletter that for some time –’ jerk – ‘there’s been a waterlogged channel in the granitelanes . . .’

  He had a wonderfully crystalline way of talking. His voice rose and fell and took you with it, up spiral staircases you did not know were there and down sudden shafts and into unsuspected corridors until you lost track of time and –

  ‘. . . batwise scutterblack so we hadn’t time to wind up properly with elbow-mandator before we could gauge the reverberation and the earth-hiccups—’

  ‘Time’s up!’ shouted the guard as the last grains of the hourglass tumbled into the base. The Cartographer was still talking, but the guard pushed him firmly back through the door and closed it behind him.

  There was a small pause while eighteen people recovered their breath and started untwisting their brains, a curiously painful process.

  The Cartographer had been talking for five minutes. For the last three of those, Neverfell now realized, he had been saying very little that made ordinary sense. Worryingly, at the time, she had felt that she understood him perfectly. Her mind had been pulled out from the shores of sanity by the current of the Cartographer’s words, and hauling herself back was a wrench.

  Even now there was a lurking feeling that she had, for a moment, been shown something wonderful, a hint to a colossal puzzle that would unravel and help her understand the world. She still had a sense of how rock felt, what it meant to have silver and copper in your veins. She could feel the tug of the unseen caves, the urge to leave her prints in caverns never before trodden by man . . .

  Now it was obvious why there was an hourglass outside the Cartographer’s door. More than five minutes’ conversation with him was just too dangerous.

  ‘So.’ The Grand Steward startled her out of her own thoughts. ‘How much of that did you understand?’

  Neverfell struggled to answer, remembering the importance of ‘not seeming a fool’. So many of the Cartographer’s phrases, which had seemed so lucid, now collapsed into nonsense under the cold light of sanity. Neverfell no longer
understood what ‘melancholy basalt’ was, or why it was important to ‘sing three degrees of silver’. However, parts of his speech lingered, and made some murky sense.

  ‘Er . . . the Cartographers have been searching the area with . . . with weasels and spoon meters . . .’ Neverfell creased her brow. ‘And now they think the only way he could have got in was up a . . . waste chute?’

  ‘That was also my understanding of Master Harpsicalian’s words.’ Enquirer Treble was resting her fingertips on her forehead, as if trying to keep the contents steady.

  ‘And mine,’ muttered the Grand Steward, as incredulously as if the Kleptomancer had been accused of crawling out of a teapot spout. ‘I see. So our thief squeezed his way up two hundred foot of sheer shaft, slithery with every kind of rot and foulness, in spite of all the downwards-pointing metal spikes designed to stop anybody or anything doing exactly that. And since the fumes of those places are deadly and no trap-lanterns will grow there, he presumably did it without needing to breathe.’

  ‘My apologies, Your Excellency.’ Enquirer Treble seemed wary of rising too far out of a bow. ‘But it would seem that the Cartographers have found no other way that he can have entered.’

  ‘And his escape seems equally implausible,’ continued the Grand Steward. ‘If I have understood Master Harpsicalian’s babblings, the criminal escaped through an underwater tunnel leading from the lagoon. An escape route that would require him to hold his breath for ten minutes, then dive down through a forty-foot waterfall into a fast-moving river.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I am rather assuming that nobody here seriously thinks the man drowned in that river,’ the Grand Steward remarked.

  ‘Not unless his ghost returned later to recover the cheese pieces from the storeroom where he had hidden them,’ answered Enquirer Treble. ‘There is no sign of them now. And, as for drowning, we suspect his suit was probably airtight, perhaps even equipped with its own air supply. Some of the Cartographers have developed suits a lot like that for exploring caves filled with water.’

  ‘That is interesting.’ The Grand Steward’s single eye did not precisely change expression, but something in its pale fire brightened and intensified. ‘Treble, this man may be a Cartographer. It might explain his knowledge of hidden ways. Make discreet enquiries, but the Cartographers themselves must not know of our suspicion, or word may reach our thief.’

  When Treble had bowed and departed to pass on orders, Neverfell spent a few moments biting back a question, until as usual it escaped her.

  ‘What’s wrong with the Cartographer? There’s something upsetting him, isn’t there? Like there’s an itch he can’t scratch.’

  The Grand Steward turned his cold eye upon her, then gave a curt but approving nod. ‘The Cartographers are restless of late,’ he confirmed. ‘Excitable. Unpredictable. They have not been this bad since the madness over the Undiscovered Passage.’

  ‘Undiscovered Passage?’

  ‘An obsession of theirs. You know, I suppose, that some Cartographers deliberately learn to squeak and hear like bats – they believe that they can use the squeak echoes to tell the shape of tunnels all around them, the way bats do but with much greater accuracy. About seven years ago all these bat-squeakers became convinced that they had sensed a new tunnel, one that had never been noticed before.

  ‘They seemed to believe it ran deep into the heart of Caverna, and yet was on no map. No wider than two cubits, straight as a harp string and very, very long. They insisted that there was something wrong with it – that it only had one end. And then, before they could work out where it was, it vanished again. The obsession filtered through to the rest of the Cartographers, like smoke seeping under a door, and they went demented hunting it for a time. They calmed after a while, but never completely gave up their search for it.’

  ‘Could that passage be the way the Kleptomancer sneaked in and out?’

  ‘The Cartographers think not. And perhaps it does not even exist outside their delusions.’

  ‘So if they never found any new trace of the tunnel, why are they restless now?’

  ‘Nobody knows. Perhaps they do not know themselves.’

  Neverfell contemplated this whilst the Grand Steward continued talking to Enquirer Treble.

  ‘So what else do we know of this man?’

  ‘The thief is short,’ she answered, ‘but not a child – he has been operating for a long time. His activities were first reported ten years ago, but he only became notorious seven years ago, when a very sizeable reward was offered for his capture. Anonymously, it would seem. We also have a list of all those thefts for which he is believed to be responsible. There . . . does not seem to be any pattern, Your Excellency.’

  ‘See if you can find out who offered that reward,’ instructed the Grand Steward. ‘What else can we deduce about him? This is a thief who will risk his life to steal a truckle of Stackfalter Sturton. What does this tell us?’

  ‘He really likes cheese?’ Neverfell suggested, then clapped both hands over her mouth when everybody glared at her.

  ‘Spoken like a cheesemaker,’ responded the Enquirer with cool disdain.

  ‘But . . .’ Neverfell could not suppress her thoughts. ‘But he must know a little about cheese. Or about this cheese, anyway. You see, when a Sturton is ripening it’s very important to turn it often, but after it’s ripe and sliced, you have to poke it with a gold needle regularly to let it vent. So he must be doing that, at the very least.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ snapped the Enquirer.

  ‘Um . . . well, if he hadn’t, I think somebody would have heard the explosion,’ Neverfell explained meekly.

  ‘He may have let them detonate in the wild tunnels, where none would hear them,’ the Enquirer responded dismissively. ‘It is plain from our records that the Kleptomancer cares little for the things he steals. Most of the time he destroys them or casts them aside as soon as he has them. The theft is all that matters to him. The disruption he causes. The notoriety it gains him. The challenge.’

  ‘Why don’t you challenge him to steal something, then? You could lie in wait and grab him.’ Neverfell looked round, and found that the Grand Steward’s cold right eye was fixed upon her. ‘Oh! Um . . . I mean . . . why don’t you challenge him to steal something, Your Excellency.’

  The Enquirer froze her with a glance of weary contempt. ‘If the man is clever enough to mix Luxuries without blowing off his own head, then he is intelligent enough to spot such an obvious trap.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Neverfell paused, trying to organize the squirrel-dance of her thoughts. ‘But people do walk into traps, don’t they? When it’s the right bait. They just can’t help it, even when they know it’s a trap.’

  ‘Not everybody opens a box when they know it will blow up in their face,’ the Enquirer suggested icily, and Neverfell reddened.

  ‘You are wrong, Treble,’ said the Grand Steward speculatively, his eye still on Neverfell. ‘Everybody has a box they cannot help but open, even if they are almost certain it is a trap. Everybody has something they cannot resist. It is just a matter of finding the right box and the right bait for each person. And for this thief I think we must bait the trap with something odd enough to pique his sense of theatre, something unique.

  ‘Our next stop will be the Cabinet of Curiosities.’

  The Grand Steward’s sedan was carried through the Avenue of Marvels, where ancient fossilized fish with narrow snouts grinned toothily from the rock of the wall, and down the Street of Dry Tears, where solitary drop-shaped crystals hung suspended from nigh-invisible threads. At last they came to two green doors, just wide enough when open for the sedan to be carried within.

  The Cabinet of Curiosities was, in fact, a set of rooms filled with wonders of the world. The Grand Steward’s hunger for anything that would break his boredom was well-known in the overground world, and so explorers would travel distant lands and take deadly risks just to bring him back something
extraordinary enough to amuse him for a little while. Small wonder, for any man who could deliver a novelty worthy of the Grand Steward’s notice was paid a king’s ransom.

  Each object within had, at one time, stirred in his mind some spark of curiosity, and a fleeting sense that the world was marvellous and not always predictable. Each time, however, the interest had burned itself out leaving only the bland grey ashes of boredom, and the new novelty was sent to join its fellows in the Cabinet of Curiosities. The Cabinet was, in fact, nothing more or less than a testament to the Grand Steward’s all-consuming, all-annihilating boredom, and he had not set foot in it for over fifty years.

  Now, however, everything was different, for he had his strange young food taster by his side. She had never seen such marvels before, and under her eye the curiosities came to life again. He saw anew the mummified body of King Arupet with gems the size of dove’s eggs in his eye sockets; the horn of a giant narwhal; a dragonfly the length of a man’s arm trapped in amber; the stuffed corpse of a three-headed calf; the skeleton of a man so holy that tiny wings had grown from his shoulders; a singed round rock said to be a thunderbolt. She seemed particularly fascinated by the pale plaster death masks of famous poets, their eyes closed and cheeks slack. He saw her curiosity building, like a geyser waiting to erupt.

  The curator of the Cabinet nearly crippled himself in his haste to approach the Grand Steward and offer his trembling bows.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the Grand Steward responded wearily. ‘Keep that girl out of my way and answer her questions, will you?’

  The girl was insatiable, capering about like a mad monkey, peering into the cases at roc’s eggs and rhino hides. Then she halted, gaped and moved slowly to stand before the lean, towering figure of a stuffed animal some eighteen feet tall. She stared transfixed at its tawny fur and tortoiseshell blotches, its soft horn-stubs and handlebar ears, its stilt legs and the mane-fringe down the back of its telescope neck.

  ‘What have you done to this horse?’ Her voice was audible to the Grand Steward even from the other side of the room. ‘Did it die from having its neck stretched too far?’