A Face Like Glass

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘And . . . the Cartographers are restless. Usually they are just bothered by the Undiscovered Passage, but now a lot of them believe that Caverna herself is getting ready to grow or shift again, which means that everything is about to change. These are the threads I am following for now, though I cannot have anybody knowing that.’

  ‘But . . .’ Neverfell bit her own tongue, but could not stop the words escaping. ‘But if it’s so secret, why did you just tell me about it all?’

  ‘That will not be a problem,’ came the response. ‘I am to return you exactly as I found you . . . which means I will be erasing your memories of the last three hours as soon as I have some more True Wine.’

  The Works

  ‘What?’ Neverfell was horrified and rather hurt. She had started to feel a strange camaraderie with her curious kidnapper during their answer-bartering. He was, after all, perhaps the only person in Caverna who was more of an outsider than she was. And now, quite suddenly, he had reminded her that she had no rights. She was a possession of the Grand Steward. Even her memories were not her own. They were just grime to be wiped away from a borrowed possession.

  ‘I cannot send you back knowing what you know. And it is better for you if you do not. If you know too much, it will show in your face. The less you know, the longer you will live.’

  ‘But . . . I want to remember this conversation! I want to understand! I don’t want to be a toy! I don’t want to be a thing! I want to know how everything works! And I’m not supposed to eat or drink anything anyway! I’ll get in trouble if I drink the Wine!’

  He gazed at her unblinking with his stony drudge face, and Neverfell had no idea whether he felt sympathy or contempt, or whether he had even heard her. He said not another word more, but returned to his metal suit and began methodically donning it again. Once back in his armour, he picked up his helmet, strode to the double doors and opened them to reveal the bellowing waterfall.

  Ignoring Neverfell’s protests, he fastened a clip on his belt to the wire, then took out a small crank handle, fixed it to the front of the clip, and wound it vigorously for several minutes. He then swung back, so that he was hanging below the wire, suspended by his belt, and looked across at Neverfell.

  ‘You’re thinking of trying to escape,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question. ‘Forget that idea. Even if the waterfall didn’t kill you, you’d be lost in Drudgery. It’s not a safe place for the clueless, and, besides, that’s where the people who want you dead will be looking for you first. When I return, I will make sure you are left somewhere safe.’

  Then he screwed on his helmet, kicked off from the floor, and pulled a lever on the hand crank. Instantly, with a wwhhrrzzjj noise, he raced backwards out of the room along the wire, in spite of its upward slope. As he reached the waterfall, the falling deluge made an umbrella shape of splatter as it struck him. The next moment he was gone.

  Neverfell stared out at the vast waterfall, and her spirits sank. She could feel the cold of it on her face and hands, and its voice was all but deafening. But the Kleptomancer had passed out through it and survived. She did not know how he had managed to slide back up the wire . . . but if he could do it perhaps so could she.

  What I need is a belt clip like his one. And he has another suit.

  Neverfell scampered to the place where she had seen the other armoured suit hanging. The fish-shaped scales had a shimmer that made them look watery and light, but when she unhooked it from the ceiling her arms almost gave under its weight. It was lined with leather and smelt of oil and wax.

  Hanging beside it was a matching goggled helmet, with a tube leading from the mouth-part of the mask to a backpack. Curious, Neverfell opened the pack and discovered within a solitary trap-lantern, dull grey and inert. It woke up as the air touched it and managed a hopeful amber gleam.

  ‘Hello, little yellow,’ she whispered, as the trap snapped blearily around it, sensing the draught. ‘So that’s how he survived swimming so long underwater after the banquet! He had you in an airtight pack, didn’t he? Giving him air.’

  To her excitement, Neverfell found that this other suit also had a belt-clip, with a hole in the front for the kind of crank handle the Kleptomancer had wound up before leaving. The handle itself, however, was missing, and her spirits tumbled again. Perhaps it had been too much to hope that the thief would leave her with such an easy means of escape.

  She scoured the room, without much hope, but could find no sign of the missing handle. Perhaps he only had one. Or perhaps he had two, but had taken them both with him.

  Neverfell found a grub and fed it to the little trap in the pack. ‘I’m just going to have to do things the hard way, aren’t I?’ she muttered to it. If her apprenticeship had taught her anything, it was how to jury-rig something in an emergency on no sleep.

  One thing that the room did not lack was tools, indeed many of them were better than any that Neverfell had ever owned. The casing of the belt clip itself was welded shut, so she could not open it and examine the workings. However, she could learn a fair amount by peering into the handle socket, and prodding it with a spindle. Then it was a matter of cobbling together something the right shape to act as a makeshift crank handle. After an hour of prodding, hammering, sawing, trial and error, she had an ugly-looking portion of a chair leg with a few nails jutting from one end, which could just about be slotted into the socket and rotated using a cross-shaft. With each turn, a promising click-click-click-click issued from within the mechanism.

  She only stopped when she was out of breath and the mechanism could be wound no further. The weight of the suit made it very hard to put on, but she managed by laying it on the ground, opening it, wriggling her way in and fastening the clasps. Once she was standing up in it, everything became a lot easier. Fortunately the Kleptomancer was only a little taller than she was, so there were only a few places where the scales were rucked like concertina wrinkles. She could just about lever her hands into the big leather gloves at the end, though the fingers were clumsy and unwieldy.

  Neverfell was just considering putting on the helmet when she heard a familiar sound from beyond the waterfall. It was a high metallic whine, the distinctive whirr of wire passing through a belt clip. Far sooner than she had expected, the Kleptomancer was returning.

  Neverfell lurched forward, and flung herself against the wall near the opening, so that one of the open shutters would hide her from view. Holding her breath, she saw the familiar goggled figure land dripping in the doorway and unclip his belt from the wire. She let him take two paces into the room before she lurched out with a pair of heavy shears under one arm, fumbled her belt clip on to the wire, and swung out beneath it, the way he had done.

  ‘Hey!’

  The Kleptomancer turned in time to see her flipping the lever on the clip. The next moment the clip gave a fierce, grating, keening noise, and the ground was gone from beneath her feet. The thief made a snatch at her ankle, and his finger just brushed her armoured toes. The next moment the icy power of the waterfall axed down upon her, knocking out her wits. Then she was out the other side and still rising, gasping for air, half deafened from the shock, her eyes full of wet hair.

  Her heart caught in her throat as she looked down and saw the falling water cascading down a hundred feet or more into smokily indistinct spray clouds. Then she was skimming up towards the opposite wall of the great shaft, where her feet shakily found purchase on a waiting ledge. She unclipped her belt mechanism from the wire, and it released its remaining tension in a high-pitched buzz.

  The Kleptomancer would not be slow to pursue. With her shears, she sawed at the thick wire that spanned the river until it gave with a spung noise, and whiplashed back on itself, rebounding off the rock face on the other side of the sheer drop.

  I hope I haven’t stranded him there forever so he starves. No, he’s ever so clever. I’m sure hell think of something.

  There was a crawl-through beside her, so Neverfell ducked into it and scrambled a
way, her armoured scales rasping against the gritty floor, water sloshing inside her suit. Only when she reached proper tunnels did she dare unclasp and peel off the heavy suit. She left it sitting up in a dark corner, its arms folded across its stomach as if it had enjoyed a good meal.

  Despite the burning pain in her ankle she forced herself to run and run, only letting herself slow to a limp when the roar of the waterfall had faded behind her, and she became aware of other noises. The ground shook with a rhythmic shunt and clatter, like that from an enormous machine, distorted by echo. Now and then a gong rang out, trailing its brassy echo after it like a comet tail. She hobbled towards the sounds, for the sounds meant people.

  Everywhere a thick grey dust coated the floor, and soon it coated her feet like mouse fur and created a roughness in her throat. The passages here were all low, and squirmed around and over each other like a basket of eels. She was lurching along one such corridor when it opened out unexpectedly. Fortunately she managed to stop an inch or two before the floor did.

  Her passage had ended in an arched aperture set in a clifflike wall, and she was looking down into a broad crevasse. Far below, she could see the treacherous white flare of a raging river. Half-submerged in the water were monstrous waterwheels of black wood, each the height of ten men, their slatted blades streaming as they rose from the water. Their spindles vanished into the walls of the crevasse on either side, and Neverfell could just make out the edges of great millstones, revolving inch by grudging inch, the unseen mill machinery groaning and roaring like enslaved leviathans.

  Set in the sheer walls that flanked either side of the crevasse, Neverfell could see countless other archways and openings like the one at which she had just appeared, rope ladders dangling beneath each one. The walls themselves were pocked and etched with ledges barely a hand’s span wide, and metal spokes to serve as foot-supports and hand holds. With the aid of these, hundreds of people were scrambling up and down the cliffs, in spite of the steepness.

  Many of those climbing upward bore wooden yokes with bags or buckets dangling from them, yet did not seem to be thrown off balance by the extra weight. There were bulging hessian flour sacks, fine-weave bags of snuff, even rolls of newly milled paper. Some of those struggling up the cliff-face with such loads were children of Neverfell’s age and even younger. Even from a distance, Neverfell could see that the climbing figures were short, even the adults probably not much taller than she was. At many of the archways, she could see carts and pit ponies waiting to take the goods away.

  The entire crevasse was startlingly bright. Hundreds of greenish wild trap-lanterns glowed and pulsed in the cliff face, thriving on the air breathed out by the clambering multitude. Some of the traps were large enough to have swallowed a cow. Without really thinking about it, Neverfell had always supposed that the Drudgery would be murky and dark, but of course that made no sense. Dense crowds meant more traps meant brighter light.

  Neverfell stared, fascinated. In her head she knew that what she was watching must be back-breaking and dangerous, and yet it was hard to feel anything for the workers. They just seemed so dogged, placid and docile, a hundred heads all with the same Face. Watching them, it was hard to believe that they had individual thoughts and feelings, that they were not just contented cogs in a giant machine, like those turned by the waterwheels below.

  Then Neverfell saw one of the cogs falter and miss a notch. On the far wall of the crevasse, a girl who looked nine or ten years old lost her footing for a moment. She regained it next instant, but not before her yoke teetered dangerously, so that a bag of snuff fell out of one of the buckets. When she finally reached the top, Neverfell could see a man in a dark red coat counting out the bags in her bucket, and turning to berate her. He was obviously shouting, but the roar of water and machinery drowned his voice, and Neverfell could only watch the action play out in dumb show. To judge by his greater height and use of lordly Faces, this man was not a drudge, but a foreman of some sort.

  He pointed down the crevasse, and the girl leaned over to peer, her face still perfectly calm. Following their gaze, Neverfell could just about see a dark blue blob that might be the fallen bag, caught on a jutting prong of rock teased by the river’s white mane. Neverfell watched horrified as the girl began her descent, still stone-faced but with hints of tremor in her legs.

  When she reached the lowermost ledge and continued to clamber downwards on to the more perilous, water-darkened crags, this was noticed by the other climbers. Some of them scrambled swiftly up to the foreman’s ledge. Soon there was a horseshoe of figures around the foreman, pointing down at the girl, talking at once. The foreman responded with bellowing and wild gestures of his gnarled cane. For a moment it looked as if one or two of the drudges over whom he towered might hold their ground, but then they exchanged glances with each other and gradually pulled back, heads bowed in surrender.

  The girl below was reaching down from an overhang, trying to snatch at the bag beneath her. No, don’t! begged Neverfell in her head, as she watched more and more of the younger girl’s weight leaning over the drop. Don’t! Please don’t! It’s just a bag of snuff! A stupid bag of snuff!

  Neverfell blinked and missed the crucial instant. As her lids were closing there was a girl still on the ledge, fingertips just brushing the bag. By the time her eyes were open again, the ledge was empty. There was no sign of her in the water. The river had swallowed her like a white wolf and rushed on.

  The other drudges showed no display of emotion. They stared for a long time down into the pitiless mill-race, then glanced at one another, picked up their yokes and returned to their work. The foreman lifted a long-handled wooden hammer and began beating on what looked like a great stone xylophone, great slabs of slate providing the different notes. He played a simple sequence of notes repeatedly, and after a while a new boy arrived, picked up the lost girl’s yoke and began clambering down the sheer face.

  ‘What’s wrong with you all?’ Neverfell wailed, aloud and unheard. ‘You saw what happened! Why don’t any of you care?’

  And then, quite suddenly, everything changed before her eyes. The figures on the wall ceased to be ants and became people. Suddenly she could imagine the strain on their shoulders, their broken nails, the chill of spray, the stomach-twisting awareness of the hungry drop below. How had she been stupid enough to think that these people were not grief-stricken, or cold, or weary, or angry? They just did not have the Faces to show any of these things. They had always been denied such expressions, and now, at last, Neverfell was starting to understand why.

  How could the drudges rise up against bullies like the foreman? Rebels needed to look at each other and see their own anger reflected, and know that their feeling was part of a greater tide. But any drudge who glanced at his fellows would see only calm, tame Faces waiting for orders.

  Neverfell could feel the muscles of her face tighten and move. There was a tingling sensation in her skin and a buzzing feeling in her chest. Yes, she knew what this was. She remembered Childersin talking to her, telling her that she was . . . angry.

  Neverfell found a large, dank piece of sacking and wrapped it around herself to conceal her pyjamas, and to shroud her hair and face. Only then did she dare the narrow tunnels, where she soon found herself stifled and bruised by a mass of hurrying, pressing, unwashed bodies.

  The reek of rot and the chamberpot was overwhelming, and she soon realized why. Occasional grilles beneath her feet looked down into caverns full of heaped waste of all sorts, being shovelled by masked drudges into a ravine where yet another river rushed, presumably so that it could be carried out of Caverna. Amid the waste stood fine mesh cages the height of a man, their insides boiling and crawling with motion. Thousands of moths and grubs gorged and fattened on dung, not knowing they were destined to feed the lanterns of Caverna.

  Through narrow arches, she saw long low dormitories crammed with sleeping figures and soaked with glaring green light from the unshaded trap-lanterns. She glimpsed c
rèches where babies were laid out a dozen to a bed, whilst among them strode the crèche nurses, wearing masks of the docile Faces the infants were permitted to learn. Everybody around her was short, a lot of the adults not much taller than she was. Many of the children walked oddly, their legs buckling inwards so their knees knocked, and they shook with coughs that seemed too large for them.

  You wanted to know how everything worked, said the relentless voice in Neverfell’s head. And now you do.

  She felt as if she were looking at a river, a flood of brown and grey clothes, seething with matching foam-pale faces. And that was how everybody else saw the drudges, one great mindless force of nature that could be harnessed to turn treadmills and bear away rubbish and nourish the whole city.

  And yet there was a life to this Undercity, she realized, a life belied by the drab monotony of the naked stone and blank faces. As the air shook with the thunder of grinding millstones, lunging pump pistons and rattling treadmills, sometimes she heard strains of song trained to follow their rhythm, like man-size footsteps scampering between the long strides of giants. She started to hear the differences in the tunes of the stone xylophones with their coded signals, some urgent, some leisurely, some almost jaunty. She began to notice the subtle hand mimes the drudges used to communicate over the din, the way they clasped hands in greeting, barely bothering to glance at each other’s immobile faces.

  In among the dun-coloured river of drudges, she saw a flash of purple. Reflexively, she flattened herself against a wall, and peered through the crowd. Yes, there was a figure ahead, dressed in the unmistakable colours of an Enquirer. He was standing in the very middle of the corridor, so that the human river was forced to part to pass him, and appeared to be scanning the flow. Now and then he reached out and casually caught at an arm, forcing somebody to stop. Those he halted were nearly all girls of Neverfell’s build and height.

  Neverfell caught fragments of sentences.