A Face Like Glass

by Frances Hardinge

  The character of the tunnels gradually changed, the air growing colder, the chipped surfaces of the walls lighter, less tarnished by time. The muted echoes of the thoroughfares were gradually replaced by the distinctive chip, bang and clatter of picks on stone, and the occasional sandy rattle of shale and rocks.

  Before long, Neverfell and Erstwhile passed a pit pony serenely dragging a wagon full of rocks. Its driver appeared to have twists of cloth pushed into his ears. It was not clear whether this was to protect him from the din or the words of the Cartographers. Neverfell’s crazed and goggled appearance only earned her a fleeting glance, though his gaze lingered curiously on Erstwhile, who was walking a pace behind her.

  ‘You better put cloth in your ears,’ whispered Neverfell when the cart had rolled by, ‘or they’ll wonder how you’re walking along with me without going mad.’ They cut little pieces off Neverfell’s already frayed sleeves and rolled them up to make earplugs. ‘We’re going to start meeting people soon – do you think I better start twitching and fidgeting and acting crazy?’

  Erstwhile gave her a sideways glance as he chewed the cloth pieces to make them soft. ‘I don’t think you need to change a thing,’ was all he said.

  Many of these tunnels were propped with timber struts, their wood dusty but unblackened. Here and there, pitched windchimes had been hung to measure the air currents, chalk marks drawn on the walls, and names of tunnels scrawled on the floor. At last they found themselves in a long horizontal shaft, where various drudge figures seemed to be hurrying out of side passages carrying pails of chipped rock, pouring basins of milky water down wooden fumes, or examining pale seams in the rock face ahead.

  One of them noticed the two new arrivals, and gestured to gain Erstwhile’s attention.

  ‘Not here!’ the man mouthed in an exaggerated fashion, having evidently noticed Erstwhile’s earplugs. ‘Take her through there. On the left.’

  Erstwhile nodded, grabbed Neverfell’s arm and led her through an arch to the left, and down a small, downward-sloping passage to a rather makeshift, ill-fitting door, to which an hourglass had been fixed.

  ‘This must be where they keep their Cartographers,’ whispered Neverfell. ‘Wait here for me. It’s best if one of us is outside watching to make sure the time doesn’t run out.’

  ‘No, I’d better be the one to go in,’ Erstwhile snapped suddenly. ‘You’re half mad already – you got less far to go if it comes to going crazy.’

  ‘Or maybe I’ve got less to lose.’ Neverfell took a deep breath, then twisted the hourglass upside down and stepped into the room before Erstwhile could object.

  In the middle of the small, rounded room beyond the door, a man was sitting on a wooden chair, quite calmly. He looked about fifty years old, his thinning blond-grey hair combed neatly across his head. He wore a thick coat trimmed with greying, damp-spiked fur, and he was no drudge, to judge by his height, and by the brightness and confidence of the smile he directed at Neverfell when he looked up. It was a Face that might be worn by a professor pleased to see the arrival of a new student.

  His feet were bare, and his long, dirty toes kept flexing against the stone floor over and over, as if they were trying to pick something up.

  ‘Haaah, well timed. You can help me recalculate the meridian. It has swung anticlockwise again and scattered my azimuths.’

  ‘I’m . . .’ Neverfell swallowed and opted for honesty. ‘I’m not a real Cartographer.’

  ‘I know,’ said the toe-flexer. ‘Your butterflies are in the wrong places. But you will do. Here is your end of the string. Now walk round me in a slow circle, looking at me continually, and tell me when I look whitest.’

  ‘Sir, please!’ Neverfell did not want to spend her full five minutes walking in circles. ‘I want to ask you something. About the Doldrums. About passages running in and out of them. About what happened there seven years ago.’

  ‘Doldrums. Dollldrrruums.’ The Cartographer first whispered the word, then breathed it slowly so that ‘dol’ became a sonorous bell chime, and rolled the ‘r’ into a drumroll. ‘Haven’t been asked about that for a while. Such a pity it was closed off. Such a beautiful Twister.’

  ‘What’s a Twister?’ The question was out before Neverfell could stop herself.

  The man beamed at her as if by asking that she had presented him with a golden chalice completely filled with chocolate ice cream. ‘You want to know?’ he asked delightedly. ‘You really want to know?’

  Neverfell suddenly had a strong feeling that perhaps she didn’t.

  ‘It wasn’t just the Twister, mind,’ the Cartographer went on. ‘Something else was happening there as well.’

  ‘Illegal digging,’ suggested Neverfell, slightly disorientated by how normal the conversation seemed to be so far. ‘Lots of Cartographers went there to find out about it. And then they died, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes. Influenza. That’s what people said.’ He was observing her closely, and there was something wrong with the way he blinked. Most blinkers didn’t close their eyes completely, but he did, and paused an instant before opening them. Blink. Breath. Unblink. ‘Who are you?’ He was still smiling, but his voice suddenly had a menacing, suspicious drawl. ‘Why are you dressed as one of us? Why are you here, asking about the Doldrums?’

  All the sensible options seemed to involve lying or walking out and learning nothing more. Instead, on an impulse, Neverfell slowly lifted her goggles, so that her face could be seen by the light of the single trap-lantern hanging from the ceiling.

  ‘Ahhh. You.’ The Cartographer sat back in his chair. Blink. Unblink. ‘She doesn’t like you.’

  ‘What? Who doesn’t?’ asked Neverfell in confusion, the image of Madame Appeline’s face springing unbidden to mind.

  ‘She doesn’t like you at all.’ The Cartographer put his head on one side and closed his eyes, apparently focusing on the sensation through his toes. ‘You . . . tickle.’

  Neverfell remembered the Kleptomancer’s words about Caverna, and developed a new suspicion as to the identity of ‘she’ .

  ‘I don’t want to tickle,’ she murmured with feeling. ‘I don’t want to be in the city at all. But there’s nowhere else for me to go.’

  ‘If you want to go nowhere, you need the Undiscovered Passage. That goes to nowhere and nothingness. The bat-squeaks went into the nothingness, and nothing came back.’

  ‘Yes.’ Neverfell leaned forward to whisper. ‘I do want the Undiscovered Passage. I want to know everything about it. It appeared and disappeared seven years ago as well, didn’t it? Did it happen round about the time those other Cartographers started swarming to the Doldrums? What I mean to say is, is it possible they did that because they’d realized that that was where the Undiscovered Passage was?’

  Neverfell now had the Cartographer’s undivided attention. Indeed, she rather wished something would come along to divide it, so intense was his stare. And then, just as she felt as though his gaze were boring into her forehead like a knitting needle, the Cartographer stood and walked to another door behind him, twisted the hourglass attached to it and stepped through. The hourglass itself was murky with dust and crushed insects, and the glass appeared to have been scored by claws.

  ‘Wait! Where are you going?’ Neverfell’s voice echoed uselessly in the little room. For a moment she was afraid that he had gone to report her identity. Then she began to understand what she had just seen. The door through which he had passed had its own Cartographer’s hourglass. Presumably, therefore, he had gone to speak with somebody that even he could not risk talking to for more than five minutes, a Cartographer whose madness and insight was feared even by ordinary Cartographers.

  Although she knew it was foolish, Neverfell could not resist running over to this second door and pressing her ear against it. All she could hear, however, was a muted conversation, which seemed to be between the man who had just left her and another who spoke in a hissing, clicking way, interrupted by the occasional short, sharp
shriek. There was a pause, then a patter of steps, a metallic squeak, then the sound of yet another door being opened and shut.

  There was another pause, and then Neverfell thought she could hear extremely faint hissing and shrieks, and behind even them perhaps a hint of bat-like squeaking.

  The unseen door opened and closed once more, and Neverfell heard what sounded like a hissed and screamed explanation. She leaped away from the door before it too opened to readmit the short man to whom she had been speaking before.

  His appearance was now even more disturbing. His hair flew up in wild antennae-like wisps, his eyes bulged, and his forehead was glossy with perspiration. Across his high brow a sooty handprint was visible, and his collar seemed to have been chewed off.

  ‘Beautiful,’ was the first thing he said. ‘Flaws are the most beautiful thing, are they not? Like the tiny fractures in a gem that glimmer when they catch the light. And sometimes they have shapes in them, like the flecks in a perfect eye you could sink into slide down the spirals so sweet and hopeless for she never forgives but coming back to the point a twister at the kissing points of two norths with a corkscrew radiance . . .’

  And if it had been nonsense, Neverfell would have been safe. But fragments of it almost did make sense, and her brain could not help but hang on to them and be pulled along, like a rider with one foot in the stirrup trailed behind a galloping horse. And it was worth it, because the longer you held on the more sense it made, only the thing dragging you was suddenly too scaly to be a horse and had far too many heads . . .

  And Neverfell started to understand the beauty of flaws, those places where up and down secretly gave up their argument and shook hands, where compass points spun like a dervish and where space itself was twisted like a wrung-out flannel. These places were the dimples for Caverna’s glittering smile, her foibles, her signature. To understand them was to steal a smile, a twisted rose from her hand, a bone from between her thousand teeth.

  And so it seemed that Neverfell’s mind had broken out of the silly common-sense skull that had trapped it all this time, and gone lolloping off, wild as a broken bird and formless as soup. Before her she saw the Twister, a crooked pin dragging the map askew. She poured her mind into it, took its shape, started to become the Twister. Ah yes, that was how it all fitted together. Now that she had folded her mind she could see that.

  And then for a moment she saw a flash of something else, something tantalizing. For the tiniest instant she saw an aperture like a perfectly round cave mouth that appeared to lead to a shaft full of light. The Undiscovered Passage. It was beckoning to her, it was begging her to explore and map it . . . and it was gone. She seemed to feel the inner sigh of every Cartographer in Caverna at the memory of that passage. Where was it? Where did it lead? And why, oh why, did it vanish before they could worship it with maps?

  She could find it right now. She knew she could. But it would be far easier and quicker if she gave up on her body and wandered the tunnels with her mind alone, swimming down the glittering gem-veins in the mountain’s rock . . .

  . . . and Neverfell came to herself to discover that she was kneeling on grazed knees, her throat was sore and that somebody was trying to twist off her ears.

  She gave a squawk of pain, and shook off her attacker, who proved to be Erstwhile. She was back in the corridor again. The door to the Cartographer’s room was closed once more, and she could see that the sands in the hourglass had all run through into the base.

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do!’ yelped Erstwhile once he had recovered his breath a little. ‘When the hourglass ran out, I had to drag you out, and I tried shaking you but it didn’t work! You kept flailing around and shouting about the glory of loam!’

  ‘Thanks,’ Neverfell croaked weakly. Her head still felt crowded. She stared down at her feet, which now appeared to be bare, and flexed her toes slowly.

  ‘Did it work?’ asked Erstwhile, peering into her face.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Neverfell. ‘Just for a while there I could see how it all fitted together, how things really joined and . . .’ She made helpless gestures, like somebody trying to put together two halves of an invisible coconut. ‘I mean . . . even here it’s beautiful. Just imagine that left is a kind of pink colour and all you have to do is swivel it past gold and OW! Erstwhile! Ow! Let go of my ears!’

  It became evident that Erstwhile had no intention of relinquishing Neverfell’s ears, not until he had dragged her by them away from Perilous Jut. Even then he was clearly examining Neverfell for signs of Cartography, and the fact that she repeatedly forgot that she could not walk through walls apparently did not reassure him. At last, however, he relented and let her continue her conversation.

  ‘So?’

  ‘My theory was right,’ Neverfell began slowly. ‘I’m sure of it now. I asked the Cartographer about the Doldrums and he told me . . . showed me . . . oh, I can’t explain! I started to understand what he was saying, and then I lost track of words, and I could almost see it. In the Doldrums there’s a . . . a Twister . . . it’s a place where . . .’ Numbly Neverfell groped for the concept. To her alarm it groped back, and she recoiled. ‘Aargh! No! Never mind what it is! It’s a weird thing where geography doesn’t work the way it should.

  ‘The important bit is this: the Doldrums weren’t ever properly sealed off. There’s a way in. Two, in fact. The first one is out through the back of Madame Appeline’s hidden room. And that’s the easy part, that’s the part you can work out from where things are, even with a normal brain. It’s the other way in that most people wouldn’t guess.

  ‘It’s through the Childersin townhouse. You go in through the house, out the back, down the private passage and then, well, the Twister does something so you end up in the Doldrums. The Morning Room is in the Doldrums.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ Erstwhile sounded deeply unimpressed. ‘So there’s a secret tunnel between Madame Appeline’s domain and Maxim Childersin’s house. We already knew they were working together. That’s what we just melted your mind to find out?’

  ‘No – that’s not it. That’s not what they dug at all. It’s all about the Morning Room – oh, I’m going to do this as a story because it’s easier that way.’ Neverfell tugged at the ends of her hair, and was once again surprised to find them black instead of red.

  ‘Suppose once upon a time there was a clever and powerful man who was willing to do anything for his family. Now, he agreed with everybody else that Caverna was the only place to live, but he wasn’t like all the other powerful Cavernans. He always had one eye looking out across the world. And he discovered that there was something that could give his family an edge over everybody else at Court, make them smarter, stronger and better at everything. But it only existed in the overground. You couldn’t get it in Caverna – it was forbidden. So he had to look for a way of smuggling it in, and in the end he found one.’

  ‘But what was it?’ asked Erstwhile. ‘The thing he smuggled in.’

  ‘Think.’ Neverfell gnawed a knuckle. ‘What’s the hardest thing to bring into Caverna? The one thing that would never be allowed?’

  Erstwhile thought for a moment, then remembered where he had left his smile. ‘Gunpowder!’

  Neverfell shook her head. ‘Daylight. It’s daylight.

  ‘I’ve seen the Undiscovered Passage. Well, sort of seen it, the way the Cartographers remember it, the ones that sensed it. They say it only has one end – they think the other one goes to nothingness. The thing is, Cartographers are all in love with Caverna, and can’t really understand anything outside her.

  ‘I don’t think the Undiscovered Passage goes into nothingness, Erstwhile. I think it leads out, all the way to the overground. Out of Caverna. And I think it begins in the Childersins’ Morning Room. I don’t think the blue light in there is done with trap-lanterns. I think it’s real daylight.

  ‘I think Master Childersin makes his family eat breakfast in the Morning Room every day so that they can sit there soaking up day
light. And I think he makes them keep to the overground clock instead of a normal twenty-five hour clock so that it’s always day when they go there, and never night.

  ‘And the Childersins are different from everybody else, aren’t they? They stand out, even at Court. They’re never out of clock the way everybody else is. They’re cleverer, their skin is shinier, they’re even taller. Did you ever see the clothes and armour in the Cabinet of Curiosities, the ones made for overgrounders? They’re all really big, like they’re made for people six feet tall. And look at me – I come from outside, and I’m tall for my age. Well, the Childersins, particularly the younger ones, they’re all tall for their age as well. So maybe the sun doesn’t just fry off your skin. Maybe it makes you bigger and stronger.’

  ‘So all the illegal digging, that was the Undiscovered Passage? A tunnel leading straight up to let the sun ooze in?’

  ‘Yes. And Madame Appeline helped by getting rid of the rubble, though I still don’t really understand why, or where the Tragedy Range fits into all of this, or why I keep feeling like there’s a link between her and me.

  ‘When they finished the tunnel, I suppose they sealed it off with glass at the Morning Room end to disguise what it was, but before they did, two things happened. The first thing was that some of the bat-squeakers sensed the passage just before it was sealed, and some of them even worked out where it was and were murdered to keep them silent.’

  ‘And the other thing?’

  ‘Something came down the shaft from the overground. Me.’

  Up Meets Down

  Within half an hour of returning to Drudgery, Neverfell realized that something was wrong. Her first hint was Erstwhile, who kept twitching his head to look around him with increasing frequency. Only then was she aware that their progress was much faster than it had been, much easier than it should have been. The crowds were not pressing as close as they had. There seemed to be a fine, untouchable bubble around them. This would have made sense if Neverfell had still been wearing her Cartographer’s clothes, but she had changed back into normal drudgewear, and covered her face with her mask again.