A Face Like Glass

by Frances Hardinge

  When Erstwhile reached out to tug at another boy’s arm, the other simply continued on his way without giving Erstwhile a glance.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ hissed Neverfell.

  ‘Us,’ Erstwhile whispered back. ‘Something’s wrong with us. I don’t know what it is. But everybody else does.’ He sounded shaken at finding himself rejected by the flow of his world. ‘Let’s just get back to the crèche. Then I’ll take a walk, talk to some people and find out what’s wrong.’

  Neverfell felt a throb of relief when she finally saw the door to the crèche ahead. She slipped in with Erstwhile a step behind her, hurried through into the main room and faltered to a halt.

  The room was crowded to the seams. Between the cots, from which the babies peered like peas from ragged pods, clustered dozens of adult drudges, lining every wall, squatting on tables and perching on the craggy juts of the rough-cut wall. Delvers with broken nails, treadmill-trudgers, bow-backed carriers, a hundred faces so still and greyed with dust that she might have been facing down a crowd of statues.

  Neverfell heard a click behind her, and turned to find that the matron had bolted the door from the inside. Stepping forward, the matron yanked the mask from Neverfell’s face. Neverfell froze, but did not duck or cower. It was too late for that. They knew. All of them knew.

  It was only slightly reassuring to note that most of their unblinking, unwavering stares were fixed not on her, but on Erstwhile.

  ‘Did you think nobody would find out about her?’ asked one of the men squatting on the milk trolley. Neverfell’s gaze flew to the source of the voice, but could not work out who had spoken. None of the drudges before her held themselves like a leader, nor did the silent crowd look to anybody for orders. It was as if the crowd had chosen one person to be its spokesperson, and had done so almost at random.

  ‘I was just . . .’ Erstwhile’s sentence halted, looked around itself, and realized it had nowhere to go.

  ‘This is the outsider.’ It was a woman who spoke this time, wan-haired and faded. ‘The one everybody wants. Last time she was loose down here, the Enquiry tore half of Drudgery apart looking for her. And now you’ve brought her back here.’

  ‘Listen!’ Erstwhile was scratching for his last threads of courage. ‘We have to hide her. She knows things, about the Grand Steward’s death, and . . .’

  His words were lost in a murmur of consternation and disapproval, a soft sound more like a fading drum echo than the sound of human voices.

  ‘The Grand Steward’s death?’ Another man, with a broken nose. ‘Worse and worse. This girl is only a danger to us. Unless we hand her over to the Enquiry, or the Council.’

  ‘No!’ Neverfell and Erstwhile exclaimed at once.

  ‘The Council will offer a bigger ransom,’ came a voice from the back of the room.

  ‘And perhaps treat us better,’ suggested another. ‘Give us more eggs for our children.’

  ‘Listen, listen!’ squawked Erstwhile. ‘It’s not just the Grand Steward! The murderers who did for him killed drudges too!’

  ‘It’s true!’ Neverfell pitched in. ‘The last rehearsals, that was them. They were using a poison that drove people mad, and made them kill their loved ones.’

  The murmur of disapproval died completely, and was succeeded by an absolute silence. It crossed Neverfell’s mind that if stares had a sound these were the loudest set of stares she had ever heard. Erstwhile had won one victory at least. Everybody was now listening.

  ‘It was Maxim Childersin,’ Erstwhile continued breathlessly. ‘The vintner. The leader of the Council. He did it all. And he’ll get away with it too, unless we stop him. And, with the help of Neverfell here, we can stop him. We’ve been finding out about things he’s done. Crimes that will topple him. The Enquiry hate him – this is just the chance they’ll want. They’ll be drooling to hear it.

  ‘We can’t prove he killed the Grand Steward, but he’s done more than that. He’s had a secret tunnel built, running all the way to the overground, so he can smuggle in daylight.’ Erstwhile had recovered now and was building momentum. ‘An illegal tunnel. It’s right there in his breakfast room. That breaks about a hundred laws, doesn’t it? Neverfell found out about it.’

  ‘Then we give the girl to the Enquiry,’ rasped an old man with one eye. ‘She can tell them about the Grand Steward and the secret tunnel.’

  ‘What? No!’ shouted Erstwhile. ‘The Enquiry’s full of torturers and murderers! We can’t hand her over to them!’

  ‘If they hate Childersin so much, they’ll need her alive,’ came the answer. ‘She’ll be safe enough. What reason have they to keep us alive if we cross them?’

  ‘It won’t work!’ cried Neverfell. ‘If I thought it would, I would have gone straight to the Enquiry, and taken my chances at the start! Do you think I like running around endangering everybody? Yes, if I actually could get a chance to speak at the Court’s grand hearing, and tell everyone what really happened to the Grand Steward, maybe that would make a difference. They’d all see I was telling the truth. I can’t lie.

  ‘But I never would get a chance to speak! Master Childersin and his friends have spies and agents in the Enquiry. By now he must know I know something, or I wouldn’t have run away. So if I turn up in the hands of the Enquiry he’ll have me killed in seconds.’

  ‘He can do that too,’ put in Erstwhile. ‘Neverfell nearly got murdered in an Enquirer cell, just because they thought she knew too much.’

  ‘We don’t have any choice,’ was the answering growl. The murmur of the room became louder again, the tide of feeling almost visible like smoke.

  ‘Listen!’ exploded Neverfell. ‘It’s not just about me and Master Childersin and the Enquiry! If you hand me over, don’t you see what you’d be doing? It’s true, I don’t want to be murdered or tortured. But you shouldn’t want to hand me over either. Didn’t you hear what we said about the passage?

  ‘There’s a secret shaft to the overground. Maybe the first one for hundreds of years. The only other way to the surface is the main gate where the outsiders come to trade, and that one’s locked and barred and guarded to the hilt, to make sure that nobody gets into Caverna and nobody leaves. If we tell the Enquiry about the hidden shaft, they’ll tear in and seal it off forever, and that’ll be the end of it. Don’t you see? This is a chance that none of us will ever get again if we live to be a hundred. Which we won’t. This tunnel – it’s not just a way of getting daylight into Caverna. It’s a way out.’

  The murmur began again, this time with an incredulous edge to it. Again Neverfell sensed the fear of the outdoors, the dread of the burning sun. Even Erstwhile was staring at her.

  ‘I know, I know what you all think,’ she protested hastily, before the sound could grow too loud for her voice to rise above it. ‘I know what we’ve all been told about the world outside Caverna. But I don’t think it’s true. I lived out there once, for the first five years of my life. I can’t remember much, but I can remember sunlight. And I don’t feel scared when I think of it. I feel . . . I feel like it’s something I’m meant to feel on my face. I feel like I’ve gone blind, and I’m remembering what it’s like to have eyes.’ She faltered to a halt, losing confidence before so many stony, indifferent stares.

  ‘Keep talking,’ Erstwhile muttered through the corner of his mouth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trust me. Keep talking. About the overground.’

  Neverfell could only assume that he had sensed something in the frozen crowd that she could not, but she took a deep breath and reached for the scattered stars of memory amid the blackness of her amnesia.

  It was a stumbled, piecemeal explanation, nor could it be otherwise. She started with the bluebell-wood vision she had experienced after eating the Stackfalter Sturton, and tried to describe the way the blooms had crushed under her feet, the green teeth of the ferns. She tried to find words for the way the air moved crazily and made everything shiver as if it was alive, and made your face col
d. She reached for a phrase that would show them dew, and the smell of moss. She failed.

  ‘I don’t have the words!’ she wailed at last. ‘And I know that all around this mountain there’s desert and baking heat – everybody knows that. But that’s not all there is. You can cross the desert, the overgrounders do all the time, and then you get to other places. Places where the grapes come from. And the spices and the timber and the hay for the animals. And the birds, they . . . they’re faster, and . . . so fast you almost can’t see them. Just hear them. And the sky is a thousand times bigger than Caverna, a thousand thousand times.

  ‘Oh, I can’t show you!’ The frustration was an ache. ‘She’s got us, she’s got us all. Caverna. She doesn’t want to let us go. Do you know what she’s like? A huge trap-lantern with us inside her, digesting us really, really slowly, and not wanting to let any of us go. Maybe that’s the worst kind of prison – not knowing you’re in a prison. Because then you don’t fight to get out.

  ‘And we should all be fighting to get out. All of us. We should be fighting to get all of them out.’ Neverfell waved a panicky hand at the ranks of silent babies. ‘None of us should be down here, and maybe if we weren’t we wouldn’t get bow-leg and stoop-back and out-of-clock and everything else. Even though I can only remember tiny bits about the overground, every little bit of me has been tugging and yanking at me all these years to claw my way back to it. And if I thought that I couldn’t ever see it again I think I’d go mad.’

  Again Neverfell tailed off, wishing for once that she had the mind and tongue of a Childersin, with their easy grace and way with words. But she was just Neverfell, a bit mad and a little Cartographied to boot.

  It was a moment or two before she realized that there was no murmur of contempt or disagreement, and nobody had stepped forward to grab her by the arms and drag her to the Enquiry.

  There was a pause and then the drudges turned away and began a susurration of whispers. The same phrases were audible over and over.

  ‘. . . danger every moment she is here . . .’ the children . . .’ crossing the desert . . .’

  ‘. . . only chance . . .’ risky . . .’

  ‘What are they talking about?’ Neverfell whispered to Erstwhile. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Shh!’ Erstwhile hissed back, a little shakily. ‘We got them thinking, that’s what’s happening.’

  At last the room-wide whispers ceased, and the drudge crowd turned back to stare at Neverfell.

  ‘How could we escape through this tunnel, even if we wanted to?’ It was the crèche matron who spoke this time. ‘You say it runs from Childersin’s private tunnels. How could we ever reach it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but there has to be a way.’ Everything was moving too fast. Neverfell’s plan had not reached this far, and yet she surprised herself with a thrill of certainty. ‘Yes. I’ll find a way.’

  ‘You have a day,’ came the answer, and this time Neverfell did not look to see who spoke. ‘You have until the hour of naught tomorrow to come up with a plan to reach the passage. If you cannot come up with one, we must take you to the Enquiry. I am sorry. The danger of hiding you is too great.’

  ‘I understand,’ answered Neverfell to everybody and nobody in particular. The thrill of certainty melted away like a fistful of ice crystals. Now there was just a clock face staring down her mind’s eye.

  Little more than twenty-five hours, and Neverfell could not think. It did not help that Erstwhile was with her pacing in small circles, his ideas describing even smaller circles. In the end his circles got so small he nearly tripped over his own ankles.

  ‘You bought us some time back there, Nev, or your face did, anyway. The things you were saying were just a mad old jumble of nothing, but they weren’t listening to you. They were looking at you. That’s what swung them. They could see little snippets of what you remember of the overground. Like holes with light pouring through them. They’re scared, though, and they mean what they say. If we can’t come up with a plan by the hour of naught, they’ll hand you over.

  ‘You don’t have a plan, do you?’ he added, accusingly. ‘After all you said, about finding a way out. You don’t have any idea how to do that, do you?’

  ‘It’s just a . . .’ Neverfell failed her hands, wondering how she could make him understand the mess of tiny bubble-plans frothing around in her head, failing to make one big usable plan. ‘Oh, I can’t think!’

  ‘There’s nowhere left to run,’ Erstwhile growled. ‘Except the wild caves. But then we’d run out of food or be eaten by cave weasels. Wherever we go, they’ll find us. But we got to run. We got to. We got a day to run.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Neverfell said in a small voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I can’t come up with anything,’ Neverfell continued unsteadily, ‘you should turn me into the Enquiry yourself. At least then you’ll get the reward, and the rest of Drudgery won’t hold it against you any more for bringing me here.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Erstwhile took a moment to raise his hands and pull his frog-Face the way Neverfell had taught him, to show he was really, really angry. ‘What’s wrong with you, always looking to throw yourself on the nearest spike?’

  ‘You’re right.’ Neverfell clutched her head again. ‘Yes, you’re right. Sorry, Erstwhile, I just can’t think straight right now.’

  ‘Right now?’ muttered Erstwhile under his breath.

  Those two words, uttered in a sarcastic undertone, stopped Neverfell’s mind in its tracks. She lost her train of thought, and gave up on it, leaving it to steam away cross-country to some dark, uncharted canyon. She even stopped breathing for a moment.

  I can’t think straight. But why am I trying to do that anyway? Everybody else thinks straight. That’s why nobody expects me to think zigzag-hop. Which is what I do naturally.

  ‘Erstwhile,’ she said, catching at the tail-end of a trailing thought and letting it pull her, ‘I need you to wear my mask for a bit.’

  ‘Your mask?’

  ‘Yes. And my dress.’

  ‘What? I’m not doing that!’

  ‘But that makes no sense! You’ve been risking your life for me left, right and centre, did you think I hadn’t noticed? So how can it be worse to wear my dress? It’s only for a few hours, long enough that the drudges trying to keep watch on me don’t notice the real me sneaking off.’

  ‘Sneaking off? Where are you going?’

  ‘To do something I can’t do if I’m being watched. I don’t quite have a plan, but I think now I sort of have a plan for how to make a plan for coming up with a plan. And I can’t think about it too hard right now or it won’t work. Please, trust me.’

  Erstwhile’s hands twitched, and Neverfell guessed that he was thinking of putting his new angry Face on again.

  ‘I better not have to look after those babies,’ he muttered.

  Neverfell drifted out of the crèche with a tattered shawl wrapped around her head, her hair straggled over her face, her arms and bare feet thickly grimed. With luck she would look like just another drudge girl coming back from a visit to the crèche to peep in on an infant brother or sister. She could only hope that any lookouts left to watch for her would be lulled by the sight of a solitary figure in her uniform and mask sitting in the main crèche and surveying the sleeping babes.

  She was listening out for one particular thing, and it was not long before she heard it.

  ‘Cartographers!’ A call of panic and warning.

  Neverfell was standing in one of the wider thoroughfares, supported by clusters of floor-to-ceiling pillars where stalagmites and stalactites had met and combined. As the cry went up, the river of drudges magically parted down the middle, everybody flattening themselves against the walls. A few seconds later, three whooping, leaping figures raced through, bouncing off the chalky-white pillars.

  Once again, the Cartographers were on the move. Something had happened, changed or appeared, calling them to it as irresistibly as a p
lug calls water. Even now, Cartographers all over Drudgery would be twitching, raising their heads to stare, feeling the pull and passing on the word to each other.

  Before the division down the middle of the passage could close up again and fill with people, Neverfell broke from the recoiling crowds and took off after the three figures. It did not matter what was calling to the Cartographers. What mattered was that it was probably calling to all of them.

  Right now she dearly wanted to speak with the most elusive man in Caverna. She did not know where the Kleptomancer had made his new lair, but she knew that he was or had been a Cartographer. She could only hope that he would be drawn to these geographical peculiarities like all other Cartographers in Drudgery.

  Following the Cartographers was no easy matter, however. They scrambled willy-nilly, caring nothing for scratches, scrapes and bruises from misjudged drops. They waded through chest-deep pools and slithered up and down shafts until Neverfell lost all sense of where she was.

  At last they reached a rather dull-looking tunnel in rough-chiselled grey-brown rock, where they all stopped dead and simply stared upward.

  Soaked and cold, Neverfell settled herself down in a dark corner and tried not to let her teeth chatter too loudly. It was eerie watching them all staring rapt at nothing, pausing only to take notes, make chalk marks on the walls and fiddle with machinery.

  At nothing? From time to time she was tempted to let her gaze creep upward towards the object of their fascination, and every time she felt an odd little thrill of panic. That’s silly, her mind told her firmly. You don’t have to look. There’s just a low and lumpy ceiling. Nothing to see.

  Within minutes another Cartographer turned up, dragging an enormous metal spirit level that struck sparks off the rocky floor. Over the next hour Neverfell saw their numbers swell to nine. Then, one at a time, they seemed to lose interest and wandered away without a word.