The gondolas came to a halt at the shore, their hulls crunching against submerged gravel, and the passengers alighted. Neverfell felt the ground give a little under her tread, and looked down to find that it was made of a fine white powder, now lightly dusting her shoes.
Sand, said Neverfell’s head, recollecting accounts of distant lands. Not sand, said some stubborn instinct. Too fine. Too white.
Everything’s too white, she thought suddenly, heart banging. Everything’s just waiting for me to stain it or break it somehow.
Staring about her, Neverfell could see large tables set up around the edge of the island. However each was surrounded by a fence of what looked a bit like gauze. The figures seated within were distinctly visible, but it was like looking at them through a fine film of mist. From the centre of each table rose a little tree fashioned from metal, and in the branches of these nestled lanterns with peach and cream-coloured trap-lanterns. On the far side of the island, a little wooden bridge ran from the island to the wall of the cavern, where it met a pair of swinging doors. Through these flowed a stream of serving staff bearing napkins, glasses of water and so forth.
Two footmen appeared, each wearing the same white doublet and mournfully restrained Face. They showed the Childersin party to an unoccupied table. When the footmen held the gauze open for the new arrivals to enter, it gave a faint tinkle, and Neverfell realized that it was actually made up of thousands of very fine metallic links, like diaphanous chain mail. Another precaution to protect the guests from each other, she suspected.
Neverfell settled uneasily into her chair next to Zouelle. On either side of her place setting were laid out a terrifying range of bizarre cutlery. There were seven different glasses, and a small bowl full of white, feathery biscuits in the shape of moths.
Do nothing. Do nothing do nothing do nothing. Neverfell’s face burned with self-consciousness, and keeping her limbs still took agonizing effort. But this was her chance, she realized. She was there to be seen . . . and to see.
Gripping her seat to keep her hands still, Neverfell dared to peer across at the other tables and let her dazzled eye slide over unfamiliar faces and figures. She was still not used to seeing so many tall people. Courtiers simply seemed to be taller and healthier-looking than the servants and all the drudge messengers she had ever seen. The Childersins, however, tended to be taller, clearer-skinned and brighter-eyed than the rest. In particular, the younger members of the family had a definite height advantage over their counterparts on other tables.
A faint breeze rippled the silvery gauze around the other tables, so that the distant diners shimmered in and out of sight, and briefly Neverfell thought she glimpsed a hazy but familiar figure on the far side with an elegantly tiny waist, brilliant green feathers quivering in its coiffure.
‘That looks like Madame Appeline!’ Without thinking, Neverfell started to raise one hand, but Zouelle caught at her wrist and prevented her.
‘Stop!’ she hissed. ‘Neverfell, what are you doing? If you wave, you will look as if you are mocking her! You must think of these things!’
The common sense in Zouelle’s words hit Neverfell like a slingshot. The last time Neverfell had appeared before Madame Appeline it had been in the role of captured thief, and the Facesmith had duly handed Neverfell over to the authorities. If there had been any chance of friendship between them, Neverfell’s actions had probably killed it dead.
‘Besides,’ Zouelle continued, ‘our family has as little to do with Madame Appeline as possible.’
‘Really?’ Neverfell rubbed at her forehead as the world became even more complicated. ‘Why? What has she done wrong?’
‘Well, I don’t know all the details,’ Zouelle admitted, ‘but Uncle has always made it very clear that she is not a friend to our family.’
Crestfallen, Neverfell stared across at the distant figure. She had secretly hoped for another chance to talk to Madame Appeline so that she could explain everything. Instead, she found herself on the far side of the banquet, and worse still surrounded by a family of the Facesmith’s enemies.
Before she could devote much time to moping, however, her highly trained nose was tantalized by a delicious smell that left hunger softly raking her stomach. A few minutes later, the white-clad servants swooped in with the first course. It was a glazed peacock filled with pineapple marinated in orange brandy. Disturbingly, the bird’s head and neck had been stuffed and reattached to the roasted body, and its luxuriant tail feathers sprouted from the back. Its silvery, shocked-looking glass eyes seemed to be looking directly at Neverfell, and her brain promptly became a battleground.
It looks like it’s alive . . . I wonder if its eyes would be squishy if I poked them with my – no – mustn’t do anything – but the meat looks like it’s been varnished – I could just reach out and – no – mustn’t do anything – it smells good can I eat it now? What about now? No! Mustn’t do anything! She only became aware that she was bouncing on her chair when she noticed the Childersins’ gazes resting on her.
Grand Steward banquets were designed with great care, so as to allow the guests to enjoy as many True Delicacies as possible without actually dying. Thus they alternated between courses that were merely excellent, and those that were dangerously extraordinary. The peacock was one of the former.
Everybody else behaved as if the servants were invisible, but Neverfell could not help marvelling at the silent grace with which they moved as one, filling each glass to precisely the same level and placing dishes down with feather softness.
‘They’re like wonderful mice!’ she whispered to Zouelle.
‘They need to be,’ Zouelle murmured back, out of the corner of her smile. ‘Only the best are allowed to serve at these banquets – it’s a great honour and a great responsibility. Making the slightest error would shame the Grand Steward, and that would be worth more than their lives.’
‘So which one is the Grand Steward?’ Neverfell glanced around the tables, trying to see if any of them were larger and grander than the others. She suddenly realized that she had no idea what he looked like.
‘Oh, he isn’t down here with us.’ Zouelle corrected her. ‘He always has somewhere set aside where he can watch us without being seen. I think he’s probably up there.’ She let her eyes flick up for a moment to point halfway up the opposite wall of vast cavern. Following her gaze, Neverfell saw one waterfall that was larger than the rest and fell like a silver curtain before a dark recess. ‘They will be particularly careful now, of course. After what happened three days ago.’
‘What did happen?’
‘Oh, yet another of his food tasters died.’ Zouelle folded her napkin into a simple flower shape before using one corner to dab at the corner of her mouth. ‘His favourite one, this time. Poison, doubtless meant for the Grand Steward himself. People do try it from time to time. I hear the Enquiry have already caught the poisoner, but it will make the Grand Steward wary.’
Banquets were sounding so horribly dangerous that Neverfell was starting to wonder why anybody ever went to them. Then she took her first mouthful of the peacock, and decided that she had found at least one good reason to take the risk. Between mouthfuls, however, she could not help leaning over to Zouelle with questions.
‘Who are those?’ Neverfell realized that there was one table that had been set up on a separate little island away from the main gathering. The gaggle of men and women seated at it did not seem to be dressed for the occasion, or, in fact, any occasion that Neverfell could easily imagine. Several wore lantern hats of the sort many donned when wandering deep and obscure caves where the traps seldom grew. A couple of them had pushed aside their cutlery so that they could set down a device which looked a lot like a huge steel trifle, covered in whirring dials. To her chagrin, Neverfell was too far away to deduce the fascinating device’s purpose, but to judge by the zeal with which the strange men were beating it with hammers, it was not doing what it should. ‘What’s wrong with them? And why aren’t
they doing etiquette?’
‘Oh, the rules are different for them,’ answered Zouelle. ‘They’re Cartographers.’
‘They look a bit mad,’ whispered Neverfell.
‘Oh no,’ Zouelle corrected her. ‘They’re very, very mad. All Cartographers and mapmakers are.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, the way Uncle puts it, map-making is all very well if you’re dealing with somewhere flat, like an overground landscape. The problem with Caverna is that it isn’t flat. It goes up and down and slants and narrows and spirals round itself and bursts into huge caverns and meets itself going the other way. So – you know the crinkly edible bit inside a walnut? Well, suppose you had to draw a flat picture of the surface of that.’
There was a small pause while Neverfell went cross-eyed trying to imagine it.
‘And now,’ continued Zouelle relentlessly, ‘imagine that you are trying to map the biggest, crinkliest, most complicated walnut in the world – that’s Caverna. Cartographers have to twist their brains a certain way to understand even part of it, and afterwards their brains don’t untwist. The maddest ones spend half the time pot-holing and the rest of it squeaking like bats. There are a few slightly saner ones you can talk to, but it’s not a good idea.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if you talk to them long enough, you start to understand them, and then after a short while you don’t really understand anything else. You run off to be a Cartographer and, next thing you know, you’re bat-squeaking.’
‘So if they’re mad and dangerous, why are they here?’
‘Because the Grand Steward invites everybody important to his banquets, and Cartographers are important. Essential, really. They’re the only people who can tell you where it’s safe to dig new tunnels, where you’ll end up when you do, and if the existing tunnels are in danger of falling down. Now sit up straight, Neverfell; people are staring.’
Following Zouelle’s gaze, Neverfell realized that here and there among the crowded tables she could make out a faint star of light. With a frisson, she realized that each of them was traplight winking off opera glasses and lorgnettes, all apparently pointed towards her. For some reason, she did indeed seem to be attracting attention.
‘Quick, here comes the next course!’ Zouelle told her. ‘This is the first real course, a True Delicacy. Make sure you eat one of the moth biscuits first to clean away the taste of the last course.’
The moth biscuits tasted a bit dusty and moth-y, and made Neverfell want to sneeze so badly she only stopped herself by gripping her own nose firmly with one napkin-covered hand. Afterwards, she couldn’t taste anything at all.
The newly arrived True Delicacy was a pale gold jelly in the shape of a tiny castle, complete with turrets. Embedded in it was what looked like beautifully crafted models of tiny birds with jewel-coloured plumage and long beaks. Neverfell was leaning forward to peer when she saw one twitch slightly, sending a quiver through the jelly.
‘Zouelle!’ she gasped in horror. ‘That one’s alive!’ The jelly on the table began shivering from head to foot as more and more tiny wings tried to flutter. ‘Oh, they’re all alive! We have to get them out!’ She had to be pulled down into her chair by Zouelle’s restraining hand.
‘Don’t! They’ll be out in a moment, I promise! If you try to spoon them out you’ll wake them up too quickly and they’ll choke. Wait and see – they’ll be fine.’
It was all Neverfell could do to stay in her seat, her mind full of how horrible it must be to have one’s eyes and ears and beak full of jelly, and to have one’s wings not work without knowing why. But, as she watched, something altered in the jelly castle. It started to soften and subside, and the birds’-wing trembles grew more determined, and then, as one, all the little birds burst free, leaving ragged holes in the quivering mass, their wings beaded with sticky gold.
Neverfell followed them with her eyes. ‘I hope they get out,’ she muttered. ‘I hope the trap-lanterns don’t eat them.’
A tiny spoonful of the jelly was placed on her plate. Gingerly, she dipped the tip of her tongue into it. The taste was a sound, a thin ribbon of blue-silver sounds blended together into a single melody so loud and vivid that she looked around for the orchestra. The tune was the most haunting she had ever encountered, and she thought she heard in it a song of loss, confusion and remembered skies.
She could hear the rest of the family talking about the jelly.
‘. . . wonderful, how the birds remain unharmed . . .’
‘. . . have to steep them in the jelly for a year and a day so it absorbs their song, then it takes another year to reorder the notes into real music . . .’
Tiny bird-shapes with long beaks were just visible, flitting about the corners of the cavern, their wings a whirr and their shadows thrown large and rippled on the wall. They uttered not a chirrup, trill or keen. The spoon trembled in Neverfell’s hand.
It was at this point that her attention was distracted by the peculiar behaviour of a richly dressed, grey-haired man on another table. In the middle of a conversation, his head wobbled comically, and he opened his mouth wide as if preparing to bellow something across the table. Instead of doing so, however, he rocked back and then made a determined attempt to plant his face in his jelly. He was thwarted in this at the last moment by the two guests next to him, who placed hurried hands on his shoulders and caught him just before his beard grazed the plate.
The whole thing was so clownish that Neverfell could not suppress a snort of mirth. Fortunately this was covered by a slightly louder laugh from Maxim Childersin, who was looking the same way.
‘Oh, that is quite beautiful. Masterful. I did wonder if something like that would happen.’
It seemed that the man was being helped out of his chair, and carried back to his boat, his arms over the shoulders of two of his companions. His head lolled forward, and his dragging toes left matching grooves in the sand. The laughter inside Neverfell died a death.
‘Is that man all right?’
‘Oh goodness, no. Did you see the bird flitting around near his ear just before he collapsed? Somebody who knew about the jelly course in advance must have bought and trained a bird of the same sort before the banquet, then released it mid-course. It will have been primed to hunt down a particular person, and jab them with its beak. With so many birds flitting around, nobody would notice an extra one, or wonder whether it had poison on its beak.’
‘Somebody hired the Zookeeper, you think?’ suggested one of the other Childersin uncles.
‘It certainly looks like his work,’ agreed Maxim Childersin. ‘Trained animals, poison . . . yes, I think so. Very elegant.’
Neverfell could think of lots of other words to describe such a murder, and she had a horrible feeling that all of them were printed across her face. And yet although she understood in her head that she had just watched a man die she could not really believe it. It had all seemed like something from a pantomime, and everybody around her was so calm and amused.
‘Why didn’t his friends do anything? Why did they just quietly carry him away?’ she whispered.
‘Making a fuss would be far more disastrous. The death will look like a heart attack, and they cannot suggest it is anything else without casting aspersions on the Grand Steward’s birds.’
As Neverfell digested this, she realized that her reaction had not gone unnoticed. Seated a few tables away were two women well dressed in peach and gold brocade. One of them was desperately peering across at Neverfell with a sketchbook in her hand. The other seemed to be suffering some kind of apoplexy.
‘Zouelle, who are those women?’
‘Facesmiths,’ whispered Zouelle, and spared Neverfell a confidential smirk. ‘Poor dears. They’ve never seen anyone who can – oh! Neverfell! Hands in your lap, back straight, here comes the next course!’
And the next was followed by the next and then the next, each heralded by a different captivating scent. A quail-and-cranberry pie led to a cordial
of cloud and elderberry and then a huge tureen of turtle and thyme soup. With trepidation Neverfell realized that the time of the Stackfalter Sturton’s debut was arriving. She knew she should be more worried about her own grand introduction to Court society, but when she thought of the trouble that had gone into the great cheese she felt a bit like a mother whose child is about to step on to the stage in front of hundreds of onlookers.
‘They will be bringing out a True Wine to suit it and prepare the palate,’ Zouelle murmured as she reached for another moth biscuit. ‘Not one of ours, I’m afraid. Something from the Ganderblack family, who have not been seeing eye to eye with us at all. And Ganderblack Wines are always so treacherous and aggressive.’
Tiny crystal goblets were placed before each person, and the carvers were swiftly replaced by bottle-bearers. The liquid within each bottle was a deep and stormy mauve. Only when the corks were eased free did Neverfell start to understand what Zouelle meant. The Wine did not slop around like ordinary liquid, but moved smokily and stealthily, coiling up the inside of the bottle and trying to snake over the lip. The waiters managed to keep it in the bottle through a set of amazingly agile twists, jerks, tilts and arm waggles. Once tipped into the goblets it seemed to become calmer.
Neverfell was just marvelling at the skill of the young male servant who had succeeded in pouring the prowling Wine into her goblet, when it happened. A single rebellious drop slipped from the mouth and down the neck of the bottle. It fell to the pure white cloth, leaving a brilliant, purple splotch.
The young man froze, staring at the spot. His blandly polite expression did not waver, but Neverfell heard him give a tiny, ragged gasp of pure horror and mortal terror. Immediately she remembered Zouelle saying that making the smallest mistake was worth more than a servant’s life.