‘Erstwhile.’ Neverfell’s voice was very small. ‘I can’t. I . . . I have to go to the palace. So I can save Master Childersin.’
‘Have you gone Cartographic?’ exploded Erstwhile. ‘If you go to the palace, they’ll have your head on a block! Who came up with that plan – the Childersin girl?’
‘No. It’s my idea.’ Neverfell’s voice sounded somewhat tremulous. ‘Listen – I can tell the Grand Steward that Master Childersin had nothing to do with me spilling the Wine. And everybody will have to believe me, won’t they? Because my face shows what I’m thinking. I can’t lie. And then Master Childersin can go home and stop his family tearing each other apart—’
‘Stop it!’ spat Erstwhile. ‘You don’t owe this Childersin family anything, don’t you understand that? It’s their own juice they’re stewing in. Have you listened to a word I’ve said? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you believe me?’
‘I . . . I do . . . I know you wouldn’t lie to me.’ Neverfell sounded miserable and distressed. ‘All these years . . . you’ve been my best friend. My only friend.’
Erstwhile heard the sad, numb little confession, and dug his fingernails into his palms.
‘Don’t be such a puddle-head,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve lied to you. Lots of times. You asked me about things I didn’t know and I made things up. I made things up about me too. Hundreds of them. And you got no idea which bits were the lies, have you?
‘I lied to you and it was easy, because you believe everybody means what they say. Everyone’s lying to you, Neverfell. Everyone. And you can’t tell, because you’re just not very bright when it comes to people. Brighten up fast, or you’re done for.’
He did not look at her. He did not need to. Over the years she had built a special palace of the mind for him, and he had helped lay every brick. Now he could feel its golden walls tumbling. If he looked into her face, he would see hurt, bewilderment and the painful, necessary birth of doubt.
He turned away before she could answer, and was soon running off down the labyrinth of tunnels. Drudge boy running an errand, eyes obediently lowered.
Of course I lied to you all these years, he told Neverfell in his head. For the same reason I had to tell you the truth just now.
You’re the only real friend I’ve ever had, you stupid little hen.
In the heart of Caverna, the thronging thoroughfares at last yielded to a broad avenue of marble, flanked by well-guarded colonnades. At the far end of this could be glimpsed a vast door with matching portcullis, the only entrance into the elite labyrinth of courtyards and pleasure rooms that formed the Grand Steward’s palace.
Towards this portcullis walked two girls, one a straight-backed blonde girl in a torn burgundy dress, the other red-haired, jittery and fretting at her green silk sleeves.
‘Are you ready?’ asked Zouelle in an undertone. She seemed to be having some trouble meeting Neverfell’s eye.
‘What if they show me in to see the Grand Steward?’ whispered Neverfell.
‘They won’t,’ Zouelle declared, and then hesitated. ‘And if they do . . . call him “Your Excellency”. Remember that if the Grand Steward’s right eye is open, he will be cold but fair, but if his left eye is open that is a time when people fall in or out of favour. If both eyes are open, then you are of especial interest to him.’
Neverfell’s knees felt like custard and her heart galloped as they approached one of the white-clad palace guards. He turned a cold and uninviting Face upon her.
‘Excuse . . . excuse me? My name is Neverfell. I . . . I knocked over the Ganderblack Wine at the banquet. I need to give evidence – I’ve come to turn myself in.’
Half-life
The Grand Steward was dying.
There was nothing precisely wrong with his body. It was, in fact, unusually healthy and strong, though it had become strange over time. His heart beat slowly and steadily, strengthened by the juice of a hundred carefully chosen herbs that flowed with his blood. No, the problem was his mind, or more accurately his soul. Try as he might, he could not stop the life gradually seeping from it and leaving it greyly numb.
His senses had never faded with age. On the contrary, over the years he had used specific spices to sharpen them. He could gaze upon a particular deep shade of green, and pick out every nuance of the colour. Zeluppian Fern Green, his mind would inform him.
Grey, said his soul. Just a shade of grey with a greenish name.
His well-trained tongue could pick out every flavour of a sweetmeat. Honey from bees fed only cowslip nectar, his mind would tell him, with cherries marinated for twenty-one years in peach-and-saffron brandy.
Ash, said his soul. Ash and dust.
Even the continual battle to stay alive, to avoid assassination by the hungry and ambitious, no longer made him feel alive as it once had. The danger no longer gave him a thrill; the battle of wits offered no surge of the blood. Now there was only a cold and heavy dread that death would bring not release but an eternity of greater monotony, that he would find himself trapped in a lifeless body, with a mind that was fading mote by mote, blind, deaf, dumb, numb and powerless against the march of the grey.
And yet, yesterday, he had almost felt something. He had sat behind the crystal curtain of the waterfall, his sharp ears catching every sordid whisper at every table, each a tiresome scribble across the marble of his mind. Then the tedium had been broken, a goblet had been tipped over, and his attention had been dragged to the figure of a girl who had jumped to her feet as purple Wine spread across the table before her. He could not now recall what she had looked like, but he remembered the torrent of feelings that had blazed, ached and flickered across her face. Shock, guilt, regret, horror, self-consciousness – for a moment he had almost remembered what it was like to feel these things. His mind had flinched from the flame of the Real.
And now the Enquiry told him that this very girl had turned herself in at the gate. He would send for her, and perhaps he would find that her facial antics had all been a cunning piece of theatrics, a natural-looking montage of Faces prepared by some clever Facesmith to impress and deceive everyone. Yes, it was probably so. Nothing in Caverna happened naturally or without planning.
Despite this, as he waited in his marble-tiled reception chamber, he felt something sluggish stirring in his soul, something that in another heart might have been hope.
Flanked by guards, Neverfell walked through the palace down corridors of malachite. For hours she had been kept in an antechamber, her mind a snowstorm, and now that she had been summoned forth without explanation she did not know whether to be terrified or relieved.
The events of the last day had flung open great doors in her head, and now big windy thoughts were blowing in from all directions and throwing everything into a mess. Strangely, the thoughts that had haunted her most were the images of Erstwhile storming off stony-faced, and Master Grandible sitting alone in his reeking tunnels.
At the end of the corridor were twinned doors, flanked by two figures dressed in black and dark green. Their black silk blindfolds revealed them to be perfumiers. Neverfell’s eye travelled perplexed over the twinned swords at the belt of each. As she approached, they held up a hand to halt her and sniffed, slowly and carefully. Apparently satisfied, they then stepped back and pulled open the doors. She walked through, and heard the doors close behind her.
The dimness of the room she had entered made it seem even larger than it was. The ceiling was high-vaulted, intricately carved arches rising from twin rows of pale pillars; the apex was lost in gloom. The only light came from a chandelier that hung over a desk at the far end of the room. Behind the desk sat three figures, a woman and two men. Most of their faces were in shadow, the lanterns above them making bright slabs of their foreheads and upper cheeks.
‘Come forward.’
Neverfell could not even be sure which of the three had spoken. The floor between her and the waiting figures had a glossy shimmer and slithered under her shoe soles. There were mothe
r-of-pearl pictures inlaid in the pale stone of the pillars, and as Neverfell passed them the light seemed to shiver across them, as if in apprehension. In the shadow cast by the pillars, she thought she saw motionless figures standing flush against the wall and watching her every motion.
She could see the mist of her breath as she drew closer to the desk. Above, two of the chandelier traps stirred with restless hunger, flickering and flashing as they snapped at each other. In the gloom behind the threesome a vast banner sagged against the wall. Beneath it lurked a white marble throne, on which was seated the pale grey statue of a man, his pensive gaze half turned away.
‘Do you know how long it takes to prepare a perfect Cardlespray Wine?’
Neverfell jumped, and tried to scrabble a handful of her wits. Amid the chill silence she had almost started to feel that she was the only living thing in the room. It was the middlemost figure that had spoken, a man whose eyes were mere sparks in deep diamond-shaped hollows, and whose hair had thinned to a gauze of well-combed wisps. Was this the Grand Steward? His voice had an irritable bite to it, as if Neverfell were a vexing scrap caught between his teeth.
‘I . . . no . . .’
‘One hundred and three years.’ The woman’s voice was like molten chocolate, dark and warm, but there was no emotion in it. ‘The grapes spoil if they are exposed to loud noises, so they are tended by a silent order of monks and all the local birds are killed. The fruit can only be harvested at night during the new moon, and have to be crushed by the feet of orphans. The barrels are stored deep in the earth, and only the softest, sweetest music is played to them, continually, for over a century. And after all this, the Wine is fit to be drunk . . . unless somebody throws it over a table.’
‘I . . .’ There was nothing Neverfell could say. She could not promise to reharvest the grapes, trample them into Wine by moonlight and then play harp music to it for a century.
‘Do you know why a vandal is worse than a thief?’ asked the man on the right, in a soft growl. ‘A thief steals a treasure from its owner. A vandal steals it from the world.’
‘I didn’t . . .’ She trailed off. I didn’t mean to. But she had meant to.
‘Who is your master?’ demanded the central man. ‘Whose orders were you following?’
‘Nobody! There weren’t any orders!’
During the icy silence, Neverfell could almost see the barrage of questions arcing in a dark cloud towards her. Next moment they fell thick and fast as arrows.
‘What did the Childersin family promise you if you did this?’
‘Nothing! They didn’t . . . They—’
‘What was the rest of the plan?’
‘There wasn’t any – nobody planned it – I didn’t plan – I just—’
‘You just what? Why? You spilt the Cardlespray knowingly, deliberately. Why?’
Neverfell’s mouth fell open, but she could not seem to breathe. There was a pain in her eyes and throat that wanted to become tears. The panel would see through any lie she told, and this was the one question she could not answer truthfully, not without giving away the servant whose error she had risked everything to hide.
The only good thing about the spilt Wine is that maybe I saved that man. And if I tell them about it now even that will be undone.
‘I’m sorry.’ Neverfell gulped. Her eyes felt warm, and tears tumbled helplessly over her cheeks.
‘What was that? Louder!’
‘I’m . . . I’m sorry. But I can’t tell you.’
‘What?’
The floodgates broke open. All three interrogators were on their feet and bellowing. Neverfell flinched and twitched as bellowed questions struck and sliced at her. She clutched her hands to the sides of her head to steady herself, shaking like a leaf. The craziness of panic was only a few gasps away.
‘You’re wrong!’ she screamed, desperation making her bold. ‘You’re all wrong! Nobody told me to do it – nobody did anything but me! And I didn’t plan it – it just happened, and I can’t tell you why! I just can’t!’
While she stood panting, the statue of the man on the throne moved his head slightly, and in the darkness beneath his brow a frost-spark of light glimmered in a human eye.
It was no statue. It was a living man. His stillness and lack of colour had led Neverfell to mistake him for stone. As she watched, the middlemost of her interrogators cast a glance over his shoulder, as if for instruction, and saw the throned man’s left hand move very slightly, the little finger executing a tiny gesture. The interrogator’s demeanour changed, and when he turned to face Neverfell once more his face was calmly inscrutable.
‘Come closer,’ he said.
Everything changed before Neverfell’s eyes. The threesome at the desk were still forbidding and fearsome, but now she saw them for what they were – cat’s paws, mouthpieces, a curtain between her and the true source of power. As she drew nearer to the desk, she could not stop her eye straying to the figure on the throne.
His skin was smooth, unwrinkled and blue-ish white, but even from a distance Neverfell could make out a faint network of glistening lines all over it as though he were inlaid with pearly patterns like the pillars. From a distance his long hair had looked white, but as she got closer she realized that each strand was like a thread of glass. His fingernails had an iridescent mother-of-pearl sheen.
He was seated at an angle on his throne, so that the left-hand side of his body and face were turned towards the room. It was his left eye which watched her with frosted, unblinking tenacity. What she could see of his features were set in an expression both slumberous and attentive, as if he were listening to cunningly played music of great beauty.
The right half of his face and body was largely obscured by shadow and the angle. However, in the darkness beneath his right brow she glimpsed the pale curve of a closed lid. His right eye was shut.
If his left eye is open, Zouelle had told her, that is a time when people fall in or out of favour.
Could this still be a trick?
The Grand Steward stared at the red-haired girl who trembled like a harp string, face still flushed from the shock of her own shouting.
In her face he saw terror. Evasion. Defiance. Outrage. Desperation. She looked at him, and the green mirrors of her eyes showed him his own silvery strangeness, his fierce lifelessness. Fear. Curiosity. Recoil.
Could somebody really have schooled her to blunder in with such expressions, clumsy and unwelcome as mud on a puppy’s paws? And could any Facesmith really have supplied her with this blinding torrent of Faces?
He saw her with one eye and with half his mind. Surrounded by deceit and conspiracy as he was, the Grand Steward could not afford to lower his guard, and so a hundred years before he had given up on sleep. Since then he had only allowed the right and left sides of his mind to slumber in turn.
Today it was the right half of his mind that was awake. Due to some strange alchemy of the body that still baffled him, this meant that it was the left half of his body which he could feel and move, the left eye which he could train upon the oddity before him. Most of his underlings did not understand such subtleties, of course. They knew only that he had two aspects, and quietly referred to them as Left-Eye and Right-Eye among themselves.
Because the Grand Steward was Left-Eye today, he could not remember the girl’s name, nor could he have put what he saw into sentences. Only Right-Eye could truly manage language, and when he fell asleep words simply fell apart, scattering their letters like the beads of broken necklaces. Left-Eye, however, could see patterns behind details. It saw the expression behind the features, the music behind the notes, the conspiracy behind the odd details and coincidences.
And yes, there was conspiracy here. Everything that had brought this girl before him today was part of somebody’s game. He could almost see it arching away behind her like a poison rainbow.
But did she know? Was she genuine or a fraud? He had given the signal, and soon he would find out.
Neverfell stiffened. Somewhere behind her, she thought she heard the faintest of sounds, like a squeak of a hasty step on the glass floor. She spun round. There was nobody behind her, though she thought she saw a figure slip back into the shadow of the nearest pillar.
A few yards away from her, however, sat a chest of tortoiseshell wood, its catch towards her.
Neverfell turned to face the desk once more, hoping for guidance, but the threesome seated behind it had settled into an eerie stillness, all wearing the same stony, immovable Face. Again, Neverfell had the uncanny feeling that she was the only living thing in the room.
‘Do you want me to open it?’
There was no response. Warily she tiptoed over to it, and dropped to her knees. The latch was cold beneath her fingertips. Her shadow lolled over the chest’s lid. And she knew, as she always knew such things, that she had to open it, whether she liked it or not. Even now that dark oblong of the unknown within it was tugging at her hands.
She clicked the catch back and opened the chest. It was dark within, but seemed to be empty. Then she glimpsed movement inside, a dark, frail scuttle. She shuffled to one side to let the light from behind her fall on the chest, just in time to see two long, eyelash-thin wisps appear above the rim, waving in a questing, predatory fashion. The next instant the owner of these wisps leaped on to the back of her hand.
‘Ow!’ A vicious stab of pain shot through Neverfell’s wrist. It was a full-grown cavern spider, large enough to span her hand with its legs, and it had bitten her just where her glove ended. She dashed the spider off reflexively with her other hand, and was repelled to see two crushed legs left behind. A warning tickle in her collar sent her slapping at her neck and shoulders, only to feel another bite in her ankle. Another spider on her skirt, another on her right arm, and more crawling out of the box.