‘Do you remember what we’re doing now, miss?’ one of the servant women asked gently.
‘Yes . . .’ Neverfell scraped at her memory to see if she knew the woman’s name, and found to her joy that she did. ‘It’s Clarelle, isn’t it? Yes, I do. We’re going to the Doldrums. We’re going to make sure the route there is clear for the drudges.’
Thankfully, they encountered next to nobody as they strode hastily along the byways. However, all the while the twisting tunnels brought Neverfell echoes of the sounds of conflict – cries, metallic clashes, rumblings that sounded worryingly like rockfalls. I caused that. Did I cause that? She could not decide how to feel about it. Instead she thought of Zouelle waiting in the Morning Room and trying to hold off the rest of her family, and all the people counting upon her to scout out the Doldrums.
They weaved through the Samphire district, and edged along the Octopus, until a broad thoroughfare came to a sudden stop. It had been blocked off by a solid wall of heavy stone blocks, thickly mortared round the edges so that no air could squeak past.
‘That must be it,’ Neverfell said aloud. ‘The old entrance to the Doldrums.’ She bit her lip as she examined it. Battering down the wall would make a lot of noise, but she had chosen this option rather than asking her allies to battle their way into the Doldrums through Madame Appeline’s abode. That would inevitably have involved bloodshed, and she had already caused enough of that.
‘Somebody’s coming,’ murmured Clarelle. Neverfell pulled up her hood just in time as half a dozen girls sprinted round the corner and continued running. They wore simple white dresses, their hair tied neatly back, and Neverfell recognized them as Putty Girls belonging to Madame Appeline. A few seconds later, a handful of men in cream-coloured livery came racing round the corner.
‘Ah, let them go. It’s Appeline we were told to find. And it looks like she must have escaped.’ The men turned and walked back the way they had come.
‘That’s the livery of the de Meina sisters,’ whispered one of Neverfell’s guides. ‘The Facesmiths. After you denounced Madame Appeline in the Hall of the Gentles, I suppose they thought they had a good excuse to attack her.’ Neverfell could well believe it, as she recalled how bitterly the Facesmith sisters had spoken about Madame Appeline.
Neverfell directed a quick glance at her companions, then set off after the men, at a discreet distance. Just as she suspected, their path took them to the front door of Madame Appeline’s abode.
The aforementioned door, however, was now off its hinges, having suffered some splintering impact. A long timber lying before it had evidently been used as a battering ram. There was a substantial crowd outside, not all of them wearing the livery of the de Meina household. This mob, however, seemed to have expended most of its energy, and was in the process of drifting away. A few of its members were having to be helped hence, sporting what looked like crossbow wounds, testimony to Madame Appeline’s security measures.
‘Any sign of the Facesmith?’ one of them shouted.
‘No,’ came the call from within. ‘We’ve searched everywhere. She’s not here.’
‘Get the Putty Girls to tell you where she is!’
‘Too late. They’ve all run away.’
As Neverfell watched from round the corner, the last of the triumphant force finally departed, some of it carrying away familiar-looking furniture. In the end there were no further sounds of life issuing from beyond the broken door.
‘Miss Neverfell?’ Clarelle brought Neverfell out of her own thoughts. ‘I should go back to the forces at the gate and tell them the way is clear.’
‘Yes,’ answered Neverfell absently, and then realized what she was staring at. ‘Yes! Clearer than we expected. We don’t have to bash down the wall into the Doldrums after all. We can go in this way, through the secret door.’
After a quick conversation, it was decided that Neverfell would remain by the broken entrance, to keep an eye on it and make sure the route through Madame Appeline’s tunnels remained clear. The other two servants would retrace their steps through the thoroughfares, so that they could stand as lookout at different junctions in the Octopus, and bring warning if a large and hostile armed force approached from the direction of the palace. Neverfell took up her position just outside the shattered door, whilst the two servants disappeared back the way they had come.
Standing so near to the door was an eerie experience. Neverfell was not close enough to see much through the splintered gap, but she could make out the gradual darkening as the trap-lanterns within let themselves fade, one by one. It was like watching a creature die, and gradually lose the sparks of life. It filled her with a pity and fear, and made her wish that the last faint glimmer of light at the far end of the corridor would die out and be done.
In spite of herself, Neverfell drew closer to the door, even fingered the ravaged wood. Looking down the corridor, she could see the shattered remains of the door to the reception room, and through that the shattered remains of the door into Madame Appeline’s grove. The far end of the corridor and the reception room were swathed in darkness, but as she stared and blinked it seemed to Neverfell that the distant murk of the grove was less inkily black than it should have been.
Slowly she realized what this meant. Somewhere in the depths of these devastated tunnels, a trap-lantern was still softly glowing and glowing. This could mean only one thing. Someone down there was breathing.
Face Off
Of course the raiders didn’t find Madame Appeline. How stupid of me. They didn’t know she had a secret passage. She could have slipped through the hidden door, waited until they’d finished shouting and looting, then come back.
It was strange, but, staring down the corridor to the tiny, almost imperceptible glimmer of light, Neverfell felt afraid in a way that she had not while facing down Maxim Childersin, or testifying before the Hall of the Gentles. She still felt a sense of connection to Madame Appeline, of linked destiny. Before it had seemed like a bright rope she could cling to, or perhaps even climb to reach somewhere she belonged. Now she knew of the Facesmith’s betrayal the sense of connection was haunted, twisted, a black chain leading away from her down the shadowy corridor ahead.
It almost seemed to be pulling at her, reeling her in. She was just telling herself that there was no reason to venture in alone, that she could wait there on lookout until reinforcements came, when another thought hit her like a brick.
Zouelle.
If Madame Appeline was down there in the darkness, the Facesmith would not wish to dare the streets where she might meet prowling mobs sent by her rivals. Instead, sooner or later, she would flee to her close and secret ally, Maxim Childersin. She would make haste down the secret passageway to the Morning Room, and there she would find a girl she despised. A girl she could blame for her own denunciation before the Hall of the Gentles. Zouelle Childersin, alone, undefended and unsuspecting.
Perhaps she had already had that idea. She could be heading for the secret room and the passage beyond at this very moment . . .
Neverfell wiped her perspiring palms on her clothes, and stepped forward into the corridor. Running off to find the other servants would waste valuable time and leave the area unguarded. The black chain of inevitability hauled her in, step after step.
As she advanced, the few surviving traps glimmered into life and showed her scenes of devastation. The table in the reception room was overturned, the floor crunchy with broken crockery. Neverfell stooped for a trap-lantern and took it with her.
The sight of the once beautiful grove clutched at her heart. Nearly all the millennia-old crystal-trees had been shattered, leaving nothing but kaleidoscopic stumps like broken tusks, and glistening shards scattering the moss carpet. She stooped and picked up one long shard. It was cloudy cream and rose in colouration, streaked like an expensive sweet. It was narrow, sharp and cold in her hand. Neverfell did not know if it made her feel more safe or less.
At one point, she passed yet anoth
er broken door, and glimpsed through it into one of Madame Appeline’s treasured galleries, half the alabaster masks still hovering sublime in their lines, the others lying on the ground like so many skittles.
She passed on, and did not notice the furthest of the pale faces let out the breath it had been holding, and slip silently from the line.
It was difficult to find the stairway, so spidery-fine was its outline, but at last her lanternlight gleamed upon the ivy-like whorls. Heart in her mouth, Neverfell climbed the spiral stairs, the metal ringing slightly under her feet. Only then did it occur to Neverfell that she was re-enacting her motions from her dream-that-had-not-been a dream, on the day of the betrayal.
She did not hear another set of feet walking carefully through the shattered grove behind her, making sure that they did not crunch on the fragments of crystal.
As she reached the top, all around her a faint glow started to bloom. She stepped forward on to the gallery, which proved to be a long, metal balcony fixed to the wall, just six feet or so below the roof of the cavern. Clustering on the gallery, the ceiling and the upper parts of the wall were the largest trap-lanterns that Neverfell had ever seen. One of them was about nine feet across, its crusty skin glowing just enough for her to make out the pale rings and honey-coloured blotches. No wonder the false sky of the grove had blazed so brightly, and no wonder it had taken the Putty Girls so much puff to keep them shining.
In her dream, a monkey had led her to the hidden door. Now it was the frail will-o’-the-wisp of reawakening memory that drew her on. Very carefully she edged round the greatest of the traps. It stirred slightly, its great jaws opening like a beast hunting in its dreams, then closing again. She drew her fingertips down the smooth tiles of the wall until they found and tugged at the hidden catch. A door swung open away from her.
The last time I entered this room I went mad. Zouelle had to hold me down.
She tightened her grip on the lantern and stepped into the room.
It was a small room, and there were hundreds of faces in it. Some were moulded in clay or cast in plaster, but most were drawings, rapid but detailed sketches in coloured pastels or charcoal. They were all images of the same woman, Neverfell could see that at a glance, and with a shock of familiarity she recognized again and again expressions from the Tragedy Range.
The woman was not Madame Appeline. Her skin was dappled and her hair long and red. Her eyes were large and grey-green. Her features were gaunt, agonized and infinitely expressive. The pictures seemed to be arranged in some kind of sequence. In the pictures to the left of the door the woman was merely thin, but as Neverfell’s gaze darted frantically through the images around the room, she could see her growing frailer and more haggard. The woman was dying before her eyes. Finally, on the right hand side of the door was what looked like a death mask, the cheeks fallen in, the mouth expressionless at last.
There was another small door set in the opposite wall, but Neverfell scarcely noticed it, because her gaze was drawn to the mural immediately above it. It was a sketch in pastel and tempura, drawn directly on to the plaster of the wall itself. It showed a full-length image of the woman, so that the manacles round her legs were visible. A red-haired child was being wrested from her arms. The faces of both woman and child were full of utter anguish, and had been sketched in the most meticulous detail.
On the floor at Neverfell’s feet were the remains of a clay mask that had been smashed to pieces. To judge by the fragments, it had shown the face of a child, her expression contorted by grief and rage so terrible that one expected to hear it screaming. When she looked at it, Neverfell’s hands and arms throbbed with remembered bruises.
The room seemed to be shuddering, and Neverfell realized that her lantern-hand was shaking. There was a feather-faint noise behind her, and she spun round.
There was one Madame Appeline face in the room after all. It was between her and the door to the gallery, and it was not a mask.
Neverfell flung herself backwards as Madame Appeline’s arm slashed down, and the bodkin aimed at her face missed by inches.
‘You’re not my mother.’ Neverfell could hardly find the breath for words. ‘She was.’ She gestured wildly with her shard at the dozens of images of the red-haired woman. ‘And you killed her.’
‘She was ill when she came here.’ Madame Appeline’s heart-shaped face wore one of the tender Faces from the Tragedy Range, but now that Neverfell had seen the original she knew it for the cruel mockery it was. ‘All I did was let her die.’
‘Why?’ erupted Neverfell. ‘Just so you could draw her expressions, and use them as Faces?’
‘Just? Did you say just? Ebbing away before my sketchbook was the most useful thing she ever did. Before my Tragedy Range, Faces were varnish. I made them into true art.’
Something inside Neverfell seemed to crack with these words. She gave a croak of pure anguish and rage, and lunged at Madame Appeline with her shard of crystal tree. But at the last moment the muscles of her arm seemed to weaken. Although the flesh and bone before her belonged to a cruel and calculating enemy, the expression it wore came from the red-haired woman in the pictures, from Neverfell’s own mother. It was a stolen Face, but Neverfell could not strike at it, and Madame Appeline knew it.
‘You,’ hissed the Facesmith. Her tone was poison. ‘I never asked for you.
‘I had the perfect bargaining position. Maxim Childersin wanted to build a secret shaft to the surface, one that he could reach through the Twister behind his townhouse. So he needed the help of somebody in the Doldrums. My tunnels were ideally placed, so he approached me.
‘I told him my price. I wanted an outsider with a particularly expressive face, one I could study in extreme situations of my choosing. Preferably with green eyes, so that her Faces would suit me well. One outsider.
‘And his agents in the overground found me the perfect specimen. They told her of the oils in Caverna that could cure her illness, and she paid them all she had to smuggle her into the city. But she would not leave her child behind. And when she was lowered down the shaft, there you were, in her arms.’
‘You hate me.’ Neverfell could not understand the icy vitriol in the Facesmith’s voice.
‘I have always hated you. The first moment I saw you, there was something in your face . . . I found uses for you, of course. Your mother managed her finest Faces when you were pulled from her arms, but your face – no child should have looked so angry, so implacable. You made my blood run cold.’
Half-forgotten fragments of memory were whirling into place. The scene from Neverfell’s Wine vision came back to her, now with new clarity.
The same thing, every day. The half an hour in her mother’s arms so warm, so short. Then the dry click of the clock striking naught, and the strong hands dragging her away. Screaming and screaming, losing her grip on the beloved hand one more time and being thrown into the cupboard room . . .
‘Your blood has always been cold,’ said Neverfell, her voice shaking.
‘I have sensibilities!’ snapped Madame Appeline. ‘You bruised them, shattered them. After your mother died, your face became a thorn in me. So Childersin gave me Wine to make you forget everything. I gave you the finest luxuries so as to sketch your reactions, and I bought you a dozen dresses the better to set off your expressions, but all the time I sensed that your vengeful self was just buried. Waiting for its chance. And then one day you vanished from my tunnels. Disappeared completely. That infernal Kleptomancer!’
Another two pieces of the puzzle. It was the Kleptomancer, then, who had stolen Neverfell at the age of five, and left her on some long-forgotten whim in Grandible’s tunnels. And it was Madame Appeline who had offered the reward for the master thief’s capture, desperate to reclaim the child who knew too much.
‘I never forgot you,’ continued the Facesmith. ‘That a child’s face could hold so much rage, so much defiance . . . it did not seem possible. I have created a thousand Faces, and always I feared seeing
that one expression of yours pushing through the others. It would be like seeing a ghost.
‘Perhaps you blame me for taking your memories? I left you clean. Purged of all your ghosts. I am the one who has been haunted all my life. Haunted by you.’
The Facesmith made another unexpected lunge, and Neverfell dodged aside, one hand raised to protect her face. The bodkin point traced a painful line across the back of her hand. The dance of stab and dodge had moved the pair of them around each other, so that it was now Neverfell who stood with her back to the door.
‘And then one day I did see you,’ hissed Madame Appeline. ‘Large as life, and in my tunnels. I knew you at once. Maxim promised that you would not live to threaten me, but his assassin failed to drown you. And then when he went to the Enquiry to buy you, he changed his mind and decided to keep you alive. But I knew – knew – that you would only be safe dead. If only the Zookeeper had been worth the fee I paid him!’
‘You stole my mother’s Faces,’ whispered Neverfell. ‘You stole them, and you sold them, and you walked around wearing them, and using them to make people do what you wanted. You used my mother’s Faces on me. And all the time you were her murderess or close enough. All that time you were trying to murder me.’
‘Do not look at me! Not with that Face!’ Madame Appeline was shaking from head to foot, the feathers in her hair quivering like insect antennae. ‘Just as you looked when you were an imp of five. I should have snuffled you out then!’
Madame Appeline made another pounce and slash, and Neverfell again leaped back, the motion carrying her out through the door and on to the gallery. All around, the traps eased into light once more, sensing the frenzied movements and the rush of rapid breaths. Some were blindly gaping, their fangs so fine and pale they looked like fringes of fur.
Madame Appeline struck out with her bodkin again and again like a giant stinging insect. Neverfell dodged, dodged, dodged. All the while the shard was in her hand, and her mother’s tender gaze was before her, pasted on to a murderess’s face.