There was nobody in the main corridor of the tasters’ retreat, nobody to see as each of the traps hanging from the walls started to shiver and blister white. Now they were shedding white flakes like dandruff, now their light was sallowing, now there was a string of woolly detonations, filling the air with the spores of their destruction.
The sounds were too quiet to disturb the happy haze of those in the smoking room, or those sleeping in their chambers. In the recreation room, however, several looked up from chess or cards to peer quizzically at the door and notice a bitter taste in the air. One stood to open the door, and gaped uncomprehendingly into the void beyond.
Only when the lamps in the room itself frenzied, frothed and failed did the tasters wake up to their danger. Like most such awakenings, it arrived too late.
Darkness, they were in darkness! It was one of the greatest fears of all those in Caverna. To be in darkness meant to be without trap-lanterns. No traps sooner or later meant suffocating in stale air. In their panic, the tasters forgot that the fresh air in the rooms would last for hours yet. They seemed already to feel a harshness like dust in their lungs and a choking in their throats. Their only thought was to get out, to run through the palace until they found light.
They forgot all about their comrades in their private chambers and in the smoking room. Scrambling over one another, trying to claw each other out of the way, they blundered to the door that led to the rest of the palace, and yanked back the bolts that had been thrown to keep them safe. They surged into the courtyard, choking and calling out, and the few palace servants in attendance scrambled after them, following the sounds of their voices. Neither noticed somebody slipping past them the other way, into the tasters’ quarters.
Those in the smoking room were roused by the sounds of chaos outside, and found themselves staring up into a chilling and sobering blackness. The Perfume in the hookah smoke, however, lulled them back into their daze. There is nothing to worry about, it told them. You do not need light. You do not need breath. You only need me. They lolled back on to their divans, and let the Perfume pull their dreams over them once more like a golden counterpane.
Meanwhile, the unseen stranger stopped in the middle of the now empty corridor. To his midnight-coloured eyes there was no darkness. Dead matter like the walls and floor were murky and colourless, but visible. Life was luminous. His spice-sharpened vision showed him his own body as a glowing, man-shaped phantasm. Even now the whole scene was softly gilded with the dust from the newly dead traps, the powdery glow fading as the last traces of vitality ebbed away.
The assassin smiled, knowing that he had the mysterious Kleptomancer to thank for the sparseness of guards in this area. Right now, most of the armed men in the palace would be waiting to ambush the master thief in the Cabinet of Curiosities.
He set down his briefcase in the middle of the hallway, and opened it. For him, the contents were alive with shimmering, squirming light. Sinuous slivers of this light broke off from the main tangle, slithering out of the case and on to the floor. They seethed and skimmed over the corridor, following their own blind instincts and their extraordinary sense of smell.
Here! They found a footprint with the scent they sought, and they clicked to tell one another, a cold sound like pebbles rapped together. They coiled and writhed in the unseen print, until the watcher could almost make out its outline. There – a few slivers flowed on ahead of the rest, and they found another print. Another, another, and now they were seething at the base of a door.
So this was the chamber of his quarry. Stooping, the man scooped up the twisting slivers with his gloved hands, and fed them in through the keyhole.
On the other side, the slivers tumbled down to the floor, retracting into coils from the shock of their fall, then recovering and tasting the air with their tiny gaping mouths.
The slivers themselves were not disturbed by the darkness, for they had never known anything else. Theirs was a world of brightly coloured scents, sounds felt through their bellies and the tremors of the ground, and the sinuous touch of each others’ scales. Hours before, their narrow mouths had closed upon strands of hair that smelt of something young and living. Now they thought of nothing but that scent. It blazed in their minds, russet gold, and drew them on. There was no excitement, only cool, mindless hunger.
They silently seethed over the carpet, discovering ruffled indentations recently pressed by feet, a trail drawing them further and further into the room. The front runners touched their noses against something soft and slippery smooth, something that smelt of the russet gold. It was a discarded satin shoe, and their tiny shapes poured in between its straps, drunk with the smell. Narrow mouths sought and bit, lithe bodies boiled in a mass, and within seconds there was nothing left of the shoe but its sole, and scattered fragments of silk, some melting with a hiss as venom ate into the tender fabric.
The slivers were abroad again. One found the carved wooden foot of a bed, and gave three rapid clicks. Its siblings heard, and joined it in twining up the leg, sliding over the knobbles and grooves in the ornate carvings.
Their tiny bodies barely dented the pillow as they slid out upon it, exploring the valley in its centre, strewn with occasional fine hairs. They weaved down the pillow’s slope, found the crumpled edge of a blanket, and slipped neatly under it, in search of animal warmth.
They found none, only cool sheet and rough blanket. Their quarry’s scent was everywhere. Their quarry was nowhere. Where was she?
Up above them, lying on the thick brocade canopy stretched over the frame of the bed, Neverfell crouched in darkness and held her breath.
The idea of sleeping on the bed’s canopy had come to her all of a sudden. It had suddenly looked a little like her own dear, much-missed hammock, and so she had scrambled up, using the ornate carvings of the posts for footholds. Sleep had indeed been waiting for her there, and as soon as she had stretched out on the canopy her eyelids had drooped and her mind had tumbled into sweet fog.
There it might have remained if it had not been for her sharp cheesemaker’s nose. It had twitched in sleep as the fine powder crept under her door, and when her own trap blew itself apart she was woken, not by the sound, but by the smell. And there, staring up into darkness and listening to the sounds of receding screams, she had heard some thing or things quietly slithering and rasping their way through her keyhole. There were alien things in her room. They smelt the way cold stone felt. The blackness was absolute, and she could tell where they were only from the clicks.
Click. Click click. They were directly below her, and Neverfell knew they were in her bed.
She also had a keen idea what they were. Only glisserblinds clicked that way, and only when they were hunting as a pack. She listened intensely, trying to work out if any of the clicks were getting closer. She dared not move, for fear of creaking the bed frame. Their hearing was better than hers, their sense of smell more acute. They were blind, of course, but for the moment so was she.
It was while she was listening that she became aware that the thick brocade beneath her was starting to shift and stretch imperceptibly under her unaccustomed weight.
From somewhere beyond Neverfell’s feet came a short, sharp tac noise, the unmistakable sound of a thread snapping. There was a silence and then a frenzy of clicks below, clicks answering, clicks rising, getting closer. They had heard, they knew, they were writhing up the bedposts to get to her.
Neverfell struggled into a sitting position, the bed frame groaning as she did so. With a staccato tac-tac-tac-tac, a seam somewhere gave way, and the canopy beneath her lurched, throwing her off balance. Frantic, Neverfell hauled herself upright again and swung her legs over the edge of the frame. Just as she was bracing for the jump, she felt something cold as a fish slither over the back of her hand.
With a squawk of sheer panic, she gave a violent jerk of her hand, and flung the unseen something across the room, she knew not where. Then she hurled herself forward into the waiting darkness.<
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She could not see the floor to judge the jump, and landed with a crash, her knee jolting into her face. There was no time to sob over her bruised hip or wrenched ankle, however. The glisserblinds would have heard the crash of her landing. Even now they would be sliding back down the posts, or falling from the canopy to the carpet like a fat and deadly rain.
Neverfell stumbled to her feet and hobbled as fast as her tortured ankle would let her, in what she hoped was the direction of the table. She succeeded in finding the corner painfully with her hip, and swept a desperate hand across it until she located the key. Feeling her way along the wall she reached the door, fearing every moment to feel something underfoot that squirmed and bit.
She found the lock, fumbled the key into it somehow, turned it. A click sounded mere feet behind her. Flinging the door open, Neverfell leaped through it. Before she could slam the door behind her, however, her injured ankle gave way.
She slumped abruptly to the floor. And it was for this reason alone that, a moment later, the thing that had been waiting to happen to Neverfell ended up happening an inch above her head instead.
All she heard was the faint silken sound of something slicing the air above her, and then the reverberating thud of metal striking into wood. Her stomach exploded with tingles, as if it sensed that it had been the unseen blade’s intended destination. Somewhere in front of her, somebody was breathing.
With all her strength Neverfell flung herself into a backwards roll, and rose unsteadily to her feet. Turning, she hurtled away down the corridor at the fastest limp-sprint she could manage.
The killer had not expected her to reach the door alive. He had heard her cry out and had thought that the glisserblinds’ work was done. Thus he had been halfway back down the corridor when he heard the key turn, and had been caught off guard. His misjudged swing, furthermore, had left his sword embedded in the wooden panelling of the wall.
Another tug and it was free. He sprinted after the fleeing girl on feet that made no sound. Ahead of him, her frail, luminous form blundered moth-like against walls, and he gained quickly. As she was passing the ember chute she stumbled over the prone form of a dead guard, and fell sprawling with a yelp.
Now was the moment. He leaped forward, sword raised. Or now would have been the moment if another gleaming figure had not, at this very instant, erupted without warning from the gaping blackness of the ember chute.
It was a foot shorter than the killer, but stocky and surprisingly agile. It parried the descending blade with a forearm, and the killer was surprised to hear a metallic clang instead of a shriek of pain. The next moment the odd figure had punched the assassin in the face with shocking force and accuracy, and the assassin realized that it too could see in the dark.
The blow knocked him back a couple of feet, and then he saw the stocky figure lift one arm and level it at him. There seemed to be something bulky jutting from its hand. Reflexively, the killer raised his sword and lunged forward to attack.
During the long second of his lunge, the assassin thought he saw his own body and that of his new enemy grow brighter still, as if both were living more fiercely in that lethal moment. Before his sword could bite anything but air, a supernova went off in his chest, and suddenly he found he was not leaping forward any more. The floor hit him in the back hard. Then the world and all its lightless lights went out quietly and left him to darkness, like a dying trap-lantern.
Meanwhile the stocky figure paid no attention to his fallen attacker. Instead he flung a broad, metal-clad arm round the injured girl as she struggled to her feet, and tumbled backwards into the darkness of the ember chute, dragging her with him.
There was a descending and fading scream from the chute. The ember-chute doors, which had flung back on their hinges, swung slowly to and clicked against each other. And then, all over Caverna, the clocks gave a hiccup of their cogs as they chimelessly chimed the hour of naught.
A Drop of Madness
When Neverfell came round, she found that she was shivering. She was lying on something hard and flat, and for some reason she seemed to be wet. Her hair was plastered to her face, and chill dribbles had run in at the collar of her pyjamas.
The memory of her kidnap returned to her, like an army of soldiers marching out of mist. The glisserblinds, the pursuit through the dark, chaotic sounds around her, being gripped round her middle and plummeting through a choking blackness that smelt like ash . . . Gingerly she opened her eyes a crack, and peered out between the damp strands of her hair.
She appeared to be lying on a large table, against the wall of a reasonably sizeable cavern. The ceiling was low and strung with hooks, from which hung a veritable forest of tools, flasks, baskets and sacks, so that her view of the far wall was obstructed. From one hook hung an armoured suit made up of tiny diamond-shaped scales, and further off she could just make out the hanging swell of a tattered hammock of thick wool and sacking. On another table not far away was what looked like a set of alchemist’s equipment, a huddle of bulge-bellied glass flasks and flimsy scales loaded with gold and scarlet powders.
From the other side of the room Neverfell could hear faint squeaks and creaks. Her teeth were chattering, but her curiosity was stronger than anything else. As quietly as she could, she lowered herself down from the table, and crept slowly in the direction of the sounds, taking care not to nudge the hanging tools and sacks or put too much weight on her injured ankle.
Just ahead, she could see a lantern resting on the ground. Somebody was standing next to it, the upper half of his body concealed behind a rack of hanging grain sacks and cooking pots. She could just make out gloved hands unfastening the clasps on a metal suit, prising the armour apart and letting it fall to the floor, to reveal surprisingly drab, brown, work-a-day clothes underneath. Then something large and round was lowered to the ground where it rang like a gong, rolled a little and glared up at her with two droplet-spattered goggles.
She recognized it in an instant from description. It was the Kleptomancer’s helmet.
His hands, now ungloved, were pulling something out of a pocket with a tremulous eagerness. It was a letter, sealed with a strange and elaborate design in purple wax. The figure crouched, holding the letter close to the lantern, and Neverfell saw the Kleptomancer properly for the first time.
She had been braced for a headless man. She would not have been surprised by searing eyes, aquiline mockery or twitching insanity. In fact, she had been ready for anything except ordinariness.
The face upward-lit by the measly trap was wide-jawed and clean-shaven, with a high forehead so that the eyes, nose and mouth seemed crowded in the lower part of it. His eyes were small, his nose short and blunt, his hair nut-brown and close-cropped. It was not a face that would stand out from a crowd. Indeed, given his height, most crowds would have swallowed him altogether.
His expression was perfectly blank. Perhaps there was something a little too even about the central line of his mouth. There were no rises, falls, curls and valleys, just a perfectly straight line. It was not cruel or hard, but level as the surface of still water.
The only remarkable feature was his eyes, the irises of which were black and lightless. As she watched, Neverfell saw him squint at the letter, and rub impatiently at his eyes with the heel of his hand.
The dead black irises had to mean that he had been taking Nocteric to help him see in the dark. Neverfell had never used it, but knew a little about it. They said that one of the common after-effects was snow-freckle, a symptom that flecked your eyes with white and left you with half-blind, mottled sight for an hour or so. If she was right, the Kleptomancer was squinting because his eyes were starting to freckle. Perhaps this could work in her favour.
Stealthily she approached, taking pains to stay outside the lantern’s halo of light. As she watched, he pulled out a pair of tinted spectacles with triangular lenses and tried peering through them at the letter, then gave a short hiss of annoyance. Slapping his letter down on the floor, he v
entured uncertainly into the darkness, one arm raised to protect his head from the hanging tools. Ducking to peer, Neverfell could just about see him rummaging in a distant bag, pulling out several pairs of curious-looking goggles.
Neverfell had planned to wait until the Kleptomancer’s sight had thickened further before making her move, but the sight of the unattended letter was too much for her. Holding her breath, she slipped forward as quietly as possible, snatched up the letter and limped stealthily back into the shadows.
A few seconds later she heard a crash. Then there came the sound of hurried, blundering steps and a cacophony of jangling tools as if someone were pushing through them at speed.
Neverfell pulled herself up into the hammock in the nick of time, and hung silently in its belly as the Kleptomancer pushed past, in the direction of the table where he had left her. A moment later, she heard his voice for the first time.
‘Where are you?’ It was a shout, but a strangely passionless one, and his voice had a slight roughness, as if it had gathered fluff through lack of use. ‘I know you have my letter.’
She had to wait. If she could only wait, his sight would dim further, and she would have a chance of making her escape.
The light where she lay was very poor, but with difficulty she could just make out the words written on the front.
To be opened after the successful completion of Operation M331.
Stealthily she broke the seal, and peered at the contents until her eyes ached:
Immediately imbibe blend 4ZZ to erase days 17670 to 17691 and blend 8HH to revive day 35839. Discover all you can from item. Observe rupture for two days. Once all information gleaned, return item exactly as found. Next letter will arrive in three days’ time.
Elsewhere in the room, she could still hear the Kleptomancer crashing around, looking for her. As she listened, however, the attempts seemed to grow more sluggish and desultory. Perhaps he was giving up. Perhaps the snow-freckle was setting in. Perhaps this was her chance to try to escape.