Next instant the image was gone, and Neverfell was left staring at the door as it clicked to. Her mind was crazed with colour and jumbled thoughts. It took her a moment or two before she remembered that she should be throwing all the bolts.
That last extraordinary Face had sent a throb through her very soul, like a breeze shivering the string of a harp, and she could not account for it. Something in her heart cried out that it was familiar. Without knowing why, Neverfell had come very close to flinging the door open again, throwing her arms around the visitor and bursting into tears.
Stir Crazy
Neverfell realized that she was in trouble the moment she removed her mask. Grandible’s grey gaze settled upon her and hardened like frost.
‘What is it?’ One of his broad, rough hands cupped her face, whilst his other raised his lantern so that the greenish traplight fell upon her cheek. ‘You are hiding something!’
Faced once again with her master’s uncanny ability to guess her thoughts, Neverfell could only stutter and stammer.
‘What did you do?’ Above all else, it was the hint of fear in Master Grandible’s voice which threw Neverfell off balance. ‘You spoke to her, didn’t you?’ he demanded hoarsely.
‘She . . .’
‘Did you take your mask off?’
Neverfell shook her head as best she could with her chin in Grandible’s calloused grip. His eyes slid to and fro across her face as though somebody had etched answers there.
‘Did you tell her anything about yourself? Anything about me, or the tunnels? Anything at all?’
‘No!’ squeaked Neverfell, wracking her brains to make sure that she had not. No, she had told the beautiful lady almost nothing, all she had done was ask questions and nod occasionally. ‘I didn’t! All I told her was . . . that I was sorry.’
‘Sorry? Why sorry?’
Because she was nice and you were rude, thought Neverfell.
‘Because she was nice and you were rude,’ said Neverfell. Then gulped and chewed her lower lip as once again her words galloped away from her.
There was a pause, then her master let out a long sigh and released her chin.
‘Why wouldn’t you give her what she wanted?’ asked Neverfell. Her feet kept up a back-and-forth dance. Timid step backwards, impatient step forward. ‘There’s a round of Stackfalter Sturton the size of my fist going spare – the one we set aside so we’d know when the bigger one was ripe. Why don’t we give her a crumb or two of that?’
‘For the same reason that I do not try to pull a thread free from a cobweb and use it to darn my socks,’ growled Grandible. ‘Pull on a thread, and you pull on the whole web. And then out come the spiders . . .’
Even when Master Grandible answered questions, the result was not always very rewarding.
For the next week, Neverfell was a menace. She could concentrate on nothing. She spooned elk’s spittle on to a Barkbent round instead of reindeer tears, and it protested with a flood of acid steam, scalding her arm scarlet. She forgot to move the Liquorish Lazars down from the shelf near the cooling pipes, and only remembered them when they started juddering against the wood.
Strange and wonderful Madame Appeline had said that she might be able to devise a Face for Neverfell that would make her less hideous. The thought filled her with a warm surge of hope, but then she remembered the Facesmith’s ominous words about the Court and this was replaced by a turbulent and queasy sense of dread. Master Grandible was so stonily immovable, she could no more imagine anything happening to him than she could visualize living without the rocky ceiling that crowned her world. But the Facesmith had hinted that by hiding away from the Court he was putting himself in danger and letting others plot against him. Could it be true? He had not been ready with an answer. Could anybody harm her master in his impregnable dairy castle?
‘What’s got into you?’ Grandible growled.
And Neverfell could give him no answer, for she did not know what had got into her. But into her it had decidedly got, for now in the cooking pot of her thoughts she could feel it simmering, sending up a bubble-string of excitement. She had half an idea, she had a seed of a plan, though perhaps it was untrue to say that she had it, for she felt rather as if it had her. For once, however, she had a wispy thought that she had not confided to Grandible, for the simple reason that she did not quite know what it was or what to say about it.
‘You see?’ Grandible growled. ‘One look at that woman’s world, one whiff . . . it’s an infection. You’ve a fever now, and you’ll be lucky if that’s all you get.’ He did not treat her as an invalid, though, and, in fact, seemed determined to keep Neverfell as busy as possible.
Could Neverfell trust Madame Appeline? Again and again her mind strayed back to the last Face she had seen her wearing, the tired and loving expression without gloss. Try as she might, she could not believe it was nothing but an empty mask.
You couldn’t invent a Face like that without feeling it, she told herself.
The thought was still at the forefront of her mind three days later when Erstwhile dropped by to deliver several barrels of fresh milk, a vat of clean dove feathers and six bottles of lavender water that had been used to wash a dead man’s feet. Erstwhile was a scrawny, slightly pockmarked delivery boy, and the most regular visitor to Grandible’s tunnels. He was about a year older than Neverfell, although two inches shorter, and was often willing to spend time with her and answer her questions, albeit in a rather lordly way. Neverfell suspected that he rather liked seeing her hanging on his every word and knowing that his visits were important to somebody.
‘Erstwhile – what do you know about Madame Appeline?’ The question was out almost before he had sat down.
Erstwhile did not have any angry or annoyed expressions. Worker and drudge-class families were never taught such Faces, for it was assumed they did not need them. Nonetheless Neverfell noticed his shoulders stiffen and sensed that she had offended him. He had arrived full of pride and ready to tell her something, and now she had put his nose out of joint by asking about somebody else. He thawed slightly, however, when she brought him a cup of ginger tea.
‘Here – look at this.’ He brandished something in front of her face for an instant, just long enough for her to see that it was a small, yellowing painting of an overground scene, then hid it back in his coat. ‘I have to deliver it to a trader in the Crumbles, but I’ll let you look at it for three eggs.’
When Neverfell brought him three preserved eggs, still in their blue shells, he let her hold the picture. It showed a small house peeping wary-windowed through a veil of trees, with a forest hill rising behind. There was a whitish hole in the sky, brighter than the rest.
‘That’s the sun, isn’t it?’ she asked, pointing.
‘Yes – that’s why there’s nobody outdoors in the picture. You know about that, don’t you? The sun burns people. And lots of them have to go out to work in the fields, but if they’re out too long their skin burns red and painful and then it falls off. And none of them can ever look up because the sun is too bright, and if they do it burns their eyes out and they go blind.’
He glanced sideways at Neverfell as he unpeeled one of the eggs, revealing the fine, snowflake-like patterns across its caramel-coloured surface.
‘Look at you, jumpy as a sick rat. You know, it’s just as well I come here, or you’d go crazy. Grandible will be sorry some day he’s locked you up like this with no company. You’ll go proper crazy and kill him.’
‘Don’t say things like that!’ squeaked Neverfell, her voice shrill with distress, but also a touch of outrage. She had told Erstwhile too much in the past, and thus he knew that occasionally she did go crazy. Sometimes it was when she felt particularly trapped or hopeless, or when the tunnels were unusually dark or stuffy, or when she got stuck in a crawl-through. Sometimes it happened for no obvious reason at all. She would feel a terrible panic tightening her chest and giving her heart a queasy lollop, she would be fighting for breath . . .
and then she would be recovering somewhere, shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings.
She could remember almost nothing of her fits afterwards, except a desperation for light and air. Not greenish trap-lantern light or the dull red drowsing of embers, but a chilly, searing immensity staring down at her from above. Not the ordinary, homely, pungent air of the cheese tunnels, but air that smelt of big and had somewhere to be. Air that jostled and roared.
Erstwhile cackled at her dismay, his good humour restored.
‘All right. That’s long enough.’ He took back the picture, tucked it in his jacket and settled down to cutting his egg in half, exposing its creamy, dark turquoise yolk. ‘You want to know about Madame Appeline?’
Neverfell nodded.
‘Easy. I know all about her. She’s one of the best-known Facesmiths in Caverna. Probably about seventy years old now, though she hasn’t aged in forty years. The other Facesmiths hate her like poison – even more than they hate each other – because she didn’t become a Facesmith through a proper apprenticeship like everybody else. About seven years ago she was a nobody, just some back-cave feature-twitcher teaching pretty smiles for pocket money. Then all of a sudden she brought out her Tragedy Range.’
‘Tragedy Range?’ Neverfell’s mind flitted to the haggard look she had glimpsed for an instant behind Madame Appeline’s smile.
‘Yeah. You see, before that everybody used to hire Facesmiths because they wanted to have the newest, brightest smile, or the most lordly glare. The Tragedy Range wasn’t like that. It had sad Faces. Hurt Faces. Brave Faces. They weren’t always pretty, but they made people look deep and interesting like they had a secret sorrow. The Court went crazy over them. She’s been famous ever since.’
‘But what’s she like? I mean . . . is she nice? Is she trustworthy?’
‘Trustworthy?’ Erstwhile picked his teeth. ‘She’s a Facesmith. Everything about her is fake. And for sale.’
‘But . . . Faces have to come from somewhere, don’t they?’ persisted Neverfell. ‘The feelings behind them, I mean. So . . . perhaps something happened to her seven years ago, something tragic, and that’s why she suddenly came up with all these Faces?’
Erstwhile shrugged. He was bored of Madame Appeline.
‘I can’t sit around nattering all day.’ He dropped the crushed eggshells into Neverfell’s hand. ‘You shouldn’t be sitting around like a great lump either. You’ve got your precious banquet cheese to prepare, haven’t you?’
The approach of a grand banquet always sent a shiver through the tunnels of Caverna. In some parts, masked perfumiers might be letting a single droplet of a pearly fluid fall into a vast aviary to see how many of their canaries swooned with the fumes. Elsewhere, furriers would be carefully skinning dozens of moles to produce gloves from their tiny pelts. A thousand little luxuries were being tested with trepidation to discover which were too ordinary for the Court, and which too exquisite to be survivable.
As far as Grandible and Neverfell were concerned, the banquet meant one thing – the debut of the great Stackfalter Sturton. It was a cheese of monstrous proportions, weighing as much as Neverfell herself. Sturtons were known for the peculiarity of the visions they induced. They had a habit of showing people truths that they knew already but still needed to be told, because they had forgotten them or refused to see them. Sturtons were also notoriously difficult to craft successfully and without fatalities, so Grandible and Neverfell dedicated all their energies to making the Stackfalter Sturton ready for its great moment. It might as well have been a bride being groomed for a wedding.
Every day the Stackfalter Sturton’s dappled white-and-apricot hide had to be painted with a mixture of primrose oil and musk, and its long, fine mosses groomed with a careful brush. More importantly, the great cheese had to be turned over every one hundred and forty-one minutes and, since it was about three cubits across, this required two people and a great deal of huffing. Every one hundred and forty-one minutes, therefore, both Neverfell and Grandible needed to be awake.
In the sunless world of Caverna there were no days or nights as such, but everybody by mutual consent used the same twenty-five-hour clock. In order to make sure that there was always somebody awake in the cheese tunnels, Grandible and Neverfell always slept different shifts, or ‘kept different clocks’ to use the common phrase. Grandible generally slept from seven until thirteen o’clock, and Neverfell from twenty-one until four. One person, however, could not hope to turn the Sturton alone.
After about three days of sleeping no more than two hours at a time, both of them started to come unsprung. To make matters worse, other orders poured in shortly before the banquet. Those in the highest circles had heard of the great Sturton debut, and suddenly Grandible’s wares were fashionable. There were small orders from countless illustrious-sounding ladies, including Madame Appeline, who asked only for a small package of Zephurta’s Whim. Even though the lady seemed to have given up on her request for the Sturton, Neverfell clung to hope like a drowner.
‘Can’t we just send a crumb or two of Sturton to Madame Appeline? Please? Can we? We can send her some of the sample truckle!’ Beside the great Sturton sat a smaller replica, like the lumpy egg of some ill-constructed bird. This would be opened before the Sturton was sent out to glory, just to make sure that the paste of the cheese was everything it should be.
‘No.’
Eventually things reached crisis point. The other cheeses had noticed their attendants’ favouritism and started to complain at their neglect. Angry bries went on an ooze offensive. One Popping Quimp triggered unexpectedly and had bounced and crackled halfway down the tunnel before Neverfell could leap on it with a damp towel and smother the flames. Even Grandible’s stolen moments of slumber were interrupted by the sound of Neverfell shrieking for assistance or desperately swatting butter-flies.
‘Master, Master, can I take apart the mangle? Because then we can put the cheese between two big serving boards and I can make a crank-handle thingy and it will only take one of us to wind it so it turns over the cheese and so one of us can sleep, Master Grandible. Can I try that?’
And Grandible, who had impatiently batted away a hundred other impractical suggestions, hesitated and scratched at his chin.
‘Hmph. Tell me more.’
As it turned out, the mangle did not die in vain. There were false starts and nipped fingers, but like many of Neverfell’s mechanical experiments the crank-handle cheese-turner eventually worked. When Neverfell demonstrated it at long last, her master watched her with the most acute and belligerent attention, then slowly nodded.
‘Go to bed,’ was all he said. And he ruffled Neverfell’s nests of pigtails with a hand so large and rough that the gesture almost felt like a cuff. Neverfell staggered off and dropped into her hammock knowing that, for once, Master Grandible was very pleased with her. Sleep swallowed her like a pond gulping a pebble.
She woke again quite suddenly two hours later, and stared up at the rocky ceiling of the tunnel, eardrums tingling as if somebody had snapped their fingers in front of her face. She knew instantly that it must be twenty-five o’clock, or the ‘hour of naught’. When the silver-faced clock in Grandible’s reception room reached the hour of naught, it gave a dull click as the mechanism reset. For some reason, it was this and not the chimes of other hours that had a habit of waking Neverfell.
In spite of her exhaustion this click had jerked her out of sleep once more. She gave a small, beleaguered moan and wrapped herself in a ball, but to no avail. She was drenched in ice-cold wakefulness, and jumpy as a grasshopper.
‘Not fair,’ she whispered as she tumbled out of her hammock. ‘Not fair. Please don’t let me be out of clock! Not again!’
Because there was no night or day in Caverna, sometimes people fell ‘out of clock’. Their cycles of sleeping and waking collapsed, and often they could not sleep at all, but drifted through endless hazy, miserabl
e hours. Neverfell was particularly prone to this.
Doing, doing, doing. What can I be doing?
Her brain felt like a sponge, and everything looked spangly as she tottered down the passages, checking on the slumbering cheeses. She tried sweeping up, but she kept tripping over pails and leaving little whey prints down the corridors. In the end she hobbled back to the Sturton’s boudoir, knowing that Master Grandible would find something for her to do.
There were only a couple of trap-lanterns set in corners of the antechamber. As their lemony light ebbed and glowed the great cheese almost seemed to swell and contract like a creature breathing in its sleep. Wicked glints slunk along the iron angles of the mangled mangle. Beyond them, seated on the floor with his back to the wall was Master Grandible, his eyes closed and jaw hanging open.
Neverfell’s lungs seemed to empty of air, and she managed only a faint squeak of alarm. For a moment all she could think was that somehow her master had suddenly died. Cheeses turned on you sometimes, even mild-mannered and well-trained cheeses. It was one of the hazards of the profession. And what other alternative explanation was there? In all the years she had known him, Master Grandible had never slipped, never made an error, never forgotten a responsibility. Surely, even with his exhaustion . . .
Master Grandible’s jaw wobbled slightly; from his throat issued a reverberating snore like a calf in a well. Yes, the impossible had happened. The infallible Master Grandible had fallen asleep on duty, two minutes before the Sturton needed to be turned.
Neverfell tiptoed over to him and put her hand out towards his shoulder, then hesitated and withdrew it. No, why shake him awake? He needed sleep and she would let him have it. She would take care of the turning for him, and the next one too if he was still asleep then. He would be proud of her. He would have to be.