The thoroughfare was busier now. Occasionally the carriage slowed to pass another cart, the horses snuffing as their shaggy flanks brushed the arching walls, and each time Neverfell cast a glance about her, wondering if this was the opportunity she needed. But each time she was coldly aware of how quickly she would be caught if she jumped.
‘Never mind,’ said Childersin. He patted her hand, and with a strength of mind that amazed her Neverfell managed not to flinch. ‘Here is what we will do. When our family are masters of a substantial part of the overground, I will put aside a portion of it just for you. Perhaps a little island nation or something. We will have the best artists paint it for you, so that you can see what it looks like, and the inhabitants will send you gifts of tribute and letters. It will be all yours. You can choose their governor and change their laws if you like.’
Neverfell listened with stunned fascination, as if she had seen a crack appear between herself and Maxim Childersin, and deepen, pushing them apart until they were divided by a colossal ravine. It amazed her that Childersin, for all his wit, wisdom and wiles, truly did not understand why this would not make her happy. She remembered their earlier exchange, while viewing the paintings of his vineyards.
But what’s the point of owning them if you never see them?
What’s the point of seeing them if I don’t own them?
With a quickening of the blood, Neverfell realized that the carriage was now rattling along a thoroughfare not far from Fenugreek Circle. This was a rounded cavern where various thoroughfares intersected, and was usually a higgledy-piggledy mess of carriages moving slowly round each other in their bid to reach the turning of their choice. If she could jump out anywhere and lose herself in the crush, it would be at the Circle.
‘Where are we going?’ Maxim Childersin peered around. ‘Oh no, turn left here and take the long route. Avoid the Circle – it gives too many opportunities for the assassin’s bow.’
Neverfell’s heart plunged once more, and again she started to wonder whether Maxim Childersin knew all about her plans, and was toying with her. Every time the carriage slowed, she desperately assessed her chances of escape. Time and again there was no turning she could run down, or the way ahead was blocked with jostlers, and while she hesitated the moment passed. She knew none of these streets, and could so easily throw away her one chance by sprinting into a dead end.
Rough cobbles stared back at her, and she was all too aware of the thinness of her flimsy shoes. For the first time she wondered whether these had been chosen deliberately to dissuade her from running.
Finally she saw the grand approach to the palace rolling out ahead, filled with gilded sedans, and jostling paradribbles like gaily coloured mushroom clusters. Heavy rain from the day before had found its way down crack and cranny, so that now forlorn drops were falling from the chipped ceilings. Lost rain, stained pearly pale by the ancient rock, varnishing walls and turning floors to mirrors in its doomed quest to return to the sea and sky.
Time had run out. The last chance had gone. The carriage was pulling up at the great palace gates.
Maxim dismounted, and held out a hand to help Neverfell down. The guards flanked them. Perhaps she could break from them and sprint. But she would be obvious in this serenely gliding crowd, a single frayed thread in an immaculate tapestry . . .
She was barely forming this thought, when all serene gliding was brought to an abrupt end. There was a crashing rumble that echoed from one side of the thoroughfare to the other. The air filled with clouds of stone dust, and one single screamed word.
‘Rockfall!’
A second later, nobody was sane. There was scarcely a word more feared in all of Caverna. It was more terrible than darkness, more ruthless than glisserblinds. It was the awful awareness of the massive cold weight of the mountain above, the mountain which did not care about etiquette or machinations, beauty or power.
Dignity was forgotten, for what good was dignity against several thousand tons of rock? The slow of thought cringed, staring upward for cracks spreading like black veins over the rock ceiling. Those quicker of wit were already hurling themselves under anything that might withstand the brunt of a rocky cascade. Sedan-owners found uninvited intruders bursting in through the doors. Others rolled under carts or flung themselves flat. Wiser souls raced to arches, counting on the masons’ skill to protect them.
The only person who did not react thus was a girl in a misshapen burgundy dress and a frothy wine-coloured veil, who suddenly found that her armed guards had thrown themselves prone. She twitched barely a glance to and fro, before sprinting straight into the massing cloud of pale dust.
Running Rogue
Almost immediately Neverfell found herself running blind. Rubble crunched and rolled under her feet, bruising her soles, and she could smell newly split chalk, angry flint. Her footing slid and she dropped to one knee, grazing it, but was on her feet again next instant. If a wall had capsized, perhaps there would be a new hole she could scramble through, and at least her entourage would be loath to run into what might be a collapsing tunnel.
Of course, I might be running straight into a collapsing tunnel.
She slithered down the other side of the unseen rubble heap, only to see a pallid figure loom unexpectedly from the chalky mist. It was a young woman in the all-too-familiar white garb of a palace servant, with one hand upon an iron lever set in the wall. Neverfell had time to squawk, but not enough to avoid barrelling into her.
‘Aaaahsorry!’ Neverfell staggered, and as she strove to recover her balance the young woman took a firm grip on her collar.
‘Miss?’ she whispered. ‘Miss Neverfell?’
Neverfell could not guess what had betrayed her identity, but decided not to stay for questions. She tried to drag herself free, and her new captor gave a curt, curling whistle, a tiny rising note like a bird’s question. A few seconds later, two more servants sprinted into view.
‘Change of plan!’ breathed the woman. ‘Breathsbait Door!’
Ignoring Neverfell’s protests, the two men gripped her under the arms, lifted her bodily off her feet and whisked her away through the settling powder cloud. The woman sped ahead, and Neverfell saw her push her finger through a hidden ring in the wall and pull. A door-shaped expanse of the mosaic-covered wall swung open.
Before Neverfell could react, the two men hurled her through this door and closed it behind her, leaving her in a narrow corridor with the woman.
‘Shh!’ her companion hissed. ‘Your friend Erstwhile told us you needed to escape. Quiet, or they’ll find us.’
At the mention of Erstwhile’s name, Neverfell steadied herself. She was confused, but apparently among friends. Outside the door she could hear the sound of screaming, panic, rapid footfalls, shrill whinnies of horses. Occasionally there were shouted questions, the words muffled by the door. She wondered how many of them were asking after her.
‘They will probably waste some time trying to find you under the rubble,’ whispered the servant woman. ‘Come!’
Neverfell found herself sidling after her soft-spoken benefactress down cramped, foot-wide passages with thick carpets and velvet-lined walls. The only light entered through tiny ornamental holes in the walls, filled with coloured glass. There was something dream-like about it all, not least the way that her guide glided on ahead of her without speaking.
Looking through the little spyholes, Neverfell could see familiar courtyards, fountains, and secret alcoves thick with taffeta ferns. She was inside the palace, she realized, but observing it from a perspective that few were privileged to see. These must be the servants’ corridors, letting them slip through the palace unnoticed, hearing and seeing without being heard and seen.
The palace was the worst place for a fugitive. It was a den of a thousand eyes, idle, acquisitive, scandal-hungry, wary eyes. It held the headquarters of the Enquiry and the meeting halls of the new Council, and was renowned for being hard to enter or leave. It was the scene of Neverfell??
?s celebrity, and the place where she was most likely to be recognized at a glance. It was, in short, absolutely the last place anybody would expect her to be hiding.
Of course the hard part will be getting away from the palace again once they’ve started looking for me, she thought. But at the back of her mind a small, timid plan was venturing out like a fox cub.
By the time the hour was out, Enquirer Treble was making sense of the many babbled reports of the incident, and was able to strain out the rubbish and stare at the facts.
At the gates of the palace, a young girl with a covered face had leaped from the Childersin carriage and disappeared into the debris cloud of an unexpected rockfall. Ever since, the Childersin family and their allies had been frantic, scouring the streets, paying information brokers and stray-finders and setting up unexplained checkpoints and patrols.
Enquirer Treble was in essence a hunter, with a hunter’s tenacity and instincts, and relied heavily on both. This news had set her snuffing the air, like a lioness detecting the scent of an antelope sandwich.
‘It’s her. I know it’s her,’ she muttered under her breath as she reached the palace gates. ‘Their witless witness. The outsider girl. So their pawn has rebelled and slipped her leash, has she? We must find her. Have our men scour the city for her, particularly the route heading to Cheesemaster Grandible’s tunnels.’
‘Is this higher priority than finding the Kleptomancer?’ asked one of the junior Enquirers.
‘Yes. Higher than everything else. This girl is the key to the case of the Grand Steward’s death. All the other leads have led to nothing. That farce of an autopsy!’ The physicians ordered to look for signs of poison had explained, as politely as they could, the difficulties of spotting ‘unusual symptoms’ in a corpse that had blood like oozing crystal and a heart shaped like a banana.
‘I had hoped to learn something from those so-called rehearsal deaths in Drudgery,’ she muttered, ‘but none of them bore any resemblance to His Excellency’s passing. No sign of poison in the victims’ bodies, or evidence that any of them went mad and killed themselves. Just a bunch of sordid, unconnected murders – some of the murderers even confessed.
‘But this girl . . . the Childersins have been locking her away like a prize claret, and now they are pulling out every stop to find her. We must seize this chance to track her down before they . . . Stop! What are you doing?’
Treble had looked across just in time to see one of her men examining a mahogany sedan with a quizzical air, and tugging back the bolt that held the door closed. Her cry came too late, and the door burst open. A small, lean figure lurched into view in the gap, its narrow face all but covered by a set of multi-lensed goggles and a thicket of mad black hair. It waved a sextant studded with dead butterflies, and made gurgling, buzzing sounds in its throat until Treble leaped forward and shoved it hard in the chest, so that it fell back into the sedan. Treble slammed the door shut, fastened the bolt and turned on her minion.
‘Fool! Are you blind?’ She pointed at the hourglass fixed to the side of the sedan. ‘Can you not recognize a Cartographer transport when you see one?’ She turned to the foremost of the white-clad servants who were helping bear the poles of the sedan. ‘Why is there a Cartographer here?’
‘Investigating the rockfall, my Lady Enquirer,’ the servant replied, bowing his head as deeply as he could without tipping the sedan. ‘Ascertaining whether this thoroughfare and the palace are safe.’ Like most of the palace servants, even when he spoke up his voice was apologetically soft, so that he sounded as if he were speaking in brackets.
‘Oh, of course. And what did he – she – it say? Is the area safe?’
‘Yes, my Lady Enquirer. It seems that it was not a true collapse, but that one of the Grand Steward’s old defences was accidentally triggered. The Grand Steward felt that if a mob were to attack his gates it would be both droll and useful to cause an appearance of a rockfall so that one or two of the rebels would be buried and the rest terrified into flight.’
‘I see. Very well, on you go.’ Another small gift from the Grand Steward, thought Enquirer Treble, allowing herself the rare luxury of a smile.
Inside the sedan, Neverfell held her breath, scarcely believing that the plan had worked. The black hair dye provided by the servants was not even dry yet, and occasionally she had to wipe away cold streaks of it as it ran down her cheeks and the back of her neck. The goggles fogged her vision and gave her a headache unless she kept one eye shut. On her lap lay a bundle of provisions the palace servants had given her.
Her mind was still reeling from overhearing Enquirer Treble’s conversation. She had thought she might be missed, but not this much. The Childersins were scouring the city for her, and now so were the Enquiry. What was more, they would be waiting to ambush her on the routes to Grandible’s stronghold.
For a long time the sedan bobbed gently beneath her, like a cork on the supple back of a stream. The clatter and echo of hoofs and voices gradually faded and became more intermittent.
‘We are away from the crowds now, miss. It should be safe to talk,’ came the soft voice of the manservant carrying the front of the sedan.
‘Thank you,’ Neverfell whispered back. ‘Thank you for all of this. The triggering of the rockfall defence, that was you too, wasn’t it?’ She recalled the female servant with her hand on the metal wall-lever.
‘Yes, that was us. One of His Excellency’s many mechanically triggered traps. He liked to be prepared for every emergency, so he had various devices and passages created in secret, just in case he should suddenly find himself needing to drop an assassin down a pit, or slip out of the palace, or escape from the Hall of Gentles if he found himself overthrown and on High Trial. We were the only people he told about these precautions, so that we could make sure they were maintained and in good working order.’
‘It sounds like he was prepared for everything except what really happened.’ Neverfell felt a pang of pity. ‘It won’t be safe to head for Master Grandible’s tunnels after all, will it?’
‘No, I fear not. Do you have anywhere else you can go?’
Neverfell hugged the sextant in the darkness and rocked to and fro for a few moments before answering. It seemed that she was set about on all sides by clever people who planned ahead. But brilliant people didn’t predict everything, just things that made sense. They didn’t expect you to sleep in your bed canopy or throw Wine across the table.
I’m not clever like the rest – I’m just a bit mad. But maybe a bit mad will do.
‘I need to get down to Drudgery. Where is the best place to do that?’
‘There are some descents near Musselband. We can drop you there and send word to your friend Erstwhile to meet you. But are you sure that is where you want to go? You do not have anywhere safer?’
‘I think right now the safest place is where nobody expects me to be,’ Neverfell answered softly, hoping she was right. She held her peace for a while, but too many questions were bubbling to the top of her head. ‘Can I ask something? Were you the ones who kept leaving letters under my pillow?’
‘Yes. I am sorry that we could not tell you.’
‘No. Of course not.’ If she had known that the palace servants were her secret protectors, she would have given it away helplessly with every glance. She winced. ‘It looks like all I can do is put my friends in danger.’
‘We are used to danger,’ the faceless voice assured her. ‘It comes with our job. Every day we are expected to carry untamed pastries and savage cheeses, advance down corridors to see whether assassins have left traps, cover for the mistakes of our betters and risk our lives for members of the Court. We look out for our own because nobody else will. Do you know how many courtiers have been willing to risk their lives for one of us?’
‘No. How many?’
‘One,’ came the answer. ‘Precisely one in five hundred years.’
The sedan door opened. Pulling off her goggles, Neverfell stepped out into a low-c
eilinged alcove just off the silent thoroughfare, the walls etched with the whorls and rib-frills of fossilized sea-things. She turned towards the man who had been speaking with her, the owner of the soft-as-fur voice, and found herself looking into the face of the manservant she had saved at her first banquet.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and with that he and his fellow servant lifted the sedan and trotted away, their feet making less sound than the stray drips falling from the ceiling to the sodden dust.
Neverfell had just started her packed lunch from the servants when Erstwhile squeaked into view on his unicycle, pink-necked with haste and spattered to the knees with mud-flecks. He did not recognize her until she shouted his name and scampered over.
‘You just jump into troubles like they’re puddles, don’t you?’ was the only greeting he gave. ‘How did you dig yourself in a hole this deep? Mixed up in the Grand Steward’s death, hunted like a rat all over Caverna – see what happens when I’m not keeping an eye on you?’
His voice was hushed, scared and outraged, but he was there in spite of the danger, so Neverfell hugged him and smudged his cheek with her hair dye.
Erstwhile’s part in Neverfell’s escape was quickly related. He had known for some time who was smuggling Neverfell’s messages out of the palace for her. ‘So when I got your last message I went and told them you needed to escape. Thought they might have a better plan than jumping out of a carriage.’
Neverfell’s tale took longer, and it took the same amount of time again for Erstwhile to run out of steam exclaiming what he thought of it.
‘I never seen trouble like this! I don’t know how we’re going to get you out of it, Nev.’