She had not been prepared for the musky, stealthy, predatory sense of hunger in the room. Something, or rather somethings, were hanging unseen in the air, singing their hunger so that she could
feel it like a hum in her teeth.
One wrong step
, they sang,
one wrong glyph, one word out of place and you are ours.
‘Don’t you see?’ Zouelle was still speaking, her face taut and pale. ‘It’s too late to start having doubts, or changing your story. You gave your statement to the
Enquiry, and Uncle Maxim has staked
everything
on it. He went all out to stop you being arrested, and now his whole position – his stand against the Enquiry – his argument for
setting up the Council –
all
of it relies on your statement, and the notion that you can’t lie. If people hear you saying that your statement might not have been true after all,
you cut the ground right out from under him. You could destroy him, and all of us!’
‘But what if I did sleepwalk? Shouldn’t we try to work out what happened before anybody else does? Borcas said—’
‘I don’t know what game Borcas is playing. For all I know the Enquiry sent her to put doubts in your head.’
‘It’s not just Borcas.’ Neverfell had been knocked on to the back foot by the other girl’s forceful response, but now she was starting to recover. ‘When I fell into
bed in the guest chamber, I was too tired to take my shoes off, but when I got up again there they were by the side of my bed. I don’t think Borcas is making things up. And I don’t
think
you
think she is, either. Because there’s one other thing that changed while I was asleep. You. You’ve been acting differently ever since.
‘Zouelle, I know you know something. Did you see me sleepwalking? Did you see me do something that means you can’t bear to be around me any more? What did I do? Just . . . tell
me!’
‘I didn’t see anything. And this is all nonsense, Neverfell. You’re . . . you’re overwrought.’ Zouelle had retreated behind her big-sister manner again, but it was
too late for Neverfell to be fooled by it.
‘It isn’t nonsense. There’s more. I had this dream, and I think maybe it’s like a shadow of what I was really doing—’
‘Stop it!’ Zouelle hissed with unexpected violence. ‘Stop it! I don’t want to hear it!’
‘But it’s important! I
did
climb up to the gallery. I saw myself doing it in my dream, but I didn’t know that’s where it was at the time. There was a monkey with
me, showing me the way, and we found a secret door, and we opened it—’
‘I don’t want to hear your stupid dreams!’ erupted Zouelle. ‘I don’t want to hear your stupid, crazy voice any more! I don’t want you in my house! Get out and
leave me alone! Get out!’
Neverfell had not been ready for this explosion, and the first shove almost knocked her off balance, but she raised her hand in time to defect the second. The blow struck her forearm, right on
the existing bruises, and her dream suddenly flashed into her mind, shocking as a hot coal in a tub of cold water. She remembered beating at the screaming mask, remembered bruising her hands and
forearms with the desperation of her own blows. But these dream blows had left real bruises, tender and bird’s-egg blue.
At long last the cogs bit, locked their teeth and began to turn. Neverfell recoiled from Zouelle, arms still raised defensively, her back to the door.
‘I beat a mask to pieces in my dream,’ Neverfell whispered, ‘and it left real bruises on my hands and arms. Which means that I really was hitting something, hard enough that it
should have woken me up. Bumps and grazes always woke me from sleepwalking when I was little.
‘But this time it didn’t. Because I wasn’t asleep, was I?’
Zouelle was fluttering again, spasming between a look of mild annoyance and one of her big-sister smiles.
‘I was
awake
.’ Neverfell could hear her own voice, sounding stark and surprised. ‘I sneaked out for a walk, then came back and locked the door and got into bed, and I
don’t remember any of it. So I must have drunk Wine that made me forget it. Somebody gave me Wine. Somebody I trusted enough to drink it. Maybe somebody who carries a vial of Wine around with
them all the time, so they can get rid of mistakes.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? You were the dream monkey who led me to the secret room. And you were the one who gave me the Wine, so I wouldn’t remember it.’
Neverfell felt more wondering than accusing, but Zouelle backed away from her as if she were a stormcloud. Then the blonde girl turned tail, and sped down the narrow room, in a sequence of
nervous zigzag leaps, her feet finding spaces clean of chalk amid the intricate shapes and inscriptions on the floor, her blonde plait flapping against her back and tiny talons of purple flame
snatching at her heels. At the far end of the room she halted by a mahogany table in the middle of which stood a silver goblet with tiny vials arranged in a circle round it.
‘Leave me alone!’ the blonde girl screamed.
‘Zouelle!’ Neverfell took a hasty step forward, and then halted. She could sense something changing in the room. Looking down, she realized that Zouelle’s first hasty step
backwards had slightly scuffed the edge of one of the circles. The chalk lines were releasing lazy, luminous whorls of purple smoke, and the cask in the centre was emitting a long, slow hiss. One
loose tendril of smoke lapped over Neverfell’s toes like a tongue, and she could feel the Wine tasting her thoughts, her most recent memories. She flinched away from the contact.
There was a crackle in the air. The disturbance had woken the other Wines in the room. One was muttering in a string of leathery pops, another yowling silently and yellowly, another watching
events so hard that its silence felt like treacle. Their attention was on the young intruder, a frail, fleeting creature who had no protective amulet and no rings of lore and no idea how to command
them.
The only sane option was retreat back out into the corridor. Fortunately sanity had never really slowed Neverfell down.
‘Go away!’ Zouelle snatched up one of the vials, and held it aloft in one hand, ready to throw. Her long, glossy plait had lost its ribbon, and it was starting to unravel into
kinked, rippling waves. ‘Get out of here, or I’ll . . .’
‘A-and behind the secret door there was a mask,’ Neverfell stammered doggedly. ‘A crumbling mask. “What did you do to her?” it kept screaming. And about how it
would never have done something if it had known—’
Zouelle gave what sounded like a sob and hurled the vial across the room at Neverfell’s head. Neverfell narrowly ducked it, and heard the tinkle of broken glass, and the whisper of tiny,
distant screams spreading spider legs and scampering away.
‘. . . and I didn’t recognize its voice at first, not for ages,’ Neverfell continued, ‘not until you screamed at me just now. The mask had
your
voice, Zouelle. I
don’t know who you were shouting at, or when, or why, or what it was about, but I know it was you. Just as I know you were crying in here, before I knocked. Crying about something
you’ve done. Something you’d never have done if you’d known everything. Some mistake you can’t get rid of with Wine.’
‘You’re the mistake!’ shouted Zouelle. ‘Talking to you the first time was the worst mistake I ever made! But I
can
get rid of it. I’m a Childersin. I can
wipe out mistakes and never have to think about them again. You’re just grime in my head – I can wipe you away – soon I won’t remember any of it! It’ll all be
gone!’ As Neverfell watched, Zouelle reached out towards the goblet in the middle of the table.
‘Stop! Don’t!’
Neverfell’s leaps were clumsy and inexpert. She could not remember where Zouelle’s feet had touched the flagstones, so she jumped for anywhere that looked like she could land without
destroying the circles. As she jumped over the sigils, pale amethyst tendrils whiplashed out and tried to catch her. One sank invisible fangs into the hem of her dress and the edge of her memory.
She shrieked, kicked out and pulled free, hearing a rip of cloth and feeling a rending in her mind as a dozen words were torn away and lost to her forever. She could sense the disappointed snap of
other jaws missing her by inches.
She reached the far side of the room just as Zouelle was raising the goblet to her lips. Neverfell threw herself headlong at the vintner girl, slapping the goblet out of her hand. It flew
through the air, turning over and over in the air, spraying droplets of True Wine in all directions like dark mauve pearls. As these drops fell to splatter the floor, there was a chorus of tiny
disappointed shrieks, like violin strings being scrubbed with wire wool. One plump drop fell squarely on the back of Zouelle’s hand, and for a moment it looked as if she might raise it to her
mouth. Then it stirred in its smoky, predatory way, and Zouelle made a choked sound in her throat, and dashed it off her skin as she would a scorpion.
For a few seconds Zouelle stared quivering at the place where the drop had been, then she collapsed to her knees and covered her face, heaving up helpless, tearless sobs. Neverfell dropped to a
crouch beside her, grabbed the taller girl’s shoulders and shook her hard.
‘Don’t! Don’t
ever
do that! Do you know what it’s like, having big holes in your head that you can’t remember, and seams that don’t match up? It drives
you crazy. Crazy like me.’
‘I didn’t want to.’ Suddenly Zouelle did not sound adult or big-sisterly at all. ‘But I can’t bear the memories, the pictures in my head. I just wanted it all to go
away . . .’
‘But Wine doesn’t make anything go away! When you bury a big memory it’s always still there, like an itch right down inside your bones where you can’t scratch it, or
somebody walking a step behind you that you can’t look at. And . . . and if we didn’t remember things we wish we hadn’t done, wouldn’t we just run off and do them
again?’
‘You don’t understand—’
Neverfell put her arms round the older girl and squeezed hard.
‘What don’t I understand? I know you’ve been lying to me, probably about lots of things. And I know there are probably plans inside plans inside plans, and I’m just a
pawn, and that’s all I ever was. Even back when we first met. And it doesn’t matter, because you’re my friend. You’re my friend and you’re in trouble. All this while
you’ve been miserable, and I’ve been too stupid to notice. Now please, please, tell me! What’s going on?’
‘I can’t! It’ll just make everything even worse, for you
and
me.’ Zouelle raised her pale face from her hands. ‘Your face—’
‘I don’t care!’ All over the laboratory Wines rippled and hissed in their casks as Neverfell’s shout echoed down the room. ‘I don’t care about my face!
I’m tired of being stupid, and everybody keeping me stupid just for the sake of my face. Even if it means I have to run off and live in the wild caves with a bag over my head, I still want to
know what’s going on. I need to know.’
Zouelle looked at her for a long time, her face pale and unreadable as a chalk cliff-face.
‘It was a bit like a play,’ she whispered at last. ‘With scenes and lines. I’m . . . I’m good at acting.
‘You remember how I made you curious about Madame Appeline’s hidden room? Well . . . you’re right. I knocked on your door when you were sleeping in her guest chamber, and told
you that I’d found it, and that I’d stolen the key. You came straight out and followed me, through the galley, and up the stairs to the grove. And . . . and to the room.
‘I was standing outside as lookout while you went in. But then you went berserk, started smashing things. So I had to go in after you, and hold on to you until you calmed down. I . . . I
didn’t know it was going to do that to you.’
‘What was in there?’ Curiosity gnawed Neverfell’s very core.
‘I don’t know. By the time I came in after you, you’d crushed the trap-lantern we’d brought with us. The room was in darkness. There were masks, I think. I didn’t
look too hard.
‘But whatever it was you saw tore you apart. When we came out into the light, I could see your face was full of flames and knives and howling and pain and . . . I couldn’t look at
it. Then you saw your reflection in a mirror and you panicked.
‘I told you we had to wipe that bit of your memory, or Madame Appeline would take one look at you and know you’d seen the secret room, and then neither of us would get out alive. And
that even if we did the Grand Steward would probably have us all executed for bringing you back with a ruined face. Then I gave you my vial of Wine, and a moth biscuit so you wouldn’t have a
taste of Wine in your mouth when you woke up again. I even told you where to drop the vial so I could collect it later.’
‘But then you didn’t do anything wrong!’ Reflexively, Neverfell clutched at the brightest spot in Zouelle’s account. ‘You were just helping me look for the truth,
and protecting me afterwards, weren’t you?’ Then another detail sank in. ‘Oh no – I smashed things in the secret room – that means that Madame Appeline must know by
now that we were in there!’
Zouelle stared, then broke down into fits of convulsive, hysterical laughter.
‘Oh, Neverfell!’ she gasped. ‘You’re so almost clever! If only you didn’t like people so much! You still don’t understand what all this is about, do you?
‘Who do you think showed me the door to the secret room? Who do you think gave me the key? Who do you think kept all the Putty Girls out of the way, so we could sneak to the room and back
without being seen? Of course Madame Appeline knows we were in that room.
She arranged it.
‘All the sneaking around, that whole pantomime, it wasn’t to fool her. It was to fool
you
.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. You were brought to the room so that you would see something terrible. Something that would cut you to the heart a hundred times more deeply than what you saw in the Undercity.
All the horror you felt would show in your face and spoil it.’
‘But why?’ Neverfell burst out. ‘Why would Madame Appeline want that?’ She did not want to believe it.
‘Because,’ Zouelle answered wearily, ‘she knew that when you realized your face was spoilt you’d panic, and—’