‘Because you already have one of your own,’ Zouelle responded with an air of patience, ‘so nobody will suspect you, and you know the other candidates better than I do so you
can get closer to them. Come on – we do not have much time!’
Borcas vanished through the door just long enough for Neverfell to reach a fever-pitch of anxiety, and for the rabbit to deposit a heap of soft, distressed droppings on her knee. At last Borcas
returned, rather flushed, with a bundle under one arm and a card in one hand.
‘Good,’ smiled Zouelle. ‘Marden – go!’ The cart rattled away again. ‘Head to the Twirl Stair.’
When the rumble of wheels stopped again, Neverfell’s blanket was pulled away, and she found that the cart stood in a small cavern some ten feet across, in the ceiling of which was set a
broad, rough-hewn shaft. Up the middle of this shaft rose a spiralling stair of black iron.
Borcas’s bundle was opened, and, the next thing Neverfell knew, a white muslin gown was being pulled down over her ordinary clothes. Round her waist was tied a blue sash with a silver
heron embroidered on it, very much like the one she had seen above the door. Beneath the heron was stitched the words ‘Beaumoreau Academy’. Neverfell’s rough pigtails were tucked
under a gauzy cap, and an ointment smeared across her neck, hands and wrists, filling the air with the bitterly piquant smell of cloves.
The card Borcas had brought out was placed in Neverfell’s hand, and proved to be a gilt-edged invitation to attend an ‘Audition in Facial Athletics and Artistry’.
‘There.’ Zouelle smoothed Neverfell’s cap, tucking in a few stray wisps. ‘Now, is everybody ready? Take the stair, and when you reach the top the door will be twenty
yards to your left. Good luck, both of you!’
‘Wha– aren’t you coming?’ Borcas sounded as horrified as Neverfell felt.
‘Me? Of course not! I can hardly show my face there after yesterday, can I?’ Zouelle was climbing back on to the cart. ‘But I shall be right here waiting for you and looking
after the rabbit – and if you two do
exactly
what I told you to do then everything should go perfectly.’
Somewhat crestfallen, Neverfell accompanied Borcas to the foot of the stairway. Borcas was still wearing her strange, lopsided Face, but she smelt a bit like Grandible’s rabbit had when it
felt cornered.
‘You smell like my rabbit,’ Neverfell whispered.
‘Well, you smell like a dead man’s pantry,’ snapped Borcas, ‘but some of us are too polite to comment.’
‘Now, Borcas,’ called Zouelle, ‘you should go first, and, Neverfell – climb up a few minutes after her. You don’t want to arrive together, do you?’
Neverfell obediently let Borcas start climbing first, and only began her own ascent once the other girl was nothing but a dark blot against the skeletal whorls of the staircase above. Neverfell
was naturally nimble, but was not used to long skirts, and found that her legs were trembling from excitement. The shaft itself was full of strange gusts and gasps of air, and occasionally solitary
bright droplets winked down past her and then vanished into darkness below.
At the top of the stair, she found herself in a long corridor that stretched from left to right. There was no sign of Borcas. To her left, she could see a heavy-looking door set deep in the
wall. It was intricately decorated in a tracery of green vines in which gold and purple birds nestled. At the sight of this, the clamp of excitement in Neverfell’s stomach tightened and
became terror. Her mind was a mad moth, and she could barely keep Zouelle’s instructions straight in her head as she reached the door and pulled at the red rope bell pull.
One of the birds painted on to the door was a large owl, staring directly out towards Neverfell. She jumped when, without warning, the owl’s painted eyes receded with a
shunk
,
leaving two round holes, through which a pair of more human eyes could be seen peering a few seconds later.
‘Your business?’
‘I was sent here . . . by . . . by the Bomo school. For an . . . audition for Putty Girls.’ Neverfell hesitantly waved her stolen invitation before the gaze of the owl-eye
spyholes.
‘Name?’
Neverfell goldfished helplessly behind her mask as she fell off the edge of her briefing.
‘Name? I . . . I . . . can’t remember!’ It was an idiotic, panic-stricken thing to say, and escaped Neverfell in a sort of incoherent chirrup.
There was a pause.
‘Caramemba,’ muttered the voice in the slow, careful tone of one writing something down. ‘Caramemba from the Beaumoreau Academy. You are lucky – the auditions have not
started yet.’
The human eyes receded into darkness, and the owl’s eyes reappeared in their appointed place. After a series of clicks and scrapes the door opened. Somehow, in spite of her panic,
Neverfell had bluffed her way in.
Beyond the door extended a neat hallway, floors patterned in a mosaic of different crystals, walls covered in ornate tapestries depicting woodland scenes from which multicoloured animals peered
coyly. Disturbingly, there was no sign of Neverfell’s interlocutor, so she was left to tiptoe down the corridor alone, watched by the stitched eyes of azure squirrels and purple chamois.
At the far end two wooden doors swung open to reveal a room unlike anything Neverfell had ever seen. From the ceiling hung a large trap-lantern chandelier, so vast that you could barely see the
little black-clad boy crouched upon it, puffing hard to keep the traps aglow. The walls were suffocating beneath pastoral tapestries and framed pictures.
In the middle of the room was a long table, covered by a white and gold cloth and an ornate silver tea service. Along its length some dozen girls sat stiff-backed, hands nervously twisted in
their laps. One of the girls was Borcas. She met Neverfell’s gaze with a bland, disinterested stare, then cleared her throat slightly and looked meaningfully across the room. Following her
gaze, Neverfell noticed a servant woman standing next to a little side-table where wrapped and beribboned boxes clustered.
Realizing these must be the presents that the girls had brought for the Facesmith, Neverfell timidly approached the servant, bobbed a curtsy and mutely offered up her bottle to be added to the
rest. Relieved of her burden, she gingerly approached the main table and seated herself on the one stool remaining.
Most of the girls seemed to be too self-absorbed for conversation. Many were cupping tiny hand mirrors in their palms to examine their own countenances. Some, like Borcas, were carefully holding
grotesque or unnatural distortions of their features. Others were cycling so quickly through different expressions that their faces seemed to be in spasm. Neverfell’s bizarre appearance,
however, was gradually gaining some attention. Those wearing the same Beaumoreau uniform as herself seemed particularly curious.
Neverfell had delivered the Wine, just as she had promised. Now, according to Zouelle’s plan, she should be ‘slipping away’ from the other girls to look for the piece of the
Stackfalter Sturton. But how was she supposed to do that when so many of them were staring at her?
A tall, auburn-haired girl to Neverfell’s right scrutinized her for some time before speaking.
‘You should probably take off your mask, you know.’
‘I . . .’ Neverfell’s mind emptied and her mouth became a desert. ‘I . . . have pimples!’
‘Nobody here minds. And how can you audition with your face covered?’
Neverfell did not answer. How could she, when she could only guess what the audition would involve? She lowered her head and blushed deeply under her mask and got on with clattering her crockery
and stirring jam into her tea.
The exchange had apparently sparked off a small forest fire of gossip and surmise. Neverfell could hear whispered snatches from all around her.
‘. . . must have a special Face that she prepared early and doesn’t want us to see . . .’
‘. . . probably recognize her if we saw her . . . one of the high-ranking Craftsmen houses . . .’
‘. . . wrong side of the blanket . . .’
‘. . . notice the smell of cloves? Obviously she’s using Perfume and trying to hide it . . .’
Neverfell was almost relieved when another door opened, and Madame Appeline swept into the room, glittering like a dragonfly in pleated emerald satin. Just as the Facesmith’s smiling gaze
was gliding down the rows of seated girls, Neverfell remembered that Madame Appeline had seen her mask before.
She had wanted more than anything to talk to Madame Appeline, but now everything had changed. She was an imposter, and had lied her way into the house. Overwhelmed by fear and confusion, she
feigned a muffled coughing fit and doubled over, quietly lowering her face into her hands and her napkin so that her mask could not be seen.
‘My dears, it is a delight to see such a bevy of fresh, fair and flexible faces.’ Madame Appeline’s voice was just as warm and sweet as Neverfell had remembered. ‘Your
schools have picked you out as particularly exceptional candidates, which is why you are here today.
‘Now, first of all I would like you to show me what you can do. In a moment you will be shown through that door, and into the light.’ She waved a hand at the doorway through which
she had just entered. ‘You will see something . . . very unusual. Unique, I like to think, in Caverna. You will then have half an hour to observe what you find there and prepare a selection
of five Faces from your personal repertoire that you think are an appropriate response to it.’
The door opened, and out of it trooped a string of girls, all a few years older than those seated at the table. These older girls were all dressed in simple, unornamented white gowns, their hair
tied back so that their carefully serene faces were entirely visible. Most of them had large, well-spaced eyes, high cheekbones and broad, flexible mouths, giving the uncanny impression that they
were members of the same enormous extended family. Neverfell guessed that these must be Madame Appeline’s Putty Girls. Light poured through the door so brightly that it put the chandelier to
shame.
Madame Appeline flashed a last smile and departed the room, leaving Neverfell and the other candidates to file awkwardly into the light. And as she emerged, each girl halted in her tracks as if
thunderstruck. As Neverfell’s eyes adjusted to the scene before her, her heart, which had been jerking like a drowning hare, stopped for a beat.
She was standing in a grove. She had never seen a grove except in pictures, and yet she knew,
knew
that this was what she was seeing. A path weaved between tall and sturdy trunks, ridged
and rugged bark gleaming with tiny beads of dew. From above brilliant golden light turned shifting leaves to blades of green fire. A breeze brushed her face, giving a sudden giddying sense of
unlimited distance.
A grove. A grove, deep in the sunless tunnels of the city of Caverna.
Only after she had taken a few stumbling steps did Neverfell realize that she was looking not at a miracle but at a masterpiece. For all its brilliant green, the softness beneath her feet was
carpet. Somehow she
knew
that real woodland moss should give, slip and crush more under her weight. The leaves above were chiming softly in the breeze, and she guessed that they must be
glass. Spellbound, she reached out a hand to touch one of the dew drops, and found it was a crystal bead. As her finger traced the surface of the bark, she somehow
knew
that she should be
feeling the green down of lichen, and that the bark itself should be crumbling under her touch to reveal pale wood and insects. Somewhere above, hundreds of powerful trap-lanterns must be hanging
from the high and unseen ceiling of the cavern to provide the brilliant light.
The great trunks were the pièce de résistance, of course, for she realized that these must be real trees . . . or at least that they must have been real trees uncounted thousands
of years ago. Petrified forests were sometimes discovered deep within the rock, places where the earth had drowned and swallowed hundreds of living trees, and then over the millennia had replaced
living, sap-filled wood with quartzes and multicoloured gemstones, a little at a time.
In this case, instead of mining the trees for the beauty of their pink, gold and green crystal, the diggers had apparently removed only the rock around them, leaving the trees untouched. This
forest of jewelled trees was without decay. Every knothole, every ring was preserved with semi-precious precision. It was infinitely valuable and utterly dead.
For several minutes the audition candidates could only gawp. Then, as one, they glanced at one another, then scattered, mirrors in hand. Nobody wanted to try out sample Faces where another
candidate might observe and steal ideas. In a space of seconds, Neverfell found herself entirely alone. Which was, she remembered with a jolt, precisely what she wanted.
She would not have long alone. If she was to track down the Sturton fragment, it had to be now.
Eyes closed, she breathed deeply and focused upon the smells. There were traces of a dozen soaps and perfumes, body smells, dried flowers and of course the oil of cloves in which she was doused
. . . but there it was, the faintest pungent hint of cheese, like a familiar voice in a crowd’s tumult. Having made sure nobody else was within view, she loosened her mask and pulled it
slightly away from her face so that she could smell more easily.
Snuffing like a bloodhound, she made her way through the crystalline forest. At last she came upon a small white stone hut richly carved with images of leaping fish. The faint scent seemed to
come from within, so she tried the door. It was locked, but she recognized it as a trick lock of a sort Grandible often used, and soon had it open.
Within she found an odd but elegant pantry. Wide shelves housed a number of crates, little sacks, bottles and jars. Up on the high shelf was a box that she recognized as the one she had packed
for Madame Appeline. She scrambled on to a chair, and retrieved it. It did not appear to have been opened, and when she prised off the lid she found the little crumb of Sturton was still in its
hiding place. She plucked it out, and hastily crammed the box back in its place, then jumped down from her chair, just in time to hear the door unlock from the outside.