A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge Page A

For the first time that she could remember, the way was open, and the locks on Grandible’s door could not hold her in.
    She scampered furtively back to Grandible’s study, found paper and pen and dashed out a quick note.
    RABBIT ESCAPED THROUGH HOLE IN WALL BEHIND GRAVELHIDE PRESSES. GONE TO FIND IT.
    Leaving this note on her master’s desk, Neverfell scuttled back to the fissure. It was true that she did have an escapee rabbit to retrieve, of course, but that was not
her main reason for wriggling through the hole.
    I can find Madame Appeline. I can ask her to give back the Stackfalter Sturton. I can make it all better.
    She had no solid reason for believing that Madame Appeline would listen to her, and yet she did believe it. Neverfell could not shake the memory of that sad and strangely familiar Face the woman
had worn. It was as if there were an invisible cord between them, pulling her along.
    With difficulty she dragged herself through the hole and out to the other side, shaking stone dust from her pigtails, almost sick with excitement and terror. The scene before her was only a
dusty corridor, but it was a new corridor, with dust that tasted different, and walls that had never known the warmth of her hand. It was fascinating, and she was shaking as she scrambled
over the debris towards the light of a distant cavern.
    Out , was the beat in her heart. Out, out, out.

 

A Crossing of Paths
    Every inch of Neverfell seemed to be throbbing with life. Everything was new, and new was a drug.
    She piled some of the rubble back into the hole to conceal it, then ventured slowly forward, trailing her calloused fingers over the corrugated surface of the wall. New rock, cleanly
chipped, not rough with age or lichen. Split rocks rolled under her shoe soles. Somewhere in the distance there were sounds, jumbled by echo, and she realized that these had been the background
music of her world, until this moment muffled to cloud-murmurs by the thick stone wall in between. Now she felt as if plugs had been pulled from her ears.
    Most confused of all, however, was her nose. Over seven years it had become finely attuned to the overpowering odour of cheese, so that she could have found her way blindfolded through
Grandible’s tunnels by recognizing each great truckle she passed from its familiar soft, sleeping reek.
    Now, there was an eerie nose-silence, followed by a giddy awareness of . . . not- cheese smells. Cold, washed chalk smells of freshly cracked rock, the dank fragrance of unseen plants
clinging slickly to life. Warm smells, animal smells. People smells. Feet, sweat, hair grease, fatty soap . . . and yet each fragrance different, personal. It was so overwhelming that Neverfell was
glad of her mask, with its familiar scent of musty velvet.
    Behind all these, she detected the aroma of scared rabbit. Neverfell followed the scent and found a tiny pyramid of moist, brown droppings a little further up the tunnel. The fugitive had
clearly come that way.
    She tiptoed to the end of her tiny passage, then crouched and peered out on to the largest cavern she ever remembered seeing.
    It was some fifty feet high, well-lit and shaped like half a dome. The rounded walls were ridged with natural ledges and balconies, from which cascaded peach-coloured stalactites, and on these
nestled great wild flytraps as big as her head, freckled like orchids and glowing creamily as they gaped their finely toothed maws. Neverfell realized this must be a cavern through which many
people passed, if the traps were thriving. These glowed brightly, which meant that not long ago they had sensed motion or a released breath.
    Opposite the tunnel entrance was a large and ruggedly sheer wall with a number of broad rock shelves, along each of which a thoroughfare seemed to run. The uppermost bore metal tracks, and
occasionally man-high trolleys of black steel would rear out of black tunnel mouths, rattle along the rails with their wheels sparking at the