A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge Read Free Book Online

to betrayer that all her words seemed to have fallen out of her. When she
reached the reception room, Master Grandible had dropped into his chair, eyes bloodshot and breath still wheezing. She carried in her tiny tapestry-seat stool and hunched on it at his feet, her
knees pulled up to her nose. He took the bottle, sipped, then stared down the neck.
    ‘Neverfell – what do you think the Court is?’
    Neverfell could not even shape a sentence. The Court was golden, the Court was glory. It was fair maidens and a thousand new faces and her heart beating fast. It was the world. It was everything
that was not here.
    ‘I know you hate it,’ she said.
    Master Grandible leaned forward, and dropped his broad chin down to rest on his fists.
    ‘It is a giant web, Neverfell, full of bright-winged, glistening insects. All of them full of their own poison, all entangled, all struggling to live and to kill. All of them pull the web
this way and that to favour themselves or throttle each other. And every motion that one of them makes is felt by all the others.’
    ‘But Madame Appeline . . .’
    Madame Appeline is different , Neverfell wanted to say. I saw it in her Face. But she could hear how foolish it would sound, so she let the sentence drop.
    ‘It sickens me now to say it,’ Grandible went on, ‘but as a young man I had a notable place at Court.’
    ‘Did you?’ Neverfell could not help leaning forward in excitement, even though she knew it was not how her master wanted her to react.
    ‘Nobody else had successfully ripened a Wanepilch Milchmaid in this city without their eyes falling out,’ Grandible explained, ‘so, when I succeeded, a round of it was sent to
the Grand Steward himself. And . . . they say that when he placed the first sliver of it into his mouth, he actually tasted it.’
    ‘So . . . it is all true what they say of him, then? That he would be blind, deaf and numb without the very finest luxuries?’
    ‘Not quite. There is nothing wrong with his eyes, ears, nose, skin or tongue, only the parley they hold with his soul. He can look at a flower and tell you it is blue, but blue means
nothing to him. You can put a forkful of meat on his tongue and he will be able to tell you that it is roast beef, the age and stock of the cow, exactly how long it has been cooked and which type
of tree gave the wood for the fire, but it might as well be a pebble for all the flavour means to him. He can analyse it, but he no longer feels it.
    ‘But what is to be expected of a man five hundred years old? They say he remembers the days when there was an overground city up on the mountainside, and no Caverna, just a set of caves
and cellars where the city stored its luxuries. He has outlived that city, seen it fall into ruin beneath the ravages of war and weather, while its citizens gradually retreated beneath the earth
and dug downwards.
    ‘For four hundred and twenty of those five hundred years his body has been trying to die. He has sustained himself on every liquor, spice and unguent known to hold back death, but there is
only so long you can drag a bow against a string before it starts to creak. The colours in his soul are fading, and his passions are going out one by one, like stars. That is why the Craftsmen of
the City strive, night and day, century in and century out, to steal, create or invent something that he can feel.’
    ‘And you succeeded!’
    ‘Yes. I won the Grand Steward’s favour.’
    There was something in his dark tone that curbed Neverfell’s burning desire to know about the benefits of the favour of the Grand Steward. Did he give you a hat made of gold and a
monkey is that where your clock came from did he knight you did you drink pearls dissolved in coffee . . . These were all questions that Neverfell managed not to ask.
    ‘Some say the favour of the Grand Steward is double-edged. They are wrong. It is all edge and everybody knows it, and still all the courtiers spend their every waking