SPYDERS
"What have I done? What have I done? I have done something terrible—what is it? I just wanted to help! I thought if I sent Madame Appeline what she wanted, it would make friends for you in the Court ... I just wanted to keep you safe!"
"Safe?" Grandible's face was still that of a statue, frozen and grayish with suppressed emotion. "Safe?" His voice rose to a roar, tiny flecks of Stackfalter Sturton falling out of his eyebrows. Neverfell gave a wordless squeak of apology as she was shaken like a doll and then abruptly thrust away.
Master Grandible stared at her, one hand raised as if he were considering striking her. Then he reached out unsteadily and shoved at her shoulder with the flat of his hand. Neverfell quivered and went nowhere, uncertain whether he wanted her to leave, unsure whether the gesture had been angry or affectionate.
"A person I could trust" was all he said, and gave a small choking sound that she did not immediately recognize as a laugh. "That was what I thought. When I pulled you out of the whey. You were so ..." He sighed and cupped his hands as if a small, damp kitten were resting its paws on his palms. "What more could I do? I boarded my doors against every betrayal I could imagine. But there was one I never expected." He rasped his yellowing fingernails through his beard with a sound like a toothbrush war. "Ha. Betrayal for my own good."
"What ... what does it mean? What have I done?"
"You have woken the spiders."
Master Grandible sometimes had an odd, unbalanced way of saying words that gave them new meanings. When he talked of ordinary spiders of the spindle-legged and spinning variety, the word had its usual ring. But here there was a greater weight on the first syllable, the second dusty and dead, almost inaudible. Spy ... der.
"Go and fetch the prune gin. Bring it to the reception room."
Neverfell ran off to fetch the bottle, her face burning and her stomach acid. She had gone so fast from lifesaver 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 favor 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 flavor means to him. He can analyze 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 downward.
"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 colors 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 favor."
There was something in his dark tone that curbed Neverfell's burning desire to know about the benefits of the favor 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 favor 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 moment clutching at it and bleeding. The moment you rise to favor, you gain a hundred unseen and envious enemies.
"I was stung too often. No favor was worth it. I decided to pull myself out of the web, and buried myself in these tunnels so that I could not find myself playing the Court games even by accident. Leaving the Court is no easy matter, for one finds oneself entangled—debts, threats, secrets shared, people who know your weaknesses, and people whose weaknesses you know. When I left, many whispered that this was just another move in a more complicated game, one that required me to be out of sight. There were four assassination attempts against me in the first month."
The many locks, the precautions taken for every visitor ... all of these began to make more sense.
"Eventually they left me alone," continued the cheesemaker, "but only because, year in and year out, I took every care to be completely neutral. No games, no alliances, no biases. I used the same rules for everybody. No exceptions."
"Oh ..." Neverfell hugged her knees as clarity dawned. "So that's why you didn't want to give Madame Appeline the Sturton when she asked for it? Because that would be making an exception?"
"Yes," Grandible muttered hollowly. "And now everybody will think that I have done so knowingly. At the grand banquet the Sturton will make its debut, and Madame Appeline's client will already have a Face tailor-made to respond to it. It will be obvious that it could not have been prepared without prior knowledge of the cheese. Everybody will see the Face and know."
"What ... what can I do? Can I make it better?"
"No."
There it was. Neverfell felt her stomach turn over. For the hundredth time one of her wild gestures had knocked something over and broken it beyond mending. This time, however, she knew that she had broken something far larger, something that could not be replaced. Her soul burned with self-hate, and she wished that she could break herself into a thousand pieces like a china pot. She buried her nose between her knees and snuffled.
"No," her master repeated. "There is nothing we can do. I shall send a man to try to retrieve the delivery, but I think it is too late."
"But ... you could tell everybody it was my fault, and that you did nothing wrong! I could tell them what happened! Or maybe you could send me to talk to Madame Appeline! I could explain, and ask her to give us back the Stackfalter Sturton—"
"NO!" For the first time Grandible sounded truly and ferociously angry. Neverfell leaped to her feet and fled.
It was all very well being told that she could do nothing to make things better. Neverfell did not have the kind of mind that could take that quietly. She did not have the kind of mind that could be quiet at all.
In many respects, poor Neverfell's overactive mind had coped with her lonely and cloistered life in the only way it could. It had gone a little mad to avoid going wholly mad. To break up the dreary repetition of the day it had learned to skip unpredictably, to invent and half-believe, to shuffle thoughts until they were surprising and unrecognizable.
Small wonder that when she did find somebody to talk with they barely understood her. She was like a playing piece making "knight moves" when everybody else was obeying checkers rules. Half the time her mind was visiting squares where nobody else ever landed, and even when people understood the position her mind had reached, they could never work out how she had got there.
At the moment, her mind was throwing up ideas and thoughts the way a fountain throws up water drops, most of them foolish on second glance, losing their glitter as they fell.
We can give Stackfalter Sturton samples to everybody! Everybody in the entire Court! Then it'll be fair!
We can swap the big banquet Sturton for another giant cheese that looks exactly the same but tastes a bit different, so that the Face Madame Appeline creates won't match the taste!
We can send an extra cheese to the banquet, one that will split and fill the whole room with stinging steam! That way everybody will have to run away, and nobody will see the Face Madame Appeline has prepared!
Fortunately she had just enough common sense to see the flaws in these plans before presenting them to Cheesemaster Grandible. There was not enough Sturton to give to everybody without breaking into the big truckle, there was not enough time to make and ripen a suitable decoy cheese, and it was just possible that blinding the Grand Steward and his privileged nobles with poison cheese steam would not greatly improve Master Grandible's position.
Among the flood of ideas and imaginings, however, a couple of thoughts bubbled and bobbed to the surface again and again. Why had Master Grandible been so angry at her suggestion that she talk to people and take the blame? He had been frightened at the idea of her speaking with Madame Appeline from the start. Was there some secret that her careless words might give away?
By the time she dared to reappear, Master Grandible had staggered back to tend to the Sturton once more, his racking coughs just audible in the distance, and Neverfell was reluctant to disturb him. To judge from the papers on his desk, however, he was translating all his fears into action. The traps and precautions he had already laid in place were nothing compared to those he now seemed to be preparing. To judge by the scrawled maps on his desk, he was planning a series of heavy doors subdividing his district, so that if he found himself under siege he could fall back and fall back, forcing his imagined enemies to break in through door after door.
The door that stood between his tunnels and the rest of Caverna was now covered with new padlocks in addition to the original locks, and as usual there was no sign of the keys. Are those locks to keep enemies out, thought Neverfell, or me in?
She also found a list of new duties with her name at the top, and gawped in alarm as her eye ran down it. Evidently the fortification project was taking all Grandible's time, so he had passed most of his customary tasks on to her. The scrawled entry "Stckfltr brush rabbt milk once daily" was explained when a small crate arrived at the appointed time containing one quivering, wild-eyed rabbit, not best pleased by Neverfell's inquisitive but innocent decision to shake the box before opening it.
The rabbit's pale coat was patchy, as though it had been pulling out its own fur through nerves or boredom. But when it twitched its buttonhole nostrils at Neverfell, she felt a surge of love for it in the way that only the lonely can. To judge by the long scratches its hind claws left on her forearms when she tried to hug it, however, the feeling was not mutual.
The Sturton had to be brushed with rabbit milk. How did you milk rabbits? Neverfell knew something of the way cows, sheep, and goats were milked. How different could it be?
"Don't—Hold still—Oh, you dratted, pink-eyed ... Oh, come back, sweetheart! I didn't mean it!"
Neverfell knelt on the stone floor, peering under the long wooden shelf affixed to the wall of the passage. Along the top of the shelf a row of crimson-veined Pulp Cheddars gently perspired. Underneath the shelf, a pale shape flattened itself to the floor like a slumped soufflé, long ears flush to its back, pink eyes dark and empty with fear.
She was not much wiser about how one went about milking a rabbit, but she was considerably wiser when it came to ways not to do it. For example, she was now aware that even though rabbit bellies hung very close to the ground, they were very resistant to being lifted into a croquet-hoop shape so that one could slip a bucket under them. Furthermore, she was now better educated about the power of a rabbit's jump, the sharpness of its claws, and the sheer speed of its mismatched legs.
Unfortunately, as a result of these lessons, the rabbit was loose in the cheese tunnels, probably leaving an invisible trail of shed hair, fleas, and rodent fear in its wake to startle and spoil the delicately reared truckles.
"Here ... it's all right ..."
She impulsively reached toward the rabbit, despite the tufted hole that its teeth had ravaged in the shoulder of her doublet. The rabbit scrambled away from her with a chitter of claws, and Neverfell flinched backward, grazing her knuckles on the coarse wood of the shelf.
"Don't ..." Somehow she had to calm and capture the rabbit again, before the cheesemaker found out. "Is it my face? Look—it's all right, I'm covering it." She tied her velvet mask over her features. "There! Look! Bad face gone away now." The rabbit simply broke into a round-backed bobbing run, and took off down the corridor. "Oh, you little ..." Neverfell scrambled to her feet and sprinted after it, the tiny pail rattling on her arm.
The rabbit took the first left into the Whistleplatch corridor. It squeezed between the vats as if it were boneless, and lurked behind them until Neverfell poked it out with a broom handle. It kicked a bucket of standing cream, and for a time Neverfell could track the long, pale prints left by its back legs. By throwing herself full length she managed to place a hand upon it, pushing it to the ground, so that it flattened itself again into a quivering, docile dollop of rabbit. Then she tried to pick it up and it transformed into a wild white halo of fur, claw, and tooth. Cursing and bleeding from a dozen scratches, Neverfell set off in pursuit once more.
Every time the rabbit had a choice between two corridors, it chose the one that sloped upward. Up, up, up, its frantic unthinking heart was chanting. Up means out. Somehow Neverfell could almost hear it, and as she pursued the rabbit her heart began the same chant.
At last it found a dead end, a parade of mighty cheese presses crushing the whey out of great Gravelhide truckles as rough as a cow's tongue.
"Ha!" Neverfell swung the door shut behind her and fastened it, then gazed up and down the Gravelhide passage. There—a pair of white ears. The rabbit had squeezed behind one of the presses.
"Oh ... don't make me do this." There was a scrabbling. Silence. Scrabbling. Silence. Silence. "All right, all right!" Neverfell pushed back her hair, then began slowly dragging the nearest press forward.
First press, grindingly, painfully dragged away from the rock wall. No rabbit.
Second press. No rabbit.
Third press. No rabbit. And ... no wall.
Down through the part of the wall that had been hidden by the presses, there ran a vertical crack some four feet high. At the bottom, the crack opened into a triangular hole, half-filled with rubble. At some long-forgotten time, the rock's great mass must have shifted, so that it cracked and created this narrow fissure. The rows of presses had concealed it.
There were distinct rabbit tracks in the surrounding mortar dust, leading to the hole. Neverfell stared. Lay flat. Clawed the chunks of loose masonry out of the way. Peered.
With her cheek pressed against the ground, Neverfell could see that the aperture continued into the rock for about three yards, and then opened out into a larger space. What was more, there seemed to be a hint of light beyond. With a rush of the blood, she realized that she was on the edge of Master Grandible's district. If that was another tunnel beyond the hole, it was one she had never seen before. Her well-trained cheesemaker's nose twitched as a thousand delicate and unfamiliar smells assailed it.
As an obedient apprentice, she knew she had to warn Master Grandible of the breach in his defenses. If she did that straightaway and in person, however, he would find ways to block this beautiful hole, and she was not ready for that. 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 and snatching up her mask, 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 toward the light of a distant cavern.
Out, was the beat in her heart. Out, out, out.
