Read A Face Like Glass for Free Online

put the cheese between two big serving boards and I can make a crank-handle thingy and it will only take one of us to wind
it so it turns over the cheese and so one of us can sleep, Master Grandible. Can I try that?’
    And Grandible, who had impatiently batted away a hundred other impractical suggestions, hesitated and scratched at his chin.
    ‘Hmph. Tell me more.’
    As it turned out, the mangle did not die in vain. There were false starts and nipped fingers, but like many of Neverfell’s mechanical experiments the crank-handle cheese-turner eventually
worked. When Neverfell demonstrated it at long last, her master watched her with the most acute and belligerent attention, then slowly nodded.
    ‘Go to bed,’ was all he said. And he ruffled Neverfell’s nests of pigtails with a hand so large and rough that the gesture almost felt like a cuff. Neverfell staggered off and
dropped into her hammock knowing that, for once, Master Grandible was very pleased with her. Sleep swallowed her like a pond gulping a pebble.
    She woke again quite suddenly two hours later, and stared up at the rocky ceiling of the tunnel, eardrums tingling as if somebody had snapped their fingers in front of her face. She knew
instantly that it must be twenty-five o’clock, or the ‘hour of naught’. When the silver-faced clock in Grandible’s reception room reached the hour of naught, it gave a dull
click as the mechanism reset. For some reason, it was this and not the chimes of other hours that had a habit of waking Neverfell.
    In spite of her exhaustion this click had jerked her out of sleep once more. She gave a small, beleaguered moan and wrapped herself in a ball, but to no avail. She was drenched in ice-cold
wakefulness, and jumpy as a grasshopper.
    ‘Not fair,’ she whispered as she tumbled out of her hammock. ‘Not fair . Please don’t let me be out of clock! Not again!’
    Because there was no night or day in Caverna, sometimes people fell ‘out of clock’. Their cycles of sleeping and waking collapsed, and often they could not sleep at all, but drifted
through endless hazy, miserable hours. Neverfell was particularly prone to this.
    Doing, doing, doing. What can I be doing?
    Her brain felt like a sponge, and everything looked spangly as she tottered down the passages, checking on the slumbering cheeses. She tried sweeping up, but she kept tripping over pails and
leaving little whey prints down the corridors. In the end she hobbled back to the Sturton’s boudoir, knowing that Master Grandible would find something for her to do.
    There were only a couple of trap-lanterns set in corners of the antechamber. As their lemony light ebbed and glowed the great cheese almost seemed to swell and contract like a creature breathing
in its sleep. Wicked glints slunk along the iron angles of the mangled mangle. Beyond them, seated on the floor with his back to the wall was Master Grandible, his eyes closed and jaw hanging
open.
    Neverfell’s lungs seemed to empty of air, and she managed only a faint squeak of alarm. For a moment all she could think was that somehow her master had suddenly died. Cheeses turned on
you sometimes, even mild-mannered and well-trained cheeses. It was one of the hazards of the profession. And what other alternative explanation was there? In all the years she had known him, Master
Grandible had never slipped, never made an error, never forgotten a responsibility. Surely, even with his exhaustion . . .
    Master Grandible’s jaw wobbled slightly; from his throat issued a reverberating snore like a calf in a well. Yes, the impossible had happened. The infallible Master Grandible had fallen
asleep on duty, two minutes before the Sturton needed to be turned.
    Neverfell tiptoed over to him and put her hand out towards his shoulder, then hesitated and withdrew it. No, why shake him awake? He needed sleep and she would let him have it. She would take
care of the turning for him, and the next one too if he was