Shadowplay

in their brackets. “What do you mean, Your Grace?”

“I have brought us here without a single guard. What if these are murderers?”

“But you wished this kept a secret. Don’t worry yourself too much, Duchess—I am reasonably fit, and I can use one of these torches to defend you, if necessary.” Utta stretched up to lift one from its socket. “Even a murderer will not relish being struck in the face with this.”

Merolanna laughed. “I was worrying about you, good Sister Utta, rather than myself. You do not deserve to be harmed because of these strange games I find myself playing. I care not what happens to me. I am old, and all my chicks are dead or fled or lost...” For a moment her face became painfully sober and her lip trembled. “Ah, well. Ah, well.” The duchess took a breath and straightened, swelling her sizable bosom so that she seemed suddenly a small but daunting ship of war. “It does us no good to stand here whispering like frightened girls. Come, Utta. You have the torch. Lead the way.”

They made their way up the winding staircase. The first floor was unoccupied. The single, undivided chamber contained several large tables bearing plaster models of the castle, some true to life and others showing possible improvements, the fruits of one of King Olin’s enthusiasms now as forgotten as the dusty, mummified corpse of a mouse that lay in the middle of the doorway.

Merolanna eyed the tiny body with distaste. “Somebody should do something. What use is it having cats if they do not eat the mice instead of leaving them around to rot?”

“Cats don’t always eat their prey, Your Grace,” Utta said. “Sometimes they only play with them and then kill them for sport.”

“Nasty creatures. I never did like cats. Give me a hound any day. Stupid but honest.” Merolanna looked around for eavesdroppers—a reflex because they were quite alone. Still, when she spoke again it was in a low voice. “That’s why I preferred Gailon Tolly, for all his faults, to his brothers. Hendon is a cat if ever there was one. You can see the cruelty—he wears it like a fancy outfit, with pride.”

Utta nodded as they returned to the stairs, leaving the cobwebbed models behind. Even Zoria herself, she felt sure, would have found it hard to feel charitable toward Hendon Tolly.

The doors on the second and third floors were smaller, and locked. She guessed that at least the upper one contained part of King Olin’s famous library. This tower had always been his private sanctuary, and even with him gone so long she felt disrespectful poking around without royal permission.

But I am with Merolanna—the king’s own aunt, she reminded herself. If that is not permission enough, what is?

The door to the chamber which took up the entire top floor was open, although Utta felt oddly sure that in any ordinary circumstances it would be locked just like the floors below it. No light burned inside, and from where the two women stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, their torch barely threw light past the doorway. As Utta moved closer the shadows inside bent and stretched. Suddenly she felt short of breath. Zoria, preserve me from dangers known and unknown, she prayed, from peril of the body and peril of the soul. “Your Grace?”

Merolanna frowned as if irritated at herself. She had not left the top of the stairs. “Very well. I’m coming.” She hesitated a moment longer, then walked forward to stand at Utta’s side. Together they stepped into the doorway, both of them holding their breath. Utta lifted the torch.

If the room full of plaster models at the bottom of the tower had seemed cluttered, this was something else again. Books had been stacked everywhere across the floor in unsteady-looking towers, and across every surface, many of them open, covering the two long tables in heedless piles. More than a few of the volumes lay bent-backed, perched like clumsy nesting birds on tabletop or pile, in positions that likely had not changed since the king’s disappearance. Many had lost pages: a mulch of creased parchments covered the floor like drifts of leaves. For Zoria, tutored in the thrifty ways of the Zorian sisterhood, where books were a precious, expensive resource and could be read only with the permission of the adelfa, the mistress of the shrine’s sisterhood, this careless plenitude was both exhilarating and shocking.

“What a dreadful clutter!” said Merolanna. “And it’s frightfully cold in here, too. I’m shivering, Utta. Would you see if there’s any wood, and light a fire?”

“Light not any fires, great ladies!” a tiny voice piped. “I beg ’ee, or tha will scorch my own sweet mistress most cracklingly!”

Utta jumped and dropped the torch, which with great good fortune landed in one of the few places on the floor not covered with sheets of book paper. She snatched it up again, breathing thanks she had not set the entire tower aflame. “What was...?”

Merolanna had given a little screech at the mysterious words, and now reached out and clutched Utta’s shoulder so fiercely that the Zorian sister could barely restrain a cry of her own. “It was here! In this very room!” the duchess whispered. She made the sign of the Three. “Who speaks?” she demanded aloud, her voice cracked and quavering. “Are you a ghost? A demon spirit?”

“No, great ladies, no ghost. I will show myself presently.” The faint, shrill voice might almost have come from the phantom of the dead mouse downstairs. A moment later, Utta saw something stirring on the tabletop. A minuscule, four-limbed shape crawled out from between two closeleaning piles of books. When it stood up, and was revealed to be a man no taller than Utta’s finger, she nearly dropped the torch again.

“Oh, merciful daughter of Perin,” Utta said. “It is a little man.”

“No mere man,” the stranger chirped, “but a Gutter-Scout of the Rooftoppers.” He bowed. “Beetledown the Bowman, I hight. Beg pardon for affrighting thee.”

“You see this too,” Merolanna said, tightening her grip on Utta again until the other woman squirmed. “Sister Utta, you see it. I am not mad, am I?”

“I see it,” was all she could say. At this moment Utta was not entirely certain of her own sanity. “Who are you?” she asked the tiny man. “I mean, what are you?”

“He said he was a Rooftopper,” Merolanna said. “That’s plain enough.”

“A...Rooftopper?”

“Don’t you know the stories? Ah, but you’re from the Vuttish islands, aren’t you?” Merolanna stared at Utta for a moment, then suddenly remembered what they were talking about and turned back to the astonishing little apparition on the table. “What do you want? Are you the one who...did you put that letter in my chamber?”

Beetledown bowed. It was hard to tell, he was so small, but he might have been a little shame-faced. “That were my folk, yes, and Beetledown played some part, ’tis also true. We took the letter and we brought it back. Any more, though, be not mine to tell. You must wait.”

“Wait?” Merolanna’s laugh was more than a little shaky. Utta half feared that the duchess would faint or run screaming, but Merolanna seemed determined to prove she was made of bolder stuff. “Wait for what? The goblins to come and play us a tune? The fairy-king to lead us to his hoard of gold? By the Holy Trigon, are all the stories coming to life?”

“Again, this one cannot say, great lady. But un comes who can.” He cocked his head. “Ah. I hear her.”

He pointed to the great, long-unused fireplace. A line of figures had begun to file out from behind a pile of books beside the hearth—tiny men like Beetledown, dressed in fantastical armor made of nut husks and rodent skeletons, carrying equally tiny swords and spears. The miniature troop marched silently across the floor (although not without a few nervous glances upward at Utta and Merolanna) and lined up before the fireplace. A platform descended slowly out of the flue and into the opening of the fireplace, winched down on threads with a feathery squeak like the cry of baby birds. When it was a half-foot above the ash-covered andiron, it stopped, swaying slightly. At the center of the platform, on a beautiful throne constructed in part from what appeared to be a gilded pinecone, sat a finger-sized woman with red hair and a little crown of gold wire. She regarded her two large guests with calm interest, then smiled.

“Her Sublime and Inextricable Majesty, Queen Upsteeplebat,” announced Beetledown with considerable fervor.

“We owe you an explanation, Duchess Merolanna and Sister Utta,” said the little queen. The stones of the fireplace, like the shape of a theater or temple, made her high voice easier to hear than the little man’s had been. “We have information that we think you will find valuable, and in turn, we ask you to aid us in the great matters that are upon us all.”

“Aid you?” Merolanna shook her head. The duchess was looking her age now, confused and even a little weary. “By the gods, I swear I understand none of this. Tiny people out of an old tale. What could we do to help