Utta cleared the books piled on the floor, then did her best to move the book cabinets without tipping them —no easy task. The door resisted her pull for a moment—she wondered if the Rooftoppers had remembered to oil the hinges as well at the latch—but then, with a shriek that made her wince, it swung toward her.
“Carefully!” came Upsteeplebat’s piping cry, but there was no need. Utta had already taken a step back in dismay from what she took to be half a dozen huge spiders dangling in the doorway before she realized they were Rooftoppers hanging from ropes like steeplejacks, slowly climbing back up to the top of the doorframe.
Most of them looked at her with anxiety or even fear—and small wonder, since she was dozens of times their size, as tall in their eyes as the spire of a great temple—but one tiny climber who seemed barely more than a boy kicked his legs and gave her a sort of salute before he disappeared into the darkness above the door.
“Fare you well,” Utta whispered as the rest of the climbers also reached the safety of the doorframe. She turned to the queen, who still stood on her platform in the fireplace like an image of Zoria in a shrine. Utta could not help wondering if that was coincidence or more of the Rooftopper’s planning. “Your people are brave.”
“We fight the cat, the rat, the jay, the gull,” said the Rooftopper queen. “Our walls are full of spiders and centipedes. We must be brave to survive. You may enter now.”
Utta leaned forward into the doorway.
“What...what do you see?” Merolanna’s voice quivered a little, but she had been at court for most of a century and was good at masking her feelings even in the most extreme of situations. “Can we get on with this?”
“It’s dark—I’ll need the torch.”
“A candle only, if you please, Sister Utta,” said the queen. “And if you’ll be kind enough to take my good Beetledown on your shoulder, he will help you to walk carefully in our sacred place.”
The little man, who had been standing silently on the hearth, now bowed. Utta got a candle on a dish—they had been left everywhere around the room, as if Olin had liked to use dozens at a time—then lowered her hand and let the Rooftopper climb on.
Merolanna stood, not without a little huffing and wheezing. “I’m coming with you. Whatever it is, I want to see it.”
“I will join you inside.” The Rooftopper queen lifted her hand. The royal platform slowly began to rise upward, back into the fireplace flue.
“Do thee step careful, like un told thee,” said Beetledown. The voice so close to her ear made Utta itchy. She lifted the candle and led Merolanna through the open door.
The floor of the room beyond was scarcely half the size of the one in the king’s library, but the room itself extended farther upward: with candle lifted, Utta could see the rafters of the tower top itself, latticed with what she first took for spiderwebs, then realized were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rope bridges, none any wider than her hand. Some were only a foot or so long, but a few stretched for a dozen feet or more in sagging parabolas braced with slender crosswires.
“Watch tha foot!” cried Beetledown. Utta looked down to see that she had nearly stepped on a ramp that led from the floor to an old rosewood chest no higher than the middle of her thigh. The lid was flung back and the hinges, badly rusted, had given way, so that the lid hung unevenly, half resting on the ground, but it was the inside of the chest that caught her eye. A row of tiny houses had been built inside it, along the back—half a dozen simple but beautifully constructed three-story houses.
“Merciful Zoria,” said Utta. “Is this where your people live?” “Nay,” said Beetledown, “only those as tend the Ears.” “Tend the ears?”
“Step careful, please. And watch tha head, too.”
Utta looked up just before walking into one of the hanging bridges. Up close, she could see it was much less simple than she had thought: the knot-work was regular and decorative, the wooden planks clearly finished by hand with love and care. She resolved to move even more slowly. Just the loss of one of these bridges to her clumsiness would be a shame.
“Did you ever imagine such a thing was here, under our noses?” she asked Merolanna.
“This castle has always been full of secrets,” the other woman said, sounding oddly mournful.
They moved deeper into what might have once been a simple storeroom but had long since become a weird, magical place of miniature bridges and ladders, of furniture turned into houses, with small wonders of fittings and drapery inside them that Utta could only glimpse, and tiny lanterns glowing in the windows like fireflies.
“Where are all your people?” she asked.
“There be only few of we folk who live in this place—only those who serve the Lord of the Peak direct and personal,” the little man explained. “Those stay inside, so as not to be trod on by giants.” He coughed, a sound like a bird sniffing. “Beggin’ tha pardon, ma’am.”
Utta smiled. “No, that sounds very sensible. How long have your people been here, hiding from us blundering giants?”
“Forever, ma’am. Long as remembered. The Lord of the Peak, he made us and gave us this place for our own. Well, not
“But then why is your god named the Lord of the Peak?” Utta asked. “If you have always been here, what mountain can you know?”
“Why, the great peak your folk do call Wolfstooth,” Beetledown said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world—which, to him, it doubtless was. “That is where the Lord lives.”
Utta shook her head, but gently, so as not to dislodge the little man. Wolfstooth Spire, the castle’s central tower, was the Rooftopper’s Xandos—the home of their god! What a world this was, both his and hers. What a strange, wonderful world.
The queen now appeared from a hidden door somewhere on the far side of the room, riding in a chariot drawn by a herd of white mice, with a small phalanx of soldiers behind her. She waved in an imperial sort of way, then led Utta and Merolanna a little farther down what was clearly the attic room’s main thoroughfare, between rows of chests and other furniture—each, Utta had no doubt, converted into temples or mantiseries or congregations of sisters, all in service to the god who they believed lived at the top of a nearby tower.
Upsteeplebat’s chariot drew to a halt at the end of the aisle; her mice settled on their haunches and began most unceremoniously to groom themselves. Against the wall, at the end of a sort of plaza a couple of yards across made when the furniture had been pushed back was a high dresser of the kind used by wealthy women. Its drawers had been pulled out, the bottommost the farthest, the topmost the least, and a fretwork of ladders and ramps connected the drawers together. More of the spidery steeplejacks were at work here, but it took a moment for her to make out what they were doing. A long bundle, almost like an insect wrapped in webbing by a spider, was being carefully lowered down from the topmost drawer to the floor.
“Could you kneel, please,” Upsteeplebat said in her high, calm voice. “We have delicate work to do, and all of us will be safer if you are sitting or kneeling.”
“Can we get on with things?” Merolanna grumbled. “This dress isn’t meant for such games. If you’d told me I’d be down on the floor like a child playing tops I’d have worn my nightclothes instead.”
Utta could not blame the dowager duchess for complaining. Though she herself was in good, healthy fettle, and much more conveniently garbed in a simple robe, her old bones did not particularly enjoy the exercise, either.
When they were seated, a small troop of soldiers and a trio of shaven-headed creatures (whose delicate features Utta guessed must be female) brought out a cushioned bed made from what had obviously once been a jewel case. The bundle from the uppermost drawer was lowered into it, then unwrapped to reveal a Rooftopper woman with dark hair and pale skin, dead or sleeping.
“I present to you the Glorious and Accurate Ears,” the queen said, “whose family has for centuries been our link to the Lord of the Peak, and who will today, for the first time, share the Lord’s words straightly with your folk.”
The trio of priestesses, if that was what they were, stepped forward to stand at the head and either arm of the Ears. They lit bowls of some stuff that smoked and waved them over her and then began to chant words too quiet to be heard. This went on for long moments; Utta could feel Merolanna shifting impatiently beside her. In the quiet room, the rucking and crinkling of the duchess’ dress sounded like distant thunder.
At last the priestesses stepped back and bowed their heads. The silence continued. Utta began to wonder if
