by Tad Williams
“What?” Merolanna began to stand and then fell back in the chair, fanning vigorously. “What madness—what cruel prank...?”
“Please, Your Grace, hear us out.” Upsteeplebat spoke kindly, but there was a note of authority in her own voice that Utta could not help remarking. “We do not play at games. Our Lord of the Peak, to whom we owe our very existence, has spoken, and told us what to do, and what to say to you.”
“Is that your Rooftopper king?” Utta rose from her own chair and went to stand by Merolanna’s. She set her hand on the duchess’ shoulder and could not help noticing how the woman was trembling.
Upsteeplebat shook her head. “Not in the sense you mean. No, I rule the Rooftoppers here among the living. But the Master of the Heights rules all living things and we are his servants.”
“Your god?”
She nodded her head. “You may call him thus. To us, he is simply the Lord.”
Merolanna took a long breath; Utta could feel her shudder. “What do you want? Just tell me, please.”
“You must come with us. You must hear what the Lord of the Peak has to say.”
“You would take us...to your god?” Utta wondered that a few moments ago she had thought things as strange as they could get.
“In a way. No harm will come to you.”
Merolanna looked at Utta, her expression a grimace somewhere between despair and hilarity. Her voice, when she finally spoke, shared the same air of resigned confusion. “Take us, then. To Rooftopper’s Heaven or wherever else. Why not?”
The tiny queen gestured toward a door in the wall at the back of the library, half-obscured by bookshelves and piles of loose books. “Please know that this is a rare honor. It has been centuries since we invited any of your kind into our sacred place.”
“Through that door? But it’s locked,” said Merolanna. “Olin always talked about how the storeroom here at the top of the tower hadn’t been opened since his grandfather’s day —that the key was lost and that nothing short of breaking it down would ever get it open.”
“Nor would it,” said Upsteeplebat with a tone of satisfaction. “It has been wedged on the far side in a thousand places and the key is indeed lost—at least to your folk. But now the Lord of the Peak has called for you, so my people have labored for two days to remove the wedges and other impediments.” She waved her hands and three of her tiny soldiers stepped out from their line along the base of the fireplace bricks. They lifted trumpets made of what looked like seashells and blew a long, shrill, tootling call. As if in reply, Utta heard a thin scraping noise, and then a metallic plink, as of a small hammer striking an equally small anvil.
“All praise to the Lord of Heights,” Upsteeplebat said, “the oil was sufficient to loosen the lock’s workings. It was the matter about which my council argued and argued. Now pull the door, please—but gently. My subjects will take some while to climb out of the way.”
“You do it,” Merolanna whispered to Utta. “Small things, oh, they make me jump so.”
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 this place, ’haps—this room we took for ours in my great-grands’ day. But our lands, our walls, our roofs, we have had forever.”
“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 she or Merolanna were expected to ask a question, but then the woman in the bed began to move, first to twitch as in a fever-dream, then to thrash weakly. Suddenly she sat up. Her eyes opened wide, but she did not seem to be looking at anything in the room, not even the two giant women. She spoke in a surprisingly low voice, a slurry string of quiet sounds like bees buzzing. The priestesses swayed.
“What does she say?” demanded Merolanna.
“She says nothing,” the queen of the Rooftoppers corrected her. “It is the Lord of the Peak himself who speaks, and he says, ‘The end of these days comes on white wings, but it bears darkness like an egg. Old Night waits to be born, and unless the sea swallows all untimely, the stars themselves will rain down like flaming arrows.’ Those are the words of the Lord of High Places.”
Vague, apocalyptic prophecy was not what the dowager duchess had come to hear. “Ask about my son,” she said in a sharp whisper. But Utta could tell that a bargain was being struck, even if she did not yet know with whom they were bargaining—the Rooftoppers and their queen? Their god? Or simply this one Rooftopper oracle?
“We have been told that you know something of this woman’s son, O Lord of the Peak,” Utta said slowly and clearly, hoping that if the Rooftoppers spoke her language, so did their god. “Will you tell us of him?”
The woman thrashed again and almost fell from her bed. Two tiny, shaven-headed priestesses stepped forward to hold her as she mumbled and rasped again.
“‘The High Ones took him, fifty winters past,’” the queen said, translating or simply amplifying the Ears’ quiet mumble. “‘He was carried behind the cloud of unknowing mortals call the Shadowline. But he yet lives.’”
Merolanna let out a little shriek, swayed, and collapsed against Utta, who did her best to hold her upright: the duchess was of a size that she would destroy much of the Rooftoppers’ religious quarter if allowed to fall. “She will thank you for this news—but I think not today,” Utta said, a little out of breath. She bent closer to Queen Upsteeplebat. “Can your god not tell us more?” she whispered. “Is there a way to find her child?”
For long moments the Ears lay like a dead woman—much like Merolanna, who seemed to have fainted. Then the tiny shape stirred and spoke again, but so quietly that Utta could only see her lips move. Even the little queen had to lean against the rail of her chariot to hear.
“The Lord of High Places says, ‘The world’s need is great. Old Night pecks at its shell, yearning to breathe the air of Time. This castle’s priest of light and stars once owned a piece of the House of the Moon, ancient and powerful, but now it has been taken. Find where that stolen piece has gone and in return Heaven will speak more of this mortal woman’s son.”
With that the Ears fell into a deep, deathlike sleep. When it was clear she would speak the god’s words no longer, the priestesses wrapped her up again. This time the tiny soldiers moved in and carried the entire bed away into the shadows like a funeral bier.
Utta held Merolanna, who groaned like a woman in a bad dream, and wondered and wondered at the surpassing strangeness this day had brought.
The duchess stirred in her bed and sat up, hands clawing out as though something had been pulled away from her.
“Where are they? Did I dream?”
“You did not dream,” Utta told her. “Unless I dreamed the same dream.”
“But what else did that little creature say? I cannot remember!” Merolanna fumbled for the cup of watered wine on the chest by her bed, drank it so fast that a pinkish rivulet spilled and ran down her chin.
Utta told her the rest of the Ears’ pronouncement. “But I can make no sense of it.”
“My child!” Merolanna fell back against the pillows, her chest heaving. “I gave him away,” she moaned, “and now the fairies have him. Poor, poor boy!” In halting words, she told Utta of the child’s secret birth and disappearance. Utta was surprised, but not astonished—the Zorians did not believe humans could be perfected, only forgiven.
“If the little people’s oracle spoke correctly, that was almost fifty years gone, Your Grace,” she told Merolanna. “Still, we must try to understand the god’s words—if it really was a god who spoke. A piece of the Moon’s House, the little woman said. And that it belonged to the castle’s priest of light and stars.�
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“Priest? Do they mean Father Timoid? But he is gone!” Merolanna tossed her head as if in a fever. “Why should some god send this message to torture me?”
“Perhaps they mean Hierarch Sisel.” Utta reached out to take the duchess’ hand, hoping to calm her. “He is the highest priest of all, so...”
“But he is gone too, to his house in the country. He told me he could not bear to see what the Tollys were doing.” Merolanna tried to calm herself. “Would he be the priest of light and stars, though? He is the great priest of the Trigon, and they are air, water, and earth...” She moaned again. “Ah, if only Chaven were here. He knows of such things—he studies the stars, and knows almost as much about the old tales of the gods as Sisel...”
“Wait,” said Utta. “Perhaps that is who it means. Chaven is a priest of sorts—a priest of logic and science. And his is the particular study of light and the stars, with those lenses of his. Perhaps Chaven had some powerful object that is now lost.”
“But Chaven is the one who’s lost!” said Merolanna. “He’s vanished! And that means my son is lost forever...!”
“No one simply disappears,” said Utta. “Unless the gods themselves take them. And the Rooftoppers’ god, at least, does not seem to know what’s happened to Chaven, so perhaps he is still alive.” She stood. “I will see what I can discover, Your Grace.”
“Be careful!” Merolanna cried as Utta moved to the door. She extended her arms again as though to draw the Zorian sister back. “You are all I have left!”
“We have the gods, Duchess. I will pray for my gracious lady Zoria’s help. You should do the same.”
Merolanna slumped back. “Gods, fairies...the world has run utterly mad.”
Utta called in the little maid Eilis. “See to your mistress,” she told the girl. “Take good care of her. She has had a shock.”
But who will see to me? she wondered as she left Merolanna’s chambers. Who will take care of me in this mad time when legends spring to life at our feet? Zoria, merciful goddess, I need your help now more than ever.
