"In a way. No harm will come to you."
Merolanna looked at Utta, her expression a grimace somewhere be¬tween 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 li¬brary, 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 suf¬ficient 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 sub¬jects 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 won¬der, 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, lie 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 com¬ing 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 mournfull.
'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 glow¬ing 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.