(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (34 page)

The figure threw back the hood of the wet cloak, revealing a tangle of white hair and a face so old and so lined that at first Briony could not be sure if it was male or female.

“You took long enough, daughter,” the ancient creature said. The voice marked her as a woman, although just barely, a throaty rasp halfway between a chuckle and a growl. “I thought I would have to lie down and have a nap to give you time to catch up.”

Briony still had the knife out, but it seemed more important to bend double and keep her hands on her knees instead while she struggled to catch her breath. This was followed by a coughing fit that made her whimper at the pain in her chest. At last she straightened up. “I…couldn’t…catch you…”

The old, old woman shook her head. “I fear for the breed,” was all she said, then began laying new faggots on the fire. “Sit down, child. I can see you’re ill—I’ll have to do something about that. Are you hungry, too?”

“Who…who are you? I mean, yes—Oh, gods, yes, I’m starving.”

“Good. We’ll make you work for your supper, but I suppose you should rest and recover a bit first.” The old woman gave her a sharp look. It was like being stared at by a wild beast. Briony’s heart tripped again. The woman’s eyes were not blue or green or even brown, but black and shiny as volcano glass. “One thing we
won’t
ask you to do is sing. We’ve had quite enough of that tuneless caterwauling.”

Even in the midst of all these unexpected happenings, Briony was stung. “I was just trying to keep myself going.” She slumped to the ground and tucked the knife back into its sheath, still finding it hard to get her breath. The old woman was scarcely as high as Briony’s own shoulder and looked to weigh no more than a roast Orphanstide duck.

“Maybe it was the song, then, daughter,” said the old woman as she bent to rummage in a sack that hung from the front of the wagon. “I’ve never cared much for that Gregor. Too full of himself, and a dreadful man for a stretched rhyme. I told him so, too.”

Briony, recovering her strength a little, shook her head. Perhaps this ancient was a little mad—surely she’d have to be, to live in the forest this way, by herself. “He’s been dead for two centuries.”

“Yes, he has, bless him, and not a moment too soon.” She straightened up. “Hmmm. If I’d known yesterday I would have company, I would have gathered more marsh marigold, and maybe some chestnuts. But I didn’t know until this morning.”

“This morning what?”

“That you’d be coming. It took you long enough.” She shrugged her thin shoulders, two bony points beneath the cloak. “It’s not just Gregor, though, it’s that song of his—more of it wrong than right, you know. Zosim the Helper—there’s a laugh. That snake-eyed trickster helped himself to a few things, but that’s all the helping he ever did. And the snow. Pure nonsense. Khors’ castle wasn’t made of ice or anything like that, it shone that way because of the elfglass it was covered with—fairy-shimmer, they used to call the stuff. And ‘Everfrost!’” She smacked her lips in disgust, as if she’d eaten something that tasted foul. “He just took the real story and mixed it up with that Caylor story about the Prince of Birds—and
that
was a mumbled-up porridge of the story of the Godswar in the first place!”

Briony blinked. She wished that the woman would stop talking and get cooking. Only the griping pain in her stomach was allowing her to remain upright. “You…sound like you know…a great deal about…about the War of the Gods.”

The old woman snickered, then the snicker became a full throated laugh. She laughed until she was wheezing and had to sit down beside Briony. “Yes, daughter, I do know a great deal about it.” She chuckled again and wiped her eyes. “I ought to, child. I was there.”

I
T TOOK SISTER UTTA LONGER than she would have liked to clear away the books and rolls of parchment on the least cluttered chair, but when she had finished Merolanna sank into it gladly. Once she saw that the duchess was only light-headed—and no surprise; Utta was feeling a bit dizzy herself—she cleared herself a place to sit, too. This task was not made any easier by the fact that a pentecount of miniature soldiers standing at attention on the floor had been joined by at least that number of tiny courtiers, so that there was almost nowhere Sister Utta could put her foot or anything else down without first having to wait for finger-high people to clear the way. King Olin’s study now looked like the grandest and most elaborate game of dolls a little girl could ever imagine. At the center of it all, as poised and graceful as if she were the ordinary-sized one and Utta and the duchess were the inexplicable atomies, sat Queen Upsteeplebat on her hanging platform in the fireplace.

Merolanna fanned herself with a sheaf of parchments. “What did you mean, you can tell me about my son? What do you know about my son?”

Utta could make no sense of this: she had lived more than twenty years in the castle, and to the best of her knowledge Merolanna was childless. “Are you all right, Your Grace?”

Merolanna waved a hand at her. “Losing my mind, there is no doubt about that, but otherwise I am well enough. I am more grateful than I can say that you are here with me. You
are
seeing and hearing the same things I am, aren’t you?”

“Tiny people? Yes, I’m afraid I am.”

Upsteeplebat raised her arms in a gesture of support, or perhaps apology. “I am sorry if I shocked you, Duchess Merolanna. I cannot explain how we know about your son, but I can promise you it was not by deliberately intruding on your privacy.” The queen showed them a smile tinier than a baby’s fingernail. “Although I must confess we have been guilty of that in other circumstances with other folk. But I can tell you no more about any of it, because we are offering you a bargain.”

“What sort?” asked Utta.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Merolanna. “You don’t have to bargain with me. Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you—food? You must live a dreadful, poor life hiding in the shadows if all the old stories now turn out to be true. Surely you can’t want money…”

The Rooftopper queen smiled again. “We eat better than you would suppose, Duchess. In fact, we could triple our numbers and still barely dent what is thrown away or ignored in this great household. But what we want is something a bit less obvious. And we do not want it for ourselves.”

“Please,” said Merolanna with an edge of anger in her voice, “do not play at games with me, madam. You tease me with the prospect of learning something about my son, which if you know of his existence at all, you must know I would do anything to achieve. Just tell me what you want.”

“I cannot. We do not know.”

“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.”