Shadowplay

Merola

They made their way up the winding staircase. The first floor was un¬occupied. 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 mid¬dle of the doorway.

Merola

"Cats don't always cat their prey, Your Grace," Utta said. "Sometimes thecy 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." Merola

Utta nodded as they returned to the stairs, leaving the cobwebbed mod¬els 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 li¬brary. 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 Merola

The door to the chamber which took up the entire top floor was open, al¬though 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?"

Merola

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 every¬where 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 shock-ing.

"What a dreadful clutter!" said Merola

"'Light not any fires, great ladies!" a tiny voice piped. "I beg 'ee, or that 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…?"

Merola

"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 close-leaning 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," Merola

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

"He said he was a Rooftopper," Merola

"A… Rooftopper?"

"Don't you know the stories? Ah, but you're from the Vuttish islands, aren't you?" Merola

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?" Merola

"Again, this one ca

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 Merola