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 stand¬ing 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 in¬truding 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, fan¬ning 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 re¬marking. "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 mo¬ments 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 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