by Tad Williams
The shrieks of the girls playing ball rose up and filled the long silence. She looked at him carefully, and this time it was as though she had retreated behind a high wall and peered down at him from the battlements. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “If you do not hope too much. My company is nothing to hope for.”
“Now it is you who does not tell the truth, my lady.”
She frowned, but thinking, not disagreeing. “It is possible that some afternoons, when it does not rain, you may find me here, in this garden, at about this time of the day.”
He stood, and bowed. “I will look forward to such days.”
She smiled her sad smile. “Go on and join the living, Matt Tinwright. Perhaps we will meet, as you say. Perhaps we shall.”
He bowed again and walked away. It took all his strength not to look back, or at least not to do so immediately. When he did, the bench where she had sat was empty.
Duchess Merolanna hesitated at the bottom of the tower steps as the door creaked shut behind them. “Oh, I’m a fool.”
The creak ended in a low, shuddering thump as the door swung closed. The breeze set the torches fluttering in their brackets. “What do you mean, Your Grace?”
“I have brought us here without a single guard. What if these are murderers?”
“But you wished this kept a secret. Don’t worry yourself too much, Duchess—I am reasonably fit, and I can use one of these torches to defend you, if necessary.” Utta stretched up to lift one from its socket. “Even a murderer will not relish being struck in the face with this.”
Merolanna laughed. “I was worrying about you, good Sister Utta, rather than myself. You do not deserve to be harmed because of these strange games I find myself playing. I care not what happens to me. I am old, and all my chicks are dead or fled or lost…” For a moment her face became painfully sober and her lip trembled. “Ah, well. Ah, well.” The duchess took a breath and straightened, swelling her sizable bosom so that she seemed suddenly a small but daunting ship of war. “It does us no good to stand here whispering like frightened girls. Come, Utta. You have the torch. Lead the way.”
They made their way up the winding staircase. The first floor was unoccupied. 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 middle of the doorway.
Merolanna eyed the tiny body with distaste. “Somebody should do something. What use is it having cats if they do not eat the mice instead of leaving them around to rot?”
“Cats don’t always eat their prey, Your Grace,” Utta said. “Sometimes they 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.” Merolanna looked around for eavesdroppers—a reflex because they were quite alone. Still, when she spoke again it was in a low voice. “That’s why I preferred Gailon Tolly, for all his faults, to his brothers. Hendon is a cat if ever there was one. You can see the cruelty—he wears it like a fancy outfit, with pride.”
Utta nodded as they returned to the stairs, leaving the cobwebbed models 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 library. 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 Merolanna—the king’s own aunt, she reminded herself. If that is not permission enough, what is?
The door to the chamber which took up the entire top floor was open, although 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?”
Merolanna frowned as if irritated at herself. She had not left the top of the stairs. “Very well. I’m coming.” She hesitated a moment longer, then walked forward to stand at Utta’s side. Together they stepped into the doorway, both of them holding their breath. Utta lifted the torch.
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 everywhere 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 shocking.
“What a dreadful clutter!” said Merolanna. “And it’s frightfully cold in here, too. I’m shivering, Utta. Would you see if there’s any wood, and light a fire?”
“Light not any fires, great ladies!” a tiny voice piped. “I beg ’ee, or tha 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…?”
Merolanna had given a little screech at the mysterious words, and now reached out and clutched Utta’s shoulder so fiercely that the Zorian sister could barely restrain a cry of her own. “It was here! In this very room!” the duchess whispered. She made the sign of the Three. “Who speaks?” she demanded aloud, her voice cracked and quavering. “Are you a ghost? A demon spirit?”
“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,” Merolanna said, tightening her grip on Utta again until the other woman squirmed. “Sister Utta, you see it. I am not mad, am I?”
“I see it,” was all she could say. At this moment Utta was not entirely certain of her own sanity. “Who are you?” she asked the tiny man. “I mean, what are you?”
“He said he was a Rooftopper,” Merolanna said. “That’s plain enough.”
“A…Rooftopper?”
“Don’t you know the stories? Ah, but you’re from the Vuttish islands, aren’t you?” Merolanna stared at Utta for a moment, then suddenly remembered what they were talking about and turned back to the astonishing little apparition on the table. “What do you want? Are you the one who…did you put that letter in my chamber?”
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?” Merolanna’s laugh was more than a little shaky. Utta half feared that the duchess would faint
or run screaming, but Merolanna seemed determined to prove she was made of bolder stuff. “Wait for what? The goblins to come and play us a tune? The fairy-king to lead us to his hoard of gold? By the Holy Trigon, are all the stories coming to life?”
“Again, this one cannot say, great lady. But un comes who can.” He cocked his head. “Ah. I hear her.”
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 Merolanna) and lined up before the fireplace. A platform descended slowly out of the flue and into the opening of the fireplace, winched down on threads with a feathery squeak like the cry of baby birds. When it was a half-foot above the ash-covered andiron, it stopped, swaying slightly. At the center of the platform, on a beautiful throne constructed in part from what appeared to be a gilded pinecone, sat a finger-sized woman with red hair and a little crown of gold wire. She regarded her two large guests with calm interest, then smiled.
“Her Sublime and Inextricable Majesty, Queen Upsteeplebat,” announced Beetledown with considerable fervor.
“We owe you an explanation, Duchess Merolanna and Sister Utta,” said the little queen. The stones of the fireplace, like the shape of a theater or temple, made her high voice easier to hear than the little man’s had been. “We have information that we think you will find valuable, and in turn, we ask you to aid us in the great matters that are upon us all.”
“Aid you?” Merolanna shook her head. The duchess was looking her age now, confused and even a little weary. “By the gods, I swear I understand none of this. Tiny people out of an old tale. What could we do to help you? And what information could you give us?”
“For one thing, Duchess,” said the queen gently, as if to a restless child instead of to a woman many, many times her size, “we believe we can tell you what happened to your son.”
“Are you sure?” Opal asked. “Perhaps you’re still too tired.”
His wife, Chert noted, seemed to be having second thoughts.
“No, Mistress,” Chaven protested, “I am much recovered. In fact, I am ashamed at having let myself go so far last night.” He did indeed look rather embarrassed. “I count you even better friends for your kindness, indulging me at a bad time.”
“But, are you truly…?” Opal looked at the physician, then at her husband, as though she wanted him to intervene. Chert was quite happy to sit with a sour smile on his face. This messing about with mirrors had been her idea, after all. “Will you really do it here? In our home?”
Chaven smiled. “Mistress Opal, this is not some great, dangerous experiment I will perform, only the mildest bit of captromancy. Nothing will damage your son or your house.”
Son. Chert still wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but kept his thoughts to himself. Just in the months since Flint had come to them, the boy had grown another handspan, and now he towered over Chert. How could you consider someone your son who first of all didn’t belong to you, whose mother and father might be alive and living nearby, and who in a few years would be twice your own size?
Ah, I suppose it isn’t the height but the heart, he thought. He looked at the boy, sitting sleepy-eyed and faintly distrustful, curled in his blanket in the corner he had made his own. At least he’s out of his bed. These days Flint was like some ancient relative—asleep most of the day, barely speaking. The boy had never been talkative, of course, but until the moment he had woken up from his weird adventure in the Mysteries the vigor had practically sprayed off him like a dog shaking a wet coat.
“What do you need, Doctor?” Chert couldn’t help being a little curious. “Special herbs? Opal could go to the market.”
“You could go to the market, you old hedgehog,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.
“No, no.” The physician waved his hand. He looked a bit better for a night’s sleep, but Chert knew him well enough to see the hollowness behind the façade of the ordinary. Chaven Makaros was not a happy man, not remotely, which made Chert even more anxious. “No, I need only Mistress Opal’s mirror and a candle, and…” Chaven frowned. “Can you make this place dark?”
Chert laughed. “Can we? You forget, you are a guest in Funderling Town now. Even what we usually walk about in would seem like deep dark to you, and what you think is ordinary light makes my head ache.”
Chaven looked stricken. “Is that true? Have you been suffering because of me?”
He shook his head. “I exaggerate. But yes, of course, we can make it dark.”
As Chert stood on a stool to douse the lantern burning high in the alcove above the fire, Opal left the room and returned with a single candle in a dish which she set on the table next to Chaven. Already the exchange of the lantern for this single small light had turned the morning into something else, into eerie, timeless twilight, and Chert could not help remembering the murk of Southmarch city across the bay, the ceaseless dripping of water, those armored…things stepping out of the shadows. He had dismissed Opal’s worries about doing this in the house, thinking that she was concerned only about a mess on her immaculate floors, but realized now that something deeper troubled her: by this one act, the lighting of a candle, and the knowledge that more was to come, the day and their house itself had been transformed into something quite different, almost frightening.
“Now,” said Chaven, “I will need something to prop this mirror—ah, the cup should do nicely. And I want to put the candle here, where it will reflect without being directly in front of him. Flint, that is the boy’s name, yes? Flint, come and sit here at the table. On this bench, yes.”
The straw-haired boy rose and came forward, looking not so much apprehensive now as confused—and why not, Chert thought: it was an odd thing for parents of any kind to do, foster-folk or not, handing their child over to a strange, bespectacled fellow like this one, a man who might be small among his own kind but here was too big for any of the furniture, then letting him do the Elders knew what to the boy.
“It’s all right, son,” Chert said abruptly. Flint looked at him, then seated himself.
“Now, child, I want you to move a little so you can see nothing but the candle.” The boy tilted a bit to the side, then moved the rest of his body at the physician’s gentle direction. Chaven stood behind him.
“Perhaps you two should move to where he cannot see you,” the physician said to Chert and Opal. “Just stand behind me.”
“Will this hurt him?” Opal asked suddenly. The boy flinched.
“No, no, and again, no. No pain, nothing dangerous, only a few questions, a little…conversation.”
When Opal had taken her place, gripping Chert’s hand tighter than he could remember her doing for some time, Chaven began quietly to speak. “Now, look in the mirror, lad.” It was strange to think this same fellow, so soothing now, had been shrieking like a man caught under a rockslide only a few hours earlier. “Do you see the candle flame? You do. It is there before you, the only bright thing. Look at it. Do not watch anything else, only the flame. See how it moves? See how it glows? The darkness on either side of it is spreading, but the light only grows brighter…”
Chert couldn’t see Flint’s face, of course—the angle of the mirror didn’t permit it—but he could see the boy’s posture beginning to ease. The bony shoulders, which had been hunched as though against a cold wind, now drooped, and the head tilted forward toward the mirror-candle that Flint could see but Chert could not.
Chaven continued to talk in this soft, serious way, speaking of the candle and the darkness around it until Chert felt that he was falling into some kind of spell himself, until the pool of light on the tabletop, the candle and Flint and the mirror, all seemed to float in a shadowy void. The physician let his voice trail off into silence.
/> “Now,” Chaven said after a pause, “we are going to take a journey together, you and I. Fear nothing that you see because I will be with you. Nothing that you see can see you, or harm you in any way. Do not be afraid.”
Opal squeezed Chert’s hand so hard he had to wriggle his fingers free. He put his own hand on her arm to let her know he was still there, and also to try to stave off any sudden urges on her part to crush his fingers again.
“You are a boy again, just a very small boy—a baby, perhaps still in swaddling, and you can barely walk,” Chaven said. “Where are you? What do you see?”
A long pause was followed by a strange sound—Flint’s voice, but a new one Chert hadn’t yet heard, not the preternatural maturity of the nearly wild boy they had brought home, or the anxious sullenness that had come on him since his journey through the mysteries. This Flint sounded almost exactly like what Chaven had described—a very small child, only just up on his legs.
“See trees. See my mam.”
Opal got hold of his hand despite Chert’s best efforts and this time he didn’t have the heart to pull away, despite her desperate grip.
“And your father? Is he there?”
“Han’t got un.”
“Ah. And what is your name?”
He waited another long moment before answering. “Boy. Mam calls me boy.”
“And do you know her name?”
“Mam. Ma-ma.”
There was another spell of silence while Chaven considered. “Very well. You are a little older now. Where do you live?”
“In my house. Near the wood.”
“Do you know its name, this wood?”
“No. Only know I mustn’t go there.”
“And when other people speak to your mother, what do they call her?”
“Don’t. Don’t none come. Except the city-man. He comes with the money. Four silver seashells each time. She likes it when he comes.”
Chaven turned and gave Chert and Opal a look that Chert could not identify. “And what does he call her?”