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fireplace, and looked up. “Flue’s open.” He stood. “Up you go, young Pip. Tell us about the view from the top.”
    Up the chimney, he meant. All right. I went over to the fireplace and ducked inside. The brick walls of the chimney closed around me, burned black and a little wider than my shoulders. I looked up. Spiderwebs and darkness, and at the very top—way, way above—a square of dark gray, the night sky with morning coming soon.
    How was I supposed to climb all the way up there?
    â€œGet on with it, Pip,” came Sootle’s hollow voice from outside. “Or I’ll light a fire under you.”
    I slid my hands along the walls. Flat bricks, gritty with soot, and then, just over my head, a brick sticking out a little farther than the others. A ledge. For climbing up! I looked and found some other ledges lower down. Kicking off my shoes and my one sock and leaving them at the bottom, I started climbing. My toes clung to the sticking-out bricks and my fingers gripped hard, pulling me up. The chimney closed in around me like a dark square tunnel, growing narrower as I went higher. Soot crumbled from the bricks and sifted down, and rubbed off as my shoulders and knees brushed the walls. I heard a rush-rush-rush of wind blowing over the top of the chimney and felt the air pull at me, just as it pulled the smoke up from the hearth.
    I kept climbing, blinking to keep the soot out of my eyes, coughing when I breathed it in. At last, panting with the effort, I got to the top, where I pulled myself up, hooked my arms over the edge of the chimney, and looked around, catching my breath. Off to the east the sky was just turning the pink and gray of morning. The dark slate rooftops of the Sunrise lay all around me, chimneys sticking out of them like snaggled teeth, most of them leaking smudges of smoke. Some of them had birds’ nests built on them.
    Wind whistled over the rooftops, ruffling my hair. I could see so far! The Dawn Palace loomed over the Sunrise from its hilltop, glimmering pink in the morning light.
    I waved at the palace, at the ducal magister’s stuffy rooms and his closet full of fancy clothes and his cold cabbage soup, and his bag full of money. “Hello, Ro!” I shouted. With Rowan so busy, she was probably already hunched over her desk with Miss Dimity hovering over her like a vulture. I knew Rowan—she’d rather be taking a sword-fighting lesson than getting ready to go to another boring meeting. For a moment I felt sorry for her, stuck in her duchess box.
    Below the palace, the city was starting to stir. I turned and looked in the other direction, toward the shadowy dark of the Twilight. In the dusty-dim light the river gleamed like slowsilver, flowing around the wizards’ islands, under the Night Bridge, and away. I took a deep breath and let it out. I felt like I could leap from the chimney and fly over the city like a black bird, free and light.
    From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something moving, and jerked my head around to look. A cat, lurking.
    â€œHello, Pip,” I said, grinning. Pip bounded across the rooftiles, crawled up the outside of the chimney, and crouched next to me.
    From below I heard a hollow shout. Oh, right. The swifts were down there waiting for me, and Sootle, who thought I might be frightened of climbing up a chimney.
    Still grinning, I started down, skiffing from one brick-edge to the next, to the bottom, where I landed in a cloud of soot. I ducked out of the fireplace and stood.
    â€œWell?” Sootle asked. He and Floss and Drury had been waiting, and not very patiently, by the looks of it.
    I swiped at the soot on my face. “The sun’s rising,” I said. “And I could see all the way to the Twilight from up there.”
    From the chimney came a scrabbling noise, and more soot sifted down. The swifts stared as Pip, covered with soot so it was completely black, dropped down into the