And then, after hundreds of years of fighting, the war ended. General Gor declared himself overlord, and the tents and huts were replaced by houses and shops, the Arena and Baths were built, the shipyards converted from building warships to freighters… but in the subsequent two hundred and thirty years Lord Gor and his heirs had never seen any reason to move themselves or their government out of the Fortress.
The Fortress was the largest and oldest building for fifty leagues in every direction; perhaps it had somehow accumulated some sort of magical attraction that had affected the furniture.
Kilisha didn't find it very attractive, though, as she walked over the East Road toward it. It was a huge, ugly gray mass. In most of the city, homes and businesses were decorated with carvings and paint, but the Fortress walls were flat slabs of blank stone, the windows-and only the upper floors had any windows-simple unadorned rectangles.
The top, largely invisible to anyone but a magician, was a little more interesting than the sides; the battlements were mere elevated walkways surrounding a stone courtyard where Kilisha could see guardsmen marching in formation. There were guards posted along the ramparts, as well, which seemed foolish in a city that had been at peace for more than two centuries.
But then she remembered that a usurper had just driven out the overlord of Ethshar of the Sands. Perhaps the walls had not always been manned, but were now guarded against this Tabaea and her followers.
In any case, the Fortress guards were not her concern. She was trying to find the couch.
She could see nothing the right shade of red anywhere along the East Road, nor in the Fortress rooftop courtyard, nor on Wizard Street. The streets and alleys of Hillside, the district surrounding the Fortress, were so steep and tangled that she could see very little of what might be on them.
The other high hill in the city was Highside, to the northeast of Hillside, and that was dominated by the mansions of the city's wealthiest families; there she could see into not just streets and courtyards, but gardens and plazas. Instead of being crowded together, as the homes were throughout most of the city, the mansions of Highside were elegantly placed amid lawns and fountains and flowers, all behind high fences and walls-but from her present height the fences and walls were meaningless. She glanced in that direction-and froze.
Red! The deep, rich red she remembered…
She leaned forward, peering down, and then snorted at her own foolishness. That was a rose garden. And over there was a flower bed of something else nearly the right color.
The couch might be there somewhere, of course, perhaps under the willows, or in one of the pergolas or gazebos, or simply behind a mansion, where she couldn't see it from her present position.
And that was in the open terrain of Highside. Beyond it, to the west, to the north of Hillside, lay the mazes of alleys and passages of Bywater. That had been a fishing village supplying food to the troops during the Great War, and the city had absorbed it but had never straightened out its tangled streets. Upper stones of the older structures there were often cantilevered out, shading the street beneath; it was said that in some neighborhoods lovers could hold hands by leaning out the upstairs windows on either side of the street. If the couch was beneath one of those overhangs…
And beyond Bywater was Northshore, and then Cliffgate, and then eastward along the city wall Northgate and Northmark, to Farmgate in the northeast corner. Then Eastgate and Eastside and Wargate and Newgate, and the New Quarter m its own little walled-in area outside the original wall, and in the south end Grandgate and Southgate, and closer in Southport and Southside and Bath and Arena and Crafton and Seagate and Norcross and Lakeshore and Center City and Northside and the Merchant Quarter, each district a tangle of streets and buildings and courts.
The city was just too large for one person to search, even from the air, without some sort of guidance.
For one person.
She would need to find help. All those districts, all those streets and houses, were full of people, and surely someone must have seen where the couch went. If she really wanted to find the couch she would need to enlist the aid of as many of those people as she possibly could, and keep on asking until she found someone who knew where it had gone.
Either that, or she would need to find some magic that would locate the fugitive furniture.
She sighed. It would have been so much simpler if she had spotted it from up here-but she could see no sign of it.
She took another step, but this time let her forward foot sink below the other, beginning her descent.
Her other task remained to be done, of course, so the spell hadn't been a total waste of time, and she would also keep looking on the way down, in hopes of catching a glimpse of the couch, but her earlier high hopes had vanished. Her steps were heavy as she marched down the air.
A flicker of movement in an alley caught her eye at one point, but appeared to be merely a dog; other than that she descended without incident until she was walking just a dozen feet above Ithanalin's own roof, the rope trailing across the slates.
And here she slowed, spiraling in carefully toward the chimney that vented the parlor hearth. While still holding the lantern she caught up the dangling rope across her forearm, working it across until the free end hung down just a few feet. She twisted and maneuvered it, working intently until that loose end slid down into the open chimney.
She smiled, and quickly began feeding the line down the flue as she continued to walk in slowly sinking circles around the opening.
Finally the entire rope was hanging down into the chimney, just inches below her; she reached down and dropped the axe into place across the opening.
Now all she had to do was go back into the house and fish the bottom of the rope out of the fireplace. As long as the knots held, anything tied to that line was going to stay in the parlor. No bench or chair or couch could possibly pull that axe down the chimney!
That done, she raised the lantern high as she marched out over the street and back down to earth.
Chapter Nineteen
By suppertime Yara had paid Kelder the household's tax and the guardsman had gone about his business, though he promised to stop in later to check on the situation-he said he still felt partially responsible for Ithanalin's condition. Kilisha had secured the table, chair, bench, and coatrack in the parlor with various cords and leashes tied to the rope in the chimney, had taken the rug from the pantry and packed it into a solid box, and had then moved the locked boxes containing the dish, spoon, and rug into the workshop, to have them all in one place. The latch was still firmly attached to the front door, and the mirror still hung in its accustomed place on the parlor wall. Ithanalin's body was in the workshop with a sheet draped over it, so that any visitors would not see what had happened-and so Kilisha wouldn't feel as if her master was watching her whenever she tried to do any magic.
The spriggan was unsecured, and that worried the apprentice, but she saw nothing she could do about it while the athame's magic resided in the creature and its fingernails served as lockpicks. Any cords used to bind it would fall away uselessly, and any attempt to lock it into a box or closet would hold it only for the few seconds it needed to spring the lock. Asking the rug to hold it might work, but she didn't really feel as if she could trust the rug unless Yara kept an eye on it, and Yara had better things to do with her time.
Perhaps if they found a box that relied on bolts and bars too heavy for the spriggan to work, or arranged so it couldn't reach them…
But spriggans were much stronger than they looked, and inhumanly flexible, and she really couldn't be sure anything could hold it. Better, she thought, to avoid antagonizing it and to instead rely on the fragment of Ithanalin's personality it held. After all, she might well need its active cooperation during the restorative spell.