Kayne nodded, slowly. "So that's why—" She spread her hands, indicating the office.
"Correct. The appearance of austerity and modesty, the reality of a certain level of comfort." Ardis smiled. "You should have seen this office when my predecessor sat here. It looked like a cross between a Cathedral and a throne room. I cleared most of that out, sold the expensive trash to pay for this, and donated the rest to one of the orphanages Arden established after the Fire." She chuckled reminiscently. "Somewhere in Kingsford there are orphans bouncing on his overstuffed, plush-covered sofa and grinding muddy little feet into his appalling carpet, and I do hope he finds out about it."
Kayne snickered again. "Well, is there anything you'd like to dictate to me before I retire to my office and catch up on the last of the work from yesterday?"
Ardis considered the stack of correspondence before her. "How are things coming across the river?"
By "across the river," Ardis meant in the city of Kingsford, which had been half burned down by a disastrous fire a little more than two years ago. The fire itself was not natural; it had been set by conspirators hoping to murder Duke Arden who had joined forces (or so Ardis suspected) with members of Ardis's own Order in an attempt to usurp control of the Cloister and Cathedral of the Justiciars, and then take full control of all of the Church holdings in Kingsford and put the lot in the hands of a group of closed-minded fanatics.
Ardis only suspected that the two groups had been in league with each other, even though there was nothing but rumor to link them—the fires had certainly been started magically, in the rafters of the Duke's Theater while the Duke was attending a performance. So far as Ardis knew, the only humans in Kingsford and the surrounding area who could use magic were Priests of the Order of Justiciars. There had been any number of the fanatical faction preaching and stirring up trouble before the Fire, and there were a few witnesses among the actors and musicians who had seen a figure in the robes of a Priest loitering about the theater in a suspicious manner just before the fire. And the uprising within the Cloister walls had occurred so simultaneously with the fires in the theater that even the most skeptical were convinced that it could not be a coincidence. But a hot, high wind combined with the driest summer on record had contributed to spreading the fire out of control, while the uprising within the Cloister walls had ensured that there were no mages to spare to fight those fires, and when it was all over, the greater part of Kingsford lay in ruins. It was only the personal effort of Arden himself that kept the disaster from being worse than it was. The Duke had led the battle against the fire himself, working side by side with the lowest citizens of the city. His actions had earned him the undying loyalty of all of Kingsford, and the title "Good Duke Arden."
Two years later, the city was still partly in ruins, and Ardis felt very sorry for the Grand Duke. He had beggared himself to help pay for the rebuilding, with the intentions of creating an ideal city out of the ashes, a city with no slums, a city that was planned from the beginning, a city where residential districts would not sit cheek-by-jowl with tanneries, and sewers would not dump their noisome contents upstream from places where people drew out their water.
But the best-laid plans of men and Grand Dukes were subject to the whims of fate, and fate had decreed otherwise. Unwilling or unable to wait on the Duke's plans to rebuild their homes and businesses, those who had money of their own proceeded to put those homes and businesses wherever they pleased—usually building on what was left of their old property.
The result was that half of the rebuilt city was laid out along Duke Arden's plans, and the other half was laid out the same way it had been—in as haphazard a fashion as could be expected. The only real change was that he had been able to decree that streets would be laid out on a grid, so there were no more dead ends and cul-de-sacs, or meandering alleys that went nowhere.
"Arden finally got the fireboats he ordered," Kayne reported. "They arrived today. Whether they work or not—" She shrugged.
"If they don't, I'll make a point of assigning someone to get those pumps working by magic, providing Arden doesn't browbeat a Deliambren to come up with something better," Ardis replied. She still suffered from twitches of mingled guilt and anger when she thought of how easy it would have been for Church mages to halt the fire before it had spread more than a block or two. Not thatshe was responsible for the fact that they hadn't, but still—
I am a mage and a Justiciar, and what happened to the people of Kingsford was a gross miscarriage of Justice.
"He probably will; he already has them working on a system to pump water to every part of the city," Kayne observed. "What's a little thing like fixing the pumps on a fireboat, compared to that?"
Ardis nodded absently. If the idiots that started those fires didn't perish in the conflagration, they had better be so far from Kingsford that humans are an oddity. Because if I ever get hold of them, they'll pray to be handed over to the Duke for punishment. He'll only hang them. She had already taken care of those she had been able to catch. Recalling a magic transformation discovered and abused by another renegade Priest-Mage, she had put his discovery to better use. The miscreants were serving out life sentences, toiling under baskets of rubble and ashes, and wearing the forms of donkeys. Titularly the property of the Abbey, they were under long-term loan to the city. And when all the rubble was cleared away, they would be hitched to the carts that carried away the dead. They were well cared for, housed in their own stable in the city, where a special Priest of one of the Service Orders—a close, personal friend of both Ardis and the Duke—who knew what they were had been assigned to their physical and spiritual needs. They were awakened every morning at dawn with prayer, put to bed in their stalls with prayer, and prayed over while they worked. They would have ample opportunity for repentance, redemption, and contemplation.
They were also performing the hardest physical labor they ever had in their lives, seven days a week, from dawn to dusk, in pouring rain, burning sun, or blinding blizzard. They would never be human again, for Ardis had locked the spell on them herself. No one knew of their fate except Ardis, the Grand Duke, and the young Priest assigned to their care, who was far more concerned with the state of their souls than the discomfort of their bodies. Even Duke Arden agreed that the punishment was sufficient. Ardis had similar fates planned for any more miscreants that turned up.
"As for the rest, Arden has given up on the Carpenters, and now he's trying with the Weavers and Dyers." Kayne looked thoughtful. "I think he'll have a bit more luck with them; they need water for their work more than the Carpenters do."
Arden was trying to persuade those who had built according to their own plans to tear down what they had put up, and rebuild according to his. He was having mixed success, and often it depended on the season and whether or not he had alternatives available while those who were displaced waited for the new construction to be completed. People who might not mind spending a month or two in a well-appointed tent in the summer, would get decidedly testy about the idea in midwinter, and those whose businesses required that their materials stay dry were not likely to give up a roof for the sky.