“Where?”
“In the shipyards, near Wargate High Street.”
Kilisha blinked. “The shipyards? How did they get there’?’”
“They ran,” Kelder said dryly.
Chapter Twelve
After explaining that she couldn’t leave the house until her mistress returned from shopping, Kilisha escorted Kelder to the kitchen, where she questioned him for the better part of an hour-and answered a few of his questions, as well, though she didn’t go into detail about exactly what spell had gone wrong, or how, or why she needed the furniture back before she could restore Ithanalin to full mobility.
Kelder told her that when the door had opened and he had stepped inside, it had seemed as if the entire roomful of furniture was charging at him. He had stepped back and lifted his truncheon-guards did not ordinarily carry swords or spears when on tax-collection duty-and had shouted for the furniture to stop, but it had ignored him.
A few pieces had run out the door, and he had run after them, and the rest had all come rushing after him, and he had been afraid he would be trampled. He had retreated a few yards cast on Wizard Street.
The furniture had all headed west, in a pack; he wasn’t sure whether it was all trying to get away from him, or what. He had followed, a bit warily.
The faster pieces had galloped down the three blocks to Cross Avenue, leaving the slower-the rug, the coatrack, and what he called “the little stuff ”-behind. The coatrack had been the first to change course, when it turned up an alley to the north; Kelder had hesitated, and almost lost sight of the main group, whereupon he decided to let the small slow ones go and concentrate on the bigger pieces, which were presumably the more valuable and more potentially dangerous or disruptive.
The street had been almost deserted-after all, a tax collector had been at work-and most of the people who saw the furniture also saw him in hot pursuit, and stayed out of the way. The furniture had therefore made its way unimpeded around the corner onto Cross Avenue northbound, then left again onto East Road.
“They stayed together?” Kilisha asked.
“Mostly,” Kelder said. “For a while.”
In fact, they had split up at the fork where the East Road bore right and Low Street bore left. There the couch had taken the East Road, and the chair and bench headed southward down Low Street, toward the shipyard.
“What about the table?” Kilisha asked. “Or the rug?”
Kelder had lost sight of those well before reaching the fork, he explained. There were only the three left by then, and he had followed the pair of smaller pieces. They had dodged westward again on Wargate High Street, but he had finally caught up at the corner of Shipyard Street, and with the help of some other guards had cornered and apprehended both. He had then locked them in a materials shed and gone to report to his superiors.
“Why didn’t you come back here yesterday?” Kilisha asked.
“Because I wanted orders first. I went to my captain, and he sent me to the tax commissioner, who sent me back to the captain because this didn’t have anything to do with taxes, and then he sent me to see a wizard named Zorita, and she sent to to see someone named Kaligir, only I couldn’t get in to talk to him because of some sort of emergency meeting, and then I got orders to go back to Wargate because there was talk about calling out the entire guard to march off to Ethshar of the Sands because someone’s thrown the overlord there out of his palace... ” Kelder sighed. “I only got here this morning because the captain was too distracted to object when I said I was coming.”
“I couldn’t get to see Kaligir either,” Kilisha said.
“Who is Kaligir?” Kelder asked.
“Oh, he’s an official in the Wizards’ Guild,” Kilisha said, realizing she might have been on the verge of saying too much. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can show me where some of my master’s furniture is, and help me get it back here where it belongs!”
“Then you do want it back?”
“Of course we do! The spell was a mistake; we’ll put everything back the way it should be as soon as we collect all the pieces.”
“I don’t know where all of them are. I see you’ve caught the coatrack...”
“And we have the bowl, and the spoon, and the latch, and the mirror. And my mistress is out looking for the rug right now. As soon as she gets back, we can go get the chair and the bench.”
Kelder looked uneasy. “I can’t stay very long,” he said. “I need to report back to the captain.”
Kilisha started to reply, then stopped at a rattling sound from the front. “Could you wait here a moment?” she asked. “It’s probably just the coatrack, or a customer-I’ll tell him we’re closed, if it’s a customer.”
“I can’t stay much longer,” Kelder reiterated, but he remained seated.
Kilisha smiled and rose and hurried through the workshop to the parlor, where she found someone pounding on the front door and calling, “Open this door this instant!”
It was Yara’s voice.
The coatrack was pacing back and forth nervously at the end of its leash, but Kilisha barely glanced at it as she dashed to the door and tried to open the latch.
It wouldn’t budge.
“Just a moment!” she shouted through the door.
“Hurry!” Yara called.
Kilisha was puzzled by her urgency-and by the latch’s reluctance. Previously it had seemed all too eager to open when nobody wanted it to, but now it was stubbornly refusing to let Yara in. She slapped at it, hard. “Open up!” she demanded.
She could see the mechanism hesitate.
“Kelder!” she called over her shoulder. “Do you have something that can break a latch? Just snap it right apart, so the little metal pieces spill out on the floor?”
The latch opened, the door swung in, and Yara stumbled across the threshold, her three children clustered about her legs, and a burlap-wrapped bundle in her arms.
“There!” she said, pointing back out at the street.
Kilisha leaned to one side and looked around the door, past her mistress.
Ithanalin’s parlor table was standing in the street, pawing the hard-packed dirt with one wooden leg.
“The table!” Kilisha exclaimed. “How did you find the table’?” Then she noticed the large, squirming bundle that lay atop the table-a multi-colored bundle of braided rags. “And the rug!” she said happily.
The rug, the table, the coatrack, the latch, the bowl, the spoon, the mirror, and Kelder had the bench and the chair. Unless she had forgotten something, that only left the couch!
“Bring it in!” she said, gesturing.
Yara was already halfway to the workshop door, and ignored her, but Telleth heard and started back toward the door.
He didn’t get very far, though, because at the sound of Kil-isha’s voice the table trotted up to the door; Kilisha and Telleth had to step aside to avoid being bumped as it marched into the house.
The tangle of rug was squirming more than ever as it went by, and Kilisha realized it was squeaking, as well. There was something in there, she realized-it wasn’t just the rug, but something wrapped in the rug. “What have you got there?” she asked.
The rug hesitated.
Telleth slammed the door, trapping the table in the house, and Kilisha called to the latch, “Lock up tight, please! I think our friend the rug has something he doesn’t want to escape.”
She wondered what it could be; had there been some other object in the room that got a part of Ithanalin’s essence? One of the children’s toys, perhaps?