It was trapped! Kilisha grabbed for it, and felt the overlord’s hair brush her ringers, but then the couch veered to one side, to the left, and Kilisha saw that no, it was not trapped, as a long corridor extended from the head of the stairs in that direction.
The couch ran desperately down the corridor, gaining ground on its pursuers, then suddenly stopped, turned, and rammed its way through a large window.
“Gods!” Kilisha said, horrified. They were several stories up- she was not sure just how far. The couch and the overlord would be smashed to pieces! She dashed to the opening and looked out past the shattered glass and twisted leading, expecting to see empty air and the couch plummeting to its doom.
Instead she saw a broad sunlit and stone-paved courtyard-the one atop the Fortress that she had seen from the air three days before. The couch was galloping across it, the overlord still trapped on the seat.
It was already several yards away, and she was not about to just dive through the jagged remains of the window; she was not going to catch it just by running after it. She stood panting for a second or two, then reached for her pouch.
“It’s in the courtyard!”
“It went through the window!”
“Open this door!”
Kilisha ignored the shouting soldiers as she pulled out a vial and looked at the label, then dropped it back and grabbed the next.
On the third try she finally read STRENGTH; she pulled the cork and took a sip.
A flood of warmth rushed through her; her legs straightened and her hands tightened into fists, and she had to catch herself before she crushed the vial of potion. She carefully pressed the cork back into place, not allowing herself to push on it. She had used this spell before, and knew how easy it was to break things while enchanted.
She hoped that it would give her the speed and endurance she needed to catch the couch, and the strength to hold it.
She tucked the vial back in her pouch and jumped through the shattered window just as the soldiers got the door opened and poured through into the courtyard.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The couch was bounding up a staircase on the far side of the courtyard, up onto the ramparts. The overlord was still aboard, his foot still trapped under the arm; he appeared to be conscious, but was not struggling or gesturing or saying anything Kilisha could hear. Kilisha charged forward, across the court, after them.
The soldiers were shouting, and other soldiers, who had been patrolling the battlements, shouted replies. Several of them were already moving along the ramparts, closing in from both sides toward the top of the staircase the couch was climbing.
The couch reached the top of the stairs and turned left, trotting a quick dozen yards, only to find itself confronted by two approaching guardsmen. It wheeled on one leg and headed back in the other direction to find two more soldiers on the walkway and Kilisha already halfway up the stairs, the other pursuers close behind her.
It was apparently cornered-but Kilisha saw that there was another way out. “Some of you get below it, so it doesn’t jump!” she called. As she reached the top of the stair she grabbed the railing and glanced back to see that Adagan and one of the guards had heard her and taken heed; they were moving across the courtyard instead of climbing the stair, positioning themselves so that if the couch dove from the ramparts to the courtyard it would find them waiting.
Opir hesitated on the bottom step, then turned and followed Adagan.
Kilisha turned her attention back to the battlements.
The two patrolling soldiers from the north had come up beside her, and the three of them formed a barrier closing in one end of a box. The couch stood a dozen feet to the south, and another dozen feet beyond were two more guardsmen. To the east was a sheer drop of about eight or ten feet to the courtyard, and Adagan, Opir, and a soldier were waiting at the bottom; other soldiers and curiosity-seekers were emerging from various doors and corners and gathering there, as well.
To the west was a parapet, perhaps three feet high and a foot thick, pierced by foot-square crenelations, and beyond that wall was nothing but sky and sea. Kilisha knew that they were atop the Fortress, which stood atop the sea cliffs, which stood in turn atop the wave-washed rocks that gave the city its name; anything that went over that parapet would fall a hundred feet down a sheer stone wall and smash on the rocks below, and when the tide came in the pieces would be washed out to sea.
The couch was trapped, cornered on a strip of stone eight feet wide and eight yards long.
For a moment everything seemed to freeze; the couch, apparently realizing its situation, had stopped where it was. The guards on the ramparts had paused, unsure of what was happening. And Kilisha stood at the top of the steps, taking in the situation and preventing the men behind her from moving forward.
“Don’t hurt it!” she called. “It doesn’t know what it’s doing- it doesn’t remember who it is!”
“Who in the World is it?” someone asked. “And why does it look like a couch?”
“It is a couch,” Kilisha shouted back. “But it has a piece of a wizard’s soul trapped in it. Only it didn’t get the wizard’s memories.”
“It’s holding the overlord,” another soldier called. “I don’t care who it is, it can’t do that!”
The couch turned back and forth as they spoke; at the last sentence it backed up against the parapet and squeezed down on the overlord’s leg.
“Ow!” Wulran bellowed. “It’s crushing my leg!” He reached for the couch’s arm, and pried at it helplessly. The couch was clearly stronger than he was; it clamped down, and Wulran was unable to loosen its grip.
“Don’t go any closer,” Kilisha called, as the four soldiers started forward. “It might break his leg!”
“But...” The nearest guardsman looked at her helplessly. “We have to do something]”
“She’s just an apprentice,” one of the soldiers on the stairs behind her said.
“She’s a wizard’s apprentice,” Kelder retorted. “She knows what’s going on here better than we do!”
Kilisha was grateful for the vote of confidence; she wished she deserved it, but in truth, she really knew very little more than anyone else. She could only guess what the couch was thinking, what it wanted...
But maybe she could figure it out. Maybe she could talk it into releasing the overlord and coming home peacefully-and if not, she could try the Spell of Stupefaction. She stepped forward.
“Couch,” she called, “do you remember me? Kilisha, your apprentice?”
The couch turned, and seemed to be listening-though Kilisha had no idea why she thought so. It had no ears, no eyes, no features, but it somehow seemed alert and attentive.
“Nobody wants to hurt you,” she said, taking another step forward.
The couch backed away, tight against the parapet. It lifted one back leg up into the nearest crenelation, hoisting itself and the overlord up at an awkward angle. The soldiers started forward.
“Calm down!” Kilisha called, raising one hand-but her other hand was fumbling with her pouch. She needed the bat wing and the envelope of powdered spider and about thirty or forty seconds to work the Spell of Stupefaction, and she doubted she would have the forty seconds, but at the very least she could have the bat wing and powdered spider ready.
The soldiers and the couch stopped.
“Couch,” Kilisha called, “you’re a spell gone wrong. We just want to put it right. Half of you is an ordinary couch, and the other half is a piece of my master, the wizard Ithanalin. Do you remember any of that?”