antechamber.
Where it had previously moved freely in every direction-forward, backward, or side to side-it now seemed to have settled onto treating the end that held the overlord’s foot as its front, and the end where the dazed young man’s head rested on a pillow as its rear. Rather than bouncing about wildly it was now running full tilt, like a fleeing animal, with the overlord on its back.
“Catch it!” both Kilisha and Nuvielle shouted. Suiting her actions to her words, Kilisha ran after the fleeing furniture; she had been quickest to react, but the soldiers followed close on her heels.
Nuvielle did not join the pursuit, but Opir and Adagan, after watching in motionless surprise as the couch, the apprentice, and half a dozen soldiers ran past, fell in behind, chasing the couch up the passage from the antechamber.
Kilisha had expected the couch to turn left at the salon and head for the stairs by which she and her party had arrived, but instead it scrambled straight across, past a drapery into another passage, then turned right at the next crossing.
That brought it to a staircase, but a staircase going up. It bounded upward, almost catlike in its motion.
Kilisha followed, but even as she ran she tried to think of something she could do to stop the berserk thing without hurting either it or its passenger. While it would be bad enough if the couch smashed itself, Kilisha really didn’t want to be involved in anything that injured the overlord-or worse, killed him. That would be bad enough at any time, but now, when a usurper had already disrupted the government of the Hegemony, and Wulran had not yet sired an heir, it might be disastrous. Kilisha suspected that wizard or no, the Guild notwithstanding, if she got the overlord killed her head would wind up on a pike on the Fortress ramparts.
She reached for the flap on her belt pouch, trying to think what she could do with the spells she had prepared. Would the Spell of Stupefaction work on a couch?
Even if it would, the spell took several seconds to prepare, and she couldn’t do it while she was running. Maybe if the couch ever held still for half a minute...
The couch wheeled about on the next landing and bounded up another flight, Kilisha struggling to keep up.
The Spell of Optimum Strength-if she ever did get a hand on the couch she wanted to be able to hold onto it. She couldn’t drink the potion while she was running, though, any more than she could cast a stupefaction.
Sooner or later, though, if the couch kept going up, it would be trapped, wouldn’t it? It must be panicking, she thought, to be going up instead of down. If it had gotten out in the streets it might have been able to dodge them forever, but it wouldn’t be able to come back down these stairs without getting caught.
Of course, there might be other stairs...
“Someone go back down and make sure all the doors are closed!” she called back over her shoulder. “We mustn’t let it get out of the Fortress!”
“Right,” someone said-a deep male voice she did not recognize. She still heard boots pounding up the stairs behind her, but perhaps not quite as many. She could not risk looking back; she might lose her footing. A stumble here would not merely let the couch increase its lead over her, but might send her tumbling down the stairs on top of the guards.
It rounded a second landing, charged up one final flight, and at the top bounded across half a dozen feet of floor, then slammed into a door.
And bounced off.
Kilisha almost ran into the couch as it rebounded off the oak and iron barrier. It had clearly expected to smash right through, but the door had been stronger than it thought.
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
