Ithanalin's Restoration. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ short, curving legs; Kilisha imagined them moving like short-legged dogs, dashing and dodging rather than running flat-out. They might have taken any of the corners; they might be anywhere.

      The chair had decent legs, but it would be hobbled by the cross-braces; Kilisha couldn’t guess how it would move or what it would do.

      And the dish—how could a bowl move at all?

      It could roll, she supposed, but how far could it get that way?

      If it were rolling, it would tend to go downhill—and that meant west, down Wizard Street toward the shipyards.

      That would be the one to start with, she thought. The others might come home on their own, they might be almost anywhere, she might need to use magic to find them, but the bowl—that should be fairly easy to find.

      And she had to find it before it was broken, or before someone decided to keep it.

      She turned and headed west at a brisk trot.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      It was very hard to imagine a bowl rolling all the way across Cross Avenue without being stepped on, kicked, or otherwise battered, but Kilisha had found no trace of the missing dish anywhere in the first three blocks of her search, so she had to assume it had somehow managed it. Animated objects could be amazingly clever and persistent, as she well knew; they never tired, the way living creatures did, and they couldn’t be distracted by hunger or other discomforts. She hurried across the broad avenue, then stopped abruptly.

      She had heard something—something that might have been the sound of a spoon hitting a bowl. That wasn’t a sound one ordinarily heard outside a kitchen. It was followed by a man’s voice, swearing.

      The oaths meant trouble. Kilisha winced, then turned, trying to locate the source.

      The swearing continued, and Kilisha determined that it was coming from a little way south on Cross Avenue. She hurried in that direction.

      “…stop struggling, blast you!” she heard, followed by the sound of something whacking flesh.

      That might not be any of the lost furnishings, but it sounded like something that needed investigation, in any case. Ordinarily she might have left it to older, wiser heads than her own, but it might involve one of her master’s pieces…

      The voice was coming, she realized, from the covered entryway of a tavern on the west side of the avenue, half a block from the intersection with Wizard Street. A sort of small porch made by cutting doorways through the two sides of an immense barrel sheltered the tavern’s doorway while advertising the business, and that echoing barrel had served to amplify the sounds that had attracted her attention.

      It was a remarkable piece of good fortune, if that was indeed where her quarry had gone, and as she hurried toward the tavern she murmured a quick prayer of gratitude to any gods who might have been involved.

      She reached the outer doorway and peered into the barrel.

      A man stood there, clutching a bowl under one arm and a wooden spoon in his other hand—but the spoon was writhing about wildly, twisting and bending, slapping at the man’s arm. He was holding that arm straight out, holding the spoon as far from his body as he could; presumably it had tried to strike at other portions of his anatomy, as well.

      These were unquestionably the bowl and spoon Kilisha was looking for; although one wooden spoon looked much like any other, and the earthenware bowl was undistinguished, how many animated wooden spoons were on the streets of Ethshar on this particular afternoon?

      And this man did not look at all like a wizard; he was dressed in a working man’s brown woolen tunic and leather breeches, both filled out by an over-large belly, and he had more hair in his close-trimmed beard than atop his head.

      “Hold still! I’m not going to hurt you, confound it!”

      “Excuse me,” Kilisha said, “but I believe that’s mine.”

      The man started; he had plainly been too involved with his struggle to notice her arrival. Now he turned to stare at her.

      “Who are you?” he demanded.

      “My name is Kilisha the Apprentice,” she said, her hand dropping to the hilt of her athame. “Apprentice wizard.”

      The man stared at her a moment longer before speaking, and Kilisha was uncomfortably aware of her own rather drab and unimposing appearance. Ithanalin had the physical presence to impress his customers, and Kilisha had long known that she did not—at least, not yet; she hoped it would come with age.

      “Then why aren’t you in a wizard’s robe?” he asked.

      “Because I wasn’t dealing with customers,” she snapped. “I was working, and those—” She drew her dagger and pointed it at the bowl and spoon. ”—escaped from my master’s house.”

      The man looked down at the bowl. The spoon was no longer struggling; it seemed to be listening.

      “How do I know they’re really yours?” he asked. “I found them on the street.”

      “I told you, they escaped.”

      “But how do I know they escaped from you? You don’t look like a wizard. That dagger doesn’t prove anything!”

      Kilisha, who had already had far more trouble than she expected that day, and who knew much more still lay ahead, almost growled. She should have prepared…

      No, she told herself, she shouldn’t need to prove anything—but in fact, she could demonstrate that she was a wizard. She had a few ingredients in the pouch on her belt. She could show this troublesome person a few things. Fendel’s Spectacular Illusion required dragon’s blood, which was too expensive to waste like that, but she had a chip of chrysolite she could use to conjure the Yellow Cloud…

      But that would cover almost the entire width of the street, and hide everything for a minute or so, and he might turn and run, and she wouldn’t be able to see any better than he could. She tried to think what else she had available.

      Thrindle’s Combustion, of course. Her free hand dropped to the pouch, and with the skill born of long practice she used two fingers to pop the lid off her vial of brimstone. She made a gesture and spoke a word, and an inch or so of the hem of the man’s tunic suddenly burst into flame.

      Startled, he slapped at it and quickly extinguished the flames—but to Kilisha’s surprise and annoyance, he did not drop the bowl or spoon.

      As he beat out the embers, she said, “Do you really want to argue with a wizard, a member in good standing of the Guild?” she said. “You admit those things aren’t yours—why should you think they aren’t mine?”

      “Because they’re valuable,” the man said, frowning as he tugged at the blackened, crumbling fabric. “You’re just an apprentice, you said so yourself. I found them, and I was planning to sell them. They were just lying in the street…”

      “They were not,” Kilisha snapped. “They were moving. That’s how you knew they were worth stealing.”

      “It wasn’t stealing!” the man protested, looking up as he brushed ash from his СКАЧАТЬ