Neither man said anything; they paused, and then Costa launched a tentative thrust at Frank's face. Frank parried it easily but didn't riposte-he was in no hurry and he wanted to get the feel of the surface they were fighting on. The tiles, he discovered as he cautiously advanced and retreated across them, were too smooth to get traction on, and frequently broke and slid clattering over the edge.

Frank feinted an attack to Costa's outside line and then drove a lunge at the Duke's stomach; Costa parried it wildly but successfully and backed away a few steps. A cool wind swept across the roof, drying the sweat on Frank's face. His next attack started as an eye-jab but ducked at the last moment and cut open the back of the Duke's weapon hand. That ought to loosen his grip, Frank thought, as another explosion rocked the building.

Costa seemed upset by the blood running up his arm, so Frank redoubled the attack with a screeching, whirling bind on the Duke's blade that planted Frank's sword-point in Costa's cheek. The Duke flinched and retreated another step, so that he was once again next to the north chimney.

"Checkmate, Costa," Frank said, springing forward in a high lunge that threatened Costa's face; Costa whipped his sword up to block it-and Frank dropped low, driving his sword upward through Costa's velvet tunic, ample belly and pounding heart.

The transfixed Duke took one more backward step, overbalanced and fell away into the empty air, the sword still protruding from his stomach.

Frank stood up and brushed the sweat-matted hair out of his face with trembling fingers. Time to go below, he thought; too bad Costa took both swords down with him.

He turned to the stairway arch-and a final, much more powerful explosion tore through all three stories beneath him and blew the north wall out in a rain of dissolving bricks. The whole north half of the roof crumbled inward, and Frank, riding a wave of buckling, shattering tiles, disappeared into the churning cloud of dust and cascading masonry as timbers, furniture, sections of walls and a million free-falling rocks thundered down onto the unpaved yard of the list.

Epilogue: The Painter Kiowa Dog and his friends were bored. The scaffolding around the north end of the palace was fenced off, so they couldn't play there. It was too hot and dusty to play tag or knife-the-b.a.s.t.a.r.d, so they sat in the shade of a melon cart and flicked pebbles at the legs of pa.s.sing horses.

"Let's do something," said Cher-cher.

"Like what?" asked Kiowa Dog lazily.

"We could go explore the cellar."

"I'm sick of your d.a.m.ned cellar," Kiowa Dog explained.

"Well, we could climb-holy cow, Kiowa, look at this guy!" Cher-cher pointed at a bizarre figure leaving the keep and heading slowly for the open palace gates.

It was a man, riding in a small donkey cart because his left leg had been amputated at the hip. His age was impossible to judge-his thick hair was a youthful shade of black, and his body was that of an active young man, but his lined face and scarred cheek implied a greater age. He wore a bronze ear, and it glittered and winked in the sunlight as the cart b.u.mped over the cobblestones.

"What circus are you from, Jack?" yelled Kiowa Dog.

"Juggle for us! Dance!" giggled Cher-cher.

FRANK didn't hear the children's calls. He sat back in his cart, enjoying the sunlight and the glow of the wine he'd had with breakfast. He reached behind to make sure his supplies-his new paint box, several canvases, four bottles of good rose from the ducal cellar-were still strapped down in the shaded back of the cart, and then lightly flicked the reins. The donkey increased his pace slightly.

It hasn't been smooth and it hasn't been nice, he thought, this circle I've walked for a year-but it's closed now. He remembered his father's saying: "If it was easy, Frankie, they'd have got somebody else to do it." Well, Dad, it must be easy, because I think they are getting somebody else to do it.

ON a second-floor balcony of the keep, a man in a blue silk robe watched the donkey cart's progress toward the gate.

"So long, Frank," he whispered.

"I beg your pardon, your grace?" spoke up the page standing behind him.

"Never mind," Tyler snapped. "Uh ... bring me the Transport file on Thomas Strand, will you?"

The page bowed and sprinted away down a hall.

I guess you were right to leave, Tyler thought. There's nothing left for you here, above or below ground. Maybe there is a life for you in the hills, as you said.

Tyler pounded his fist once, softly on the railing. You should have thought of it, Frank. Gunpowder and dynamite are more valuable than gold. Where else would a stupid, suspicious man like Costa store it but in the palace bas.e.m.e.nt? And then your ignorant understreet thugs come up from below with their own explosives... . I've never seen a book as ruined as that Winnie the Pooh was when we dug it and you out of the wreckage: cut, ripped, smashed and blood-soaked, but still carrying intact its precious doc.u.ment.

The page returned, holding a manila folder. "Thank you," Tyler said, dismissing the boy with a wave. He opened the file and read Captain Duprey's notes and reports. After a few minutes of reading he nodded, as if the file had confirmed certain suspicions, and struck a match. The folder was slow to catch fire, but burned well once it did, and a few moments later Tyler dropped the blackened, flickering shreds and let the wind take them.

"I won't take any of your friends from you, Frank," he said. "Especially the dead ones."

THE crowd in front of the Ducal Palace bored Frank Rovzar, and he kept his eyes on the hills beyond. I could ride east, he thought. The Goriot Valley is being farmed again, and the country is lush with vineyards and hospitable inns and friendly peasant girls.

He smiled, deepening the lines in his cheeks. No, he thought, it's the western hills for me, the occasional towns among the yellow fields and the gray-brown tumbleweed slopes. It's a dry region but it's my father's country, and it's there, if anywhere, that I'll be able to practice the craft I was born and named for.

AFTERWORD.

This is my first book. I wrote it ten years ago, in 1975, and its sale was excuse enough for me to quit college-high time, after six years!-and quit my pizza-cook-&-dishwasher job too. I had got my very first rejection slip ten years before that, when I was thirteen, so quitting school and work now seemed to have a fitting symmetry about it. (Later I did have to go back to the job, but at least I never went back to school.) For this printing I've had to go through the book and touch it up-tighten it here, sh.o.r.e it up better there, trim some stuff I can now recognize as unnecessary-and it's been a surprisingly nostalgic experience to get back into the workings of the book after all these years, like digging up a homemade lawn sprinkler system you laid down a decade ago: you see which materials have lasted, you see places for improvements you should have thought of then, you find forgotten initials scrawled into the concrete when it was still wet, and what's this, a set of car keys with a key for that old motorcycle I used to ride to school on.

Let me tell you why I write. I can watch E.T., or listen to Bob Marley and the Wailers, or eat sashimi with wasabi and soy sauce and that stuff that seems to be grated radish, and just be grateful that I frequently have the money to avail myself of them and happen to live in a world where such things exist; but when I finish reading a fine book-The Shining, say, or MacDonald's A Deadly Shade of Gold, or Amis's Girl, 20-I'm left with an uneasy feeling that simply having paid my three dollars wasn't enough. Like the primitive cargo cults who build straw replicas of the airplanes they see flying past overhead, I want to express my grat.i.tude by doing it too. I suppose if I were a distiller I'd feel this way when I tasted Laphroaig or Wild Turkey or Plymouth gin.

So I can clearly see, when I reread this, what sorts of stories I was grateful for in 1975; science fiction, of course (I first read Heinlein's Red Planet when I was eleven), and adventure and swordfights (I think you could rub the flat of a sharp pencil point over any page of this book and read "Raphael Sabatini"), and a bit of low humor in the pull-the-chair-out-from-under-the-fat-boy vein (The Three Musketeers, Dumas's rendition or Richard Lester's, has always delighted me).

You know, it occurs to me that my tastes haven't improved a bit in ten years. In fact, just to show you how little I've learned, this summer I quit my job again.

This book always seems to have that effect on me.

Wish me luck!

-Tim Powers.

July, 1985.

end.