Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph in Rust

by Tim Powers

  They charged—and simultaneously the wall behind them exploded into the room like a gravel pile kicked by a giant. Frank was hurled backward into a display case full of bottles, and two of the Transports landed on top of him. After the debris had stopped falling he flung their limp bodies aside and struggled to his feet, coughing in the dust-foggy air. He heard the roars of two more explosions; and a third; and a fourth.

  The silhouettes of men moved behind the rubble of the wall. “Hey!” Frank called, waving his sword. “This way, Companions! I’m Rovzar!”

  The men cheered and ran to him, led by Hussar. “Should have known I’d find you in the bar,” the lord grinned.

  “We’ve got to get upstairs,” Frank said. “Costa’s up there. Come on.” Every second, more men were climbing out of the hole in the foundation where the ladies’ room had been, but Frank impatiently hustled the first ten out of the bar and up the first flight of stairs they came to.

  They met three guards on the stairs; two died and the third fled upstairs, hotly pursued. Yells, cheers and explosions echoed up and down the embattled corridors. Frank’s band of Companions took off after the fleeing Transport, but Frank concentrated on his search for the Duke. After a few minutes of running and dodging he saw, at the end of a corridor, the two doors bearing the scarred Frankie-and-Johnnie bas-relief. He ran toward them and launched a flying kick that ripped the bolt out of the wood on the other side. The doors slammed inward, knocking over a Transport guard and startling six others. Behind them all stood Costa, radiating both fear and rage.

  “There he is, idiots!” he yelled. “Get him, quickly!”

  Frank ran at the six guards and, with only a token preparatory feint, drove his point through one man’s throat. He parried a downward-sweeping blade with his right arm, and winced as the edge bit through the leather jacket into his skin; then he riposted with a quick jab between the ribs and the man rolled to the floor, more terrified than hurt. Two Transports now engaged Frank’s blade while a third man ran in and swung a whistling slash into Frank’s belly. The impact knocked Frank off his feet and the guards cheered as their adversary fell.

  “Finish him, finish him!” screeched Costa, waving a rapier he’d picked up.

  The foremost guard raised his sword as if he were planting a flag, and drove it savagely downward into the floor, for Frank had rolled aside. Pausing only to hamstring another guard, he scrambled catlike to his feet. His shirt was cut across just above the belt, and the Winnie the Pooh had been chopped nearly in half.

  Costa, beginning to worry about the outcome of the skirmish, tore down one of his gaudy tapestries and opened a door it had hidden. Frank saw him step through it, and swung a great arc with his blade to make the Transports jump back a step—like most novice swordsmen, they were more fearful of the dramatic edge than the deadlier but less spectacular point—and then leaped for the secret door, catching it a moment before it would have clicked shut. He hopped through before the four remaining guards got to it, and shot the bolt just as they began wrenching and pounding on the door from the other side.

  He turned; a narrow stairway rose before him, and he could hear Costa’s quick steps ahead and above. Frank gripped his sword firmly and loped up the stairs two at a time. He was very tired—near exhaustion, really—and he was losing blood from his right shoulder and forearm; but he wanted to settle the issue with Costa before he rested. He kept thinking about the night at the Doublon Festival when he had seen Costa’s face over the barrel of a pistol, and had failed to pull the trigger.

  At the top of the stairs stood an open arch that framed a patch of the blue sky. Leaping through it Frank found himself on the slightly tilted red-tile roof of the palace. The stairway arch he’d come out of stood midway between two chimneys that marked the north and south edges of the roof. Resting against the northern chimney was Costa, staring hopelessly at the spot where, before all the explosions started, a fire escape had stood.

  Frank slowly walked toward him, and Costa stood clear of the chimney and raised his sword in a salute. After a moment of hesitation, Frank returned the salute. Plumes of black smoke curled up into the sky from below, and the roof shook under their feet from time to time as more bombs went off within the building.

  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 jeweled 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 dissolving rain of 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-bastard, so they sat in the shade of a melon cart and flicked pebbles at the legs of passing 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 damned 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 bumped 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 rosé 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 cl
osed 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’re 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 basement? 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 document.

  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.

  To my parents, Noel and Dick Powers

  An Epitaph in Rust

  OFTEN THERE’S A WHISPER that I hear in shadowed streets.

  A breath of desperation from the tall, far-seeing clouds

  Or gasp of outrage from a manhole cover—something meets

  Between the earth and sky, in pain, and if the shifting crowds

  Can sense it, their response is only in their frightened eyes.

  The very breezes pick their way among the alleyways

  As if afraid of something in the gray December skies,

  Or listening to the heartbeat of these hollow latter days.

  Ride on, Messiah—there’s no place for you behind the wheel.

  You’ve come too late to sell your closing chapters, for our hands

  Have written us an epitaph in rust, on dusty steel.

  We’re pulled aside and served with debts and overdue demands

  By angry, ragged shapes that once were us; and when we pay

  We’ll wait in neatly ordered lines to sign our souls away.

  —from the unpublished

  Poems of Rufus Pennick

  BOOK ONE

  Rufus Pennick

  CHAPTER 1

  Brother Thomas

  WHEN THE CARILLON OF bells rang out across the valley to herald matin prayers, Brother Thomas struck the rusty lock off the door of the monastery’s highest tower, and swung it open. He stepped cautiously out onto the flat stone blocks of the tower’s roof and groped his way through almost total darkness until he touched the crumbling parapet; a cold night wind swept up the valley from the south, and he shivered as he opened his robe to lay down his two bundles.

  Up from below him floated the solemn voices of the Brothers of St. Merignac at their midnight prayers. I hope they’re all too sleepy to notice my absence, Brother Thomas thought. God knows I’ve never been very alert at matins.

  He knelt down and untied his bundles. The first held two flexible sticks that fitted together to form a long, tapering rod with a heavy cork butt. A series of metal rings, descending in size toward the tip, ran along the top side of it. He pulled a fishing reel out of his pocket, clamped it onto the rod’s grip and carefully drew the line through the rings. Finally he tied a gleaming steel hook onto the end of the line and leaned the rod against the parapet.

  The other package was simply two wooden sticks wrapped in a diamond-shaped sheet of string-reinforced black paper. Brother Thomas tied the sticks together in a cross, flexed them, and then stretched the paper over them like a skin, fitting the string perimeter into notches cut in the ends of the sticks.

  Not bad, he thought, as he gently punched the fish-hook through the front of the kite, looped it around the crossed sticks and drew the barbed point out again. With any luck, my days at this monastery are numbered.

  He stood up and peered down over one of the cracked stone merlons; the high chapel windows threw streaks of colored light across the grass of the garden, and the vineyards beyond rustled in the darkness. The very picture of routine calmness, reflected Brother Thomas with satisfaction.

  From another pocket he took a cheap rhinestone necklace, which he knotted around the hook. Then he lifted the kite, let the wind take it, and slowly played out the fishing line as the kite rose bucking and swinging into the night sky. After he had let out about fifty yards of line he sat under the parapet to avoid the worst of the wind, and simply waited.

  Come on, he thought. Bring me a rich one. One with a discerning eye—not too discerning to like rhinestones, though.

  The wind seemed to Brother Thomas to carry a hint of the smells of the city; a faint, aromatic smoke blended from the chimneys of a hundred restaurants, forges, bath-houses and incinerators. It was infinitely more alluring than the damp-earth, pine-sap and incense odors of the monastery.

  A faint sound of flapping and chittering was audible above the sighing of the breeze, and he gripped the rod more tightly. His chest felt hollow and his fingers trembled a little. I hope they’re not too noisy, he thought.

  Then the rod lunged in his hands and the reel whirred as yards and yards of line were pulled rapidly up into the sky. His lightly-pressing thumb felt the spooled line diminishing by the second. He’d better get tired quick, he thought, or I’ve lost two dollars worth of thirty-pound test.

  The line hissed out for an eternal half-minute, and then paused. Immediately he clicked on the drag. The thing seemed to be circling now, high above, as Brother Thomas stumbled about on the dark tower-top, trying to reel in as steadily as he could. The thing in the sky resisted, but with ever weaker and more spasmodic efforts.

  “Damn me! Damn me!” came a shrill cry from above. “What gives? What gives?” Thomas started so violently that he nearly let go of the rod. God in heaven, he thought; they can talk. I wish this one wouldn’t.

  “Leggo, Jack. Lemme go. It wasn’t me, Jack.” The flapping, protesting creature was now only a few feet over Thomas’ head, and the young monk jerked the rod downward to fling the vociferous flier to the stone floor.

  “Hoooo!” the thing wailed despairingly. “Wooo-hooooo!”

  “Shut up, goddammit!” hissed Thomas. “I’m not going to hurt you!” Thomas grabbed the little bird-man by the spindly legs and awkwardly removed the hook from the thing’s webbed hand. Still holding on, Thomas reached into the warm pocket of the bird-man’s kangaroo-like pouch and pulled out a handful of bright, hard objects. “There!” Thomas told it. “That wasn’t so bad, eh? Now take off!”

  He tossed it into the air and it spread its wings and thrashed away into the night, calling back childish insults and obscenities.

  Thomas wiped his sweat
ing forehead with his sleeve and listened intently. No apparent commotion, he thought—but all this racket must have been heard by someone. He quickly scooped up the loot he’d taken from the flier’s pouch and dropped it all into the pocket of his robe. Don’t panic, he told himself. Sneak back to your cell, crawl into bed and deny everything.

  Nodding at the wisdom of his own advice, he hurried down the narrow, curling tower stairway, his fishing rod and kite in one hand and the fingertips of the other brushing the damp stone wall to keep him away from the unrailed inner edge. He was panting nervously, and the echoes in the tower made it sound as if a pack of exhausted dogs had taken refuge there. God, he thought—I’m making enough noise for ten men. I’d better hurry.

  He tried to take the steps two at a time; immediately his sandaled feet slipped on the uneven mossy blocks and he rolled painfully down the last twelve steps, skinning his knees and smashing his kite and fishing pole to splinters.

  “God damn it!” he muttered when, at the bottom of the stairs, he got his breath back. It had taken him six months of furtive work to make that fishing rod. He was about to get to his feet and continue his flight when the silence was abruptly broken.

  “This blasphemy, Brother Thomas,” came a harsh voice, “while deplorable in itself, fades to insignificance before your more serious crime.” The owner of the voice slid open the door of a dark lantern he carried, and Thomas found himself looking up into the half-angry, half-sad face of Brother Olaus, the abbot, who stood in the open doorway.

  Thomas paled. “Brother, please,” he said quickly and desperately, “don’t hand me over to the police. Give me penances, I’ll scrub the sacristy floors for a year, but don’t—you can’t—let them cut my hands off. Look, the fishing rod broke, I can’t do it anymore. If you—”

  “I’m sorry, Thomas,” the abbot said. “There’s nothing you or I can do about it now. Our duties are clear. This… this calamity may, I hope, turn out in the end to have been your key to salvation.” The abbot looked down at the shivering monk with something like sympathy. “Try to see it in that light. Try—”