The Skies Discrowned

by Tim Powers

  “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 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’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 amo
ng the yellow fields and the gray-brown tumbleweed slopes. It’s a dry region but it’s my fathers country, and it’s there, if anywhere, that I’ll be able to practice the craft I was born and named for.

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  Also by Tim Powers

  Last Call Series

  Last Call

  Expiration Date

  Earthquake Weather

  Other Novels

  Epitaph In Rust

  The Skies Discrowned

  The Drawing of the Dark

  The Anubis Gates

  Dinner At Deviant’s Palace

  On Stranger Tides

  *

  The Stress of Her Regard*

  Declare*

  Three Days to Never*

  Collections

  Strange Itineraries

  * not available as SF Gateway eBooks

  Dedication

  To Roy A. Squires

  Tim Powers (1952 – )

  Tim Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and educated at California State University, gaining a degree in English. It was at University that he met K.W. Jeter and James Blaylock, who became friends and occasional collaborators, and the three of them are regarded as the founding fathers of the steampunk literary movement. He was also a friend of noted SF writer Philip K. Dick. Tim Powers is the author of many highly regarded novels and among his many honours are two Philip K. Dick Awards (for the Anubis Gates and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace) and two World Fantasy Awards (for Last Call and Declare). The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film is based on his 1988 novel On Stranger Tides. Tim Powers lives in California with his wife Serena.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Tim Powers 1976

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Tim Powers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 11774 7

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk