The Skies Discrowned (22 page)

“Take it out of my salary,” Frank said. “When can I start on the portrait?”

“Anytime, I guess. I’ll have a guard escort you to the throne room, and you can discuss it with the Duke himself. Uh, what’s your name?”

“Richard Helder,” Frank told him. The clerk scribbled it on a piece of paper, then handed it to a guard.

“Just follow him, Mr. Helder,” the clerk said. Frank nodded his thanks and followed the guard upstairs.

The throne room, as Frank noticed when he was finally admitted, had changed considerably during his absence. The bookcases and desk
were gone, replaced by overly colorful tapestries, the throne had been painted, and the year-old, unfinished Claude Rovzar portrait of Duke Topo was nowhere to be seen.

Duke Costa, a little redder of face and ampler of belly, was sitting on the throne and staring at a sheaf of star-maps. “Who’s that?” he asked the guard, pointing at Frank.

“An artist,” said the guard. “Richard Helder. Briggs passed him.”

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Costa smiled, returning to his star-maps. Frank nodded and sat down in a chair by the entrance. He glanced at the doors and saw, dimly under the new paint, the unevenness of the putty filling in the old bullet holes.

The rise and fall of Duke Costa, Frank thought. Or maybe the rise and fall of Frank Rovzar. This is the room our fathers died in.

Under this building, he thought, staring at the floor, crouches, silently, my army. It would be an interesting development if the army
wasn’t
down there—if they’ve simply stayed home, as Emsley told them to do yesterday, just before I killed him.

Idly, as he waited, Frank did a couple of sketches of Costa in profile on the reverse side of the paint box.

Finally Costa flung the maps aside. “Mr. Helder?” he said. “I understand Briggs likes your work. He’s not too easily pleased. What were you drawing there, just a second ago?”

Frank walked forward and showed the Duke the profiles.

“Not bad,” Costa said with a critical squint. “I like the style. Did you ever study the works of Rovzar?”

“What artist hasn’t?” replied Frank.

“Just so,” nodded Costa. “When can you begin?”

“That depends,” said Frank in an artificially casual voice. “You see, the only canvases I have are small—fit for paintings of children, or kittens, but hardly Dukes. I can order a canvas, of course; but with the interplanetary shipping system in the state it’s in, God knows when it would come.” He hoped Costa was unaware that canvases were made on Octavio. “Uh … you wouldn’t happen to
have
an old canvas, a painting, lying around, that I could paint over? Something roughly ten feet by five feet?”

“By God, I have!” laughed Costa. “Hey, guard!” he yelled. “Bring that picture in here! The big unfinished one!” He grinned at Frank. “You, sir,” he said, “are to have the privilege of painting over a genuine unfinished Rovzar.”

Frank raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.

The painting was brought in, still on the original easel. It was dimmed with dust, and something greasy had dripped down the left side of it, but
Frank easily recognized his father’s work, and the sight of it brought back memories of the old man with more force than anything else had in a year.

The guards bowed and withdrew. Frank took a rag out of his paint box and gently wiped off the canvas. There, looking nobler than Frank had ever seen him look in life, sat Duke Topo. Frank reached out and ran his fingers over the fine brush strokes.

He turned to Costa to speak, but saw the Duke, suddenly pale, rising from the throne and pointing a trembling finger at him. “I … I was told you were dead,” he whispered.

“You’ve got me confused with someone,” said Frank levelly. “No, no. Your drawing style—I should have guessed immediately.” The Duke slid his jewel-hiked rapier out of its velvet scabbard and then ran at Frank with the weapon held over his head like an axe. Frank snatched up the paint box and caught the descending blade with it; the sword stuck, and Frank roughly levered it out of Costa’s grasp. He kicked the Duke in the stomach and Costa dropped to the floor. Frank wrenched the paint-smeared blade loose, raised it—Costa cowered under an upflung arm—and brought it down across the face of the painting, slashing the canvas open from top to bottom.

“Guards!” bellowed Costa, scuttling away from him like a frightened beetle. “I’m being killed!”

Frank reached in behind the split painting and seized the book, then ran to the door just as it was flung open by the first of four sword-waving Transport guards.

Frank drove the paint-colorful rapier at one of them, who parried it hard, flinging drops of color at the wall. The
Winnie the Pooh
was in Frank’s right hand, so he hit the man in the face with it. A sword tore a gash in Frank’s right shoulder, and he twisted around and cut the throat of the guard who held it. Then he was through them, and running to find a bathroom. He impatiently peeled off the itchy false moustache and flung it to the ground.

“Get him! Get him!” screamed Costa. “He’s insane!” Frank ducked into one room and surprised a half-dozen women who were tacking typed pages onto a bulletin board; he fled them and their panicky, guard-drawing screams and dashed down another hallway. Blood from his shoulder spotted his cape and ran down his arm onto the leather binding of the book he held.

Ahead of him a guard appeared from around a corner. The man raised his arm and a bang sounded as a strip of plaster beside Frank’s head turned to powder. Frank convulsively kicked open the nearest door, ran through the room beyond it and, whirling his cape over his head, leaped through the closed window.

He fell, together with a rain of shattered glass, through fifteen feet of air onto a pavement, rolling as he landed to minimize the impact. He tore his cape off, picked up his book and colorful sword and looked around. He was in an enclosed garden; tables stood among the greenery, and astonished people were flinging down forks and getting to their feet; two guards, swords out, strode toward him.

Frank desperately picked up a chair from beside a nearby table and tossed it through the largest ground-floor window, which burst inward with a hideous racket. Frank leaped through it, hearing the shouts of guards from all sides. I’ll never get to a bathroom now, he thought dizzily. They’ve got me surrounded.

He was in a bar-lounge occupied only by a sparse mid-morning crowd. He vaulted over the bar, scattering glasses and ashtrays, and sent the bartender sprawling with a blow of his sword-pommel. Then, lying under the bar sink, he fumbled in his pocket and put a powerful whistle to his lips, and blew it with all the strength he could wring out of his lungs directly into the floor-drain.

“Where is he?” called someone excitedly.

“He’s hiding behind the bar!” howled the bartender, who had run off while Frank was blowing the whistle.

“All right, Pete, bring your boys in from the left, and we’ll go in from the right. We may be able to get him alive.”

Frank blew his whistle twice more, cupping his hands around the drain to aim the noise downward.

“The Duke’s right,” someone called. “He
is
crazy. He’s trying to play music back there.”

Frank took hold of his sword, stuffed the book in his shirt and stood up. A dozen of them. Here’s where I die, possibly. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked with a smile.

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.

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.