The Skies Discrowned (23 page)
Read The Skies Discrowned Online
Authors: Tim Powers
“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 among 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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The Skies Discrowned
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*
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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.
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.