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 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 father’s country, and it’s there, if anywhere, that I’ll be able to practice the craft I was born and named for.