Part 5

Probably not, Kesley thought balefully. From what he had already deduced of the workings of the Immortal mind, it was hardly likely that any two Dukes would share a behavioral pattern. And that left Kesley in an awkward position.

"A week is a long time," Kesley said, as they rode through the gates. The double doors clanged shut behind them, sealing off Winslow's palace from the city. "I'll be ready when the time comes, padre."

"I hope so. I will pray for your soul," the priest intoned.

"Fine," Kesley said savagely. "Pray for me sincerely, father. _Pater noster_--"

"Don't mock what you don't understand," Santana said. He crossed himself fervently. "Your soul is in danger, _Señor_ Ramon."

"_My_ soul? What about yours, you old windbag?"

Santana squirmed in the saddle, faced Kesley. The plump priest's sad eyes gazed mournfully into Kesley's. "My soul?" Santana repeated. "My soul is long since forfeit, but I pray constantly for my salvation."

Kesley reddened. "What do you mean by--"

He cut himself off in mid-sentence and pointed to the left. "What's _that_?" he asked hoarsely. "Mutant?"

"Yes," the Archbishop said. "There are many of them in Chicago. I think he plans to make trouble; be ready to defend yourself."

The creature was coming toward them out of a jumble of clumsily-thatched huts strung in a wobbly circle around a gullied heap of slag at the extreme left side of the road. It was tall--nearly seven feet, Kesley estimated--with elongated spidery limbs and a bloated, almost hydrocephaloid skull, devoid of hair. The mutant wore only a rag twisted carelessly about its middle; the body thus revealed was grotesquely piebald in color, blotched and spotted, the purpling skin lying loosely and peeling away in great leprous flakes.

Kesley had seen mutants before: mutant horses, mutant wolves, other products of ravaged genes, but he had never before been this close to a _human_ sport, other than Miguel. Miguel was human in all physical aspects save his life span; the creature shambling toward them now could be called "human" only by the loosest of definitions.

As the mutant approached, a musty odor of decay drifted before him. Kesley shuddered involuntarily.

Once, he knew, the cities of the world had been populated by almost as many mutants as normals. That had been in the days immediately after the great blast, before the Dukes had taken command of the world.

But most of these mutants had been sterile, carrying, like the Dukes, lethal genes. Others carried recessive characteristics only. Gradually, through the centuries, the mutant population had died out and dwindled away into scattered groups here and there in the biggest cities--and, word was, there was one city somewhere in Illinois populated only by mutants.

This one was blind, Kesley saw now, but it moved with unerring accuracy.

"Archbishop Santana!" the creature called, in a hoarse croak of a voice. "Wait for me, Archbishop!"

"How does he know you?" Kesley asked.

"Some of them have strange powers," Santana whispered. He nervously undid the crucifix that hung from the breast of his surplice and held it before him, as if to ward off the Devil.

The mutant merely chuckled. "Put away your toy, Archbishop. I don't frighten so easily."

"Stay back," Kesley snapped. "Keep away from us." To Santana he said, "Let's get out of here. Spur your horse and let's go.

"No. Let's hear him out."

The mutant stationed himself directly in their path and pointed a twisted, lumpy forefinger at Santana. "Behold the man of God," he croaked hoarsely. "_Ecce homo!_"

"What do you want?" the Archbishop demanded. Kesley saw that Santana was sheet-white beneath his outward duskiness.

"I want nothing. I merely came out here to laugh at the Archbishop of God who has come to Chicago on a mission of _murder_!"

Kesley stiffened in the saddle, but Santana caught his arm just as he was about to go for his gun. "What is this talk of murder?" Santana demanded.

Late afternoon clouds were dropping over the city now, and a cool wind came sweeping in from the lake. Kesley shivered as the mutant grinned, baring scraggly stumps of yellow teeth.

"Murder? Did I say murder? But there will be no murder, milord. Merely betrayal--and betrayal again."

* * * * *

That night, in the rooms they had taken near the city's central marketplace, the image of the mutant haunted Kesley, imposing itself before his eyes with demonic insistence.

Betrayal? No murder? The paradoxes and cloaked ambiguities the grotesque creature had uttered ground into Kesley's already sensitive consciousness, bringing with them the sharp image of the piebald spider of a man that was the mutant.

Kesley looked across the room to Santana. The plump Archbishop, having divested himself of his traveling costume, wore a loose cassock without surplice. He was thumbing the pages of his breviary, flicking rapidly over matter long since committed to memory.

"Padre?"

"Eh?"

"That mutant this afternoon--"

"Don't speak of him," Santana said.

"But he bothers me, Santana. I can't get him out of my mind, him or that crazy nonsense he was muttering."

"That was not nonsense," the Archbishop said in a hollow voice. "He struck at the heart, that man."

"I don't understand."

"You yourself made the same comment earlier, when you remarked that I, a man of God, am with you to participate in this unholy mission. Why, you ask. You asked me if I were not risking my immortal soul by accompanying you."

"And you said--"

"I said that I had little to risk. Strange words, coming from an Archbishop, but my soul is long since forfeit. God works in strange ways, and so his servants follow."

"You're still talking in riddles," Kesley complained. "Why did you come along, then, if you knew it would damn you?"

"I am _already_ damned for serving Miguel!" Santana cried. His doughy face was taut with sudden animation. "Don't you see that Miguel and his Dukes have overthrown Rome, have supplanted Christ with themselves? And we continue to serve them, not because we desire it, but because we must!"

Kesley frowned. A light of torment, almost of martyrdom, gleamed in the Archbishop's eyes now.

"What difference does it make," Santana asked, "if I help you kill Winslow? I cannot be any more damned than I am already--and possibly, possibly the consequences of your act will--will--do you see?"

"Killing Winslow will topple the whole apple cart," Kesley said softly. "You're gambling an already assured damnation against the chance that knocking off one Duke will crush all the rest and restore your religion to supremacy." He chuckled quietly. "I sometimes wonder just _whose_ catspaw I am," he said.

"Everyone's," the priest remarked. "Poor pawn, you've fallen fair of everyone's scheming."

The priest continued to read for a while, then uttered a brief prayer in rapid Spanish--perhaps it was even Latin, Kesley thought--and blew out his candle. Kesley closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

Sleep would not come. Brooding, he rolled and fidgeted, seeing over and over again the loose-jointed, hideous figure of the mutant.

VI

"I'll be back later," Kesley said in the morning. His eyes stung as if they had been sandpapered during the long, sleepless night; his lips were dry and cracking, and the oppressive city heat hung around him like the caress of a giant velvet glove, smothering without actually touching.

"Where are you going?" Santana asked, not looking up. It was a mechanical question asked out of mere courtesy, and Kesley ignored it.

"Saddle my horse," he told one of the men. "I won't need any of you to go with me."

The morning air was already steaming as he rode out into the city. The market was crowded with sleepy-eyed Chicagoans haggling for the fruit and vegetables that had been brought in while they slept. Kesley traversed the marketplace in a wide circuit and struck out along the broad cobbled road that led to Duke Winslow's palace.

About halfway there, he cut sharply and veered to the right, guiding his horse down a steep hill and off onto a narrow, red-brown unpaved road. Looking ahead, he could see his destination: the impossibly untidy bramble of shanties that was the ghetto of the mutants.

Even at this distance, he could see bizarre creatures moving idly back and forth down below, wandering from porch to porch in the isolated colony. He whitened at the sight of some of them.

There was one round, orange, doughy mass of a man that looked like some sort of giant fruit, except for the enlarged features and the tiny, stick-like legs and arms that projected from it; nearby, walking in confused circles, was a mutant with a pair of dissimilar writhing heads and an uncountable number of busy legs.

Lazy curlicues of smoke hung wavering in the air above the shacks. Kesley looked around.

_Great God_, he thought suddenly. _They're people!_

He rode down into the ghetto, feeling ashamed of his own bodily symmetry and genetic heritage, which seemed abnormal here. He, alone, of all the human beings within a half-mile radius, was untainted, and the thought made him feel strangely humble.

"Who is it you want?" a man asked. _The toll-keeper_, Kesley thought with sudden weird irony.

The "man" facing him was more nearly human than most; only a blob of flesh dangling from his forehead and a wattled reddish dewlap swinging pendulously below his chin qualified him for the ghetto. Kesley forced himself to stare rigidly over the man's shoulder while he replied.

"I'm looking for ... I don't know his name. He's tall, very tall, and--" He broke off, overwhelmed by self-conscious guilt, unable to recite the catalogue of one mutant's alienness to another.

"Go ahead," the mutant said with surprising warmth. "Tell me what he looks like and I'll see if I can find him. I'm not offended."

Kesley licked his lips and proceeded to describe the man he sought as vividly as possible. When he was through, the mutant nodded.

"You look for Lomark Dawnspear, friend. Has he wronged you?"

"No," Kesley said hastily, beginning to wish he had never come. "I just want to talk to him."

"Wait here. I'll try to bring him to you."

Kesley waited. The mutant vanished in the confusing tangle of closely-packed shacks.

In the midst of this poverty and genetic horror, Kesley held himself perfectly still, hoping not to call to himself the attention of some unfortunate who might be jealous of his fine clothes or unscrambled chromosomes. But no one approached him. The mutants held their distance, eyeing him with unashamed curiosity from the cramped porches of their huts.

It was a panorama of total ghastliness. Kesley could see now where the horror with which men regarded the Old Days had arisen: the people here were living reminders of the crime of the Old World--a crime, Kesley thought, whose consequences were visited upon the tenth and the twentieth generations.

"You seek me?" a harsh voice said.

Kesley snapped to attention and saw the hoarse-voiced Jeremiah of the streets approaching him, escorted by the dewlapped one. Kesley nodded; this was the man. In such profusion of mutation, there would hardly be two so marked.

"Do you remember who I am?" Kesley asked.

The mutant chuckled. "Could I forget? You're the young killer from the southlands, up here to do away with--but hush! I must not give it away!"

Kesley gripped the mutant by the baggy folds of flesh that hung loosely on one spidery arm. "How do you know anything of who I am?"

The mutant shrugged. "How could I keep from knowing?" His voice was mild and apologetic now, with little of its earlier raucous quality. "I can no more keep from knowing, than you--than you can keep from needing food, or seeing when your eyes are open. I ... _know_."

"How much do you know?"

"Why you are here, and where you are from ... and where you will go, and what you will become." Lomark Dawnspear's voice had modulated into a dull, almost ritualistic drone. "I see these things, and I do not speak. I speak, but you do not see. Blind, I know you. Eyes open, you march into treachery."

Kesley released the mutant and stepped back. He was shaking with inward horror; his empty stomach seemed to be squirming. "What are you talking about?"

The mutant smiled feebly. "Counter-question: who is your father, handsome blond man?"

"My father? I--"

"You do not know?"

"All right--I don't know. Do you?"

"How could I not know? Can the maggot restrain its hunger? Can the Earth forget its orbit?"

"You know, but you're not talking. Is that it?"

Dawnspear shrugged again. "You would not want me to tell you," he said softly. "I see that, too."

"All right," Kesley said, irritated. "Forget all about that. Give me some other answers."

"If I can."

"The man named van Alen--is he dead?"

"No."

"Where is he?"

"In his home. Antarctica."

"It was true, then," Kesley said. He stared into the mutant's dead eyes. "Who is he?"

"A noble of the Antarctican land," Lomark Dawnspear said. "Forget van Alen. Watch Miguel ... and Winslow. Watch everyone, youngster. Watch Santana, the greasy prelate. Watch me. Watch the fool stealing up behind you this very minute."

"The oldest trick in the world," Kesley said skeptically. But he felt a sudden cold sensation between his shoulder-blades, and whirled quickly. Another mutant stood there, a wide, slablike thing with four arms pivoting off jointed shoulders. One of its thick-fingered hands clutched a rock, jagged and heavy.

Moving instinctively Kesley grasped the arm holding the rock and yanked it down, smashing a fist into the broad creature's stomach at the same time. The rock thudded to the ground; the four arms windmilled aimlessly for a moment or two, and then the mutant backed off mumbling stertorous, incomprehensible curses.

"You'd better leave," Lomark Dawnspear said. "Some of the slower ones are beginning to realize you're here. They're likely to make things dangerous for you."

"But you haven't told me a thing," Kesley said.

"The answers lie ahead of you ... the answers and the questions. Now go."

Scowling, Kesley drew his robe tighter around his sweating body and remounted his horse. The mutant ghetto seemed like a nightmare world, shifting in and out of reality almost at random, blurring into dream and then focusing sharply on hideous actuality. Without looking back, he spurred his animal and rode hastily out of the valley.

* * * * *

Somehow, the long week passed, and somehow Kesley endured it. Each day brought him closer to the audience with Winslow, when he would be called upon to act as assassin.

And he still had not a shred of plan.

Kesley's imagination had throbbed in constant feverish play all week, picturing and re-picturing the scene. Winslow--what did he look like? Suave and bearded, with dark tired eyes like Miguel's? Thin, pallid? Bloated?

It didn't matter. There was _a_ Winslow on the throne, faceless and personalityless, and surrounding him were blurred shadows of courtiers: a priest perhaps, a few generals in formal armor, men like that. Kesley saw himself kneeling in the Duke's long hall, rising to advance on nerveless legs to the throne--

Plunging a knife into the Ducal bosom.

Firing an echoing pistol shot as he rose from obeisance.

Leaping forward and throttling Winslow on the throne.

Actually, he knew, it would not be that way. A Duke had an eternity to lose at an assassin's hands, and would be expected to surround himself with protection. No one, not even Miguel, would place himself at the mercy of anyone begging audience simply for the sake of "amusement." There were too many years to be lost.

Yet Kesley's active mind continued to develop a multitude of alternative methods for the killing, and always the picture ended with the moment of death. He found himself unable to project the action past the actual assassination; the sequel escaped his mind completely.

Seven days passed and, on the eighth, Kesley and Duke Winslow were to come face to face.

On the morning of the final day, Kesley rose early. Sleep had been intermittent during the just-ended night, and he left his quarters wearily shortly after dawn. On foot, he wandered through the awakening city, in full regalia.

By now it was generally known that ambassadors from Miguel's court had been in Chicago for the past week, and he drew uneasy stares from the curious early risers. He walked on, down one cobbled street after another, smelling the early morning smells of fresh air and the fresh food offered in the stalls.

The bright sunlight was glinting off Winslow's palace, sending down showers of scattered light. _Winslow is awakening now_, Kesley thought. _For his last morning. After four centuries he's come to his final day._

Suddenly hungry, Kesley turned into a food shop that appeared a few feet away.

"Good morning," the proprietor said unctuously.

Kesley swung himself down into a booth without replying. After a moment, he looked up. "Coffee," he said.

"Certainly, _señor_."

The white-uniformed counterman seemed delighted to be serving one of the South Americans. He bustled out officiously from behind the counter and put the cup before Kesley.

He tasted the coffee. The synthetic beverage was tepid, slightly oily. Nevertheless, he forced himself to finish it, then sat broodingly in the booth staring at the gray film of dinginess that overlay the empty cup.

"Something else maybe, _señor_?"

"No--nothing," Kesley said. "I'm not very hungry."

"Too bad, _señor_. Has the trip north disturbed your appetite? The food you're accustomed to--"

_Damned chatterbox_, Kesley thought, irritated.

"My appetite is fine." He dropped a coin ringingly on the counter and walked out, into the warm, stale morning air.

Glancing around tensely, he let his hand slip to the hilt of his dagger. He caressed it absently for a moment, scowling. The minutes were crawling by like snails; the audience with Winslow would _never_ come.

Dispiritedly, he turned his steps back toward the hotel. The desk-clerk looked up idly as he entered.

"_Señor?_"

"What is it?" Kesley snapped.

"The man from Duke Miguel--have you seen him?"

"What man?" Kesley asked, puzzled.

"He arrived while you were out--a small man with a heavy mustache. His horse was nearly dead; he must have come in a great hurry."

Kesley frowned. He was expecting no one from Miguel. Hope flashed brightly: perhaps it was a last-minute reprieve for Winslow, and thus for Kesley. Perhaps, he thought, it was a cancellation of the assassination order!

"Where is he?" Kesley asked hurriedly.

The desk-clerk jerked his head upward. "He went upstairs. Oh, about ten minutes ago. I guess he's still there."

"_Gracias_," Kesley said. With sudden excitement he dashed up the stairs, threw open the door, and looked around.

No one was in the outer room of the suite. From within came no sound--not even the usual boisterous horseplay of his men. Cautiously, Kesley opened the inner door. Within, he saw Santana huddling over his breviary in his usual chair.

"Santana?"

There was no reply.

"Padre?"

The priest appeared to be totally absorbed in his reading. Annoyed, Kesley crossed the room and grabbed Santana roughly by the shoulder. The plump Archbishop spun limply, sagging backward as Kesley touched him, and dropped heavily from the chair.

Kesley paled. The red velvet of the Archbishop's robes was stained with a deeper red, already turning a crumbling brown. A knife had been thrust through the folds of fat that covered the priest's heart, and had found its mark. Santana had attained the martyrdom he coveted.

"Feliz! Domingo!" Kesley shouted. His voice sounded harsh, dry. "Luis! Where are you?"

He strode to the adjoining door and threw it open--and his men, as if they had been held back by a spillway, came pouring forth.

All six rushed out and, Kesley saw, there was a seventh with them, a small dark man who was apparently the courier from Miguel's court. Kesley leaped back and had his pistol and knife out almost before his mind was aware that he was under attack.

The gun barked. One man fell. The courier leaped forward, knife-blade high; Kesley sidestepped and ripped through the flesh of the man's back with a fierce downstroke. Turning quickly, he kicked a third man in the stomach, and backed toward the door.

They had no guns, but they outnumbered him six to one. Tossing his mantle to one side for greater freedom, Kesley chopped downward with the knife and drew blood again, while one of the grooms sidled toward him and slit his arm shallowly with a rapid lick of his blade. Kesley fired again, and the man fell.

Then he managed to bull out the door and down the stairs, with the five remaining South Americans thundering after him. At the first landing he paused to fire; a body tumbled toward him, and he caught the small man and wedged him crossways in the stairwell just as the other four approached. Kesley ducked as a thrown knife whizzed past his ear, and kept running.

He dashed out past the astounded clerk and into the courtyard. The hotel's ostler, a tall, bony old man with walrus mustaches, was puttering around Kesley's horse, rubbing it down with the tenderness a skilled groom would devote to a choice animal.

"Get out of the way, you idiot!" Kesley yelled as he entered the court. Bewildered, the old man looked up, smiling mildly.

"Your horse is not yet curried, sir, and--"

"Out of the _way_!"

Kesley shoved the oldster to one side just as the four swarthy assassins swept into the courtyard and swarmed toward him. The old man tottered and took a couple of staggering steps that led him straight into the path of the South Americans; Kesley, mounting the horse, winced sympathetically as they collided with him and threw him roughly to the ground.

But the delay allowed Kesley to mount his animal and, even without spurs, he was able to bring the horse under quick control. He wheeled it toward the onrushing assassins. The magnificent beast whinnied and plunged forward.

Surprised, the South Americans yielded before this frontal attack; one aimed a knife blow at the horse's flank, but Kesley's boot caught the man's face and sent him reeling away. Kesley charged through the straggling, disarrayed South Americans and out of the courtyard into the main thoroughfare.

He rode three or four blocks, then pulled up, gasping for breath, and guided the horse into a side-street for a moment. For the first time in the last six minutes, he had a chance to evaluate the situation:

Point: Santana was dead.

Point: his six men had turned against him, and only their stupidity and his agility had kept Kesley from sharing the Archbishop's fate.

Point: someone had arrived from Miguel's court shortly before.

Therefore, Miguel had changed his mind and had ordered the assassinations of Santana and Kesley. Or _had_ Miguel changed his mind? Perhaps this entire expedition had been a complicated way of wiping out a troublesome Archbishop?

Kesley's fingers quivered. Anything was possible--_anything_--when dealing with immortals.

"_Betrayal and betrayal again_," the mutant Lomark Dawnspear had prophesied. And the mutant had been right.

For one reason or another--or perhaps none at all, Kesley thought coldly--Miguel had betrayed him.

And the counter-betrayal? Kesley smiled. Fifteen minutes ago he had been steeling himself for the work of assassinating Duke Winslow. Now he would, rather, swear allegiance to him. The decision was made quickly, for Kesley saw it was the only path open to him.

He rode out of the shadows and onto the main stem again, moving cautiously as if expecting to see the four small Argentinians charging madly out of nowhere toward him. But they were not to be seen; the street was crowded with Chicagoans going about their morning business, and a sickly aura of heat was starting to descend as the August day edged toward noon.