Dinner at Deviant's Palace (36 page)

The stairs leading up to the catwalk were already jammed with denizens of Dogtown, and it took two burly soldiers to keep them off the catwalk. Every few seconds one of the people fell, flailing and perhaps screaming, down into the crowd.

One soldier was shouting down through a bullhorn.
“Get away from the wall!”
he was yelling.
“There is nothing to see! They are still across the river, at least a mile away! The device they’ve got is
not
a cannon! Repeat,
not
a cannon!”

Then Rivas saw several of the wall-top soldiers stare in sudden startlement out to the east—and a couple of seconds later a section of the wall to his right exploded, the flying stones knocking down people and shacks and then the boiling dust-cloud considerately veiling the view of splintered wood, broken stone and torn flesh.

Rivas felt a flicker of wild elation, the breezy sunshine feeling again, as the wash of sour dust blew over them and he inventoried what he had with him: his pelican, some pocket change, and a girl who wanted—of all the unheard-of things—to share his life.

He gave her a wild, challenging grin. “Leave by the Dogtown gate?”

She grinned back in sheer delight. “High time.”

Hand in hand they ran forward, and hopped and clambered and slid over the tumbled masonry, coughing in the dust and the acid smell of broken stone, and then, out in the sunshine, they ran down the slope toward the river and the abandoned boats.

Tim Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including
The Anubis Gates
,
Declare
,
Hide Me Among the Graves
, and
On Stranger Tides
, which was adapted for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same title. His novels have twice won the Philip K. Dick Award and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and three times won Locus Awards. Powers lives with his wife, Serena, in San Bernardino, California.

Serena Powers

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1985 by Tim Powers

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4804-3429-5

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com