good to his word," the Duke said gruffly. "You have a witness in the person of the Archbishop."

"Surely you will not require the Duke to swear an oath?" Santana exclaimed in a shocked voice. "My presence will certify—as if certification were necessary—that—"

"Enough, padre," Kesley said. There was nothing to be won by forcing Miguel into an oath; he had already given his word as an Immortal, and if he would break that, it was reasonable to suspect that no other oath would bind him.

He looked at the girl again. Daveen's daughter, he thought. He wondered what tangled relationship of cause and effect had brought him to this place at this time, and where van Alen, who had set the whole chain of events in motion, was now.

In a month's time Kesley had been transformed from an ignorant Iowa farmer into a killer of Dukes and a wooer of noble ladies. It was a strange progress, but it was hopeless, Kesley thought, to try to account for the vagaries of fate.

"Will you accept and enter my vassalage?" Miguel asked.

Kesley met the Immortal's gaze squarely and this time, it seemed to him, it was those dark, four-hundred-year-old eyes that gave ground instead of his own.

"I accept," he said.

He forced himself to kneel and kiss the golden hem of Don Miguel's jeweled cloak.

V

The ducal capital of Chicago sprawled in a lazy ring on the banks of Lake Michigan, in Illinois Province. As Dale Kesley and his small retinue waited outside the city's walls before requesting admission, the thought occurred to him once again that the world's cities were similar. As he looked at Chicago, it seemed to him that he might never really have left Buenos Aires.

Duke Winslow's palace, visible high in the background overlooking the calm lake, might have been an exact replica of Don Miguel's, except that its flat walls were hewn from broad slabs of flesh-red feldspar instead of spun, as Miguel's were, from shimmering polyethylene. In the stagnant, late-August air, the sun's rays hit the palace walls weakly, giving them an oily glare that Kesley found displeasing. But still he preferred the natural blockiness of the stone to the consistent slickness of the plastic that formed the walls of Miguel's palace. Polyethylene walls were the products of controlled hard 

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