his head.

As Kesley and his party proceeded through the heavy gate, Kesley grinned quietly to himself. He wished van Alen could have seen the strange metamorphosis of his one-time protege: here he was, clad in the lustrous velvet robes of a Knight of the Empire of South America, riding a full-blooded, spirited, Old-Kind horse instead of a swaybacked, scaly old mutant, and distributing largesse with the natural air of the high-born.

He entered the city proper at a slow canter, the Archbishop at his side, his men behind. The streets were crowded. Chicago, built on the very ashes of the Old City of that name, was the largest city of Duke Winslow's territories, home to some three hundred thousand souls. Kesley saw eyes brighten at the sight of his magnificent horse; men in the streets cleared back, giving way, as the South American party entered.

"We should find an inn first of all," the Archbishop advised. "Tomorrow, you and I will try to seek audience with the Duke."

Kesley shook his head. "We announce ourselves to the Duke at once; we tell him we'll have an audience tomorrow. None of this begging for an appointment."

Santana shrugged. "As you wish, Señor Ramon." The sudden, hard, sardonic inflection in the Archbishop's purring voice mocked the false title Miguel had bestowed on Kesley for the purpose of the journey.

Kesley rode silently on, brooding over his mission. He had agreed lightly enough, back in Buenos Aires, to the assassination of Winslow, but now that he actually was in Winslow's own capital, with the rosy bulk of the Ducal Palace towering ahead, he wondered how he could have acceded so casually to so dangerous and so terrible a mission.

The looming palace ahead was the nerve-center of a continent, and one man—one man—controlled the multitude of ganglia. The entire vast spread of North America, from the dismal radiation-roasted Eastern seaboard to the broad plains of the Middle-West farming country to the open, relatively unscathed lands of the far West, depended for its organization on Chicago and on Chicago's Duke.

For the first time, Kesley realized the immensity of the confusion that would result when he struck down Winslow. He had no motive for the crime, either; it would be a sheerly gratuitous act, performed as a gesture of disengagement and nothing more.

But what could Miguel's motive in upsetting 

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