One of the bandits fired. The forest was illuminated briefly by the flash of gunpowder, and Kesley thought he heard something like a grunt of pain, followed by a frantic threshing in the underbrush. "I got him," a voice said. "What of the other one?" "We have him here." "_Muy bien!_ Don Miguel will be glad to see him." Kesley was lifted to his feet. Dimly, he saw five men guarding him, and a sixth crouched a few feet away with his hand clapped to a raw knife-wound in his shoulder. Efficiently, the bandits roped his arms to his sides. "I have a safe-conduct from Duke Miguel," Kesley protested, as they hustled him out of the copse. One of the bandits snorted derisively. "Safe conduct? Pah! Don Miguel gives no safe conducts!" "But--" They were in the open now. There was no sign of van Alen or of van Alen's horse. The six small ponies of the bandits were grazing in a wide circle; near the edge of the copse lay the two horses van Alen's blaster had brought down, and a few feet away were the sprawled, blackened corpses of the two dead bandits. The night was silent. Even the birds had ceased their harsh noise. Kesley tensely allowed himself to be tethered to a pommel. "Where are you taking me?" he demanded. The bandit leader chuckled, showing a set of gleaming teeth. "Buenos Aires. The capital of Duke Miguel, no? Miguel is collecting _norteamericanos_ this week!" III As well as being the chief city of Argentina Province, Buenos Aires was a Ducal capital--the first such city Kesley remembered having entered. He knew the names of the others: Chicago, Tunis, Johannesburg, Stockholm, Canberra, Strasbourg, Kiev, Hankow, Calcutta, Manila, Leopoldville. They were strange and alien names; to him, abstract symbols of Ducal power rather than concrete geographical localities. It was easy to see that this was Miguel's abode. The walls of the city bristled with dark-skinned riflemen in blue shorts and gold brocade, zealously guarding their Immortal's city against armed attack. Standing outside the city walls, Kesley could see, looming above the blocks of low, grubby buildings, the arching sweep of Don Miguel's palace. A gleaming spire almost a hundred feet high topped the vaulted building, which looked down upon the nest of small houses clustered around it as a giant would upon worms. There seemed to be a jam-up at the gates. Traffic was heavy at a Ducal capital. All around him, swarthy men on burros or horses or stubby piebald mutant beasts waited patiently to be admitted. Most of them were clad in broad-brimmed _sombreros_ and colorful _serapes_; Kesley grinned wryly at that. South America was an unchanging microcosm. Beneath the friendly sky, life, frozen always in a stasis of todays, moved on slowly, with _manana_ never quite arriving.