"Let's go take a look."
We picked our way down the slope, came up along a rutted dirt road to the dark line of trees that rimmed the palace grounds. The old man touched my arm.
"Softly here. Maybe the Troll sleeps lightly...."
I went the last few yards, eased around a brick column with a dead lantern on top, stared across fifty yards of waist-high brush at a dark silhouette outlined against the palace lights.
Cables, stretched from trees outside the circle of weeds, supported a weathered tarp which drooped over the Bolo. The wreckage of a helicopter lay like a crumpled dragonfly at the far side of the ring. Nearer, fragments of a heavy car chassis lay scattered. The old man hovered at my shoulder.
"It looks as though the gate is off limits," I hissed. "Let's try farther along."
He nodded. "No one passes here. There is a second gate, there." He pointed. "But there are guards."
"Let's climb the wall between gates."
"There are sharp spikes on top the wall. But I know a place, farther on, where the spikes have been blunted."
"Lead on, Pop."