It was that fact which George had been shunning these past fourteen days. Life was fragile. Friendship the same. Before parting, he and Orry had pledged that the war would never sunder the bonds between them. In this night's remembered ugliness, shrieks of pain, geysers of fire, George wondered whether they were naive. He felt, almost wildly, that he must do something to reaffirm his dedication to defending the ties.

He stabled his horse and went directly to Belvedere's library, a vast room with smells of leather and fine book papers. It was as silent as the night house.

When he crossed toward his desk, he spied a memento always kept on an otherwise bare refectory table. It was a conical object, rough-textured, measuring six inches from apex to base. The dark brown color indicated heavy iron content.

He realized why it had attracted his eye. Someone — a maid, probably — had moved the object from its customary position. He picked up the meteorite and continued to hold it while he envisioned the place in the past where he'd found it — the hills around West Point during his cadet days.

What lay in his hand was a piece of a much larger meteorite that had traveled through starry dark, and distances beyond his power to comprehend. Star-iron, the old men of the trade — his ancestors — called it. Known since the pharaohs ruled the Nile kingdoms.

Iron. The most potent stuff in the universe. The raw material for building civilization, or leveling it. From iron came the immense death weapons George planned to cast for a whole battery of reasons: patriotism, hatred of slavery, profit, a paternal responsibility for those who worked for him.