The Rebel of Rhada Read Online Free

and the occasional cry of alarm of some drugged or drunken warman awakened to his peril too late.
    The patrolmen paid no attention to these sounds of lawlessness. They were accustomed to them, and they had no desire to remain near the house of the warlock on the Street of Night.
    The warlock’s name was Kelber, and it was known that he lived under the protection of the new warleader of Sarissa, Tallan. But even without the warleader’s contemptuous protection, no patrolman would have disturbed the old warlock at his mysterious, sinful work. No Sarissan passed the crumbling stone house on the Street of Night without a thrill of superstitious horror and the sign of the Star in the air to ward off the warlock’s familiar devils.
    So the patrolmen, with unknowing irony, called the All’s Well and passed swiftly by. And within the house the cry went unheard, for the walls were meters thick. For a thousand years no house had been built on Sarissa that was not a fortress. The planet had a dark and bloody history, with a succession of savage kings and warleaders of which Tallan, called The Unknown because no man knew from whence he came, was only the most recent.
    The warlock’s workshop lay at the back of the stronghold, near a warren of storerooms that had once held weapons and food. The walls were crusted with white salts, for the house backed against the vast desolation of the Great Terminator Marsh, a bog that covered most of the land area of the planet’s single continent.
    Few Sarissans realized the extent of this immense marsh. Indeed, few Sarissans knew that their world was a sphere, an astronomical anomaly: the single planet of a dull red star.
    There was no sky on Sarissa. The cloud layer lay at ten thousand meters. In three thousand years, since the planet was first occupied by men, the clouds had never parted.
    The oxygen content of the air was low, and Sarissa had bred a brutish race of savage, slow-witted men from the original colonists who had come here, for God knew what reason, in the last years of the Golden Age.
    Within the old warlock’s laboratory, the walls were damp and the air cold. Strange, ancient machines crowded the floor. Books and fragments of old manuscripts were piled on tables and benches. Stuffed creatures from half a dozen worlds hung grotesquely from the vaulted ceiling. The room had a smell of age and decay.
    It could have been the workshop of any witch or warlock anywhere in the Empire, except that it was not lit with lamps or torches but by electricity.
    Heavy cables, the insulation checked and worn, snaked about the floor, eventually to vanish into one of the storerooms. This chamber was filled, from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with an astonishing collection of storage cells, batteries of every shape and size, scavenged by Kelber from half a hundred ancient mounds and ruins. The battered machines powered by this tangle of cables and batteries all carried the ancient Star blazon of the legendary First Stellar Empire. Magical devices, they were, built by the god-men of the Golden Age.
    Even with Tallan’s tolerance, the patrolmen would not have spared this room or its contents had they the courage to investigate it. In dread and panic, they would have put the old man to the sword and the house to the torch. Sin, the terrible power of darkness that had destroyed the Golden Age, was everywhere. But no patrolman had troubled Kelber since the new star king began to rule; besides, the old warlock was failing and growing feeble and half mad with age and disappointment.
    He crouched over a worktable now, consulting an ancient book, shaking his head and talking to himself. He limped from the book to one of the machines and made an adjustment with gnarled, arthritic hands.
    He was gray-bearded and dirty. He could not remember when he had last eaten, nor did he care.
    He wormed his way through the clutter to a half-formed, almost human thing sprouting wires and tubes that lay on a metal