The Rebellion Read Online Free

the safe house anyway. Domick’s reports havebeen scant of late, and he has sent no word yet about how our offer of alliance was received by the rebels. I will speak of it at the next guildmerge if I have no word from them by then.”
    Briefly, his eyes returned to me. “We will have to decide, too, what to do with your gypsy when she wakes.”
    “
If
she wakes,” Roland said, coming over determinedly. Rushton nodded and allowed himself to be ushered out.
    I lay back, weary and curiously depressed. Rushton had been right about one thing—there had been too much death. Grieving had drained the heart and soul out of me, and sometimes I felt as if all that was left of me was a pale, shadowy wraith. And now the gypsy might die, too. Well, I had known that even as I strove to save her.
    I looked out to the mountains, which were almost lost in the blackness of the stormy evening, and wished for the thousandth time that Atthis would call and that I might begin to live and act, instead of waiting.

3
    L ANTERN LIGHT GLIMMERED on patches of wet, black stone, dulling the pallid glow that emanated from a thick phosphorescent crust on the rock wall.
    Fian reached out and prodded gently at one of the scabbed mounds, and a cloud of glowing insects rose, exposing uneven patches of bare rock as they flitted away into the echoing darkness.
    “Do ye know these little beggars eat th’ holocaust poisons but are nowt poisonous themselves?” he murmured.
    I was startled at that but did not comment. There was no reason to be silent, yet the thought of the mountain of stone pressing down on top of the subterranean cave network seemed to compact the darkness and thicken it, leaving no room for words.
    I looked back, searching in vain for a glimpse of daylight, but even the rock shelf we were walking along vanished into the shadows a few steps behind. The teknoguilders had laboriously cut the ledge out of the cave walls, it was designed to run from the White Valley entrance, shaped by the flow of the upper Suggredoon River, around the cavern walls just above the level of the subterranean lake. In spite of the constant flow of water from the Suggredoon, the lake remained at the same level, because a steep channel offered an outlet through the other side of the mountain to the lowlands.
    The only other way to move about the caverns was by raft, poling between buildings and along the straight, narrow waterways that, leagues below, had been streets. Clusters of the strange, glowing insects that were the cave’s sole inhabitants lit segments of the stone walls and crumbling buildings, reflecting them in pale disconnected shimmers on the dark water, but the majority of the dead city and the caves that contained it were sunk in eternal night.
    As ever, I could not help wondering how the city had survived the shifts in the earth that had buried it under a mountain. How had the enormous dwellings, hundreds of floors high, not been crushed in the geological upheavals of the Great White? Was it yet another impossible feat of technology of the Beforetimers that kept the city intact?
    Or had fate saved the ancient city for some purpose of its own?
    I shivered.
    “This way,” Garth panted, an undercurrent of excitement in his tone. He moved along the path and around the perimeter of the ancient city with an energy and agility that belied the Teknoguildmaster’s bulk.
    Behind him came the Teknoguild ward, Fian, with Rushton and myself at the rear. We were moving in single file, because the ledge path was too narrow to walk two abreast. I stared at Rushton’s back, wondering what had possessed him to permit an expedition of guildleaders into the least accessible water caves. Ordinarily, he was violently opposed to our taking part in anything dangerous, considering us too valuable to be risked. Garth must have presented a compelling case.
    It would have been nice if either of them had thought to tell me what we were going to see, I thought with a flicker