The Rebellion (4 page)

The old cat was curled by my head in his usual position. “You were in my dream!” I beastspoke to him. “But you were much bigger.”

“Things are not always what they seem on the dreamtrails,” he sent composedly.

“I wish it were summerdays all th’ time.” Matthew’s voice came from a chair alongside the window. “I wish it were summerdays all th’ time.”

“Softly,” Rushton murmured. “You will waken her.”

“I’m awake,” I rasped. My mouth felt dry and furry.

Rushton turned on his heel to face the bed, and I could not see his face at all. After a momentary stillness, he crossed to a table, poured water into a mug, and brought it to me. I was careful not to let our hands touch as I took it from him. Lifting my head slightly, I drank a mouthful, then froze at a sudden vision of a knife spinning through the air toward me.

“What happened in Guanette?” he asked.

I reached up to touch my temple. There was a slight lump on my head but no broken skin. Odd. I explained the sequence of events in Guanette after Matthew’s departure, assuming he had told the rest. “The Herder’s acolyte threw a knife at me just as I mounted Zade,” I said at last. “The hilt must have hit me.”

I had thought the blade struck me. I even seemed to recall the feel of it cutting into me. Or had that been part of the dream?

“Who would’ve thought that weedy acolyte had such a throw in him,” Matthew marveled with what seemed to me tasteless relish. “It’s just lucky ye’d locked yer muscles in
place. Zade brought ye to th’ wagon absolutely frantic. I near died meself when I saw ye covered in blood. I thought ye were mortal wounded and raced back to Obernewtyn. It were only when I got ye here that I realized it were th’ gypsy’s blood on ye, fer ye’d nowt a scrape.”

Something in his description bothered me, but I could not pinpoint it. I sat up, wincing as a bolt of pain struck my temples. Instinctively, I set a suppressing barrier, a kind of mental net, to capture any hurt. It was a useful measure that enabled me to put off enduring pain. It was dangerous, however, to let too much pain build up.

The Healer guildmaster entered the chamber. “Is the gypsy all right?” I asked him.

“It is difficult to tell,” Roland answered gravely. “Because she lost so much blood, she is weak, but the problem is more that her body appears resistant to healing.”

I frowned. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Only a night. But you slept like the dead, if you will forgive the expression,” the Healer guildmaster added dryly. “Obviously, the blow concussed you, for there is only a slight abrasion at your temple. But you always did heal fast.” He let a little pointed silence form, reminding me that he still believed there was more to the healing of my scarred legs the previous year than I had told.

“Fortunately, it was not a serious wound,” he went on, “since your mind will not allow healing access. But I suppose you know that well enough.”

I hadn’t known. Since a healer’s talents required access to the unconscious levels of the mind, it must be some sort of instinctive reflex.

Roland shrugged. “Speaking of healing, you should be resting now.” He looked around at the others.

“I’m goin’,” Matthew said, rising. He looked down at me. “I’ll tell Alad yer awake. Gahltha is madder ’n hell that he was nowt with ye. He’s convinced ye’d nowt have been hurt if he were.”

“I hope he hasn’t blamed Zade for what happened,” I worried as the Farseeker ward departed.

Dameon came to the bedside, and as he bent to touch my hand, I kept a tight hold on my emotional shield, wary of the Empath guildmaster’s phenomenal Talent.

“I am glad you are safe, Elspeth,” he said in his soft tones.

I nodded, forgetting he could not see, but he did not wait for an answer, gliding from the room with the slow grace that was a sign of caution but that sometimes appeared to be an uncanny instinct guiding him in compensation for his blindness.

Roland glared at Rushton.

“A moment,” the Master of Obernewtyn said.

The Healer guildmaster shook his head in exasperation and moved away.

“You seem to go out of your way to try to get yourself killed,” Rushton admonished gently, pulling a chair to sit by the bed.

From this angle, a lantern on the far wall cast enough light to show me the craggy plains of his face, but it was not possible to make out his expression. Nevertheless, there was an intimacy in the moment that filled me with discomfort.

Maruman snorted derisively and curled back to sleep, for human emotions irritated his senses.

“I had no choice,” I told Rushton awkwardly, wishing Roland had not left us alone.

Rushton’s feelings for me had been distorted during a partial mindbond we had undergone during the battle for
Obernewtyn. Once, injured and delirious, he had called me his love. To my relief, he had not spoken of it since. Rushton had Misfit Talent, but it was latent, and I reasoned that his feelings for me were the same. Nearly suffocated already by his solicitude, I had no desire to face the restrictions that would surely arise from waking his overt affections. Besides, there was no room in my life for such things so long as I secretly awaited a summons from Atthis.

“You know, you talked in your sleep,” Rushton said.

My heart beat faster at the thought of what I might have said. “I dreamed. It made no sense.”

“You called out Ariel’s name.”

I heard again the dream—Ariel’s promise to kill me—and felt chilled.

“He can’t hurt us while he is locked up in the Herder cloisters as an acolyte,” Rushton said.

If
he is in a cloister
, I thought. That was what we had heard, but I could not believe that Ariel would have tied himself to an organization weakened by its estrangement from the Council. Ariel had always sought power, and a Herder acolyte would be little more than a lowly servitor for his masters.

“You said Jik’s name, too,” Rushton went on.

I felt abruptly depressed. “I dream of Jik often. I wonder what it means.”

“Too much death is all it means,” Rushton said sharply.

“That is the way of the world, and you have to accept it. What happened to Jik was not your fault, Elspeth. No one could stop a firestorm. You should not judge yourself so harshly.”

“I don’t,” I snapped. “My dreams judge me.”

“Well, what are dreams but tricks of the mind?”

“Are they?” I asked coolly. I was less convinced of that.
Sometimes dreams were gateways through which messages might come. Beasts called them
ashlings:
dreams that called.

Thunder rumbled again, and Rushton glanced back over his shoulder at the slanting gush of rain, just as a distant flash of lightning illuminated the clouds.

I took advantage of his inattention to turn the conversation to less personal matters. “Did Matthew make sure he wasn’t followed when he brought me back here from Guanette?”

Rushton turned back from the window. “The only person he saw leave was an older gypsy who rode hell for leather toward the lowlands. He is almost certainly the one who shot the arrows. I don’t know whether he had any interest in you, but fortunately, he did not try to track the wagon. Just the same, I will ask Gevan to have his coercers keep their eyes open so they can turn him aside if he does appear.”

“I’m surprised the other soldierguard didn’t come after me.”

“I expect the gypsy put an end to him and to the acolyte. The villagers are probably still arguing about who should report the whole thing. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had not even removed the corpses.”

“The queerest thing was how frightened the villagers were of the Herder. I thought the Faction had lost influence, but you would not have thought so to see them cowering.”

“I must send word to the safe house in Sutrium and ask Domick to investigate the relationship between the Herders and the Council. At his last report, they were still at odds, and I will be happier if that is still so,” Rushton murmured.

To my relief, he rose, his thoughts absorbed by these larger concerns. “I was thinking of sending someone down to make contact with the safe house anyway. Domick’s reports have
been 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 of
irritation. I glared up at the broad space between Rushton’s shoulders. As if he felt my gaze, he glanced back, but I let my eyes fall quickly.