The Rebellion (47 page)

“He must have had a true dream. He got aboard even before we did and settled himself to wait. He’s got old Powyrs twisted round his paw.”

Kella’s eyes shone. “I’m so glad he’s all right. Oh, Elspeth, maybe it’s true what Powyrs says about them being good luck.”

“ ‘Them’?” I asked, baffled. “Cats?”

She shook her head and beckoned, and I followed her to the edge of
The Cutter
. “Look out there,” she said, pointing.

I looked and was startled to see that the ocean was utterly still, stretching away like a mirror on all sides of us. Now I understood why my nausea had abated. Not a breath of air stirred the sagging canvas sails or rippled the glassy sea. We were so completely becalmed that a reflection of the ship and my face stared back with perfect clarity from the water. There was no sign of the coast, but Powyrs had explained to us the previous night that he would have to set a course directly away from land to begin with, in order to avoid the shoal beds clustered thickly in the sea between the Land and the Sadorian plains.

And then I saw three sleek, satiny, silver-gray fish, as big as grown men, propelling themselves high into the air, somersaulting, and plunging back into the water.

I gaped, astounded at their strength and agility.

“They have been known to save the lives of humans who fall from the deck,” Kella murmured.

“Good luck is right,” I said. “Good luck for the drowning seaman.”

I watched the strange fish leap out of the water as if they were moon-fair acrobats. They must be incredibly strong to lift themselves out of the sea like that, I thought. I had never tried to communicate with fish before, but some instinct told
me these might be capable of beastspeaking. The sea was utterly clear of tainting, and I could have tried, yet I found I did not want to. These lovely creatures were oblivious to the humans watching them, and I was content to have it so. Humans had caused so much sorrow for the beastworld; let these remain untouched.

“Ah, ship fish. They are nowt truly fish, you know,” Fian said, coming to stand beside me.

I jumped, for I had not heard him approach.

“Of course they are,” Kella said.

“They are warm-blooded, an’ they suckle their babes on milk after bearin’ them whole as humans do. An’ they need air.” He held up a thick book with a mottled green cover. “This book tells all about them. Ship fish are much like humans.”

“Are they descended from the merpeople?” Kella asked. She had become fascinated with accounts in Beforetime books of a race of humans with gills and fishtails who had dwelt under the sea.

Fian frowned. “I dinna know. This books says nowt of them, other than that ship fish were sometimes mistaken for them. It does say that Beforetimers had boats that would go under water.”

“Where the merpeople lived?”

Fian frowned at the healer. “I told ye, it doesn’t say. Perhaps this was written after they became extinct. Apparently, there were ruined cities under th’ sea.…” He looked down at the tome in his hand. “Powyrs has even more books in a trunk in his room, an’ he has told me I may look through them.”

“So many books,” the healer murmured.

“And all about th’ sea,” Fian said. “Enough for a lifetime’s
study, and I have only a few days.” He cast a final long look at the ship fish and turned to hurry back into the salon.

Kella shook her head. “Teknoguilders,” she said with faint disparagement. “How can he think of books when there is this to see?”

But a little later she grew tired of the ship-fish antics and went in.

I decided to climb up to the small upper deck, for it would give me a better view. It was piled with boxes, and I sat on top of one, dangling my legs and looking out at the sea. I had never known such stillness. It seemed to accentuate the vastness of the world and, in contrast, my own insignificance, but it was not an unpleasant feeling. In the face of this endless sea, I was no more than one of the ship fish, jumping in my bit of the ocean, making my little waves. There was a queer peace to be found in the thought, and I tried to draw the immense calmness into my heart to erase fear and anger and sadness.

My concentration was shattered by a muffled explosion of laughter.

“It tickles,” I heard a female voice giggle. I recognized Freya’s melodic voice and smiled, wondering whom she was with.

A moment later, I saw Rushton stroll to the rail, and my amusement evaporated.

Even as I watched, Freya stepped up beside him and shook her head, the springing golden curls catching and diffusing the morning sunlight into a pale halo.

Rushton appeared to be doing most of the speaking. Then he grasped Freya’s hands in his and stared into her face intently as if waiting for some response. Freya’s head was sunk as if in thought.

At last she nodded.

Rushton’s face suffused with joy. He flung his arms around her and hugged her tightly.

A terrible, savage pain clawed into my chest.

“You don’t know how much this means to me,” I heard Rushton saying as they moved toward the steep little stairs leading down to the main deck, obscured now by the sail. “I don’t want to tell anyone just yet. Let it remain our secret for now.…”

Their voices faded, and the pain in my chest intensified, spreading through my body like some exotic plague germ. The image of Rushton holding Freya in his arms seemed to have seared itself onto the inside of my eyelids so that I could see it even when my eyes were squeezed shut. I pulled my knees up to my chest and held them tightly, making myself into a ball.

“Rushton,” I whispered.

And who is she
? I thought bitterly.
Where did she come from, to steal him while my back was turned
?

I clenched my teeth, resisting sour envy. While my back was turned? No, Freya had taken nothing that belonged to me. What could it possibly matter that he had turned to her? There was no room for anything in my life but my quest to destroy the weaponmachines.

Perhaps that was what Maruman had been trying to say the previous night—that there would be nothing for me at Obernewtyn when my quest was over. Maybe this was the price I must pay—not just Obernewtyn, but Rushton’s love.

I took a deep, shaky breath and made myself look into the gray calmness of the sea all around me. The ship fish had departed.

I had not wanted Rushton’s affections or encouraged them. So why did it hurt so much to learn that they were lost to me?

It does not matter
, I thought fiercely.
My feet are already on the black road. It is too late to choose another, and this one I must walk alone
.

36

W
E WERE BECALMED
for two days, but by early afternoon of the third day,
The Cutter
was making up lost time, running before a stiff wind.

We were sitting in the salon, and Fian was describing the discovery of the Reichler Clinic to Daffyd.

Maruman stirred restively on my knee but did not waken. The others had taken his appearance with some equanimity, since they had only the day before learned of his loss. But I felt it was nearly miraculous to have him with me. It was Angina who pointed out that Maruman made us the thirteen that Maryon had predicted.

“Hard to believe you just stumbled on it,” Daffyd was saying.

“In a city so big? No, it was more than chance. I believe we were
meant
to find it.”

“After all, Hannah Seraphim was Rushton’s ancestor,” Kella added, her eyes shining. “Some things are meant to be.”

And some are not
, I thought, and was unable to stop my eyes from going to the table at the far end of the chamber where Rushton was talking with Hannay.

Why was it so hard not to look at him all of a sudden? Before this journey, I had done anything I could to avoid his gaze and his attention. I had refused his every overture, convinced that the force that sometimes crackled between us
arose from him, that my own feelings were no more than reactions to it.

But in this new life of pain, the knowledge that Rushton no longer loved me seemed to have released a tempest of conflicting emotions all my own. I could not believe he had endured what I now felt—this hard, painful burning in the chest, this ache in the belly and throat. How could this be love?

If it was, it was as bad as ever I had imagined it must be. I should think myself fortunate that Rushton had turned from me before what simmered between us had burst into flame.

I focused my eyes on Fian, wondering how soon I could reasonably retreat to my chamber again. Then his words caught my attention.

“It wasn’t until we had read a lot of the plasts that we realized what we had found wasn’t the Reichler Clinic after all,” he said.

“But we saw the name carved on the wall,” I protested.

He nodded. “We misinterpreted it. What we found was exactly what the sign said—a
reception center
for th’ Reichler Clinic. Nowt th’ place itself. Th’ real Reichler Clinic was where Garth always thought it mun be—in th’ mountains.”

“At Obernewtyn?” Kella asked breathlessly.

The teknoguilder shook his head. “Obernewtyn, or th’ building that stood there before
our
Obernewtyn, was likely th’ main residence for the Misfits. Th’ actual Reichler Clinic labs were almost certainly sited where the cave of the Zebkrahn now stands. We have long known some Beforetime building once stood there, but we little dreamed which building or that it—”

“Labs? For experimentation on the Misfits?” I interrupted with real horror.

“I dinna think the experiments run by the Reichler Clinic would have been harmful or dangerous,” Fian said. “Better to call them tests, as the plasts do. Hannah Seraphim would nowt have stood fer anything wrong. Fact is, we’re pretty certain she was what th’ Beforetimers called telepathic. In short, a Talented Misfit.”

I was surprised, though it was the obvious answer to why she had opened the clinic in the first place.

“This were kept a secret, along wi’ th’ names of those who came to be tested. Ye might say th’ Reichler Clinic we saw under Tor were a front fer an operation very like ours, or, I should say, it became so after Govamen began to stalk Talents.”

“I still don’t understand what they did with them,” Angina grumbled.

“There are indications, as Garth explained last guildmerge, that—”

“I know, they were trying to use them somehow for war-making. But how?” Angina asked.

“As to that …,” Fian began with some heat, but he stopped again and shook his head fractionally. “Well. We will know more of that when we unearth th’ clinic.”

“Unearth it?” I asked sharply. “Then the clinic was buried by the holocaust like the city under Tor?”

“No,” Fian said. “And nor was the city under Tor. Both were
originally
built under the earth.”

He let us clamor for a moment before going on with a rather smug expression. “Th’ upheavals are to blame for th’ flood waters, but no more.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why would anyone want to build a city under the ground?”

“Because of the whiteface.” Maruman’s sleepy thought
drifted into my mind. I looked down at him, startled. When he snored, I decided he must have been sending in his sleep.

“I suspect the Reichler Clinic was built under th’ earth so that it would be hidden. But we will know more once we have got into th’ lower levels of th’ caves.”

I thought of the tattoo on my arm, still hidden from the others in its bandage. Perhaps the Teknoguild had learned something more of what it meant. I would ask Fian about it when I had a moment alone with him.

Freya came into the salon, and I felt a wave of despair. Was this how it was to be? Every time I had begun to build a wall of calmness, it was to be shattered by the smallest thing? I half expected her to sit with Rushton, but she crossed to the galley and set about making up a tray of food.

On impulse, I touched Angina’s arm. “What is Freya’s story? How did she come to Obernewtyn?”

“She ought to tell you herself,” he said, and before I could stop him, he called out to her. I forced myself to smile as she approached, wishing passionately that I had kept my mouth shut.