Rebel Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

daggers.
    Teulon waited.
    It was then that one of the pair in the shabby furs decided to act. A pulse pistol appeared in his hand, and he leveled it at Teulon's head.
    "Die, offworlder demon of—" The rest became a choked, liquid gasp as Teulon's dagger sank into his neck.
    Startled eyes moved from the hilt of the dagger to Teulon's face. No one had seen the Raktar move.
    A moment later the pistol hanging limp in the hand of the assassin went flying as Bsak landed on the traitorous emissary and dragged him down into the snow. Jlorra did not waste time toying with their food, and as Bsak fed, the remaining three outlanders looked away.
    The snow around their feet turned to pink, then red slush.
    Teulon walked past them and nudged the cat aside long enough to retrieve his dagger. He flipped the blood from the blade before it could freeze on the alloy, wiped it clean on the dead man's outfurs, and slid it back into his forearm sheath.
    "Hasal." Teulon walked toward the temporary shelter that had been erected for his use.
    Inside the Iisleg hunting tent, the heatarc's coils glowed amber through their distribution mesh. Hasal removed his gloves to warm his thin hands. "Ice eaters. They become bolder by the day."
    Teulon used a piece of cloth to clean the faint traces of blood still clinging to his blade. Iisleg blood was very thick and tenacious. "Desperation."
    "The most dangerous of men are. And these easterners—I know their kind." Hasal crouched to scoop clean ice into a melt pot and placed it on the cookmesh. "Even the ones who believe in the rebellion would rather kiss Kangal ass than fight. The Tos' bounty on your head has gone from extravagant to extreme."
    Teulon watched his second prepare a strong, dark infusion of tea plant and idleberry grown in skim-city greenhouses. The Iisleg were addicted to the drink, which was also their only source of certain vitamins, without which they suffered a form of scurvy. The ingredients were among the many foodstuffs he had taught them to grow over the last year in the abandoned amory trenches, now transformed into hydroponies labs, to supplement what could be produced from the synthesizers. "Deprivation consumes honor."
    "As you say, Raktar." Hasal filled a transparent server carved from clear airstone so as to resemble a "Are they ready?"
    Hasal nodded. "You have but to give the word." He tugged back his hood and fingered a tuft of pale hair over his right ear. There was a tiny, brittle snap, and he plucked a crushed insect from one strand and showed it to Teulon. "This is the soul of an eastern tribe, Raktar." He flicked the dead insect into the heatarc, where it was instantly vaporized. "Lice, all of them."
    Teulon drank some of the tea. Idleberry gave the infusion a fruit scent and a faint sweet taste, but not enough had been added to mask the intense bitterness of the tea plant. The Iisleg deliberately brewed it that way, Hasal had told him once, not to save the idleberry, but to remind themselves of the nature of life.
    The tea, like the outlander tribes, was an unpleasant necessity. He watched the light from the heatarc refract through the convoluted airstone, where it created the distorted image of a face trapped in glass. The mouth of the face yawned as if trying to gulp down the dark steaming liquid of the tea. "We need them."
    "We shall be blessed if they do not first barter us off to the Kangal." Hasal started to say something else before he dragged in more air and thought about it. "It is said that they make half their women skela in order to collect more worgald."
    Teulon had heard little but bad jokes and expressions of disgust toward the dead handlers. Iisleg collectively regarded them as little more than excrement with limbs. He personally had no use for them. "I do not want their women."
    "What if these men betray us?" Hasal asked.
    Teulon's fist contracted, and the airstone server shattered.
    One hundred miles to the east, Rasakt Deves Navn, headman of Iiskar Navn,