The Rebel of Rhada Read Online Free PDF Page A

unmoving, listening to the unnatural stillness. Then he touched the old man’s throat, feeling for a pulse that no longer throbbed.
    He picked up the warlock’s body as though it weighed nothing and carried it to a straw pallet in the corner. He did not give it another glance.
    Next he moved to the unfinished cyborg on the rack. He drew a blade of god-metal from his harness and swiftly opened the head. From the bloodless cavity, he took an oval object trailing hundreds of hair-thin wires. He cracked it open against the edge of an electrical cabinet. Inside the oval, racing through a maze of printed circuits and crystals, a tiny light flickered. He reversed his dagger, and using the pommel, he crushed the contents of the brain-egg. It took a long while, but presently the light faded and died out completely.
    He dropped the two halves of the cyborg’s brain onto the stones of the floor and ground the crystal and plastic to bits beneath his heel. “Sleep long, brother,” he murmured with an ironic half-smile.
    He sheathed the dagger and drew his great sword of god-metal. For several minutes he walked methodically from one wired cabinet to another, smashing dials and controls, overturning equipment racks, savaging wiring until it hung in useless tangles from the ancient machines. In moments he destroyed the work of half a lifetime.
    When he had finished, he turned to the book-laden tables, overturning them, spilling sheaves of priceless old manuscripts and diagrams over the flagstones. Then he took flint and god-metal from his pouch and struck a fire. When it was burning well, he smashed the light globes so that the room was illuminated only by the spreading flames, splashing and dancing on the old walls.
    Without looking back now, he walked through the burning room to the doorway. He paused, listening. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he let himself out into the Street of Night, under Sarissa’s dull and sullen sky. He carefully closed and locked the door behind him.
    He was at the citadel walls before he heard the alarm being spread in the city. When he turned to look, the flames were dancing and sparking over the housetops. He listened to the growing uproar in the streets for a long while, feeling the strange emotion that was, for him, the counterpart of human satisfaction.
     
     

3
     
    Nyor, Nyor, city of sin
Dance with the warlocks
Let troubles begin
There they will gather the witches and kings
There let them be when the tocsin bell rings.
    From the Book of Warls, Interregnal period
     
    Despite the destruction of the civil wars that shattered the First Empire and the repeated sackings of the capital during the dark time of the Interregnum, Nyor remained the greatest city on the home planet of the galaxy’s only star-voyaging race. Glamiss Magnifico, though a native of Vyka, believed the ancient proverb: Who rules Nyor rules Earth. Who rules Earth rules the stars. Thus Nyor became, after the Battle of Karma, the personal holding of the Vykan Galactons and the first city of the Second Stellar Empire.
    Nv. Julianus Mullerium, The Age of the Star Kings, middle Second Stellar Empire period
     
    Torquas Primus, Galacton, King of the Universe, Protector of the Faith, Defender of the Inner and Outer Marches, Commander of the Starfleets, Lord of Nyor, and Hereditary Warleader of Vyka, had a cold.
    His eyes itched and burned; his throat was sore and his nose red and liquid. He was absolutely convinced that he burned with a high and possibly dangerous fever, despite assurances from his doctors that he was discomfited-- nothing more.
    Young Torquas had been cross all day, depressed and confined by his illness and by the rain that had been drenching Nyor for a week. The city, perched on its huge tel, seemed to huddle in the inclement weather. The boats on the river were docked and covered against the rain, the four million Nyori kept to their houses (for they had a superstitious dread of rainfall that dated back to the dawn of