The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [56]
The Human Rory was even less able to resist the crushing torment than Chel and had surrendered to the demand for obedience. Back at the start, Chel had been able to sense Rory’s state of mind with his Seer talents, but before long the implants began punishing any use of them with terrible jolts of pain up and down his spine. At some point, during a period of semi-aware delirium, they sealed shut his Seer eyes with some kind of sticky strip but he managed to quickly put it out of mind.
On they walked, along a path half-overgrown by bushes and long grass still wet from a recent shower. The light was fading into evening greyness and an odd hush hung in the air. The baggy dun robes they wore were dark with dampness from the knees down. Ahead the narrow valley widened and steepened and the undergrowth grew thicker, merging further on with the outlying bushes and trees of a dense forest. More trees dotted the valley sides, jutting from tangled, creeper-wound foliage. The cold, clean sharpness of the air was refreshing after days confined within the metal walls of the autofactory. Chel caught odours of leaf and twig, of rain-speckled blooms and damp earth, all mingling into a song that his senses remembered, a song of life and renewal, the long sweet song of Segrana …
He stumbled slightly – and was abruptly, frighteningly aware of where he was. The great mass of trees and intertwined growth up ahead was Glensturluson, one of Darien’s seven daughter-forests, havens of the green spirit of Segrana, seed nurseries for the near-countless plant varieties brought from the moon, Nivyesta, repositories of ancient memories and their echoes. Chel could almost hear them calling …
A hand grasped his shoulder and pushed.
‘Keep moving.’
Without realising it he had stopped dead in his tracks. Fearful, he started walking again.
‘I’m watching you,’ said Rory. ‘I was told to watch you in between watching my host, and to watch for weakness. So remember, I’m watching.’
It was Rory’s voice yet not Rory. After the Human’s sense of self was dismantled by the Legion Knight’s machinery of pain, a twisted lie was smashed into his thoughts. Desperate fear of punitive agony made him cling to that lie, which said that he too was a Knight of the Legion of Avatars whose intellect had been transferred to a Human in order to carry out a vital mission. The implants fed him a stream of background conversations, as if he were overhearing exchanges between other units of the Legion, and messages from Knights and Hunters who were supposedly old friends and battle comrades. The lie was gross, but it offered freedom from torment.
As they trudged along the path, Chel could feel the weight of the beam pistol swinging in one of the robe’s inside pockets. They knew their targets. Chel was to kill Vashutkin, and Rory was to kill someone called Gideon. That would be the signal for the combats mechs to spring the ambush, surging in from either side of the valley. He was ready to do it and knew he would have to do it or risk an agonising onslaught worse than any memory.
Often he had dreamed about taking his own life, but the implants were sophisticated enough to detect certain movements and stress signs and to administer discouraging spikes of pain. And there was always the possibility that the Legion Knight himself was monitoring their performance.
They were just drawing level with the daughter-forest’s lower tree line when Chel heard rustling sounds behind them. Half-turning, he saw two Humans in camouflage rise up from the undergrowth, even as a third appeared in front