The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [58]
Chel was on hands and knees and Rory was half-prone, half-struggling to disentangle the gun from his robe while suffering jolts of punitive pain. Chel could see how the torment of it made the muscles twist in the Human’s face. Suddenly there were shouts and sounds of weapons fire, then nearby flashes, streams of bright spikes. A broad shape flew out of the upper darkness and landed with a thud and a chorus of metallic whispers. The Humans recoiled, the mech charged, and Chel thought he saw Vashutkin fall back with blood on his face.
Chel grabbed a dazed Rory and got him to crawl over to the water-worn culvert that ran along the foot of the ravine. In the confusing darkness he misjudged its depth and they fell several feet into a shallow, muddy stream. Even as he landed, Chel felt another knot of pain in his gut widen and sharpen, as if a ghostly fist were tightening there, but before it could twist and intensify Segrana’s song smoothed it away to a murmur. Rory, though, was clawing at his chest, moaning. Chel got up unsteadily, noticed Rory’s beam pistol lying in the mud and kicked it off into deeper water before helping him to his feet.
They stumbled and splashed along the culvert, ducking when the rock sides became too low to properly conceal them. Fighting was still going on, stuttering bursts of gunfire, punctuated by an occasional loud thump. The aim was to cross into Glensturluson daughter-forest in the hope that some Uvovo still lived there, some scholars who could help him with Rory …
The Human was heavy and delirious, a clumsy burden to try and steer across muddy stones and fallen branches. At last they staggered out of the ravine and into the valley, finding a path away from the steep, rocky notch and the streamwater splashing down over slippery stones. The valley was a great gulf of muffling darkness amid which there was the speckled glowing mass of the Uvovo daughter-forest. The glow of blooms and vines entwined throughout made it look like a strange island afloat in the night, lit also by Uvovo lamps laid out in spirals and strings, a beckoning spectral beauty.
They were a dozen paces away when Rory gasped, doubled over and fell to his knees, clearly in dreadful pain. Chel wasn’t feeling much better – even this close to the daughter-forest, the pain from the implants was being ratcheted up. Now Rory was going into convulsions – Chel strove to reach for his talents, thinking to somehow dull the Human’s suffering, but another agonising wave cut through his innards, making his legs give way beneath him.
We cannot fail here! he thought. We’re so close …
Hands closed on his arms and legs. Fearing the worst, he began to struggle but then heard a voice say in Uvovo:
‘Be at peace, Seer – we wish to help.’
His people, the Uvovo, not Humans or servants of the Legion of Avatars. A sense of relief quivered through him … yet they wouldn’t know how badly he and Rory were afflicted. There was a specific course of action, a method of treatment which was the only way to counteract what had been inflicted upon them – he hoped they would not think him delirious when he had to persuade them. But as they carried him towards the forest’s edge a sapping exhaustion assailed him. He had to muster every shred of self-will to remain conscious, striving to stay alert as they at last crossed into the daughter-forest. Immediately the air seemed to taste sweeter and his senses awoke to the limpid ambience and the echoing song of Segrana, a comforting underharmony which tempted him to reach for his Seer talents. Yet he resisted, fearing that another lash of pain would finally put him under. Then a voice came at him from a distance, from beyond the forest’s edge.
‘Seer! – Seer Chel! Are