The Ascendant Stars (18 page)

I’ll remember you, boy. I’ll fight to keep the memory of you
.

‘I am so sorry,’ he said.

Solvjeg made a soft, sad shrugging motion. ‘He’s still in my heart. He’ll always be with me, Theo, so let’s leave this place. It’s getting cold.’

Wordlessly, he nodded and led them up and out of the darkening valley.

Robed and hooded, he walked along the valley side, and it was the walk of one whose every movement threatened to unleash pain. The memory of pain was in him, so fresh, so near, so clear that his terror of it made him want to fall down and curl up, but Chel knew how severe his punishment would be so he kept walking. He couldn’t escape the pain or its memory (pain like razor claws hot from the fire, tearing through his throat, his neck, his bowels), yet he had to and the only avenue that offered the slightest chance of it was to obey the commands of the Knight of the Legion of Avatars, perfectly, without hesitation, down to the last detail.

Rory was walking behind him. Chel was glad that he couldn’t see the Human’s face, glad that he wouldn’t be reminded of his failure, his capitulation, his guilt. Just after they were captured, just a few days ago (Was it five days or six? Seven? Longer?), when they were imprisoned within the autofactory, the spectral Pathmaster had appeared and urged him to embrace the machine-nature in order to defeat it. And at first he had thought it possible that he could conceal his intentions from the Legion Knight but the relentless cycles of drugs and pain conditioning made such plans and intentions meaningless. The implants that tapped into his feeling-paths could create agonising pain anywhere in his body. Under their impact, his conscious sense of self fractured and sank beneath the desperate need to avoid that colossal, mind-wrecking pain.

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 of them. All were pointing long weapons at them.

‘Identify yourselves,’ said the man in front, a nervous youth.

‘Just a second,’ said one of the others, who went over to Rory and pushed back his hood. ‘Ja, I thought so – you are Rory McGrain, aren’t you? I saw you back at Tusk Mountain before you went missing.’ He looked over at Chel. ‘And you’ll be the Uvovo Seer, Chel – I saw you once before with that headband over those eyes.’

‘Yes,’ said Chel, ‘that is who we are.’

‘Aye,’ said Rory. ‘We were caught by … the Brolts, but we escaped.’

‘You’d best be coming with me,’ said the older scout. ‘I’ll take you both to meet Mr V and the captain. Paul, Gennady, you spread out and carry on down the valley.’

The sky above the line of ridges and peaks to the west was a clear if fading blue, but a hazy dusk was already settling into the valley when they reached a steep southward ravine a little later. Here at the head of the valley, the daughter-forest loomed tall and dense, and only twenty paces from the path, a place of mist and shadows but also where soft glows and glimmerings were visible through the branches. Chel could feel its presence and hear that echo of Segrana’s song insinuating its way into his senses. Fear gave him the strength to shut it out.

The darkness of the ravine was relieved only by the few ineka beetles crawling along low branches and the occasional cluster of ulby roots wedged into a dripping notch in the ravine wall. A line of tall Human figures came towards them, towering over Chel, one or two holding lamps angled downwards, others wearing strange goggles with tiny bright dots on their sides. Moments later they were brought before a knot of long-coated Humans. By the light of rod-shaped torches Chel recognised the bearded features of Vashutkin, the Rus politician, his target. He fingered the solid shape of the beam pistol hanging in the inside pocket.

‘Rory!’ said Vashutkin in surprise. ‘Good to see you again, my friend. It has not been so happy without you, and the Seer Cheluvahar.’

Another man stepped into the light, not as tall as Vashutkin but wearing some kind of body armour beneath the waterproof.

‘I am Captain Gideon,’ he said in oddly accented Noranglic. ‘I command the Tygran volunteers—’

‘For which we are eternally grateful,’ Vashutkin said with irony.

‘—and I am concerned about what awaits us east of the valley mouth.’ The Tygran’s gaze swung between them. ‘What can you tell us?’

For a second Chel expected Rory to come out with a bland denial of all knowledge, but Rory was fixed on Gideon with an unwavering stare. Chel broke the lengthening silence.

‘After escaping from the mechs, we reached the valley by gullies and mountain paths. We never went down to the coastal plain.’

‘I’m curious,’ Vashutkin said suddenly. ‘Just how did you escape?’

Chel met the Human’s gaze across the torchlit space and saw a cold intensity that had not been there before.

He knows
, Chel thought with an abrupt certainty as fear made his chest feel hollow and nauseous.
He knows what we are
. But fear was not the only sensation coursing through him for beneath it he felt and heard the song of Segrana, calling from the forest.

‘The machines kept us in an enclosure of invisible powers,’ Chel said, still holding Vashutkin’s gaze. ‘But last night, during a heavy raindown, one of their devices failed. The machines were frozen, the enclosure was gone so we ran … ’

Or does he really know? I have to kill this man and Rory has to kill the one called Gideon but
…
but there is something important about him
…

‘Luck,’ Vashutkin said. ‘Always useful to have … ’

But now Rory had the gun in his hand, although still enfolded beneath the baggy robes. Chel moved to his side.

‘Rory, friend, you’re looking weary … ’

And without realising it he reached into his mind and opened the Seer talents while raising a hand to grasp Rory’s upper arm. The Human glanced round at him in fury and was about to speak when the talent flowered. Rory’s eyes unfocused and he staggered. Simultaneously a spike of pain drove down into the right side of his head, a hot needle cutting through his eye socket and the cheek and jaw, then lancing down his neck and into his chest. It blinded him for a moment and reduced all voices to muffled, anxious babble. But the song of Segrana sounded sweet, surging strong and pure. Another spear of agony burst in his chest yet it was dulled, blunted and faded.

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 you there?’

The procession of helpers had reached the crest of a hilly rise within the forest. At Chel’s request they paused so that he could peer back down through the branches and the foliage. A figure stood there, just visible in the meagre radiance that filtered through, a tall Human figure, bearded. It was Vashutkin.