“Wait—Veyt, listen to me!” Edris twisted his shoulders as the corporal and a pikeman dropped to their knees beside him and pinned his arms to the petrified root trunk. “That clause was written for a mind under compulsion! Nobody has compelled me—I am telling you in plain speech that the severing device is smashed and the old record is flawed!”
“Easy on his left leg, Corporal,” Veyt said, not unkindly, as if Edris were a feverish mule kicking in the traces. “Shock always sounds reasonable to the man in it. He’ll thank us when the work is finished.”
Edris stared up at the soldiers’ young, earnest faces holding his wrists against the stone bark. The helplessness in his chest was sharper than the grating bone in his hip. He had spent ten years teaching these recruits that any doubt near the relic was a trick of their own weakness or the enemy’s craft. He had built a machine with no lever for stopping from the inside, and now his own honest change of heart sounded to them like the exact symptom he had trained them to ignore.
The copper-braided net hissed through the lantern light and dropped over Pip’s back.
