Battleaxe: Book One of the Axis Trilogy. Sara Douglass

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СКАЧАТЬ had to spend the last long months of her pregnancy alone, lest her people force the child from her body. Now she wondered if the child would be as wondrous as she had first supposed, whether she’d made a mistake.

      She clenched her jaws against the discomfort and forced her feet to take one step after another through the snow drifts. She would manage. She had to. She did not want to die.

      Suddenly a strange whisper, barely discernible in the heightening storm, ran along the edge of the wind.

      She stopped, every nerve in her body afire. Her gloved hands pushed fine strands of hair from her eyes, and she concentrated hard, peering through the gloom, listening for any unusual sounds.

      There. Again. A soft whisper along the wind … a soft whisper and a hiccup. Skraelings!

      “Ah,” she moaned, involuntarily, terror clenching her stomach. After a moment frozen into the wind, she fumbled with the cumbersome straps holding the bundle of wood to her back, desperate to lose the burden. Her only hope of survival lay in outrunning the Skraelings. In reaching the trees before they reached her. They did not like the trees.

      But she could not run at this point in her pregnancy. Not with this child.

      The straps finally broke free, the wood tumbling about her feet, and she stumbled forward. Almost immediately she tripped and fell over, hitting the ground heavily, the impact forcing the breath from her body and sending a shaft of agony through her belly. The child kicked viciously.

      The wind whispered again. Closer.

      For a few moments she could do nothing but scrabble around in the snow, frantically trying to regain her breath and find some foot or handhold in the treacherous ground.

      A small burble of laughter, low and barely audible above the wind, sounded a few paces to her left.

      Sobbing with terror now, she lurched to her feet, everything but the need to get to the safety of the trees forgotten.

      Two paces later another whisper, this time directly behind her, and she would have screamed except that her child kicked so suddenly and directly into her diaphragm that she was winded almost as badly as she had been when she fell.

      Then, even more terrifying, a whisper directly in front of her.

      “A pretty, pretty … a tasty, tasty.” The wraith’s insubstantial face appeared momentarily in the dusk light, its silver orbs glowing obscenely, its tooth-lined jaws hanging loose with desire.

      Finally she found the breath to scream, the sound tearing through the dusk light, and she stumbled desperately to the right, fighting through the snow, arms waving in a futile effort to fend the wraiths off. She knew she was almost certainly doomed. The wraiths fed off fear as much as they fed off flesh, and they were growing as her terror grew. She could feel the strength draining out of her. They would chase her, taunt her, drain her, until even fear was gone. Then they would feed off her body.

      The child churned in her belly as she lurched through the snow, as if intent on escaping the prison of her poor, doomed body. It flailed with its fists and heels and elbows, and every time one of the dreadful whispers of the wraiths reached it through the amniotic fluid of its mother’s womb, it twisted and struck harder.

      Even though she knew she was all but doomed, the primeval urge to keep making the effort to escape kept her moving through the snow, grunting with each step, jerking every time her child beat at the confines of her womb. But now the urge to escape consumed the child as much as its mother.

      The five wraiths hung back a few paces in the snow, enjoying the woman’s fear. The chase was going well. Then, strangely, the woman twisted and jerked mid-step and crashed to the ground, writhing and clutching at the heaving mound of her belly. The wraiths, surprised by this sudden development in the chase, had to sidestep quickly out of the way, and slowed to circle the woman at a safe distance just out of arm’s reach.

      She screamed. It was a sound of such terror, wrenched from the very depths of her body, that the wraiths moaned in ecstasy.

      She turned to the nearest wraith, extending a hand for mercy. “Help me,” she whispered. “Please, help me!”

      The wraiths had never been asked for help before. They began to mill in confusion. Was she no longer afraid of them? Why was that? Wasn’t every flesh and blood creature afraid of them? Their minds communed and they wondered if perhaps they should be afraid too.

      The woman convulsed, and the snow stained bright red about her hips.

      The smell and sight of warm blood reached the wraiths, reassuring them. This one was going to die more quickly than they had originally expected. Spontaneously. Without any help from their sharp pointed fangs. Sad, but she would still taste sweet. They drifted about in the freezing wind, watching, waiting, wanting.

      After a few more minutes the woman moaned once, quietly, and then lay still, her face alabaster, her eyes opened and glazed, her hands slowly unclenching.

      The wraiths bobbed as the wind gusted through them and considered. The chase had started so well. She had feared well. But she had died strangely.

      The most courageous of the five drifted up to the woman and considered her silently for a moment longer. Finally, the coppery smell of warm blood decided it and it reached down an insubstantial claw to worry at the leather thongs of her tunic. After a moment’s resistance the leather fell open—and the one adventuresome wraith was so surprised it leapt back to the safe circling distance of its comrades.

      In the bloody mess that had once been the woman’s belly lay a child, glaring defiantly at them, hate steeping from every one of its bloodied pores.

      It had eaten its way out.

      “Ooooh!” the wraiths cooed in delight, and the more courageous of them drifted forward again and picked up the bloody child.

      “It hates,” it whispered to the others. “Feel it?”

      The other wraiths bobbed closer, emotion close to affection misting their orbs.

      The child turned its tusked head and glared at the wraiths. It hiccupped, and a small bubble of blood frothed at the corner of its mouth.

      “Aaah!” the wraiths cooed again, and huddled over the baby. Without a word they made their momentous decision. They would take it home. They would feed it. In time they would learn to love it. And then, years into a future the wraiths could not yet discern, they would learn to worship it.

      But now they were hungry and good food was cooling to one side. Appealing as it was, the baby was dumped unceremoniously in the snow, howling its rage, as the wraiths fed on its dead mother.

       Six weeks later …

      Separated by the length of the Alps and still more by race and circumstance, another woman struggled through the snowdrifts of the lower reaches of the western Icescarp Alps.

      She fell badly over a rock hidden by the snow and tore the last fingernail from her once soft, white hands as she scrabbled for purchase. She huddled against a frozen rock and sucked her finger, moaning in frustration and almost crying through cold and sad-heartedness. For a day and a night she had battled to keep alive, ever since they had dumped her here in this barren landscape. These mountains could kill even the fittest man, and she was seriously weakened by the terrible СКАЧАТЬ