"Sara Douglass - The Axis Trilogy 1 - BattleAxe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

of his could be an abomination.
She'd 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