"David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

He skied all night. At first, he had worried about the great
white bears that haunt the sea ice after the world has grown
dark. But even old, toothless bears were never so desperate or
hungry that they would stalk a human being through such a
storm. After many long moments of pushing and gliding, gliding
and pushing, he had neither thought for bears, nor for worry,
nor for anything except his need to keep moving through the
endless snow. The storm gradually built to a full blizzard, and
it grew hard to breathe. Particles of ice broke against the
soft tissues inside his nose and mouth. With every gasp stolen
from the ferocious wind, he became weaker, more delirious. He
heard Ahira screaming in the wind. Somewhere ahead, in the sea
of blackness, Ahira was calling him to the land of his new
home. 'Ahira, Ahira!' He tried to answer back, but he couldn't
feel his lips to move them. The blizzard was wild
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with snow and death; this wildness chilled him inside, and he
felt a terrible urge to keep moving, even though all movement
was agony. His arms and legs seemed infinitely heavy, his
bones as dense and cold as stone. Only bone remembers pain –
that was a saying of Haidar's. Very well, he thought, if he
lived, his bones would have much to remember. His eye sockets
hurt, and whenever he sucked in a frigid breath, his nose,
teeth, and jaw ached. He tried each moment to find the best of
his quickness and strength, to flee the terrible cold, but
each moment the cold intensified and hardened all around him,
and through him, until even his blood grew heavy and thick
with cold. Numbness crept from his toes into his feet; he
could barely feel his feet. Twice, his toes turned hard with
frostbite, and he had to stop, to sit down in the snow, bare
each foot in turn, and thrust his icy toes into his mouth. He
had no way to thaw them properly. After he had resumed pushing
through the snowdrifts, his toes froze again. Soon, he knew,
his feet would freeze all the way up to his ankles, freeze as
hard as ice. There was nothing he could do. Most likely, a few
days after they were thawed, his feet would run to rot. And
then he – or one of the City's shadow-men – would have to cut
them off.
In this manner, always facing the wind that was killing him,
or rather, always keeping the wind to his left, to the frozen
left side of his face, by the wildest of chances, he came to
land at the northern edge of Neverness. A beach frozen with
snow – it was called the Darghinni Sands – rose up before him,
though in truth he could see little of it. A long time ago
morning had come, a grey morning of swirling snow too thick to
let much light through. He couldn't see the City where it
loomed just beyond the beachhead; he didn't know how near were
the City's hospices and hotels. Up the snow-encrusted sands he
stumbled, clumsy on his skis. Once, he clacked one ski hard
against the other and almost tripped. He checked himself by