Читать книгу The Walking Shadow - Brian Stableford - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

He was crawling, dragging himself over jagged rocks and sills while a terrible wind lashed sand into his face and about his body, stinging and scourging. He had been crawling for a long, long time, and exhaustion made every movement difficult.

In and behind the wind there was another force: a sluggish but relentless current, which tugged at something inside him.

He hooked his bleeding fingers over sharp spurs of rock and hauled himself forward, his legs dragging and barely able to push at all. The hot sand swirled over his bare forearms, stirring the fine blond hair.

He felt as if he was aging, the years coursing through his body as he headed for the night of time. He knew that he had a destination but he did not know what or where it was, or even that he was going in the right direction, although he had to believe that he was, for without that belief he would simply have stopped and died. He felt that the current plucking at his soul was carrying his goal away from him, bearing it into the mists of eternity, which were forever inaccessible, but still he kept himself moving, still he would not yield.

He had seen glimmering lights above the horizon from time to time, but they were gone now, faded into a draining twilight that cast wan shadows beneath the serrated ridges of bone-white rock. Perhaps they had never been anything more than mirages, shimmering in layers of air undisturbed by the fierce wind that attacked him down here in the valley.

Night came, but still he struggled. The wind of time would bring day again, and then the night, but there was no relief from the heat and the sand and the sharp stone spurs which had already begun to lacerate his fingers. His fingers, though, did not pause in their grappling, and he was almost grateful for the ridges which allowed him purchase to drag himself along.

Beneath his body something was slithering: something massive, conjoined with the substance of the desert itself, an essence or a spirit within the rock. Because it slithered he named it a snake, but it had no form as yet.

The snake cradled him in its shapeless coil, ready to engulf him when the desert gave it birth.

His movements grew fevered and desperate as the need to rest grew within him. He knew that he must not stop, that sleep would be fatal, but even the fear of sleep spread a numb drowsiness through his lean frame. His arms jerked spasmodically as the muscles corded and cramped momentarily.

After one last agonized heave, he was still, face down against the slithering scaliness of the desert’s skin.

The current ceased to grip him. The slithering ceased. A brief, fugitive instant of panic was lost in a swirl of time and space.

With the most delicate of emetic shudders, the other world spat him out.