The Destroyer Book 4 (62 page)

I considered attacking Telaxthe, but it was futile. Even if I managed to kill her before Yillomar or Fehalda could intervene, I would soon be butchered by her other soldiers.

“If you call forth your armor, we are prepared to take you down. I will sacrifice every warrior here if it means you will be driven from this world. You cannot win, Kaiyer.”

She reached behind me and grasped my neck. Her nails dug into my flesh and our eyes met. I gritted my teeth against the pain, but the cuts were nothing compared to the disappointment that churned in my stomach. I was a fool to doubt her prowess. With one risky ploy, she found the location of the Radicle, killed an O’Baarni clan leader, and ensured my capture.

Now I would pay for underestimating her.

Lightning struck through the air, dawn in an instant. I was already crouched, crawling through the bushes beside the swollen river, my nose filled with the scent of burnt vapor. I lay flat on my side for the roar that followed the burn. It was hard to hear anything over the torrent of the rain, the scream of the river, and the crash of the thunder, but I did not hear my pursuers raise any alarm.

I risked a glance through the hail-beaten juniper bushes, but the night was so black and terrible that I saw nothing save a few feet of torrential rain. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, and I couldn’t smell anything through the storm that seemed to follow on the cloaks of the O’Baarni hunters.

Lighting flashed again and the world was lit with a sharp clarity. There were more than a dozen armored figures spread out within six hundred feet of me. There could have been more, the forest was thick with pine trees and bushes that obscured my view in the darkness of the night and the storm.

I lay back down against the frigid mud and the ice-cold granite. The hopelessness of my situation crashed into me harder than the pebble-sized hail that the rain had just turned into. There were too many. I was trapped. I wished Kaiyer were here, but thinking of my lover only made me tremble against the chill of the storm.

If they were here, then it was obvious why he was not.

I should just stand up and fight. The World would warm my blood like a hundred fires and I’d kill at least five of the fuckers before the rest could butcher me. It would be my preferred way to die. Death through battle would be quicker than whatever torture and punishment they had in store for me.

I felt the kick from within my womb and sighed. If I were alone, I could die. I had never much enjoyed this world anyway, not without Kaiyer.

Though he was dead, I wanted our child to live.

I dug through the mud at my feet and separated out the gravel. Then I applied the liquid dirt to my hair for the tenth time. I prayed to the Dead Gods that this mud would keep the light off of my mane and increase my chances of escape. I had no plan other than crawling away undetected. Suddenly an epiphany struck me like the lightning bolts that darted through the sky.

The baby kicked again. At least crawling on my elbows and knees took some of the pressure off of my spine and bladder. As if escaping the O’Baarni while huge with child was not difficult enough, the creature in my womb liked to sit right on my fucking intestines and rest its head on my bladder and I had to relieve myself every ten minutes.

After a few dozen yards of scraped knees and numb arms I began to fantasize about being in my father’s house with Relyara. Once there were hot baths. Warm meals of fresh food. Foot and back massages from my lover. Fuck, even the porcelain toilet occupied my mind with a feverish intensity. I really wanted to urinate again and for more than half a minute I was tempted to just squat down right behind this bush and allow the O’Baarni to find me if it meant I could be relieved of the pressure on my bladder right now.

My stomach pounded angrily again and I moaned. I almost decided to surrender, but my hand slipped on an ice-slick rock and I was sent spinning down an avalanche of mud, rocks, and roots. My hands reached out to grasp onto anything but found no purchase. As soon as I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to stop my descent into the river I curled myself into a tight, frozen ball around my stomach and prayed again that I didn’t land on a boulder when I fell.

I felt a sudden sensation of weightlessness and then I lost all perception of sight, smell, and sound. I was in the frigid water, safe from the hail, but colder than I could ever remember being in my entire life. The water was swift, angry, and it only took the torrent a few moments to realize that I was at its mercy. Once it did, the river slammed me into a boulder. I felt my shoulder break from the impact and I did finally scream. My face was underwater, so I doubted the sound reached my O’Baarni pursuers, but the shriek managed to let a few bottles worth of water into my lungs and breathing suddenly became the most urgent of my priorities.

I couldn’t tell where the surface of the river was, so I picked a direction and kicked my legs with as much strength as I still had left in my exhausted body. I breached the surface and took a panicked breath before the current yanked me back down into the darkness and spun me around like a top. Then I smashed into another boulder and felt my right knee break.

I was going to die here in this dark water. If there was an afterlife with the Dead Gods, perhaps Kaiyer would also be there. Perhaps our baby would come with me and we could both see it together for the first time.

At least its death would deny the dragons what they wanted. Their mirrored black scales reminded me of the dark water that tore at me. I never should have made a pact with such evil. I should have known they would betray me and attack against my wishes.

They wanted my child. They would not have it.

I found the surface again somehow and another strike of lightning revealed the outline of the river for half a second. Up ahead, the middle was deep and devoid of obstacles. To my left, a felled tree hung over a bridge of wicked boulders. If I could navigate the gaps in their teeth and grab onto the tree without being impaled on its sharp limbs, I might be able to pull myself from the icy grasp of the water before I froze or drowned.

No one else could help me through this. Relyara couldn’t escape the O’Baarni. Nyarathe fell to dragon fire. Kaiyer never made it to the mountains, he was dead. I was the only one who could save myself and the child that swam angrily in my womb.

The Singleborn of a Singleborn.

I kicked with my legs and ignored the jagged sharp pain of my smashed kneecap. I couldn’t see shit and held my arms out in front of my face, halfway expecting them to slam into the sharp lines of the boulder before the rest of my body did. The impact might not have immediately killed me, but it would snuff out the life in my womb with a cold merciless certainty.

I caught the tree branch.

I almost sobbed with joy. Somehow there was still strength in my numb hands and arms. I pulled free of the river’s icy suckle and straddled the drenched wood of the fallen tree. It had stopped hailing, but the rain was still pouring down as if the clouds were trying to drown me as much as the river. I wanted to lay on top of the wood and just sleep, but my body would not stop shaking and I knew that the O’Baarni were still hunting me. It took me a few minutes of feeling my way across the drenched log, but I eventually made it back to the shore and collapsed behind a rock that offered protection from some of the wind but none of the rain.

My stomach clenched and I gritted my teeth. The pain slid from the front of my womb and then ended at the base of my spine with the sharpness of a hundred daggers being driven into my body with sledgehammers. The baby in my womb started kicking frantically and I wondered if the hunger was getting to me.

Then the pain flared up again. Worse this time and some warmth spread through the crotch of my deerskin pants.

“No. No. No,” I said through painful breaths. It had only been a year since Kaiyer and I were lovers for the last time and it took twenty months for Elvens to gestate offspring. But it was faster for humans.

“Ahhhh!” I stifled my scream by biting into the fleshy part of my hand under my thumb. I tasted blood after the pain passed but I doubted that the O’Baarni could smell it through the storm. Their armored trackers were still nearby, and I needed to find somewhere to escape. I knew little of birthing, but I did know that it was going to be painful and I wanted freedom to scream.

I crawled away from my makeshift shelter of rocks toward the forest. My broken arm was moving, but it wasn’t fully healed yet. My kneecap was still shattered and the pain of crawling on it was worse than the contractions digging into my spine. The contractions were intermittent, unlike the ache of my broken limbs. Each half-minute of sharp agony was followed by a few minutes of respite. I began to count between them in my head so I would know when to expect the next one. They were coming regularly.

Instead of mud here, the ground was carpeted in dead pine needles and maple leaves. It was less slippery than raw mud, but the scent of decaying plant matter disgusted my sensitive nose. Lightning struck the sky again and I saw a sharp canyon wall some four hundred yards in the distance. I still didn’t have a plan for escape, but sometimes those sheer faces of rock had small nooks and caves that could give me shelter from the rain and hopefully obscure my location from the eyes and ears of my pursuers.

The pain flashed again in my spine and pelvis and I lost control of my body. It took every ounce of combat and magic training to keep from screaming. Fuck this. I would not be able to make it to the canyon wall, let alone climb up to any opening that might give me shelter. As the wave of pain ended, I breathed deeply, amazed that such intense pain could be followed so quickly by such relief. I continued my crawl, counting down and trying to move as much as I could before the next wave hit me.

“Do you see anything?” I rolled away from the voice just as the next contraction came, forcing my screaming body to cling to the roots of a nearby pine tree. By the Dead Gods, a pair of the O’Baarni had been standing not even fifteen feet from me.

“No. She slipped into the river. Probably dead.” They wore the armor of Malek’s army. I almost sighed in relief for the small victory. Malek’s warriors were fearsome in combat, as all of Kaiyer’s troops, but the men and women who wore the wolf armor were not known to be excellent scouts or trackers. Chances were that if these two warriors wore the snake armor of Alexia’s army, they would have already found me. They certainly never would have spoken to alert me to their position.

“The river cuts into the canyon ahead,” the first warrior said. It was a woman’s voice. I held my breath. If either of them happened to glance over in my direction as the lightning struck they would easily see me.

“I’ll take the east ledge and look for a body.”

“There won’t be one,” the woman sighed. “She is crafty. The storm was bad luck for us. I thought we had her captured.”

“We will search until we find her, dead or alive. She will wish she was dead.” The man’s voice made me shiver and I tried to wiggle deeper into the roots of the tree.

Then a contraction hammered into me again.

“I will signal for the search to begin from this point,” the woman said and she raised her hand into the air. I knew what she intended to do before the fire leapt into the air like a red comet, but there was no way I could move. It was taking every ounce of willpower my broken body could muster to keep from screaming out in pain.

Perhaps the Dead Gods were smiling on me, but for whatever reason, the two armored warriors focused their attention up at the rising flare instead of looking at the surrounding forest. Once the fire exploded above they parted ways and disappeared into the blackness of the stormy night.

“Just wait. Damn it all!” I seethed to the child in my belly when a contraction started again. Damn. Damn. Damn. It just fucking hurt so badly! I could not move my legs or hips during the wave of pain. They were growing closer, which must have meant I was close to my time. But how long did I have? I should have paid attention to the accounts of childbirth the women of my tribe seemed so obsessed with telling instead of tuning out their words and judging their recollections of pain exaggerated.

I forced myself to crawl again for a few more feet before I realized that my knee was healed. Then I recalled a bit of esoteric wisdom that swam to the surface of my mind like a goldfish coming to the surface of a pond. I almost moaned again and I wondered if the situation could get anymore hopeless.