05 The Skull of the World by Kate Forsyth

Author:Kate Forsyth
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Contemporary, Witches, General
ISBN: 9780451458698
Publisher: New York : ROC, 2002.
Published: 2002-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Fand crouched in the darkness. Her arms were wrapped tight about her knees, her head burrowed down in their meager shelter. She was naked.

It was freezing in this tiny dark hole. Her limbs twitched uncontrollably. She bit her lip and the blood that ran down her chin was hot. She concentrated on that heat, trying hard to find the strength to keep her body warm, as she had for so many years. For after only three minutes in the icy seas of the north, the human body began to shut down. Respiration failed, circulation stopped, the fiery track of nerves ceased their urgent pulse. The body's frail thrashing would slow, surrendering to the cold. Slowly it would sink below the waves, only to resurface again stiff and blue, many miles distant, many months later.

Fand, however, had survived for more than twenty years in these freezing seas, willing her blood to run hot and fast. Twenty years and she had not once succumbed to the temptation of drowning, not once let the cold defeat her.

But now the little spark of stubbornness was sunk down to nothingness. She could find no reason for living. Her mind wandered, traveling down well worn tracks. Fand rocked slightly, her eyes shut, her mouth shaping words and names that had almost lost meaning. It seemed she heard the sibilant hiss of voices slithering around her, searching to know what she knew, to make her speak those names, those words. She bit her lip harder and the blood ran into her mouth, sour as the taste of metal.

"Who? Who?" the voices hissed. "Who do you love? Who do you hate?"

Days before she had screamed. "You! I hate you! Leave me alone."

Now she merely rocked and mumbled, the sounds without form or meaning. The blood froze on her chin, and her eyes were sealed shut with icicles of tears.

Suddenly they were all about her, lashing her with doom-eels that stung her into screams of agony. She ripped her eyelids open, seeing only the laughing, gloating faces of her tormentors, their skin livid in the strange shifting light. The tails of the doom-eels shone blue-white. She twisted and turned, trying to avoid the shock of their touch. Each strike lacerated her frozen flesh so blood welled up, horribly black in the phosphorescent gleam of the nightglobes.

"Weak, sickly, stupid, halfbreed scum," the priestesses hissed. "Puny, useless, half-witted human, worthless as sea cow's offal. What use are you? What can you do? Can't even grow a tail. Any worthless concubine's get can do that. Can't even breathe underwater. Pathetic girl slave. No use even as a footstool. Can't skin her to keep warm, no flesh on her to eat, no blood in her to drink, no fire in her to keep us warm, feeble as sea anemones' piss, useless as spawn jelly."

Fand closed her eyes and did not listen, the slap of the doom-eels tails' no longer enough to jerk her into consciousness. For a long time she floated in darkness, pain occasionally twisting through her, damp and frail as the touch of seaweed against the leg.

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