Sara Douglass - The Serpent Bride

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The Serpent Bride: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The Serpent Bride is the first book in the Darkglass Mountain trilogy, revisiting the tempestuous magical world of Tencendor with all it’s strange and wonderful inhabitants.Tencendor is no more; the cherished home of the Acharites, Avar and Icarii crumbled beneath the Widowmaker Sea five years ago.But the sacrifice of a continent may not save a world. The Timekeeper Demons were defeated, but a more ancient evil waits patiently for its own vengeance.Across the empty ocean, deep in the Outlands, The Coil – worshippers of the Snake God – divine a terrible future from the eviscerated entrails of a living human sacrifice. They must offer their precious arch priestess to the King of Escator, Maximilian Persimius, or face oblivion.In Escator, Maximilian must agree to a union with reviled Coil to or see his beloved kingdom fall into financial ruin, though the Outlands would turn against his small realm should they uncover his bride's origins.But the King of Escator has many reasons to fear the future, for his serpent bride is not the only secret he hides…

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Just her, left alive.

Outside gathered a frightened and angry crowd, neighbours as well as sundry other concerned citizens and council members of Margalit. They had blocked off all entrances to the house as soon as they realised plague had struck the household.

In the initial days after everyone had died, the girl, Ishbel, screamed at the crowd outside for help, begging them to save her. She pressed her face against the glass of the windows and beat her small fists against frames, but the hostile expressions on the faces of the crowd outside did not alter.

They would not move to aid her.

Instead, Ishbel heard cries demanding that the house be set alight, and all the corpses and their infection burned.

She screamed at them again, begging them to allow her freedom.

She wasn’t ill.

She didn’t have the plague.

Her skin was unmarked, her brow unfevered.

“Please, please, let me out. Everyone is dead. I want to get out. Please … please …”

The crowd outside had no mercy. They would not let her escape.

Ishbel begged until she lost her voice and scraped away several of her fingernails on the wood of the front door.

The crowd would not listen. No other house in Margalit had the plague. Just the Brunelle house. Its doors and windows would not be opened again. The house would never ring with life and laughter as once it had.

When the girl was dead, they would burn the house, and all the corpses within it. Until then they would wait.

Eventually Ishbel crept away from the windows and the cold, bolted doors. She could not bear the flat hostility in the eyes outside.

All she wanted was comfort, and so she crept close to the corpse of her mother and cuddled up next to it.

Her mother was very cold and smelled very bad, but even so Ishbel garnered some comfort from the contact with her body.

Until the moment it began to whisper to her.

Ishbel. Ishbel. Listen to us.

Ishbel recoiled, terrified.

Her mother’s corpse twitched, and it whispered again.

Ishbel, Ishbel, listen to us. You must prepare

Ishbel screamed, over and over, her hands pressed against her ears, her eyes screwed shut, her body rolled into a tight ball in a corner of the room.

Then the corpses of two of her aunts, which lay a few feet from her mother’s, also twitched and whispered.

Ishbel, Ishbel, listen to us, our darling. Prepare, prepare, for soon the Lord of Elcho Falling shall walk again.

A vision accompanied the horrifying whispers.

A man, clothed in black, standing in the snow, his back to her.

Darkness writhed about his shoulders.

He sensed her presence, and turned his head a little, glancing at her from over his shoulder.

Bleakness and despair, and desolation so extreme it was murderous, overwhelmed Ishbel’s entire world.

The despair that engulfed her annihilated everything Ishbel had felt until now.

The loss of her family, and her entrapment with their corpses, was as nothing to what this man dragged at his heels.

Prepare, Ishbel, prepare for the coming of the Lord of Elcho Falling.

After her mother, and her two aunts, every other corpse in the house twitched in the same mad, cold, macabre dance of death, and whispered until the words echoed about the house.

Prepare, Ishbel, our darling, for the Lord of Elcho Falling shall walk again.

The twitching corpses and the constant whispering drove Ishbel to the brink of insanity. She didn’t want to live. She had gone mad, here in this cold house of death, watching everyone she had ever loved putrefy before her eyes.

Listening to their never-ending whispers.

Prepare, our darling … for the Lord of Elcho Falling.

She tried to starve herself, but one day she had weakened, sobbing, stuffing her mouth with mouldy pastries from the kitchen.

Then she found a knife, and drew it across her wrists, but was too weak to carve deeply, and too cowardly to bear the pain, so the blood just seeped from the thin cuts and Ishbel had not died.

Finally, frantic, crazy, Ishbel had stuffed her ears full of wadding and crept close enough to rub the foul effluent from the cadavers of her parents over her body and face. Then she licked the foulness from her fingers, just to be sure. It made her retch and sob and then scream in horror, but she did it, because surely, surely ,this way the plague would manage to take a grip in her body and kill her as mercifully fast as it had killed everyone else in her life.

But all that had happened was that the scars on her wrists became infected, and wept a purulent discharge, and throbbed unbearably.

Ishbel survived.

Whenever she slept, she dreamed of the Lord of Elcho Falling, turning his head ever so slightly so that he could look at her over his shoulder, and engulfing her in sorrow and pain.

She grew thin, her joints aching with the cold and with malnutrition, but she survived.

Outside the crowds waited.

Every so often Ishbel called out to them, letting them know she still existed within, because, no matter how greatly Ishbel wanted to die, she did not want to do so within an inferno.

On this day, huddled in the atrium of the house, Ishbel began to dream about death. She looked at the great staircase that wound its way to the upper floors of the house, and she wondered why she’d never before thought that all she needed to do was to climb to the top, then throw herself down.

Very slowly, because she was now extremely weak, Ishbel crawled on her hands and knees towards the staircase. She was frail, and she would need to take it slowly to get to the top, but get there she would.

Ishbel felt overwhelmed with a great determination. Her death was but an hour away, at the most.

But it took her much longer than an hour to climb the stairs. Ishbel was seriously weak, and she could only crawl up the staircase a few steps at a time before she needed to rest, collapsing and gasping, on the dusty wooden treads.

By late afternoon she was almost there. Every muscle trembled, aching so greatly that Ishbel wept with the pain.

But she was almost there …

Then, as she was within three steps of the top, she heard the front door open.

A faint sound, for the door was far below her, but she heard it open.

Ishbel did not know what to do. She lay on the stairs, trembling, weeping, listening to slow steps ascend the staircase, and wondered if the crowd had sent someone in to murder her.

She was taking far too long to die.

Ishbel closed her eyes, and buried her face in her arms.

“Ishbel?”

A man’s voice, very kind. Ishbel thought she must be dreaming.

“Ishbel.”

Slowly, and crying out softly with the ache of it, Ishbel turned over, opening her eyes.

A man wrapped in a crimson cloak over a similarly-coloured robe stood a few steps down, smiling at her. He was a young man, good-looking, with brown hair that flopped over his forehead, and a long, fine nose.

“Ishbel?” The man held out a hand. “My name is Aziel. Would you like to come live with me?”

She stared at him, unable to comprehend his presence.

Aziel’s smile became gentler, if that were possible. “I have been travelling for weeks to reach you, Ishbel. The Great Serpent himself sent me. He appeared to me in a dream and said that I must hurry to bring you home. He loves you, sweetheart, and so shall I.”

“Are you the Lord of Elcho Falling?” Ishbel whispered, even though she knew he could not be, for he did not drag loss and sorrow at his heels, and there was no darkness clinging to his shoulders.

Aziel frowned briefly, then he shook his head. “My name is Aziel, Ishbel. And I am lord of nothing, only a poor servant of the Great Serpent. Will you come with me?”

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