Hallowed Ground by David Niall Wilson, Steven & Wilson Savile Read Free Book Online

the life of her child on his chapped lips, and then stood.
    "Don’t leave me," she pleaded, reaching up until another wave of hurt caused her to double up again.   He didn’t seem to hear her.   Between the tears the world blurred, all the colors swirled into a chiaroscuro wash of unrelenting pain.   It looked to Mariah as though he reached inside his chest and pulled something – his heart? – out.   She shook her head.   For a full minute the world refused to focus, and then she saw his fingers fumbling with the drawstrings of a small pouch.

Chapter Ten
    Â 
    The Deacon loosened the rawhide thong that cinched the leather pouch.   He felt the girl’s pain empathically, its hooks rooted deep down in the nerves beneath his flesh.   He turned his head away and hawked up a wad of blood and phlegm.   This was new and not altogether pleasant.   He wiped beads of perspiration from his pocked brow, frowning as his concentration slipped.   For a moment longer than he could bear, he allowed too much of her pain through.   He had never felt the suffering of another quite so acutely.   He gritted his teeth against it, driving the devils of agony out of his mind.
    They refused to leave him.
    He pressed his fingers to his temple, aware of the bitter irony that he could not do for himself what he could so easily do for others.
    He was weak from the earlier healing, but he had opened himself up to greater hurts than this before and borne them with ease.   Another lance of pain flashed behind his eyes, this time so sharp it caused his vision to fail.   He did not panic or cry out but rather clutched the leather pouch, drawing strength from it.
    "Hush now, Mariah," he said, not to the wretched girl leaking her life into the ground at his feet, but to the pain itself.   It pulsed like an infected canker deep inside him.   Her child was dying.   He had looked inside her and felt the life force failing.   That was his gift; the ability to reach inside another with his senses and to understand the state of things.   In the girl, Mariah, everything felt wrong.   To mend her, he needed to be able to fight it, restoring a balance to the blood and bone, marrow and fat.   But there was always a price owed for such a gift, like now, knowing that the child was choking to death on the cord that bound it to its mother.   It was hard to believe in goodness when what gave life so mercilessly took it away from the most innocent of children.   A holy man would have shuddered, but The Deacon served his own Lord, and this was his way.
    His vision was clear on one thing.   For either to survive The Deacon had to bring the babe out into the light.
    He could not simply cut the child from her belly though, not if he wanted her to live.   Not if he wanted to give the illusion to his followers that he had tried to save them both.   Save the mother?   Save the child?   Save both or damn them?
    The Deacon clasped the pouch tighter, as though seeking wisdom from the relic within.   It responded to his touch with a brief surge of intense, fiery heat.   Aloud, in case any might be near enough to witness what was happening, he concentrated his thoughts into questions, offering them as prayer.
    "Can I save both?   Do I have the strength to oppose your will and keep both mother and child in this mortal realm?   Do I have the right?" Then, almost as an afterthought, the question, "Or are they both to leave us now?   Have you led them to my door to be harvested, Lord?"
    He reached down and tore away the cloth from Mariah's breast with an urgency approaching anger.   He laid the pouch against her bare skin and pressed his hands flat to her ribcage, riding gently with the rise and fall of her shallow breath.
    The girl made a vague gurgling noise as her eyelids fluttered open.   Her eyes rolled up into her head, leaving milky white orbs staring blindly to