The Godgame (The Godgame, Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

gasped, her lungs aching, a fit of coughing overtaking her. She held the wall to support herself, hoping her husband would not come through the door, waiting for it to pass. She did not want her husband to know how much worse she was feeling.
    She staggered to the bed and slowly crawled beneath the covers. A feverish shudder ran through her body. She clutched the blankets tightly. She stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. The sickness had settled in her lungs, making each breath difficult, as if an oxhoag sat on her chest. She was much sicker than she allowed herself to appear.
    Our son is going to be okay , she imagined saying to her husband. Ash is going to be fine. 
    Her relationship with Josef was founded somewhat on his unquestioning acceptance of her past. She always dismissed his questions, explaining to him how important it was to her to live this chapter of her life unsoiled by the one before it. He knew only that she had been born in Talos, raised and educated there. He knew that she had at a young age been a member of Marrow’s crew, but she had never told him more than that. He knew that she still had family in Talos, but she never spoke of them, except occasionally about her sister Embla.
    When she had come to the village of Fallowvane, she had been cold, hungry and scared. She had all her life been in the City, with its mobs of people, labyrinthine structures and electrical lights; and then on Marrow’s Aerial, among an eclectic group of people, she had seen amazing lands and animals and learned of the greater world. Marrow had taught her many things, had read to her every night as they lay side by side in bed.
    Another fit of coughing overtook her and, for a moment, all she could do was close her eyes and clutch herself against the pain that tore through her lungs. When the coughing finally subsided, her entire body was trembling.
    She had fled Marrow, but had soon found coming back to the life she’d left behind in Talos hollow and meaningless. She had become disgusted with the greed and decadence of the heirotimates, with the unending schemes her family members and friends plotted—constantly clawing themselves to greater positions of control and wealth—with the attitudes of even the lowliest Talosian that it was okay to manipulate and destroy others economically and emotionally for personal gain. All her years of study with Marrow, of art and philosophy, of the wonders across Meridian, had served only to open her eyes to things of worth beyond the material, and left her unable to cope in a world which defined a person’s worth based on their wealth.
    So, she had abandoned that life as well, fled Talos and everything for which it stood, shuffling for agonizing hours through a dank tunnel beneath the City, trusting in Galen who had, for a substantial price, agreed to show her the way. She had been led out through a broken drainage grate and been left alone blinking against the brightness of the cometlight with the open countryside before her, some meager supplies, and a few vague rumors she had collected about the territory of Nova.
    She had, after weeks of travel through lonely coniferous forest, sleeping in the homes of friendly but cautious villagers when she could, dehydrated and exhausted, come upon the village of Fallowvane. From the top of a small forest hill, she had been able to take in the entire spread of small houses with a single sweep of her eyes. Fallowvane was built where dense forest met sweeping grasslands, in a slight depression that seemed to shelter it. It consisted of two unpaved roads that crossed each other at the village’s center, where a sculpture stood, a twenty-foot tower of metal fused together at apparently random angles, as if constructed by a madman, which, she had later been told, it basically was. At the top of the structure protruded a weathervane, a cock in profile roosting upon an arrow, its metal an oxidized turquoise. This sculpture, and the weathervane upon