“You don’t want to face us, Deathstalker,” said Pyre. “Your father was our ally. We made a deal with him.”
“I’m not my father,” said Owen. “And his deal died with him. You’ve only got one thing I want, and we all know you’re not going to give her up willingly. You’re everything I’ve ever hated. Power without responsibility, heartless, self-obsessed evil. The last remnants of the old Empire. I suppose it’s only fitting I should be the one to finally bring you to an end.”
“Don’t be so sure, Deathstalker,” said Pyre, in his dry whispering voice. “We are older than you ever dreamed of, more powerful than your worst nightmares. This is our place, our seat of power. And you should not have come here.”
The Blood Runners reached out to the Summerstone, and drew its power into themselves. Here in their own world of stone, they controlled everything that was. And now that Owen had entered that world, he should be theirs to control too. Their linked minds smashed out at his, surrounding and enveloping his thoughts, battering him into submission. But to their surprise his mind was deeper than theirs, and they could not plumb it. Owen threw them off, and they retreated in disarray.
Pyre and Lament called them together again, and led the attack on Owen’s body, trying to warp and mould his flesh as they manipulated the primal matter that made up their world and everything in it. But Owen had been changed by the Madness Maze, and nothing less would ever be able to alter him again, and again the Blood Runners fell back, defeated.
Clinging doggedly together, they turned to the one thing they could still be sure of manipulating, and the cold stone around them rippled menacingly as their will moved through it. Great stone arms reached out of the walls to grasp and crush Owen, but he shattered them with a thought. Walls and floor and ceiling fluctuated eerily, surging this way and that like a living gray sea, but he stood firm, and the stone waves broke helplessly against the power that surrounded him. The Blood Runners lost control of the stone, as their massed will shattered on his certainty, and Owen laughed at their shocked faces.
The Blood Runners called on the only weapon they had left. They drew recklessly on the power of the Summerstone, and altered themselves. Their white flesh ran like water, reforming into horrid nightmare shapes, with jagged teeth and staring eyes, barbed tentacles and great clutching hands with claws like needles. They rose up like horned specters, and fell upon Owen, all of them at once, and he went to meet them with his sword.
Driven almost beyond sanity by the terrible choking screams from her captive alternate, Hazel reached deep inside herself, and drew recklessly on the power she’d absorbed from the Summerstone. Need and necessity brought that power roaring to life within her, almost consuming her mind in the awful white fires of its intensity. She knew she couldn’t wield such power for long in her weakened condition, and didn’t care. She would do what she had to, and worry about paying the price later. She drove the sedatives from her body, as she had once rejected the drug Blood, and her mind was clear and sharp for the first time in weeks. She could feel the computer brains circling around her thoughts, trying to contain and control her, but they were now nothing more than small children plucking at the hems of her skirt. She swept them aside with a single thought, and focused her attention on the doorway within her. She still wasn’t strong enough to keep it closed against Scour’s will, but there was still one thing she could do. She drew on all her strength, and forced the door open as wide as it would go. She called, and an army of Hazels came crashing through into the world of stone.
Scour spun around in surprise as one by one the severed heads exploded, pink and gray brain tissues spattering across the stone floor. He straightened up, blood dripping thickly from the scalpel in his hand, while the mutilated thing at his feet kicked and squealed in its wide pool of blood. And from out of nowhere, from places even farther from reality than his own stone world, came twenty Hazel d‘Arks, with guns and swords and axes, and a bitter cold rage in their eyes. Scour turned and ran, sending his headless bodies to cover his retreat. Their deaths bought him enough time to reach the door of his cell and pull it open, and then he saw what was happening outside and stopped dead. He glanced back at the advancing warrior women, and then disappeared in a shimmering energy field.
Hazel d‘Ark sat up on the trolley, tearing through the leather restraints as though they were cloth. She ripped the IV feed out of her arm, and threw it aside. She started to thank the alternates who had come to answer her call, but they were ignoring her, clustered around the whimpering thing on the floor, trying to wrap the bloody tatters of her bodysuit around her blood-streaked body. Hazel swung down from the trolley and started toward them, and Midnight Blue and Bonnie Bedlam turned to face her and block her way. Their faces were grim. Hazel nodded slowly to them.
“Thanks for coming, guys. I was in real trouble there, for a while.”
“We didn’t come for you,” said Bonnie flatly. “We came for her.” She gestured at the tortured Hazel being comforted by the others.
“Send us home, Hazel,” said Midnight Blue. “Send us all home. And don’t call us again, because we won’t come.”
“What?” said Hazel.
“You only call us when you’re in peril,” said Bonnie. “Never a thought for us, as we bleed and hurt and die to save you. We’ve had enough. We have our own lives to lead. If scum like the Blood Runners can overpower and use you, how can we know who else might be calling the next time we answer your call? Who might be waiting for us with torture instruments in their hands. No, Hazel. It’s over. Save your own ass from now on.”
“Send us home,” said Midnight.
Hazel nodded jerkily, and one by one her other selves blinked out of existence, back to their own worlds. Finally only Hazel was left in the stone cell, feeling abandoned and very alone. And then she heard a sound behind her, and spun around, ready to face Scour with her bare hands if need be, and there was Owen Deathstalker, standing in the doorway with a bloody sword, soaked as always with the blood of his enemies. He smiled at her.
“Might have known you wouldn’t need rescuing, Hazel.”
She smiled back at him. “Of course not.”
They moved slowly toward each other. They would have liked to run, but the many things they’d done and had to do had left them deathly tired. They came together in the torturer’s cell and hugged each other tightly, burying their faces in each other’s shoulder.
“You came for me,” said Hazel.
“You knew I would,” said Owen. “I thought ... I’d lost you. But I never gave up hope.”
“Nothing can keep us apart,” said Hazel. “Not after all we’ve been through together.”
They finally let go of each other and stepped back, and each automatically looked the other over, to make sure neither was badly hurt. Reassured, they smiled at each other again, and looked around the stone chamber.
“Ghastly place,” said Owen. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had finding my way here.”
“I take it you do have a way out?”
“Oh sure. Got a ship parked not too far away. But we can’t leave just yet. We still have unfinished business here. Scour.”
“Oh yeah,” said Hazel. “He teleported out of here, but I know where he’s gone. The only safe place left to him. Come with me, Owen. I want to show you something called the Summerstone.”
They made their way there easily. The Summerstone blazed in their minds like a beacon, glowing more and more brightly the closer they got. They found Scour standing beside the stone, dwarfed by its size but still glaring defiantly at them. The endless gray stone plane stretched away around them, but Owen and Hazel ignored it as they ignored Scour, their attention fixed on the huge conical standing stone. Both of them felt a thrill of recognition. And as with the Madness Maze, there was a feeling they were in the presence of something vast and magnificent. And beyond that, there was a slow, certain feeling that the Summerstone recognized them ...
“It isn’t over
yet,” said Scour, almost spitefully. “You may have killed my brothers’ bodies, but their minds live on, in the mindpool, preserved and protected by the Summerstone, and our will. Once I’ve used the stone’s power to destroy you, I’ll make new bodies for them to download into, and the Blood Runners will live again. You can’t defeat us. We are immortal. We walk in eternity. Death has no hold on us anymore.”
“You have no power,” said Owen. “You never did, really. All you have, and all you are, is what you leeched from the Summerstone. This isn’t the way things were meant to be. I think it’s time we put a stop to this madness.”
He reached out to Hazel, and she reached out to him, and their minds meshed together and became more than the sum of their parts. They reached out and touched the Summerstone. Power blazed up within them, like coming home, and they shone like stars. Scour cried out, and had to look away, shielding his eyes with his arm. Something was suddenly there on the great stone plane with them. There, and yet not quite there, the mindpool swirled around the Summerstone, almost a hundred minds held in suspension between life and death, waiting for new bodies to possess. And it was the easiest thing of all for Owen and Hazel to sever the link between the mindpool and the Summerstone. Almost a hundred minds screamed silently as they faded irrevocably away, dead and gone, come at last to the end of their artificially extended lives. Owen and Hazel separated and fell back into their bodies, and turned their dark implacable gaze on Scour, the last of the Blood Runners.
He stared at them in horror. “What have you done? What have you done? I can’t feel the mindpool anymore! I can’t hear my brothers!” “We sent them where ”They’re gone,“ said Owen. ”We sent them where they should have gone long ago. There is no more mindpool. No more Blood Runners. Just you.“
“Let me kill him,” said Hazel. “I have to kill him. For what he did to me, and my other selves.”
Owen looked at her, sensing there was more to her story than he knew. “Do what you have to, Hazel.”
Scour started to back away, and then realized there was nowhere for him to go. There was nowhere he could go that Hazel couldn’t find him. He reached out to the Summerstone with his mind, desperate for more power, only to find Owen and Hazel already there, blocking his way. He brandished a scalpel in his shaking hand, and Hazel just laughed.
“You can’t kill me!” said Scour, trying to shout with his dry, dusty voice. “I know things. Things you need to know. Who made the Madness Maze, and why. What its purpose was. What you’re becoming. Swear to spare me, and all I know is yours. I’ve lived so long, seen so much; you have no idea. You can’t let all that be lost!”
“Of course we can,” said Hazel. “It’s easy. All I have to do is think of all the death and suffering you and your kind have been responsible for down the centuries, and nothing else matters. Nothing else matters at all.”
“You’d say anything, to save your life,” said Owen. “And whatever we need to know, we’ll find out for ourselves, eventually. From a source we can trust.”
“Time to die, Scour,” said Hazel. “I am death, and I have come for you.”
Scour screamed harshly, threw his scalpel at Hazel with vicious strength, and made a run for the door. Hazel snatched the scalpel out of midair, reversed it, and threw it after Scour. The long, thin blade punched through the back of Scour’s skull, burying itself in his head. He staggered to a halt, and then turned slowly to face Hazel. The tip of the scalpel protruded from the wet ruin of his left eye. Scour tried to say something, some last plea or curse, and then he fell to his knees. One hand rose waveringly to his punctured eye, as though he thought he could pick out the thing that was killing him, and then he fell forward and lay still. The last of the Blood Runners, dead at last, and this time no way back.
“Nice throw,” said Owen. “Now, time we were going, I think. We don’t want to overstay our welcome.”
“Get me out of here, Deathstalker,” said Hazel tiredly. “Take me somewhere safe. Somewhere I can sleep without nightmares.”
And then they both turned suddenly to look at the Summerstone. Without moving, it was changing. Becoming ... something else. Its whole nature began to twist and turn, until it seemed both larger and greater than it had been. The Blood Runners saw it as a Stone, part of a Henge, but they were all gone now, and it was no longer bound by their limited perceptions. Its shape flickered, giving glimpses of something else, something that existed in far more than three dimensions. Owen and Hazel had to look away, as the Summerstone began to change into something they couldn’t bear to look at.
They turned and ran, leaving the endless gray plane behind them, intent on reaching the only exit. They scrambled over the dead Blood Runners lying on the other side of the door, and ran full pelt down the stone corridor, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and what they’d almost seen. But they were still able to sense it when the thing the Summerstone had become suddenly disappeared, gone to rejoin the rest of the Madness Maze. The stone floor trembled under their feet, the walls rumbled, and streams of dust fell from the ceiling as it dropped slowly lower.
“What is it?” said Hazel. “What’s happening?”
“This place only existed because the Blood Runners believed in it,” said Owen. “Backed by the power of the Summerstone. Now they’re all dead and it’s gone, the reality of this place is breaking down! We have to get out of here before it disappears completely, and takes us with it!”
They ran through the trembling stone corridors, Owen leading the way. He could feel the Sunstrider III’s position in his head, but the endless corridors twisted and turned before him, as though trying to keep him from escaping. He yelled to Oz to warm up the engines, and pressed the pace as much as he dared. Hazel had been through a lot, and it had taken a lot out of her. But even as they ran through the corridors, the gray stone was already beginning to silently vanish in places, as nothingness crept in from every side. Holes appeared in the walls and ceiling and floor, empty spaces Owen and Hazel couldn’t bear to look at it, because what lay beyond them was simply too awful for the human mind to contemplate. Only the area around Owen and Hazel retained any coherence, because they were real enough to sustain a small world of their own, for a time. But without the Summerstone, their will was not enough, and nothingness closed inexorably in from all sides, and nibbled at their surroundings, edging closer with every moment.
The floor beneath their feet felt increasingly unsolid, and the ceiling pressed lower inch by inch. The walls fluttered like drapes in a breeze, and one by one the human arms were disappearing, taking the light with them. Owen grabbed Hazel by the arm and made her run faster, almost dragging her along as she gasped for breath. And finally they came to the chamber where the Sunstrider III lay waiting, looking reassuringly solid and real. They ran for the open airlock, not looking back at the emptiness they sensed crowding their heels. They jumped over holes in the chamber floor, scrambled into the airlock, locked the door behind them, and ran for the bridge.
“Oz!” yelled Owen. “Are we ready to take off?”
“You find me somewhere to go and we’ll go there,” said the AI. “According to my sensors, this chamber is all there is now. If I activate the stardrive, God alone knows where we’ll end up. This isn’t our universe, Owen.”
Owen and Hazel staggered onto the bridge, and collapsed into chairs, both gasping for breath. And from somewhere outside, they heard a Voice. Afterward they could never quite remember what it said or what it sounded like, only that it meant the end of all things. The Voice at the end of the universe, when all that is must come to dust, and less than dust.
“Start the stardrive!” yelled Owen, reaching desperately out to the door he’d opened to bring the Sunstrider III into the Blood Runners’ world. The engines roared and the ship trembled as the door reappeared in his mind, perfect in every detail. Owen held it in place and drove the ship through it. The Voice cried out, and the world of stone disappeared forever.
The Su
nstrider III sailed serenely through normal space, surrounded by stars. Owen and Hazel remained slumped in their seats, gradually getting their breath back as their hearts slowed to something more like normal. They were back where they belonged, safe and sound, and it felt so good they were almost afraid to move or speak in case they shattered the mood. Their powers were back too, jumpstarted by the Summerstone. Not as powerful as they had once been, perhaps, but they were both confident a little time and rest would see to that. They were on a journey, to becoming something else, and they knew the changes weren’t finished with them yet.
“Sorry to interrupt your collapse,” Oz murmured in Owen’s ear. “But you have a call coming in. And given who this is, I think you’re really going to want to talk to him.”
“All right,” said Owen. “I’ll bite. Who is it?”
“The Wolfing.”
That made Owen sit up straight, despite his tiredness. No one had heard from the Wolfing in ages. “Put him on the bridge screen.”
The Wolfing’s head and shoulders appeared on the viewscreen, and Hazel sat up straight too. The Wolfing, last of his slaughtered kind. Older than old, possibly immortal, guardian of the Madness Maze. He had a broad, shaggy, lupine head, set on wide furry shoulders above a barrel chest. Long pointed ears stood stiffly up over rich, honey-colored fur, and he stared out of the screen with disturbingly intelligent eyes. You could see the wolf and the man in his eyes, and something less and more than both. He smiled briefly, revealing large pointed teeth.
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