The bodies packed the corridor ahead now, compacted into an almost solid mass by their determination to get to him. For the moment, the narrowness of the corridor reduced the number of headless bodies that could come at him at once, but he was approaching an intersection, and that could mean facing attacks from three or four sides at once. Owen considered the matter as he swung his sword with both hands, and stepped carefully over the dead and dying bodies on the floor. His disrupter was fully charged, but so much sheer mass would soak up the energy beam before it could penetrate far enough into the crowd to do any real good. There was only one way through this hideous headless army, and he wasn’t sure he was strong enough yet to pull it off. But he had to try. He hadn’t come all this way, got so close to Hazel, just to be stopped now.
And then he heard Hazel scream. Far away and close at hand, her despairing cry crashed into his mind, and that was all it took.
Owen reached deep inside himself, an old door opened, and a familiar frightening power coursed through him. It burst out of Owen as though he were too small to contain it, and thundered in the air around him, like the beating heart of some great unstoppable colossus. The headless bodies before Owen stopped in their tracks, hesitating as the minds that drove them sensed the arrival of a new force in their ancient stone world. Owen laughed suddenly, a dark implacable sound, and his power surged forward, smashing through the packed bodies as though they were paper, tearing them apart and sending the bloody pieces flying down the endless stone corridors. Far away, Owen could sense the controlling minds screaming, and his death‘s-head grin widened for a moment. He strode forward down the newly opened corridor, stepping over the scattered body parts or kicking them aside as the mood took him, his power wrapped around him like a cloak of majesty.
Hold on, Hazel. I’m here.
He followed the mental link in his head, running now that he was so close to her. He plunged recklessly down turning after turning, never once doubting his way. At last he came to where Hazel was being held, her presence blazing in his mind like a beacon. And there in an open stone square, to meet him and block his way, were the Blood Runners, all assembled in one place to stop the outside force that threatened their world. It had been a long time since any danger had been great enough to unite them in a single purpose, but the Deathstalker frightened them. Perhaps because they knew he was what they were supposed to have been, if only they hadn’t been too frightened to enter the Madness Maze when they had the chance. Now many of them were dead, struck down by Owen’s last attack, only forty-seven Blood Runners remaining to stand between him and Hazel d‘Ark. And Owen knew that wasn’t going to be enough. There was a power roaring within him like a mighty song, a melody powerful enough to kill or madden all who heard it.
“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.”