Owen Deathstalker came at last to the Obeah Systems in the Sunstrider III, only to find there was nothing there. No colonies, no civilizations, nothing. Just an empty sector of space, marked on the charts as the Obeah Systems through old tradition. Owen cranked open the ship’s sensors as far as they would go, but there were no lifesigns anywhere, no energy sources, no traces of artificial habitats; nothing. He sat back in his chair on the bridge, and scowled darkly. He’d made good time in getting here from Lachrymae Christi, pushing the stardrive to its limit, and he refused to believe it had all been for nothing.
“Are you sure you’ve brought us to the right place, Oz?”
“I was navigating ships before you were born, Owen,” said the AI testily. “I told you there was nothing indicated at these coordinates, but you wouldn’t listen. As far as I can tell, the Obeah Systems are what we navigators refer to as a MAMFA location.”
“And what the hell does MAMFA stand for?”
“Miles And Miles of Fuck All.”
“I’d have you overhauled if I knew where your hardware was. Suggest something, Oz! This location is the only clue we’ve got to finding Hazel. Think of something.”
“She could be dead, Owen.”
“No. I’d know.”
Oz was quiet for a while, and when he finally spoke his quiet voice was unusually hesitant. “There are legends about the Obeah Systems. Old legends. They say the Blood Runners’ world isn’t always there. It comes and it goes. That it’s a place only they can reach, and no one can find without their consent. But you’re not just anybody, Owen. You know I’ve never really understood your powers, but ... you once reached across space to destroy a Blood Runner, on his secret world. Reach out again ... and maybe you’ll be able to see where we need to go.”
Owen shut his eyes and concentrated. On Lachrymae Christi he had been reduced to merely human senses, but since coming here, he’d felt the stirrings of something returning, deep in his mind. He forced his thoughts to move in a direction that had once been so easy, concentrating all his need and urgency and desperation into a single implacable push, and a barrier gave way like a torn-aside blindfold. Power surged up in him, from the back brain, the undermind, and his thought leapt out, probing, demanding. There was something there, not too far away. He could feel it, though it wasn’t really there. Owen concentrated, sweat dripping from his face, and his mind moved like a key in a lock.
And from a place where nothing comes from, a door opened before the Sunstrider III. It opened like the petals of a rose, enveloped the ship, and took it somewhere else. The door closed, and both ship and door were gone, with nothing to show they had ever been there.
Owen sat slumped in his chair on the bridge, trying to get his thoughts in order. Nothing had changed, but everything had changed. He could feel it. He was in a different place now. He noticed that the stardrive had shut down, and sat up sharply. A quick study of the instrument panels confirmed that the ship was no longer in motion. It was stopped dead. Which should have been impossible. Further study of the close-range sensors baffled Owen even more. The Sunstrider III was apparently sitting at rest in a great stone chamber. Standard gravity atmosphere environment. Owen frowned. Some kind of teleport system, presumably. That was how they’d snatched Hazel, after all. But that still didn’t explain how the ship had come to a dead halt, or why his engines weren’t working when he hadn’t shut them down.
“Oz? Oz?”
“Give me a minute here, Owen, I’m still a little shaken. According to all our instruments, we’re no longer in normal space. In fact, we’re no longer anywhere I even know how to describe. Sensors seem to be saying ... that we’re not on any world, as such. This is just ... a place. An artificial construct of endless stone chambers and passages, endlessly branching and coming together without end or beginning. Self-contained, self-perpetuating, unconnected to normal space. I’m getting a serious headache just thinking about this.”
“But this is the location of the Blood Runners. This is where they brought Hazel. I can feel it. I can feel her, somewhere not too far away. My old mental link is coming back.”
“A pocket universe, a bubble in the warp and weft of spacetime.”
“Oz, you’re babbling.”
“I know! This place disturbs the hell out of me! Space isn’t supposed to be shaped like this. It’s sustained by some kind of central power source, but nothing I can recognize ...”
“Yeah, I can feel that too,” said Owen slowly. “Like thunder in the distance, or a light far off in the dark. I don’t know what it is either ... but it reminds me of the Madness Maze.”
“Is that good or bad?” said Oz.
“In this place, who knows? But whatever it is, it can wait. Locating and rescuing Hazel comes first. Check for lifesigns.”
“Way ahead of you, as always. The scan results are ... unusual. Either the nature of this place is interfering with my sensors, or life comes in various levels here. As though some things are more alive than others ... What kind of a place have we come to, Owen?”
“Good question. If you find out, let me know. In the meantime, treat it as enemy territory. I’m going after Hazel. She’s alive. And I think ... she’s scared.”
“Hold everything,” said Oz. “I’m reading some kind of commotion in the corridors. Lifesigns blinking on and off. The corridors are swarming with ... something.”
“Then they’d better not get in my way,” said Owen Deathstalker.
Faced with the imminent arrival of the legendary Owen Deathstalker, open war had broken out among the Blood Runners. Factions spat and quarreled around the Summerstone, while armies of headless bodies fought for dominance in the stone corridors, reflecting their owners’ fears and ambitions. No one had ever forced his way into the Blood Runners’ place before, and their safe sanctuary had suddenly become a trap from which they could not escape, because they had nowhere else to go. The thought of a fully empowered Maze survivor stalking their inviolate corridors was enough to reduce even the hardest heads to panic. Soon everybody had a plan, desperate in nature and desperately held, and no one would step down for anyone else. The headless bodies fought savagely to control the chambers and passages, and already the corpses were piling up in the corridors and blocking the intersections. Scour and Pyre were slowly emerging as the most powerful voices, not least due to the size of their private armies, but lesser forces emerged to challenge them. They all saw Hazel as the key to the conflict. Whoever owned or controlled her would have the strongest hand when it came to facing the Deathstalker.
But Scour wouldn’t give her up.
And as they all screamed and fought and argued, Owen cut his way through the press of grasping, grappling bodies in the corridors, and they never even noticed he was there, focused, as they were, entirely on one another. Owen’s skin crawled as the headless bodies slammed against one another, hands reaching out blindly to tear and crush, guided by distant senses and overpowering rage. They filled the corridors, seething like maggots in an open wound, and Owen hacked his way through them like a woodsman opening up a trail in the forest. It was horribly quiet. The bodies could not speak, and the only other sounds came from the stamping of their feet, and the tearing of flesh and the breaking of bones. The floor was awash with blood, and more ran down the corridor walls.
Owen Deathstalker cut and pushed his way through the horrid crowd, and thought Hell might be something like this. But even Hell itself wouldn’t keep him from Hazel now.
Hazel d‘Ark was back in Scour’s cell, strapped down to the trolley again. An intravenous drip had been taped to her bare arm, pumping powerful sedatives into her system. She had to fight with everything she had just to keep her thoughts clear. Her body felt strangely far away, but she had no doubt that would change the moment Scour began his work with the tray of steel instruments set out on a table beside her. He was humming quietly to himself as he strapped on a heavy apron, presumably to keep the blood from getting on his robes. Hazel reached ins
ide herself, hoping desperately. Her close proximity to the Summerstone had awakened some of her powers, but they kept slipping from her mental grasp. Scour had surrounded her with four of the severed heads on pedestals, and they were doing things to her mind. She could feel Scour’s influence, boosted by the Summerstone and focused through the computer minds, as it moved inside her head, searching out secrets she desperately tried to keep from him. But he was there, digging into her back brain, her undermind, and more and more she couldn’t tell which thoughts were hers and which were his.
She tried again to distract him with conversation. It was obvious he loved to talk, to lecture his victims. It was a part of the power he had over them. But it helped her stay awake and focused. And there was always the chance he might let slip something she could use against him.
“Tell me about Captain Markee,” she said slowly. “My old Captain, when I was a clonelegger on the Shard. Just what kind of a deal did that old fool make with you people?”
“Originally, he was part of the Deathstalker conspiracy,” said Scour, not looking up from the stiff copper wire he was carefully inserting into the exposed brain tissues of one of the heads. “You do know Owen’s father was part of a conspiracy against the Empress ... Anyway, Captain Markee came here at our request, as a messenger from Arthur Deathstalker, bringing his reply to our terms for a partnership. We wanted a tithe of the human population, a percentage of Humanity to be handed over to us every year, for our experiments. In return, we would place our teleportation abilities at his disposal. The Deathstalker recognized our worth, and agreed to the tithe. Apparently he’d already made a similar deal with the Hadenmen. Captain Markee also made a deal with us; a tithe of his crew in return for introductions to the right people, to keep his clonelegging business going. Since he and all his crew are now dead, that just left you to be his tithe. So we came for you. We didn’t realize how necessary you were to us, then. We didn’t realize what the Madness Maze had done to you.”
“Then why risk turning the rebellion against you, just to get your hands on me?”
“We had to enforce our bargain. We couldn’t have people thinking we were going soft. Now; no more distractions, dear Hazel. I think we’re ready for a test run.”
He made a final manipulation with his copper wire, and the four severed heads groaned loudly in unison. A surge of psychic power closed around Hazel’s mind like a clamp, tightening and tightening till she thought she would scream from the pressure. And then Scour’s scarred face loomed over hers, and a spike of pure amplified thought stabbed down, into her back brain, her undermind, and seized control of the doorway she opened to call her other selves through. Hazel fought to keep the door shut, but she was helpless against the mounting pressure. All she could do was lie on the damned trolley, writhe weakly under the leather straps, and watch in horror as another Hazel d‘Ark appeared in the stone cell with her.
This Hazel was dressed in barbaric white furs and leathers, and wore her hair in a mercenary’s scalplock. She barely had time to look around her new surroundings before a headless body stepped forward and hit her from behind with a massive fist. The sound of the Hazel’s neck breaking was terribly loud in the quiet. Hazel d‘Ark cried out helplessly in rage and horror, as she watched her other self crumple lifelessly to the floor. Scour bent over the body, and poked it thoughtfully here and there.
“Shame to waste such a potentially useful subject, but I need a body to dissect. Perhaps I can search out whatever physical changes the Maze has wrought in her flesh. I can’t risk doing that with you, just yet. Now; another alternate, I think. Something a little more exotic, this time.”
He moved back to his severed heads, as two headless bodies came forward to drag the dead Hazel away, out of Hazel d‘Ark’s line of sight. Her hands had clenched into fists so tight her fingers ached, and there was nothing she could do, nothing at all. Scour’s amplified command stabbed into her mind again, and Hazel screamed aloud as a second alternate materialized in the stone chamber. This time she was seven feet tall and almost inhumanly slender. She wore a black bodysuit that rose up past her neck to cover her face as well. Her long golden hair was thickly shot with gray. Metal studs covered the black suit in shining swirls and patterns, and winked from the black face mask. She held vicious throwing stars in both hands, and a gun on each hip, but she never got the chance to use any of them. Two of the headless bodies moved in and grabbed her from both sides the moment she materialized, pressing her arms to her sides. She struggled silently, but their grip was so fierce her fingers slowly opened against her will, releasing the throwing stars as her fingers went numb.
Energy suddenly spat and sparkled on the air around her, and Scour fell back a step, taken by surprise. There was a sudden tension in the air, and then both the headless bodies were thrown away from the alternate, crashing lifeless to the floor. Scour gestured quickly, and shimmering energy fields snapped into place around the alternate. Scour gestured again, and the energy fields slammed together, crushing the alternate Hazel between them. Her bones cracked loudly, but she never made a sound, even as she collapsed into unconsciousness. The shining energy fields disappeared, and the black-clad alternate fell limply to the floor. Scour walked over to the body, and kicked it once.
“Well, I won’t make that mistake again. Any future alternates I choose to call will have to be those without energy-manipulating powers.” He knelt down beside the body, and tugged experimentally at the black bodysuit. “Interesting. The metal studs attach the suit to the body, and the mask to the face; screwed right into the flesh and bone. Neither mask nor bodysuit were meant to come off. Ever. I wonder why.”
A long scalpel was suddenly in his hand, and he began cutting and sawing at the bodysuit with practiced skill. The suit’s material resisted the blade, and Scour grunted as he put more energy into it. Blood ran down the exposed pale flesh, from where he’d cut too deeply, but Scour didn’t care.
Hazel lay still on her trolley, eyes squeezed shut so she wouldn’t have to watch what he was doing, and dived deep into her own mind. Instead of wasting energy fighting the intravenous sedative, she allowed it to close down her outer conscious mind so that she could concentrate on the deeper levels. Now that Scour had forced her inner door open, she could find it easily. She could sense other Hazels clustering around her like potential ghosts, possible echoes of herself, scattered throughout spacetime. Bonnie Bedlam and Midnight Blue were there, vaguely aware of her pain and torment, and wondering why they hadn’t already been brought through. Hazel called out to them, but they couldn’t hear her. She couldn’t warn them. Far away, Hazel could hear screaming from the stone cell, and realized her black-clad alternate had awakened to the caresses of Scour’s scalpel. Hazel screamed inside her mind, and no one could hear her but herself.
Owen Deathstalker fought his way through a sea of bodies, cutting and hacking a path through the headless things as they came at him in an endless tide. They knew he was here now, and had apparently put aside their differences to concentrate on stopping him. More headless bodies came running from every direction, and Owen didn’t give a damn. He felt stronger and faster than he had in weeks, and he wasn’t even boosting. Somewhere up ahead was a power source, the uncanny thing he’d sensed earlier that reminded him of the Madness Maze. And the closer he got to it, the more powerful he became. He felt alive again, felt like himself again. Blood ran in streams on the cold stone floor, and none of it was his.
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.