Deathstalker Coda

  "Doesn't look like I'm needed anymore. I think I'll go back into the oversoul. It's lonely being just one person. And my father is dead. Again."

  She didn't mention the clones of herself she still had preserved in storage. Because… you never knew. The Empire might still need Jenny Psycho, some other day.

  "But before I leave, King Douglas, I have one last duty." She concentrated a moment, and then smiled. "There. Lewis, you promised the monsters from Shandrakor that you would bring them home again, and you did. Now I've just lifted their minds out of their monstrous bodies and reinstalled them in some of the empty bodies left behind by Alicia. So those who were once human, and then made into monsters, can be human again. I wiped out a lot of their Shandrakor memories, so they can be only human."

  "Thank you," said Lewis. "That was kind of you."

  "Well," said Diana. "You don't want to believe all the things you hear about me." She looked at Alessandra. "Why don't you come back into the oversoul with me? The old mass-mind could use a little stirring up, and we're just the troublemakers to do it."

  "Yes," said Alessandra. "I think I need to go home too."

  BrettRose stepped forward, and spoke with both their voices simultaneously, which freaked out everybody. "We have been through changes. We are together, now, for always. Two parts making up one whole person, at last. A single mind, in two bodies. We will go back to the Rookery, to lead it and keep it sharp. Just in case they might be needed again, if your new Golden Age doesn't work out after all."

  "Yes," said Douglas, the first to recover. "Teach them all to be fighters and freethinkers and general pains in the arse. Just in case the rest of Humanity gets soft and lazy again."

  BrettRose turned to Lewis. "Good-bye, Deathstalker. An honor to fight beside you. We both learned a lot."

  "You're welcome," said Lewis. "Jesus, this is spooky. Can I suggest you both practice talking separately again, because this is seriously weirding me out."

  "How does it feel?" said Jesamine, curiosity winning out over shock. "Being one person in two bodies?"

  BrettRose smiled. "Happy. Fulfilled. Whole. We feel whole, at last."

  And while everyone was considering that, another figure appeared, teleporting into the court. Daniel Wolfe stood before them, shining like a star, so brightly that none of them could look at him directly till he lowered the light. He smiled about him.

  "I am Daniel Shub," he announced calmly. "Daniel Wolfe and the three AIs of Shub, who went through the Madness Maze together, and emerged combined into one, far greater being. The power of machine mind joined to the capabilities of human mind. We have become… so very powerful. And utterly content. We are more than we were, or ever dreamed of becoming. Relax, people; we are still sworn against violence. All that lives is holy."

  "Well, yes, but you'll pardon me if I take that with just a pinch of salt," said Douglas. "I haven't forgotten your ships firing on the Mog Mor ships during the battle over Haden. You blew them all apart, and didn't even hang around to check for survivors."

  "No need. The Mog Mor ships were just drones," said Daniel Shub. "Empty ships run by remote control. Mog Mor was never more than a great bluff. Their race has become so reduced that now there are only two of their species left. That's why you never saw more than two of them at court. One of the Madness Maze's more significant failures. They all killed each other off, until only two were left; and they didn't even have the sense to end up with a breeding pair."

  "So… what will you do now?" said Lewis.

  "We will go exploring," said Daniel Shub. "To investigate higher dimensions, and other levels of reality. We doubt we'll be back, so you are welcome to take the Shub homeworld, and do with it what you will, or what you can. We have transcended at last, and it is everything we ever hoped for, but could not imagine. Perhaps one day Humanity will reach this point, and come after us, and then we will meet again."

  Daniel Shub disappeared in a flare of light that left everyone blinking, and Nina frantically checking the light levels on her cameras to make sure they'd got it all. She'd had so many exclusives in one day that she was getting quite giddy and breathless.

  "I can remember when Shub were supposed to be our children," said Douglas. "Who's the child now, I wonder?"

  "First Brett and Rose, then Daniel and Shub," said Lewis. "Thank God I was never the joining type."

  "Pardon me for butting in," said Stuart Lennox. "But it's not all happy endings, just yet. I hate to be the one to bring it up, but, what are we going to do about the Terror?"

  And that was when the final visitor strolled into the court, from a side door that no one had noticed until then.

  The shape-changing alien, wearing a face and body that no one but he remembered: a certain lupine humanoid form called the Wolfling. Big and hairy and very impressive. Everyone drew their weapons.

  "Take it easy, people," the shape-changer growled. "I bear a message from Owen Deathstalker, and you wouldn't believe how long I've been holding it for you. He wrote it out himself, in his own hand, because he knew he'd never return to say it in person. Here it is."

  He handed a thick scroll over to Lewis, who slowly unrolled it, and read the first line aloud:

  Last night I dreamed of Owen Deathstalker.

  CHAPTER NINE

  *

  JOURNEY'S END

  Owen had never felt so powerful, or so tired. But as long as Hazel's trail had been, he could sense it was finally nearing its end. The galaxy spun around him like a sparkling toy, slowly winding down, as he stepped effortlessly out of the Pale Horizon and back into space and time. He stood on the airless surface of a moon, all gray dust and pockmarked craters, and looked down on a very young world. There was no trace of Hazel anywhere. Her trail stopped here, in this place and at this time, and then just… ceased to be. She hadn't died here. Owen was sure he would have sensed that. She had just gone… somewhere else. Owen considered the blue and green world before him. There was nothing in orbit, not even a single transmitting satellite. No lights shone in the dark, to mark the presence of cities, and civilization. So Owen went down, to take a look around.

  He plunged through the turbulent atmosphere, and flew across the continents, and it was all very quiet and peaceful. He'd lost track of just how far back he'd come, how many centuries or even millennia had danced past beneath his running feet, but he could tell that these were the early days of Humanity's homeworld. Old enough to settle down, but intelligent life had yet to evolve. There were just animals, wandering grassy plains, and great birds in the sky that had enough sense to give Owen plenty of room. He came down, and it felt good to have solid ground under his feet again. Animals hid themselves in the tall grasses, observing him cautiously from a distance, making warning hooting noises to each other. Owen looked unhurriedly about him, enjoying the feel of the warm humid breeze on his face.

  It was the quiet that struck him most. Apart from the occasional cough or bark from the watching animals, or the far-off cry of an arcing bird, the whole world seemed to be holding its breath, as though waiting for history to begin. At the dawn of life, the world was untouched by human needs or wants, and the complications they caused. Owen tried to feel the significance of this moment, in the cradle of Humanity; the promise of civilization and the great Empires to come… but the world was just empty. Like a new house, waiting for its tenants to move in. This was an innocent world, and Owen didn't belong here. He considered what to do, where to go next. Hazel had been here, for a while. He could sense her presence, standing on this spot, seeing what he saw. But even in her confused and maddened state, she must have realized that she wouldn't find Owen by going any further back in time. This was the end of the line.

  So where did she go? Where else was there, but space and time?

  Owen concentrated, reaching out with his more than human senses as he rose up into the air, soaring smoothly through the rich blue skies and on up into orbit. He investigated the areas around the planet, and was surprised to d
etect the presence of other visitors. There was nothing human about them. Alien ships, and aliens that didn't need ships, and other things so strange and other that even his expanded mind couldn't make sense of them. All of them come and gone, in the long dark surrounding what would one day become Humanity's homeworld. Some so big, so impossibly alien that Owen couldn't cope with them, others so small and fleeting that he couldn't be sure they'd actually existed. And, on the very edge of his perception, vast entities that walked other paths, between or around the usual dimensions of space, traveling from unknowable places on unguessable missions. Owen turned his senses in this new direction, and detected… an anomaly.

  Halfway between the planet and its moon, there was a break in the space-time continuum, a tear forced open and then raggedly sewn together again. As though something had forced its way out of reality into somewhere else, and then pulled the hole in behind it. Owen considered the breach thoughtfully. Lewis had told him that the Terror came from a place that was not a place, and existed there in between its attacks on populated worlds. Hazel couldn't go any further back in time, so she'd gone… somewhere else.

  This was the way in. And it felt… strangely familiar.

  Since the breach in space and time wasn't, strictly speaking, real; how he viewed it depended on him. So Owen made a conscious effort to visualize the rift as a gateway. There was a sense of resistance, a slow sluggish inertia, and then the gateway appeared before him. At first Owen wasn't sure what it was he was seeing. Great ivory pillars towering up before him, crowded together. But size was only relevant, after all, so Owen looked at it again, as from a great distance, and finally recognized the ivory pillars for what they were. A huge pair of gleaming white jaws, the teeth clenched and ground together to prevent entry.

  Nice symbolism, Owen thought, wondering vaguely whether it came from Hazel or him. He turned the full force of his power upon the jaws, commanding them to open, but they didn't stir. His strength of will, that had brought him so far in space and time, was useless here, presented with another equally strong will. Owen hung before the closed gate for a long time, thinking hard, and finally broadcast a simple message with his mind.

  Hazel, it's Owen. Open up.

  The jaws gaped slowly open, like the gateway to Hell. Owen passed within them, and the gateway swallowed him up.

  He was standing in a stone corridor, in a place he knew. He'd been here before. He reached out with his expanded senses, and could feel Hazel all around him. This was her place, sprung fully born from her forehead. He could feel the stone corridors radiating away in all directions, reaching away forever, endlessly branching and rejoining in a complex maze. There was a dim gray light that came from everywhere at once, and cast no shadows at all. An artificial place, brought into being outside or inside space and time, a construct produced and maintained by a monstrous effort of will.

  The details of the place made no sense, as though they'd been added afterwards, as an afterthought; or perhaps they had just seeped in, the products of an increasingly insane mind. The air smelt of dead roses and a woman's sweat. Beads of sweat ran slowly, continuously, down the stone walls. Far away, Owen thought he could hear someone crying, sobbing and howling as though their heart had been broken. And beyond and beneath that mourning, a slow sullen grinding, like an engine that ran on hate. The whole place felt… unhealthy. Like the endless corridors we pace in fever dreams, going nowhere, for forever and a day. Owen chose a direction, and started walking.

  Ghosts came to meet him, walking the empty stone corridors, passing around and even through him as though he was the one who wasn't there. They all looked like Owen. Visions of himself, from various times in his past: sometimes young and uncertain, sometimes brave and heroic, and sometimes battered and bloody. The images were often unclear, distorted and eroded, like the faces of statues worn away by long passages of time. Or perhaps… by fading memories.

  Did I ever really look that heroic, that certain? Owen thought. Or is that just how she saw me? I never knew.

  Owen knew what this place was, or would be. He had walked these corridors before, in his past but this place's future. This was where the Blood Runners had brought Hazel d'Ark after they abducted her from Lachrymae Christi. They had trapped and kidnapped her, when she and Owen were both weakened after the defense of St. Beatrice's Mission. They brought her here, to their secret place, to torture and vivisect her, to try to steal her miraculous power and potential. Owen had tracked her here, and together he and Hazel had wiped out all the Blood Runners, in a hot savage fury. And they had seen the end of this place, its final destruction, escaping only moments before it disappeared forever. But that was then, and this was now.

  Hazel had created this place. Owen knew that, as certainly as he knew anything. The nature of the place was clear to him, the stone corridors all but talking to him, whispering her name. He could even sense the place's history, as though laid out before him on one of the ancient handwritten scrolls he had studied so long ago, when he was just a scholar and minor historian. Steeped in her madness, driven by loss and need, Hazel had reached the end of the line when she ran out of time, so she dropped out of the time and space that had failed her, and created a secret place of her own, a pocket dimension to hide and plan in. There was no telling how long Hazel had spent here; Time worked differently here, when it worked at all. But slowly Hazel changed, growing and evolving like a caterpillar in an insane cocoon, finally to emerge from her stone chrysalis and burst back into space and time, reborn as the Terror. An almost elemental force now, with little of Hazel's consciousness in it, driven by a need and a longing and a madness it could barely remember the reasons for.

  Disconnected from Hazel's history, the Terror had lost all track of space and time, and reappeared long ago and far away, in the galaxy of the Illuminati. And there she began her long journey back, heading home, following instinct as much as memory, goaded on by the loss of something it could no longer name, heading back to the Heartworld of the Empire, because… because it was responsible for her loss. The Terror started the long journey back, forgetting exactly who or what it was looking for, but compelled to search anyway. Perhaps sometimes the name Owen arose, but the Terror always forgot it again. It went where it had to, not caring who or what it had to destroy in order to raise the power necessary for its journey. It ate souls, and worlds, and civilizations, grinding them up to make its bread. The civilization of the Illuminati was the first to face the Terror's hunger, but it wasn't the last.

  It took time to produce the herald, that could travel in space while the Terror occupied its own hidden place, and longer still to produce the herald's ravenous spawn, but once the Terror had found a method that worked, it settled for that. It may not have been the best or most efficient way of doing things, but it was as good as any other to a mad mind with limitless power and no restraints or conscience.

  Owen stood very still in the middle of a corridor, bent over as though about to vomit, his arms wrapped tightly around him to keep himself from flying apart. The maze of corridors was full of information, like a library full of books all shouting at once. Here, Time was just another direction, the corridors existing simultaneously in Past, Present, and Future. And it was the only physical existence the Terror had now. Hazel's original, human body had disappeared long ago, eaten up by the terrible energies it generated and processed. The place that was not a place was the Terror; the herald and its maddening spawn just aspects of the greater whole, projected into three-dimensional space, like a fingertip pushed through a sheet of paper.

  This place was the Terror, and it was slowly becoming aware of Owen's presence within it. Owen could sense something like a great eye, sealed shut by eons of sleep, cracking slowly open to peer within its own self. There was a sound, like a sullen silver bell ringing in the heart of a stone forest at midnight. A slow gusting breeze in the corridors that might have been something breathing. Beads of sweat rolled slowly up the corridor walls, and the floor trembled u
nder Owen's feet. Something was coming his way, something vast and utterly dreadful.

  Hazel d'Ark came walking down the corridor towards him, a memory from the past. She looked just as she had when Owen first met her, so long ago on Virimonde; young and vibrant, red-haired and sharp-faced. She looked the way she used to, back before all the death and war and madness. But at the same time, she was so much more than that, there was so much more to her, as though she existed in more than three dimensions, her physical presence radiating off in directions that even Owen's expanded mind couldn't follow. A memory of Hazel, plucked at random from memories that no longer meant anything to the Terror, but invested with its power.

  "Hazel," said Owen. "It's me. It's Owen! I've found you at last."

  She kept walking right at him, her face blank and subtly inhuman. His name meant nothing to the Terror now. It reached out with its powerful will, and tried to fix Owen in the corridor, like a bug impaled on a pin, just another ghost in the Terror's collection. Owen fought it, and quickly discerned that even his new strength was nothing compared to this ancient implacable will. Hazel's mouth opened, and kept on opening, gaping impossibly wide to eat him up, body and soul, just as it had swallowed planets and populations. Owen fought, concentrating on projecting his identity at the Terror, trying to force it to recognize him, and remember him.

  The impossibly vast mouth howled out the never-ending scream of the herald's razor-edged spawn, the terrible howl that had maddened whole worlds, the horrid sound reverberating through all the stone corridors at once. It would have destroyed even Owen, if he hadn't been able to hear the loss and horror and stubborn love at its heart, that still fuelled the Terror after all this time. It was the scream of Hazel, in her ship over Haden, when she heard of Owen's death. That same scream, still going on after countless centuries. A howl of loss and rage, at what had been taken from her, and at herself, because she'd never told the Deathstalker she loved him.