Deathstalker Destiny by Simon R. Green Page A

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 inside 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