Free Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny by Simon R. Green Page B

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