Deathstalker Return (27 page)

“They went through the Maze,” said Lewis. “And they were never fully human after that. Everyone who knew them said so. And some of the miracles really did happen. There were news recordings of them at the time, even if they’re lost to us now. And some of the apocrypha hint at things like this . . . that Owen and Hazel must still be alive, somewhere, because after what the Maze had done to them, they
couldn’t
die . . .”

“This is seriously creeping me out,” said Jesamine. “I thought
Deathstalker’s Lament
was over the top when I starred in it, but this . . . If Owen and Hazel really could do things like that, they weren’t human anymore. No more human than the Grendels . . . People aren’t supposed to be able to do things like
that
...”

“It’s not real,” said Rose. “It can’t be. Just stories, grown in the telling. Owen was a great warrior, and that’s enough. It’s all anyone needs.”

“It’s legend,” Lewis said slowly. “But if we doubt this telling of the story, can we trust the official legends either? At least these people actually knew Owen and Hazel. Moon’s still here, still alive. But . . . I saw Owen and Hazel, Jack Random and Ruby Journey. Saw the real people, in contemporary records. Shub showed them to me, and the Dust Plains of Memory. Real people . . . stirring, moving, incredibly impressive people, but not . . . this. Not fairy tales.”

“Does it matter?” said Brett.

“Of course,” said Lewis. “It’s everything. Because only a legend has any chance of stopping the Terror when it comes.”

They all stood together and thought about that for a while. Lewis turned off the display screen, and put the data crystal back in its case on the shelf. He couldn’t afford doubts like this. He had to be strong, just as Owen had to be what he was believed to be—or the Empire was doomed.

“Come on, Lewis,” said Jesamine. “Let’s get out of here.”

“He went through the Madness Maze,” said Lewis. “He came out changed. More than human. Everyone said so. You all saw what Carrion could do. And Captain Silence. The stories have to be true . . . because if they aren’t, then Owen is dead and he isn’t coming back and our quest is useless.”

“Let’s go,” said Jesamine. “We’ll talk to Moon. He can tell us the truth . . . whatever it is.”

“Moon wanted us to come here,” said Lewis. “To see this, this shrine, and what it contains. Why?”

“Perhaps he wanted us to know the truth, at last,” said Jesamine. “To let us see what Owen could do, so that we’d have the confidence, and the faith, to continue on our quest.”

“Yeah, right,” said Brett.

“Shut up, Brett.”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” said Lewis. “So many things and people I believed in turned out to be not what I thought them to be. Even me. How can I believe in something like this?”

“Because he was a Deathstalker,” said Jesamine. “And so are you.”

Outside the mission, Hellen Adair was waiting for them. She didn’t ask any questions, and none of them felt like saying anything, so they walked back to the boundary of the city in silence. They made one stop along the way. Lewis insisted on being allowed to see the city cemetery, where the old leper colonists were buried. There was one grave he needed to see. He found it easily enough. Just a simple grave, and a simple headstone, bearing the single name
Vaughn.
It looked no different from any of the hundreds of other graves. He checked with the cemetery custodian, who looked up the old records, and confirmed that there really was a body in the grave. Lewis thanked the man, and went back to look at the grave again, while his companions waited more or less patiently at the gates to the cemetery.

Vaughn was dead, long dead. So who had come to Lewis at Douglas’s Coronation, to give him Owen’s ring? A ghost? Once, Lewis would have said he didn’t believe in such things, but Captain Silence’s death had been widely reported, and still he came to help fight the good fight, on Logres and Unseeli. If that really was John Silence.

You had to have faith, Lewis decided finally. In the end, it all comes down to faith. To have faith in the things that matter. To be a Deathstalker.

 

 

Hellen Adair took them to the edge of the city and pointed them on their way. No one else was there to see them off. Lewis checked the directions carefully against his internal compass, and quickly calculated the distance to be just under a mile. Hellen Adair made it clear she had no intention of going with them. This was their pilgrimage. Lewis and his companions said good-bye, and thanks, with varying amounts of sincerity, and set off into the crimson jungle again.

The going was easier this time. Someone had spoken with the Red Brain, and it had spoken with its separate parts. Although there was no easing of general aggression in the jungle as a whole, somehow the individual plants swept back out of the party’s way, forming an open trail to take them to Tobias Moon. At first, Lewis had thought Brett was up to his old tricks again, but one look at the con man’s uneasy face was enough to correct that impression. Brett didn’t approve of other people pulling his own tricks on him. It was a steady, much less strenuous march this time, and they kept up a good pace. Lewis was back in the lead again, and had to keep himself from pushing the pace too hard. Part of him was desperate to get to the Hadenman at last, and finally get some straight answers about Owen and the Maze. And part of him was really scared about what those answers might be. It is an intimidating thing, to meet legends in the flesh.

About half a mile outside Mission City, they came across the rusting remains of some misguided logging company’s attempt to introduce high tech equipment. The huge machines, several stories high, lay wrecked and abandoned in the jungle, half buried under crawling vines and slowly shifting scarlet foliage. Crimson tracers had invaded every grille and opening, and rain drops slid constantly down the red-rusted metal. Steel panels bulged outwards from the pressure of vegetable growth within, and dark, heavy branches had smashed through the steel-glass windows. Shafts of light moved slowly across drooping cranes and saws and cutting arms. Like great beached whales of rusted steel defeated by slow, implacable forces, they were already overgrown and being absorbed by the scarlet jungle.

When the party finally reached the exact coordinates provided by Hellen Adair, there was nothing there—just a small clearing in the middle of nowhere, no different from a dozen others they’d already passed through. Knee-high grass of a shocking pink undulated before them in slow rippling waves. Lewis and his companions looked about them, feeling distinctly upset. It had been a long walk, the rain was falling more heavily, and they were all feeling hot and sticky.

“We’ve been sold a pup, haven’t we?” said Brett. “I don’t want to say I told you so, but I did. They never meant for us to talk to their precious pet oracle.”

“Hush, Brett,” said Jesamine. “This is where we’re meant to be, so there must be something here. Somewhere. Right, Lewis? Lewis?”

“I’m thinking,” said Lewis.

“There is something here,” Saturday said unexpectedly. The reptiloid turned his great head slowly back and forth. “I can feel . . . something. Perhaps because the jungle reminds me of home, a little . . . there’s definitely something here that doesn’t belong here.”

“So where is Moon?” said Brett. “Hiding up a tree, maybe? Lying down in the long grass, perhaps, having a bit of a snooze? We’ve been had! There’s no one here! There isn’t a hut or a dwelling or a big lump in the ground for as far as I can see, and I can see pretty damn far! And I’m wet. I hate being wet.”

“Something’s here,” said Saturday. “And it knows we’re here.”

The ground trembled under their feet. The pink grass waved wildly, and then the center of the clearing bulged suddenly upwards, the ground cracking apart, throwing dark earth in all directions. Pale roots and tubers and wet crawling things surged up out of the broken earth and were thrust aside as a vast new shape emerged slowly and relentlessly from its earthy bed. A steel hull smeared with wet mud emerged from the gaping crevasse, rising up and up, until at last the wreck of an old-fashioned space yacht filled the clearing, buoyed up and brought to the surface again by the concentrated will of Tobias Moon and the Red Brain. The old ship slowly settled into its new place, half its bulk still sunken in the ground, the battered prow straining towards the overcast sky and open air for the first time in decades.

“Dear God,” said Lewis. “That’s Owen’s ship. That’s
Sunstrider Two.
I’d know it anywhere.”

“Of course,” said Jesamine. “They crash-landed here. The ship was never recovered. We’re probably the first people to see it in two hundred years. Is Moon . . . inside it?”

“I suppose so,” said Lewis. “I guess . . . we go in.”

“Bad move,” Brett said immediately. “That thing looks like a tomb to me. Or a prison. Or a trap. There could be anything in there. Anything.”

Rose slapped him affectionately round the back of the head. “All that weapons training I put you through, and you’re still a scaredy cat.”

“I’m a live scaredy cat,” said Brett, rubbing a bruised ear. “I can’t help feeling there’s a definite connection between the two.”

“We go in,” said Lewis. “If Moon is in there, I really don’t think we should keep him waiting.” He smiled slowly. “Look at it. This is
Owen
’s ship. It’ll be like walking into legend, into his life . . .”

“You’re really easy to impress, Deathstalker, you know that?” said Brett. “All right, it’s a famous ship, and I could probably arrange a really sweet salvage deal, if you’d let me, which you won’t, but . . . the ship is a mess. Look at it. This had to have been a really bad landing. The hull’s split open in several places, there’s no sign of the rear assemblies, and Christ alone knows what happened to the sensor spikes. They must have hit the ground like the wrath of God.”

“Exactly,” said Lewis. “And they walked away from it. Think how tough, how more than human, they would have had to have been to do that.”

“So what do we do?” said Jesamine. “Knock on the hull and wait to be invited in?”

“There’s a really big opening down by the engine compartment,” Saturday said suddenly. “And there are some really strange energies radiating from it.”

They all looked at the reptiloid. “You can see energies?” Lewis said finally.

“Oh, yes. And these are really weird energies.”

“Then that is our invitation,” said Lewis.

He led them down the length of the
Sunstrider II,
heading for the stern. Up close, the old yacht looked rougher,
realer,
than it had in his imagination. He’d heard tales about this ship all his life, but . . . he could have flown a ship like this. He had the skills. He still felt a tingle of almost superstitious awe as he approached the great rent in the steel hull over the engine chamber. Something had smashed right through the reinforced hull, leaving a rent a dozen feet high, and almost as wide. It didn’t look like crash damage. Lewis swallowed hard, and led the way in, moving cautiously through the gloomy interior—walking where Owen and his companions had walked, long ago. There was a clear path to the engine compartment, but scarlet vegetation had worked its way into the yacht over the years, lining the interior bulkheads with thick mattings of fibrous materials. It grew thicker as Lewis led the way further in, until they were all walking hunched over through a narrow tunnel like a soft, furry, red artery.

Finally, in an enclosed space that had once, but no longer, held the ship’s stardrive, they found Tobias Moon. The living fibers lining the chamber glowed with a soft rosy light, illuminating the Hadenman as he sat cross-legged on the floor, his head bowed forward, his chin resting on his chest. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t seem to be breathing. He was a man’s size and shape, but even still and silent, there was something of dread and awe about him. He looked to be tall, but not as tall as Rose; broad and muscular, but not so much as Lewis. None of that mattered. This was Tobias Moon.

He was surrounded and enveloped by a mass of barbed and thorned vines that over the years had pierced and penetrated his body in a hundred places, as though plugging him in to the mass plant consciousness of the Red Brain. Lewis studied the slowly pulsing crimson strands that cocooned Moon’s body, and tried to work out exactly what kind of place his quest had brought him to: a coffin, or a regeneration tank? Was this just another preserved body, like St. Beatrice? Or did life still move in what had, after all, been a cyborg body, one of the infamous augmented men?

“The energies are very harsh here,” said Saturday. “Unhealthy. They hurt my head. I’ve never seen anything like them before. I don’t think we should stay here.”

“I can feel . . . something,” said Jesamine, her voice a bare whisper. “Look at what the jungle’s done to him, Lewis. Do you suppose it did that to him while he was still alive? Can we cut him free?”