Deathstalker Destiny (55 page)

“Perhaps,” said Silence. “Not all your changes were for the better. It doesn’t matter now. We still have to face the Recreated.”

“When you opened fire on the Maze, and tried to destroy it,” said the Wolfing, “the Maze protected itself by jumping forward through Time. When it reappeared around the baby, everything was as it had been. You never did understand the nature of the Madness Maze. What you see is merely the physical manifestation of something far greater. The tip of a very large, very alien iceberg. The Maze is just the intrusion into our reality, into our mere three dimensions, of something far greater; a mere fraction of an alien device so vast that one glimpse of the whole thing would blast your reason away.”

“How very metaphysical,” said Silence. “I’ll be impressed later, when I’ve got time. All that really matters now is the Darkvoid Device. Parliament sent me here to find and obtain it, and bring it back to use against the Recreated, to save the homeworld and Humanity. Nothing else matters.”

“It’s not that simple,” said Owen. “Giles thought he could use the baby’s power to stop a rebellion. Instead, the baby murdered billions of people. Who knows what he might do, when he wakes again? This isn’t a weapon we dare use, Silence. We don’t know how to aim it, focus it, or even turn it off. That small baby could actually be a greater threat to Humanity than all the Recreated put together.”

“That’s theory,” said Silence. “I have to deal in facts. The Recreated are a threat now. And I have my orders.”

“We’ll stop you, if we have to,” said Owen.

“Humans,” said the Wolfing. “With your species on the edge of extinction, still you bicker and quarrel. Come with me, fools. The Madness Maze is waiting for you. Perhaps you can learn wisdom from it, in the time you have left.”

 

The Madness Maze was right back where it had been, as enigmatic and unsettling as ever. Beyond it lay the city the Handenmen built, after Owen released them from their Tomb. The once bright and shining silver towers were dark and lifeless now, the mathematically straight streets silent and deserted, with no trace anywhere of the augmented men who created the city to be the wellspring of their rebirth.

“They all went into the Maze,” said the Wolfing. “Every last one. It called to them, in a voice their original creators would have recognized, and they could not stand against it. They all went in, and none came out. That is the nature of the Maze; to judge and condemn the unworthy. They all went mad, or died, and the Maze took them into itself forever. Their time was over. They were incapable of becoming.”

“Becoming?” said Hazel sharply. “Becoming
what?”

“Only the Maze can answer that question,” said the Wolfing. “And you must go into the Maze to ask it.”

Hazel scowled. “I’ve never liked the word
must.
And besides; that damned thing almost drove me crazy last time. I’m in no hurry to give it another crack at me.”

“You have no choice,” said Wulf. “The baby is waking. His fate, your fate, and Humanity’s fate all meet their destiny together, here, at the heart of the Maze. Either you go in, and complete your journey at last, or everything you have done and stood for has been for nothing. The Recreated will destroy your species, and you will die, alone and incomplete and far from everything you hold most dear.”

The four humans looked at the Madness Maze, and felt it looking back. At first glance it seemed straightforward enough. A simple pattern of tall steel walls, shining and shimmering, but the more you looked at it the more complex you realized it was. The pattern unfolded before their eyes like a continuously blooming flower, becoming ever more subtle and intricate, like the folded convolutions of the brain. The walls were twelve feet high and only a fraction of an inch thick, and Owen remembered clearly how deathly cold they had been to the touch. The paths between the walls led to knowledge and madness, inspiration and evolution or a terrible death; the birth of a new kind of Humanity, or the death of the old. In the Maze was every dream you ever had, including all the bad ones. Perhaps especially the bad ones. Birth is always painful.

It was calling to them. They could all feel it, on levels they couldn’t comprehend or resist. As Hazel had said, only partly in jest, they had unfinished business with the Maze. Or it with them. Silence looked at the shimmering structure before him, and tried to remember the good men and women of his crew it had killed, but still something drew him to it. He had never passed all the way through. He had turned back to save Investigator Frost, because the Maze was killing her, and he couldn’t allow that. But a part of him had always wondered what he might have become, if only he’d gone all the way through, to the heart. To the center of the mysteries.

Owen looked at the Madness Maze, and thought of all the amazing things he’d done in his short, legendary life. He’d achieved many things, performed wonders, followed where his duty and his honor had led him, but he couldn’t honestly say any of it had made him happy. Despite all his wishes and convictions, he’d been forced to put aside his old scholarly self and become the warrior he’d never wanted to be. He’d seen good friends die, along with his enemies, to bring about a questionable victory and an Empire he no longer recognized or felt a part of. The Maze had changed his life forever, and made him so much more than he was, but he still didn’t know whether to praise or damn it.

Hazel scowled at the Maze, her hand resting again on the gun at her hip. She didn’t remember much about her last trip through the Maze, at least partly through her own wishes, but she was sure the damned thing had its own agenda, and not necessarily one she would agree with. She’d been many things in her life, from clonelegger and pirate to rebel and official hero, and she hated to think any of them had been anyone’s idea but her own. If she went into the Maze again, what new changes might it work in her? What might she
become?

Carrion looked at the Madness Maze, and perhaps saw more than the others, because he had lived so long with the Ashrai in the metallic forest. He saw strange energies spiraling endlessly through the steel pathways, and potentials and possibilities that both intrigued and frightened him. He welcomed these feelings, because it had been so long since he’d felt much of anything.

“Well?” said the Wolfing finally. “You’ve come all this way. Have none of you anything to say?”

“If the ... Device is in the Maze, then we have to go after it,” said Carrion. “But you heard the Deathstalker. We could just be trading one threat for another.”

“If the baby becomes a menace, then I’ll destroy it,” said Silence. “But not until I’ve made use of it.”

“John; you can‘t,” said Carrion. “He’s just a baby. He’s innocent.”

“It killed billions of people!”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“Nothing’s ever simple, is it?” said Owen. “I remember the first time I came here. I remember walking the Madness Maze to its heart, and finding the baby waiting there, safely sleeping. I think I knew even then that my life was never going to make sense. That there were greater powers than I could ever hope to understand at work in the universe. And this was where the lies started too. My ancestor Giles, the original Deathstalker, told me the baby was his clone. It didn’t occur to me till much later that cloning didn’t exist in his time. He also told me the Madness Maze was created by the Wolfings, though soon after he changed his tune and said the Maze was an alien artifact. That was his first slip, the first thing that made me distrust him. But then, I never did believe in legends. Especially when I became one. And I’ve studied far too much history to believe in happy endings. But I still believe one man of goodwill can make a difference, if he stands at the right place at the right time, and will not back down or look away.”

“Giles believed that once,” said the Wolfing. “Unfortunately, he decided he wanted to be more than just a hero, and Warrior Prime. The time has come for me to tell you the truth; the true history of Giles Deathstalker and his infant son and the Madness Maze.”

This is the tale the Wolfing told.

More than nine hundred years ago, when things were very different, and Giles was an honored hero loved and respected by all, he betrayed his wife and his Family and his Emperor, to have an affair with the Empress Hermione. Hermione became pregnant, her first and only child. Ulric was delighted at the pregnancy, and there were Empire-wide celebrations over the birth of a son and heir to the Empire. Only Giles and Hermione knew that the official genetest was a fake; that the newborn babe was a bastard and a traitor’s get. Even now, I don’t know whether Giles really loved her. If he ever loved her. Or whether he quite deliberately set out to sire a child who would give Clan Deathstalker a claim to the Iron Throne. I’d hate to think his affair with Hermione was just a means to an end, but Giles always was ambitious. Perhaps the plan was to wait until Ulric II met his death, by whatever means, and then Giles would step forward and reveal the true genetest, and the Deathstalker Family would rule the Empire. Giles never told me, and I never asked.

Whatever the truth of his ambitions, it all went horribly wrong. The betrayer was himself betrayed, by his true son, the man you came to know as Dram. Shortly after the royal birth, he told Ulric the truth, currying favor perhaps, for Dram was always ambitious too. And perhaps it was jealousy too; a fear that he would be put aside in favor of his bastard half-brother. Father and son never did get on. Giles was always off somewhere in the ever-expanding Empire, being a hero, creating his legend, while his son was left behind, to grow up in the company of tutors and politicians, and a quiet mousy mother who had no idea how to cope with her increasingly ruthless child.

The Emperor almost went mad with rage when Dram told him the truth about his beloved infant son. Ulric had been childless for many years, and so the insult Giles had done him became unbearable on many levels. He had the Empress Hermione imprisoned, awaiting trial and execution, and put a death warrant on Giles Deathstalker. They say Ulric signed it in his own blood. That’s why Giles really went on the run, all those years ago. Forget that part of the legend. There was no great clash of two godlike men. Just a petty squabble over a miserable betrayal. Giles was forewarned by one of his many allies at Court. He fought his way into the Palace, killing many good men, grabbed the baby, and went on the run with half the Imperial Fleet snapping at his heels. There was only one place in the Empire that Giles could run to, where he wouldn’t be expected: the Wolfing World. No one knew that he had a secret ally there.

Some years before, the Emperor had sent Giles to this world, to hunt down and destroy the last Wolfing. I was a legend then, myself, and a constant threat and thorn in the side to Humanity, so Ulric sent one legend to deal with another. Giles hunted me down easily enough, but when we finally came face to face, with nothing on our minds but battle and death, we were both surprised at what we saw in each other’s eyes. We knew, in a moment that seemed to last forever, that neither of us could defeat the other; that both of us would die if we fought. At long last we had found equals; someone worthy of our respect. We chose not to die. Instead, we sat and talked for hours, like two brothers separated since birth, who had only now found each other. Giles still had honor then, as well as a keen eye for a potential ally. He denied his orders, left me alive, and went back to the Emperor to tell him he couldn’t find the legendary Wolfing. That I probably no longer even existed. Ulric believed him. Why not? His precious Warrior Prime had never lied to him before. Perhaps in that moment, in that first small betrayal, was planted the seed of rebellion, and ambition, and all that was to come. I like to think so. I like to think that in some small way I helped to contribute to the downfall of the Empire that slaughtered all of my kind but me.

So who else could Giles turn to, with all the Empire turned against him, but me? He came here, seeking safety and sanctuary, and a base from which to someday strike back. So I showed him the Madness Maze. No other human had ever seen it before, save the Blood Runners, and they never spoke of it. I explained to Giles the nature and function of the Maze, and what it could do to him, if he dared to penetrate its secret heart. But he was frightened. He valued his humanity too much to give it up, then, no matter what the Maze promised. However, while he wasn’t prepared to risk himself, there was still the baby. What safer place could there be to hide his child, I asked, than in the heart of the Maze? No one would dare go in after him, and he would in time become powerful beyond belief. Giles listened to the Maze, talking through me, its involuntary guardian, and was tempted. His son; a weapon he could use to bring down the Empire that had dared turn against him. And tempted, he fell, and was damned by his own ambition.

I took the child into the heart of the Madness Maze and left him there. I have walked the Madness Maze many times, but it never chose to make me a god. It was enough that it kept me alive when I would much rather have died, and bound me to its service, an unwilling immortal guardian and mouthpiece. I would have killed the child if I could. Because he would soon become what I could not. Because he had come between me and my friend. But the Maze wouldn’t let me. It had its own plans for the child of Giles Deathstalker.