Deathstalker Coda (42 page)
Authors: Simon R. Green
The Arena became a slaughteryard, where the bodies were never cleared away, but just piled up at the sides. The sands were always red with blood now, and the stench was indescribable. The ELFs, far and far away, didn’t care. They were having fun. Sometimes they played with the dead bodies too, just for the distress they knew this would cause grieving relatives. They refused to be limited by human moralities or taboos. They saw themselves as more than human, and denied themselves nothing.
They insisted on every single bit of it being televised, on every channel, simultaneously. What was the point of being bad, if there was no one watching to be shocked and outraged? Finn wouldn’t allow the ELFs to actually come out and say it was them, but the clues were there. And people did watch; there was a regular audience. Some, because a secret part of them responded to the atrocities. Some, with horrified fascination. And some, just because it was better to know, than not. Even when it was always bad news, people needed to know. And all across Logres and all the watching worlds, outrage and a need for revenge burned coldly in people’s hearts, and they readied themselves for rebellion, and watched hopefully for a sign.
Joseph Wallace never watched, though he was careful to read all the latest reports. As the ELFs grew every day more powerful, and more closely tied to Finn, the more his own power and influence declined. The thralls on the streets might wear his uniforms, but they didn’t answer to him. Joseph was being sidelined, his power base eroded and even sabotaged by the ELFs, who wanted Finn’s attention all to themselves. Finn still called Joseph in for his disturbing little chats, but whatever influence Joseph ever had with the Emperor seemed to have disappeared. Secretly and privately and very much against Finn’s orders, Joseph’s people did their best to spy on the ELFs. Joseph had never trusted the inhuman creatures. He was Pure Humanity, after all. He gathered all his best information and intelligence and presented it to the Emperor, as proof that the ELFs had their own agenda, and was met with a cold, indifferent stare.
I don’t care,
Finn said flatly.
As long as they get the job done, I don’t care what they do. And Joseph, if you can’t get your job done, I’ll replace you with someone who can.
Finn said flatly.
As long as they get the job done, I don’t care what they do. And Joseph, if you can’t get your job done, I’ll replace you with someone who can.
As the ELFs possessed more and more people, and the armies of thralls grew and grew, so the ELF leaders and the uber-espers became even more powerful. The pool of thralls was a power source, and the more the possessors took and inhabited, the more they could take. Their esper abilities had never been so strong, so far-reaching. More and more thralls were able to manifest their owners’ abilities by proxy, though they always burnt out. But as the possessors grew stronger, so the differences between the ELF leaders and the uber-espers became more pronounced. Neither side trusted the other, and they each had their own strictly enforced territories. There were occasional border clashes, as thralls fought with thralls, and filled the terrified streets with blood and bodies.
Finn watched it all from a distance, and let them fight it out, carefully supporting neither one side nor the other. Divide and conquer still seemed like his best bet; while they were busy fighting each other, they weren’t fighting him. Besides, he enjoyed the spectacle. He allowed both sides to operate freely, while making it clear he wouldn’t tolerate any psionic battles in his capital city, because of the inevitable psychic fallout. He didn’t actually have any way of enforcing this, but so far the two sides were too preoccupied to notice. Finn was betting they’d weaken each other so much in their struggle, that whoever eventually emerged as victor would be too weak to threaten him.
And then, he’d do something about them.
But there were factors that even Finn didn’t know about. The uber-espers were determined to win, at whatever the cost. They had to win, and become more powerful than ever before, because they alone on Logres knew for sure that Owen Deathstalker was back from the dead; and they were all scared of Owen. Just one touch of his revitalized mind had been enough to show that he was more powerful than ever. More than the oversoul, more than any of them, and just possibly more powerful even than their original creator, the Mater Mundi. And so the uber-espers concentrated on possessing more and more thralls, pushing themselves to their limits and beyond to be sure of accumulating more power than the official ELF leaders.
They had to be ready, for when Owen Deathstalker came for them.
Finally, inevitably, war broke out. The Spider Harps, the Shatter Freak, Blue Hellfire, Screaming Silence, and the Gray Train turned the full force of their stored-up energies on the ELF leaders. The direct mental clash detonated over the Parade of the Endless, and everyone in the city cried out as psychic fallout devastated the surroundings. As esper minds battled for domination on their own psionic plane, the strikes and counterstrikes spilled over into the material world. Probability storms raged through the streets, manifesting in miracles and unlikely tragedies. There were breakouts of mass delusions and ripples spread through reality itself. Buildings exploded, and people too. Luck ran mad, outrageous possibilities expressing themselves in people’s flesh. Streets turned in upon themselves, with no way out. Gravity switched back and forth, and rivers ran through the sky. Tower blocks became trees, with people still trapped screaming within them. Water became fire, and the air become poison. There were falls of stones and rivers of blood, and people vanished, replaced by other versions of themselves.
And two great armies of thralls fought each other with secondhand ferocity, with guns and swords and whatever came to hand, as the dead piled up in the streets.
Only in the Rookery did people and property remain sane and safe, protected and shielded by the joined power of Diana Vertue and her followers, the Psycho Sluts. Their minds and their sanity shook and shuddered under the impact of so much mental power, but they stood firm, and within the boundaries of the Rookery people remained untouched, watching in horror at what was happening outside, helpless to intervene.
It all ended as suddenly as it had begun, and reality became firm and trustworthy again. Half the city was in flames, or rubble, and the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands, but the uber-espers had won, crushing and dominating the weaker minds of the ELF leaders, who turned out to be only human after all, and therefore limited in the evil they could conceive. The uber-espers crushed, controlled, and absorbed all the other espers in the Esper Liberation Force, until at the last there were only the five minds of the uber-espers, controlling millions of bodies.
We are the ELFs now,
the uber-espers said, and it was true. Five minds looking out through millions of bodies, and absorbing more all the time.
One day we will become the world,
said the uber-espers,
and all of Humanity will be us. Our thoughts, our will, operating in every human body. And then we’ll turn on each other, and make war across all the worlds in search of final domination, until only one of us is left. Won’t that be fun? All of Humanity, suffering endlessly, in the service of one triumphant mind.
We are the ELFs now,
the uber-espers said, and it was true. Five minds looking out through millions of bodies, and absorbing more all the time.
One day we will become the world,
said the uber-espers,
and all of Humanity will be us. Our thoughts, our will, operating in every human body. And then we’ll turn on each other, and make war across all the worlds in search of final domination, until only one of us is left. Won’t that be fun? All of Humanity, suffering endlessly, in the service of one triumphant mind.
The uber-espers laughed, and the laughter went on for hours.
Douglas Campbell, leader of the Rookery and acclaimed King of Thieves, still lived in the Lantern Lodge hotel. It wasn’t any less of a dump for being his headquarters, but it was central and familiar, and at least now he had a room all to himself. Rank had its privileges. Nina Malapert and Stuart Lennox had their own separate rooms too, just down the corridor. They could all have moved somewhere more salubrious, where the hot water was reliable and the toilet was just more than a hole in the floor, but the people liked to see Douglas living as one of them, suffering as they suffered.
(Douglas still insisted the whole place be fumigated. He had his standards.)
He was constantly protected by his bodyguard, supplied from the ranks of the Psycho Sluts. Two of the overpoweringly bright and cheerful young ladies took it in turns to stand guard outside his door, and accompany him wherever he went, and God help the poor fool who tried to get past them for any reason. Local gossip had it they’d turned one man into a frog. And then eaten him.
Under Douglas’s command and direction, the rebellion was growing slowly and steadily, and branching out. His people left the Rookery every day on secret missions, from information gathering to a little discreet sabotage. Finn’s people had first given Douglas the name King of Thieves, as a sneer over how far he’d fallen, but Douglas embraced the name, and the Rookery loved it.
Douglas had been pleasantly surprised to discover that these thieves, con men, rogues, and rascals were far more capable in the field than Finn’s trained military fanatics. It was as though they possessed some spark, some extra quality or vitality, that had been bred out of the city’s more civilized people. Certainly the Rookery had ways of acquiring tech, information, or anything else that might be needed, that would never have occurred to the law-abiding mind. The King of Thieves had learned to appreciate and value the wild talents of the Rookery. They were the only ones whose spirits the Emperor had been unable to crush. In fact, the more he tried to oppress them, the more determined they became. Years of living as despised outcasts had put iron in their souls and fire in their bellies. Douglas sometimes thought about the implications of that, and what it said about the rest of the Empire. Not least because the Rookery was changing him too. He had become wilder and more flexible in his thinking. And he liked it.
Cautiously at first, and then more openly, he plotted attacks against Finn’s weak spots, and the ragged warriors of the Rookery went out and ran joyous rings around Finn’s security. They came and went and did their damage and no one even knew they’d been there, until the explosions started. The information they gathered enabled Douglas to identify more weak links, and how to cripple them in inventive and distressing ways. Finn sent his security people running madly back and forth, but somehow they were never where they were needed, always fated to arrive just in time to pick up the pieces afterwards. They were becoming a laughingstock, and they knew it.
The actual territory that made up the Rookery expanded every day. It was now the only safe haven on all Logres, and people came from all across the planet, defying all dangers to cross the Rookery’s shifting boundaries and find relief at last from Finn, his people, and his thralls. The Rookery had to grow to accommodate them all. And so it swallowed up adjoining streets, and then adjoining blocks, on and on until it made up almost a full quarter of the Parade of the Endless. Finn declared that it was death for anyone to even approach the Rookery, but it didn’t slow the flood of refugees. In the world that Finn had made, death was no longer anything to be feared. For many, it was the kindest thing that could happen to them.
Douglas’s influence grew in other ways too. The aliens of the Rookery slowly but surely infiltrated the substructures of the city, sliding and gliding through all the service tubes and maintenance levels, the sewers and the factory outlets. They thrived in conditions that humans couldn’t tolerate, working their plans in places the humans above never even considered as inhabitable. The aliens breathed poison gases and swam through deadly chemical baths, and mile by mile they gained control of all the tasks that had once been performed by the Shub robots: all the appalling but necessary work that made possible the city’s essential services. They restored power and water and sewage and all the other comforts that the Parade of the Endless had once taken for granted. And by shutting down these services in some areas and opening them in the Rookery, the aliens rapidly made the Rookery the most attractive place in the city to live.
The aliens also made perfect unsuspected spies, listening from impossible places, their alien senses often picking up information that even the best tech would have missed. Finn would have been very surprised if he’d known how many aliens moved unsuspected through the crawl spaces and darker levels of his palace every night.
Nina Malapert was also making a name for herself. As the main newscaster for the most popular and far-reaching underground news site, she had become the face of freedom and the voice of rebellion. Every day she told the people things they didn’t know, and promised hope for the future. Her pink mohawk was taller than ever, and she never wore the same makeup twice. Everyone watched her broadcasts, even though they could be executed on the spot if they were caught doing it. (After all, you could be executed without trial for pretty much anything these days.) The people needed to know what was happening, and Finn’s official news programs had become increasingly bland propaganda. The people reading the news didn’t even bother to smile anymore.
Nina gave her audience hard facts, backed up by on-the-spot coverage, and her propaganda was at least something people wanted to hear. She never once exhorted her audience to rise up against Finn; everyone knew it wasn’t time yet. But she did invite everyone who thought they could make it to come to the Rookery, and join the growing rebel army—and a hell of a lot of them did. Parts of the Parade of the Endless were almost totally deserted now. They came because even more than safety, people need to be able to live without fear.
The city outside the Rookery was falling apart. Power cuts, food shortages, lack of essential services. Madmen on the streets, wearing peacekeeper uniforms. Businesses closing down, industry grinding to a halt. Everyone knew it couldn’t go on like this. Even Finn.
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