Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda Read Free

and you can’t make me!”
    “Brett, even I could make you,” said Jesamine.
    Brett folded his arms and leaned back against Rose, looking smug. “Want to bet, blondie?”
    Rose let her hand rest on the hilt of her sword. Lewis’s hand went to his sword, and it was all about to turn nasty when Silence decided he’d had enough. He concentrated, pulling his old power up through the back brain, the mid-brain, and out into the front of his thoughts, and suddenly his presence lashed out to fill the steel corridor. The sheer force of it sent everyone staggering backward, even the robots. In a moment they were all pressed back against the nearest wall, held there by the sheer pressure of his will, pinned helplessly. Only Owen seemed unaffected, floating untouched and unmoved. Silence glared around him.
    “When I talk, you listen. I was a captain in Lionstone’s navy. I survived the original Rebellion. I guarded Humanity for two hundred years. I went though the Madness Maze twice . I could have been as powerful as the others, but I was never interested in that kind of power. It always seemed more important to me to hang on to my . . . humanity. So, no more squabbling, and sensible suggestions only. Or I’ll forget I’m supposed to be one of the good guys.”
    He relaxed his thoughts, and everyone dropped back onto the floor again. They all looked at him with varying amounts of awe and respect. They’d forgotten, in the presence of Owen Deathstalker, that Captain John Silence had been a legend too.
    After that, no one else seemed to have anything to say, so they all just stood there and watched Owen float, waiting for something to happen.
    He looks so . . . ordinary, just sleeping, thought Lewis. Even if he is doing it in midair. And we need him to be extraordinary. Nothing less will do, to stop Finn Durandal and the Terror. What if I’ve made a terrible mistake, and brought back only a man, not a legend?
    Jesamine was also thinking about mistakes. For once, Brett had raised a genuinely important point, even if it was something no one really wanted to think about. Going into the Maze would change them; they’d all known that. But the possibility of becoming monsters, of becoming something utterly inhuman, like the Terror . . . there’d been nothing in the legends about that. What if they all started to change , to outgrow their merely human forms . . . might they all end up like the abominations in the Maze’s annex, or even like the poor distorted creatures they’d found on Shandrakor?
    Jesamine hugged herself tightly, as though trying to hold herself together against as yet unfelt forces of change within her. I don’t want to change. I don’t want to be a monster or a legend. I only went into the Maze because I couldn’t let Lewis go in alone. What if we both change, but in different ways? What if we become people we don’t even recognize anymore?
    She turned suddenly to glare at Silence. “What the Maze has done to us—can it be undone? If we went back in again, could the Maze make us just human again? The way we used to be?”
    “No,” said Silence, almost kindly. “Evolution is a one-way track. The butterfly cannot turn back into the caterpillar. But you mustn’t be frightened, Jesamine. I have lived with my powers for over two hundred years, and I like to think the old Captain Silence would still know me, and approve of me. It’s not all bad. Children find the ways of adults mysterious and incomprehensible, and fear to grow up. And then they do, and wonder what all the fuss was about.”
    “One more strained metaphor from you, and I’ll nail you to the wall with an aria,” said Jesamine. “I get the point, all right?”
    “The Owen I talked with back in Mistport seemed very human,” said Lewis, coming over to join them. “In every way that mattered. I liked him.”
    “Lots of people did,” said Silence. “And even his enemies respected him.”
    “The stories say much the same about Hazel