Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

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    Sometimes hooked fingers snagged in his clothing, jerking him to a sudden halt, and he had to feel blindly back and snap or break the metal-hard fingers before he could move on. Although he couldn’t see them, his fingers told him that the bodies before him weren’t always complete. His people had died fighting the invaders, and most of them had died hard. The invasion and destruction of Virimonde had been written in their yielding flesh, and the marks were preserved here for all to read. Rage burned in Owen at what had been done to them, and the fury helped to warm him as he struggled on.
    Finally he reached the other side, and his hands slammed up against unyielding metal. His thoughts had been slowed by the cold, and he considered the matter sluggishly for a while before realizing he’d reached his destination. He yelled for Oz to open the hidden door, and a panel opened in the wall, sliding silently to one side. Bright light poured in, blinding his frozen-open eyes. He called out harshly, in pain and triumph, the sound like some raucous gore crow disturbed on a battlefield. He pulled himself out into the corridor beyond and then collapsed, steam rising thickly from his body. Cold air steamed out of the opening and thickened into fog as it hit the warm air of the corridor. Owen lay helplessly on the floor, the horrid cold curling and uncurling inside him like ratcheting razor blades. But the stoked heat of his rage still burned deep within him, and it burned away the cold inch by inch until life returned to his body and he could move again. His fingers moved first, bending and straightening, making sharp cracking sounds like twigs trampled underfoot. His body contracted and relaxed in a series of slow pulses as warmth flooded back into cold-deadened muscles. The pain was horrific, but Owen welcomed it. It meant he was coming alive again after so long spent among the dead.
    After a while he forced himself up onto his feet and looked around for Hazel, and only then realized that she hadn’t followed him out of the place of the dead. She was still in there. He hobbled over to the opening, his knees cracking loudly, and called her name. She didn’t answer. Owen batted the freezing fog with his hands, trying to see into the darkness beyond, but even his eyes had their limits. He called again, but the cold and the dark swallowed up his voice in a moment. He reached inside himself, searching for the mental link that bound him to Hazel, but it eluded him, weakened by long neglect. He’d left her behind in the cold and the dark, in the kingdom of the dead. And he had to go back in and rescue her.
    Something inside him protested immediately. He couldn’t go back into the cold again. He just couldn’t.
    The cold and the dark and the horror of it all had nearly destroyed him. It would be madness to give it another chance at him. But even as he thought that, he knew he was going to go back in. He had to.
    Hazel needed him. He still hurt from head to toe, but that would pass. He was afraid, but that didn’t matter. He’d been afraid before. For a long time now, the only thing that really had mattered to him was Hazel d’Ark. So he took a deep breath of the freezing air, and thrust his head and shoulders back into the dark. The bitter cold closed around him like the embrace of an old familiar enemy, but he made himself ignore it, thinking only of Hazel. He forced himself on, back into the dead, and then his heart stopped as a cold hand closed suddenly around his wrist. His breath burst out of him in a painful gasp, his imagination showing him the dead coming slowly to life all around him, holding him, keeping him in their frozen Hell till he was dead like them. And then his heart and his breathing started up again as he realized the hand was Hazel’s. He grabbed her wrist, tried to say something reassuring in his croaking voice, and scrabbled frantically backward, pulling her with him. It only took a few moments before he was out in the corridor again, pulling Hazel out into the light and warmth. She came out in a series of sudden jerks, unable to help him, her body frozen rigid, and when she finally fell to the corridor floor, she made a sound like a felled log. Her eyes were frozen shut, and her face had frozen into a defiant snarl, teeth gritted together. Her skin was blue. Owen knelt beside her, chafing her hands in his, mostly just for something to do. Her body would throw off the cold just as his had, but