Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

them, and she was more alone than she'd ever been. Except she wasn't, and hadn't been, for some time now. There had always been something different about Diana Vertue, even before she became Jenny Psycho. Years before, on the ghostworld called Unseeli, Diana had joined her mind with the last remnants of a dead alien race; the Ashrai. She had become a part of their endless song, for a time, and it changed her forever. She'd tried very hard to forget that, fearing for her humanity, but recent events had forced her to remember. And now, in the final extremities of her life, with death or worse so close she could taste it, the song of the Ashrai burst from her lips again. People ran screaming from the sound of it. And the Ashrai came.
    They surged around her small running form, vast and awful, brilliant as suns.
    People could not look at them directly. There were only glimpses of huge teeth and jagged claws and sharp-planed gargoyle faces. The Ashrai were long dead, but they'd never even considered lying down. Their raging storm filled the street and crackled overhead, slamming head-on into the Mater Mundi's psistorm. Alien and human thoughts crashed together and neither would give way. Chance and probabilities ran mad as the two powerful mind-sets clashed and struggled, and that madness followed Diana through the streets.
    There were rains of fish and frogs, and lightning stabbed down repeatedly from a cloudless sky. Springs burst up out of the ground, and buildings caught on fire.
    Locks unlocked and doors led out instead of in. Streets suddenly led somewhere other than where they used to, and not every place they led to could be returned from. Whole city blocks swapped their positions, and houses were suddenly separated by stores that had never been there before, selling goods with no
    names. Things giggled in alleyways, and strange faces beckoned from vilely-lit windows. Everywhere dice rolled sixes, and every cardplayer held the dead man's hand. People spoke in tongues and stigmata ran with alien blood. The old became young, and babies with knowing eyes spoke unpleasant wisdom. And through it all Diana ran on, untouched and unaffected, heading for New Hope and sanctuary.
    She commandeered a gravity sled and flew it out past the city limits, the ghosts of the dead Ashrai boiling around her like stormclouds. Their song was thunder and their grotesque faces flashed like lightning. The Mater Mundi was left behind with the city, not defeated or discouraged, but unwilling to draw attention to itself now that immediate victory was no longer possible. Thousands of espers came to themselves again, and found themselves far from where they had been, and didn't know why. Chance and probability became normal again, and bewildered street cleaners wondered what to do about the tons of fish and frogs clogging the streets.
    High above and far away, Diana raced her sled toward New Hope, and stopped singing. Only then did she realize her throat was raw, and her lips were bleeding. Humans weren't meant to sing with such an alien voice. The Ashrai soared and dipped around her, large as clouds, alien voices raised in an alien song that frightened and disturbed her now she was no longer a part of it. And then they were gone, and there was only the small battered form of Diana Vertue, flying alone in an empty sky.
    It took her the best part of two hours to reach the floating city of New Hope, even pushing the sled's motor to its limits. Evening was falling toward night, and New Hope blazed against the growing darkness like a crown built of precious stones and starstuff. The bright shining lights and colors didn't fool Diana for
    a moment. She knew that behind the fairy-tale glamour lay weapons and defenses powerful enough to hold off a good-sized army. The elves would never be slaves again. The Esper Liberation Front might not be the terrorist organization it had once been, but it had lost none of its ferocity or singleness of purpose.
    A telepathic probe from the city bid Diana welcome and gave her a location to land her sled. Any other uninvited visitor would have received either a demand for an immediate explanation or a mental compulsion to leave or die, but the elves had always had a soft spot for Jenny Psycho, the only freedom fighter even more hard-core than them. The city grew and grew as Diana approached, stretching miles in diameter, filling the darkening sky with its shimmering towers of crystal and glass. Gossamer walkways