Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

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.
    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