Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

armies of the uber-espers finally came to the Parade of the Endless by all the roads at once, and marched across the city boundaries laughing and cheering and singing ugly songs. Sometimes they made sounds like animals, or things that had never had a voice before. They poured into the city down a hundred roads, from a hundred dead cities; millions of possessed men and women and even children, run by five terribly powerful minds. They found no victims waiting for them in the outskirts; the people living there had long since abandoned their homes, retreating to the better-defended center of the city. Some had fled out into the surrounding countryside, hoping to avoid the marching armies, but the hovering uber-esper minds picked them out easily, and added them to the horde, and now they marched back into their city with someone else living in their heads. The thralls smashed and burnt the houses they walked past. Just because they could.
    Finn pulled his forces back from the city boundaries, in carefully practiced disorder, pretending to fall back in a panic, but actually retreating just slowly enough to keep the thralls pursuing them, towards the ambushes and booby traps Finn had waiting for them. And as the thralls swarmed into the city, the people of the Rookery came storming out. They swiftly made contact with the retreating forces, who were so scared they were actually pleased to see the very rebels they’d been fighting the week before. Most of the clone guards, still wearing their steel masks, just didn’t have the practical experience to deal with fighting on a scale like this, and were glad of expert minds to tell them what to do. They were programmed to follow orders from anyone who gave them with sufficient authority.
    The thralls came in, the defending forces stopped retreating and went to meet them, and vicious hand-to-hand fighting filled the city’s streets and squares and open parks. The defenders had swords and axes, guns and grenades. The thralls mostly had improvised weapons, and a vast superiority in numbers. Blood flew and bodies fell, and the tides of battle surged blindly this way and that. Diana Vertue and the Psycho Sluts flew high above it all, hanging on the sky like gaudy birds of prey, casting a protection over the defenders below, so that the thralls couldn’t possess them with eye contact.
    The thrall armies, and through them the uber-espers, were thrown and confused at first when their main tactic suddenly no longer worked, and they took a lot of losses before they gathered their wits and urged the thralls on into open combat. They plunged forward with swords and knives and often just their grasping, clawing hands. They were all attack and no defense, because there were always more to replace those who fell. Sometimes just the sheer force of numbers was enough to overwhelm and overrun even the best-prepared defenders. It was clear to the uber-espers that they wouldn’t be claiming any more thralls in the Parade of the Endless until the defenders were defeated, and Diana and her Sluts were brought down. Or until the uber-espers found the courage to leave their bolt-holes and join the attack in person.
    They might. They were all in the city, or more properly, under it. And they did so want to pull this famed city down, and make it theirs.
    Terrible fighting raged back and forth in the streets, and blood and guts splashed the walls and ran thickly in the gutters, as the bodies piled up on every side. A dozen thralls fell for every defender, but the odds were thousands to one. The thralls kept pouring across the city boundaries, and there were still more on the way. They had no real tactics, only mass movements and the voices in their heads screaming Kill! Kill! but there seemed no end to their numbers, and unlike the defenders, they never got tired or careless or afraid. The rebels from the Rookery were spread all over the city, inspiring others through their vicious example, but they couldn’t be everywhere.
    Two armies clashed, bodies fell and did not rise again, and the focus of the fighting moved slowly but inexorably towards the heart of the city, and the Imperial Palace.

    And while all this was going on, Douglas Campbell was somewhere else. He and Tel Markham crept through deserted side streets, avoiding the fighting, heading for the Imperial Palace to meet with Emperor Finn, that together they might set a trap for the uber-espers. A trap promising the only bait that might tempt