Deathstalker Destiny by Simon R. Green

and very alone. And then she heard a sound behind her, and spun around, ready to face Scour with her bare hands if need be, and there was Owen Deathstalker, standing in the doorway with a bloody sword, soaked as always with the blood of his enemies. He smiled at her.
    “Might have known you wouldn’t need rescuing, Hazel.”
    She smiled back at him. “Of course not.”
    They moved slowly toward each other. They would have liked to run, but the many things they’d done and had to do had left them deathly tired. They came together in the torturer’s cell and hugged each other tightly, burying their faces in each other’s shoulder.
    “You came for me,” said Hazel.
    “You knew I would,” said Owen. “I thought ... I’d lost you. But I never gave up hope.”
    “Nothing can keep us apart,” said Hazel. “Not after all we’ve been through together.”
    They finally let go of each other and stepped back, and each automatically looked the other over, to make sure neither was badly hurt. Reassured, they smiled at each other again, and looked around the stone chamber.
    “Ghastly place,” said Owen. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had finding my way here.”
    “I take it you do have a way out?”
    “Oh sure. Got a ship parked not too far away. But we can’t leave just yet. We still have unfinished business here. Scour.”
    “Oh yeah,” said Hazel. “He teleported out of here, but I know where he’s gone. The only safe place left to him. Come with me, Owen. I want to show you something called the Summerstone.”
     
    They made their way there easily. The Summerstone blazed in their minds like a beacon, glowing more and more brightly the closer they got. They found Scour standing beside the stone, dwarfed by its size but still glaring defiantly at them. The endless gray stone plane stretched away around them, but Owen and Hazel ignored it as they ignored Scour, their attention fixed on the huge conical standing stone. Both of them felt a thrill of recognition. And as with the Madness Maze, there was a feeling they were in the presence of something vast and magnificent. And beyond that, there was a slow, certain feeling that the Summerstone recognized them ...
    “It isn’t over yet,” said Scour, almost spitefully. “You may have killed my brothers’ bodies, but their minds live on, in the mindpool, preserved and protected by the Summerstone, and our will. Once I’ve used the stone’s power to destroy you, I’ll make new bodies for them to download into, and the Blood Runners will live again. You can’t defeat us. We are immortal. We walk in eternity. Death has no hold on us anymore.”
    “You have no power,” said Owen. “You never did, really. All you have, and all you are, is what you leeched from the Summerstone. This isn’t the way things were meant to be. I think it’s time we put a stop to this madness.”
    He reached out to Hazel, and she reached out to him, and their minds meshed together and became more than the sum of their parts. They reached out and touched the Summerstone. Power blazed up within them, like coming home, and they shone like stars. Scour cried out, and had to look away, shielding his eyes with his arm. Something was suddenly there on the great stone plane with them. There, and yet not quite there, the mindpool swirled around the Summerstone, almost a hundred minds held in suspension between life and death, waiting for new bodies to possess. And it was the easiest thing of all for Owen and Hazel to sever the link between the mindpool and the Summerstone. Almost a hundred minds screamed silently as they faded irrevocably away, dead and gone, come at last to the end of their artificially extended lives. Owen and Hazel separated and fell back into their bodies, and turned their dark implacable gaze on Scour, the last of the Blood Runners.
    He stared at them in horror. “What have you done? What have you done ? I can’t feel the mindpool anymore! I can’t hear my