Deathstalker Legacy (71 page)

“Owen,” she said breathlessly. “That’s Owen. And Hazel. I played them on the stage . . . but I never knew, I never really believed . . . they were
real
. . .”

“Owen Deathstalker,” said the whispering voice. “Hazel d’Ark. Diana Vertue, also known as Jenny Psycho, onetime avatar of the Mater Mundi. Tobias Moon, Hadenman. And Captain John Silence, of the
Dauntless
. There were others, of course. Jack Random, Ruby Journey, Investigator Frost, Giles Deathstalker; but they are all dead. Of these five before you, it is possible that some or all are still alive.”

The image on the screen changed, showing just the one man. He was tall and rangy, with dark hair and darker eyes. He held himself like a fighter; no, a warrior. There was a tired, almost bitter quality to his face, like a man who’d carried heavy burdens, without complaint, for much longer than any man should ever have to. He looked competent, crafty, dangerous. Lewis recognized him from the scenes he’d been shown deep in the technojungle of Shub.

“Owen,” he said. “Oh God, look at you. What did they do to you, to weigh you down like that?”

“Yes,” said the dusty voice. “This is Owen Deathstalker. The reluctant hero, who walked the Madness Maze to its very heart, and learned there the answers to questions we can only guess at. Owen; lost to us now, in Time. Who died alone, far from friends and succor, in the dirty back alleys of Mistport.”

A familiar weight settled over Lewis’s heart, crushing newly raised hopes. “So; he really is dead? You’re sure?”

“No. We are not sure. He died, but . . . he has been seen in the future. Alive, and fighting at your side. When you know the answer to this mystery, perhaps you will come back and explain it to us.”

“Hold it!” Jesamine said sharply. “Everyone go back to their starting position. Is Owen alive or not?”

“The Deathstalker died on Mistworld,” said the gray man. “That much is certain. But we are dealing with time travel here. Many things are possible, with time travel. Supposedly.”

“In other words, you haven’t got a clue either,” said Lewis. “I think this is why Humanity never invented a practical means for time travel; because it makes your head hurt just thinking about the implications.”

Owen’s image disappeared from the screen before them, replaced by a young woman. Tall and lithely muscular, she scowled out of the screen with a sharp pointed face and a mane of long untidy red hair. Her eyes were hooded, and a piercing green. She gave off the same dangerous quality as a cornered rat, and looked like someone you’d be really stupid to turn your back on. Lewis could feel his nose wrinkling as he looked at her. Surely this couldn’t be who he thought it was. Surely this gutter bravo couldn’t be the legendary love of the blessed Owen Deathstalker?

“Hazel d’Ark,” the dusty voice said remorselessly. “A great fighter. A brave and canny warrior. She endured stresses and strains that would have broken most people, from Blood addiction to the loss of good friends to the birth of a new social order she knew she could never really be a part of; but in the end she broke, faced with one loss too many. She loved Owen, but she never told him; and with his death she knew she never would. She ran away, and disappeared, after the last great battle against the Recreated. She saved Humanity, but she couldn’t save the one man she truly cared for. She never got to see the Golden Age her courage and her actions helped to bring about. No one has seen anything of her for two hundred years. Her fate remains a mystery. Even to us.”

“Poor girl,” said Jesamine. “We owe her so much, and the universe wouldn’t even let her have the one thing she wanted.”

“She made the mistake of loving a Deathstalker,” said Lewis. “We’ve never been lucky in love.”

“Perhaps I can change that,” said Jesamine.

“Perhaps,” said Lewis, and they smiled at each other.

Next up on the screen was a short blond woman with a pale face and sharp blue, absolutely crazy eyes. She looked like she was about to jump right out of the screen and bite everyone’s throats out. She looked like she’d taken everything fate could throw at her, and then spit in fate’s face and laughed. This was a woman who’d had two names, both of them equally feared and respected.

“Diana Vertue,” said the gray man. “Captain Silence’s daughter. Also known as Jenny Psycho. Once a manifest of the Mater Mundi, she became an uber-esper in her own right, one of the most powerful minds of her time. She helped form the oversoul. She taught the AIs of Shub their true nature, and fought the Recreated to a standstill, buying time for Owen to save us all. She was assassinated, one hundred and eighteen years ago, at the first great rebellion of the ELFs. There were rumors of super-esper involvement; The Shatter Freak and The Gray Train. Certainly no ordinary combination of espers could have brought her down. She was betrayed by those she had reason to trust, and her body was utterly destroyed. Rogue energies still flare and burn on the spot where she fell. It is said her mind still lives on, as a part of the oversoul. That she can still be contacted, through them. Or perhaps it is just that espers also need comforting myths to sustain them.”

There was no mistaking the next figure on the screen. The subtly inhuman face, the glowing golden eyes. The cyborg, the augmented man, the old Enemy of Humanity; the man-machine with the mark of Cain upon his brow. The Hadenman : Tobias Moon. He didn’t look that special, until you came to the face, and the eyes. Just looking at them made Lewis’s hair stand up on the back of his neck. No one had made a cyborg of any kind in hundreds of years, and all because of what the Hadenmen had done in their time. All long gone now, they were the boogeymen of the modern age, the stuff of nightmares and the villains of a thousand adventure vid serials. Fractious children were told to go to sleep or the Hadenmen would get them. Tobias Moon was the last of them, and only a minor legend, barely remembered, omitted from all the official versions because his presence was just too disturbing.

Robert and Constance hadn’t wanted Humanity to know they owed their present freedoms in part to a Hadenman.

“Tobias Moon,” said the whispering voice. “The Hadenman who died, and returned to life. The cyborg who rejected his own people to become Owen’s friend and ally. Who sought so very hard to find the Humanity within him. Perhaps the only living survivor of all those who passed through the Madness Maze. It is said he can still be found on what was once a leper colony, deep in the sentient jungles of Lachrymae Christi. A hermit for two centuries now, he is is the sole means whereby the colonists of the planet can communicate with the living consciousness of the world: the Red Brain. People who go looking for Tobias Moon without good reason tend not to come back.”

“So he was real,” said Lewis. “I often wondered. There are so many versions of the story, especially once you start really digging, and so many apocrypha. And it didn’t seem exactly likely; a Hadenman, fighting
for
Humanity.”

Jesamine nodded. “He gives me the creeps, just looking at him. Why did this version of the legend have to be true? I much prefer the one where Owen raises an army of dragons to fight against the Recreated.”

“No,” said the gray man. “That was Carrion, and the Ashrai.”

Lewis and Jesamine looked at him.

“Who?” said Lewis.

“What?” said Jesamine.

The next figure on the screen was a more familiar sight. A tall, lean man with a thickening waist and a receding hairline. He wore an old-fashioned uniform, of an Imperial Fleet Captain. He looked like a man used to giving orders, and a man used to being obeyed. Lewis recognized him at once from the scenes Shub had shown him.

“Captain John Silence,” said the gray man. “He worked with King Robert and Queen Constance to build the Golden Age, though he never approved of the mythmaking process. He dropped out of public sight just over a hundred years ago, when people started worshiping his statues. The Shadow Court sent a whole army against his isolated country house, and burned it down with him in it. They couldn’t find enough of his body to bury, but they collected some ashes and scattered them across the Victory Gardens in the Parade of the Endless. One of the few officers who served the Empress Lionstone loyally to the end, who went on to be lionized by the people for his heroic actions against Shub and the Recreated. He passed through the Madness Maze, it is said, but if he acquired any powers or abilities, he never showed them. It is also said he loved an Investigator.”

“Poor bastard,” said Jesamine. “Legend has it they were even more inhuman than the Hadenmen.”

There was a pause, and then an unexpected sixth figure appeared on the screen. There was nothing familiar about this man. Tall and whipcord lean, he dressed in black leathers under a billowing black cape. Jet black hair and coal-black eyes, his face was pale and proud and utterly unyielding. His thin mouth had an arrogant curl, and his stance was openly defiant. And in his hand, one of the great lost weapons of the old Empire. The power lance.

“Since you asked about him, this is Carrion. We know little about him, and what information we have been able to gather is often contradictory. A traitor to the Empire, he fought alongside the alien Ashrai, against Humanity. Deserted his ship and his crew, and killed his own friends and fellow officers, in defense of the planet Unseeli. The planet was scorched, the Ashrai were exterminated, but somehow Carrion survived there for years afterwards, living alone on a dead planet. He was Captain Silence’s closest friend and companion. Carrion: a man of great power, possibly derived from the Maze, possibly from the dead Ashrai.

“He was never a part of the legends, and barely mentioned even in the wildest apocrypha, but records exist that suggest he was a vital part of the history. That he gathered an army of the Ashrai, and flew unprotected through space with them under his own power, to oppose the Recreated in the last great battle. Which may be where the legends of Owen and the dragons came from. It may be that this Carrion knows things that we do not, that you will need to know. It is said that he lives still on the restored world of Unseeli, among the Ashrai, brought to life again by Owen and the Maze. If so, he is older than any other human, living among the alien Ashrai as one of them. Approach him with caution. No human has had contact with him for two hundred years, not least because the only human he ever cared for was his lost friend, Captain Silence. Unseeli is a forbidden world, Quarantined by order of Parliament, after the Ashrai turned down the offer of their own Seat in Parliament; the only alien species ever so honored. No ships land on Unseeli. The few that got past the Quarantine starcruiser were destroyed by the Ashrai.”

The viewscreen disappeared. Strange geometric shapes rose up out of the Dust Plains of Memory, revolving slowly, endlessly unfolding. Lewis looked at Jesamine, and then back at the crumbling gray figure still standing before them.

“So,” he said finally. “The only survivors from the days of legend are . . . Owen, possibly, in the future. Hazel; missing. Diana Vertue, possibly, as part of the oversoul. And two ex-terrorists, Tobias Moon and Carrion. Not really what I was hoping to hear.”

The gray man shrugged, in a curiously jerky motion that temporarily lost him one of his shoulders as it flowed away down his arm. “Nothing is certain, where the Madness Maze is concerned. Whatever it does to people, it breaks every law of science we understand. All of these people became more than human. Perhaps for such as they . . . death is not the end. You must search out the history, the truth. Go to Mistworld, to Lachrymae Christi, to Unseeli. You are a Deathstalker; perhaps people will talk to you who would not talk to anyone else. And in searching out legends, it may be that you will become a legend yourself. Certainly only beings of power, like those in the old legends, can hope to protect us all from the Terror. So go now, Deathstalker . . . and do what you have to do.”

The figure turned and walked away across the sighing surface of the Dust Plains of Memory. The Towers crumbled and fell, and were absorbed back into the gray sea along with all the other shapes, until all that remained of the last great receptacle of human history was a gently twitching surface, murmuring querulously to itself in overlapping voices.

Emma Steel sat alone in her approved Paragon’s apartment, holding an ice pack to her jaw. Her rank entitled her to use regen tech for even minor damage, but she felt too embarrassed to apply. Embarrassed, and angry with herself. It had been a long time since anybody had been able to catch her off guard. But who would have thought an old retired trader could move so
fast
? She hadn’t even seen Chevron start his move. But she wasn’t entirely unhappy that the Deathstalker and Jesamine Flowers had got away. Even if Parliament was currently hopping mad about it. What was the Empire coming to, when a man and a woman could be condemned to death, without trial, just for falling in love? It was only an arranged marriage between Douglas and Jesamine after all; how big a deal could it be for the King to choose himself a new Queen?