Deathstalker Return (15 page)

“I can’t believe what Finn said about my father,” said Douglas. “When can I speak to him, Anne?”

“Soon. You do believe this really is James, don’t you, Douglas?”

“You can’t fake a genetest. Everyone knows that.”

Anne nodded slowly. “You look tired. You’ve had a lot thrown at you, on your first day back. I’ve got to talk with Finn now; we’re going to schedule a whole series of public appearances for James, to let everyone know he’s back and introduce him to the Empire. That’s going to keep us busy for some time. You don’t need to be involved in any of that, Douglas. Get some rest, take all the time you need to pull yourself together again, and we’ll contact you when we need you.”

“Yes,” said Douglas. “Rest sounds good. We’ll talk again, later.”

Anne gave him a searching look, but Douglas maintained his tired, defeated look, and after a long moment Anne nodded and strode off back down the corridor, picking up the two Paragons along the way. Douglas watched them go, and then considered the two guards standing by his door. They weren’t his people. Anne had replaced the original guards with new men, undoubtedly loyal only to the new order. They were there as much to keep him in as to keep others out. Douglas nodded amiably to them and entered his private chambers. He locked the door behind him, and then jammed a chair up against it as well, just in case.

Safely back in his own territory, he dropped the pleasant mask and scowled so fiercely it was almost painful. He stamped back and forth, his hands clenched into tight fists, his mind whirling with plans for revenge and retribution. He would have liked to have kicked the hell out of the furniture, but that would have made too much noise, and he had no doubt the new guards were listening. He had to wonder what else Finn and Anne had taken from him while he was still too blind with self-pity to notice. Had it really been two whole months? He looked around the room with new eyes, and was honestly shocked at the mess. How could he have lived in such a sty for so long, without noticing? No wonder Anne hadn’t taken him seriously anymore. He forced himself to calm down, pushing back the anger, unclenching his fists. He had to be cool, calm, controlled. There were things he had to do.

He strode over to his private comm unit, and put through a call to House Campbell, punching in his old family security codes. The connection took longer than usual to make, and when his screen finally cleared, the face looking back at him was that of a stranger. He wore anonymous guard’s armor with no markings. He recognized Douglas immediately, and inclined his head.

“Your Majesty. How may I serve you?”

“I want to talk to my father,” said Douglas. “Why are you answering his private number?”

“No one speaks to William Campbell,” said the guard. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, but I have my orders, direct from the Durandal.”

“Finn is my Champion,” said Douglas. “He answers to me. I am your King, and I want to speak to my father.”

“The Durandal’s orders were quite specific,” said the guard, unmoved. “No one is to speak to the prisoner, without his express permission. And in this case, his authority derives from Parliament, and not Your Majesty.”

“I could come down and see him,” said Douglas.

“I would advise against that, Your Majesty. All unauthorized ships approaching House Campbell are to be shot down on sight. The Durandal’s orders.”

“Gosh,” said Douglas. “I’d better not do that, then. I’ll talk to Finn. Thank you for your assistance. You’ve been very helpful. I’ll be sure to remember you.”

He couldn’t resist that last barb, and was rewarded by just a little uncertainty in the guard’s face before he shut down the connection from his end. Douglas scowled at the blank screen. Events had clearly slipped even further from his control than he’d realized. His first impulse was to commandeer a flyer, load it up with really big guns, and pay House Campbell a personal royal visit the guards there would never forget; but he knew he couldn’t do that. Finn would be expecting something like that. And Douglas had a strong feeling he wouldn’t be allowed to just stroll out of the palace either. He was beginning to sense just how comprehensive a trap had been constructed around him by Finn and Anne, and God alone knew how many others. All he could do for now was play along, play the broken man in public, until he could get back into shape again, physically and mentally. And then he would show these upstarts and their fake brother James just how Douglas Campbell had become a legend among the Paragons, long before he became King.

He would show them what a real Campbell could do, with vengeance in his heart.

But first he had to clean up his room. He couldn’t live in this dump anymore. Just looking at some of it made his skin crawl. And simple repetitious manual jobs always helped him think. It took him a long time to clear the mess up, but he had a lot of thinking to do.

 

 

Over the next few weeks, Douglas sweated his way through every punishing exercise he could think of, while watching brother James make the rounds of all the very best news and gossip shows on his viewscreen. It seemed like James was everywhere, dashing from public appearance to public appearance, his every move covered by all the celebrity channels. Looking big and bluff and handsome with his bright eyes and bashful smile, James was the biggest news sensation since the return of the Terror. The people were desperate for good news, and the return of the man who should have been King was just what they needed. He wasn’t Owen Deathstalker, but he would do.

William, of course, was painted as the very blackest of villains, who only reluctantly kept James alive in case something happened to Douglas while he was playing at being a Paragon. Should James have been needed, it seemed William and Niamh had arranged to have a powerful esper delete all of James’s memories since the crash, so he would know nothing of his imprisonment. This particular announcement led to open hostility against all espers, even though the oversoul went out of their way to deny that any of their people had ever been involved in such a scheme. No one believed them. There were demonstrations bordering on riots in cities on worlds all across the Empire, calling for strict new controls on all espers. From all across the Empire, espers quietly made their way to Logres, and to the floating city of New Hope, where they holed up behind powerful protections and waited for the people to come to their senses again.

They should have known better. The people had a new hero to believe in, and they didn’t want their precious fairy story spoiled.

Douglas exercised ceaselessly, ate all the right foods, and pushed his soft body back into shape again. He worked out regularly with his sword and shield, and the old skills came flooding back. He wanted to be ready for when Finn dropped the other shoe.

He missed Jesamine, and Lewis. He missed having people around him he could trust. But he had no time to indulge his own problems, when the Empire’s problems were clearly so much bigger.

Douglas seemed to be the only person in the whole Empire who wasn’t impressed by James. This larger-than-life hero on the viewscreen wasn’t the easygoing, intelligent, deeply moral man Douglas had heard about all his life. This new James was just too perfect. He always knew the right thing to say, even if it didn’t seem to mean much on closer examination. He always came out with the right answers, even if they didn’t always fit the question. He was a great one for the barbed sound bite, delivered with a flashing smile and just a hint of a wink, and the public ate it up with spoons.

Douglas thought James was beginning to look overre-hearsed, and he still wasn’t very good at the personal stuff. He was fine at shaking hands with people and asking interested questions, but he couldn’t ad-lib to save his life. Fortunately, there were always some of Finn’s people close at hand to whisk him away on urgent business, if it became clear James was getting out of his depth. Douglas thought James was hollow, all surface charm, with nothing original in his head that hadn’t been put there. It bothered Douglas greatly that no one else could see it.
None so blind . . .
he supposed. Douglas hadn’t been allowed to meet with James since that first day, but he kept pushing. Sooner or later, Finn and Anne would have to let the two brothers meet again, because it would look decidedly odd if they didn’t. And when that finally happened, Douglas was determined to be ready with a whole bunch of really awkward questions.

He no longer had any doubts that James was a fake of some kind. For all his coaching, this James still made occasional factual errors about his life before the accident. Small things, perhaps, that only another member of Clan Campbell could have known, but Douglas spotted them immediately. His whole early life Douglas had been compared (usually unfavorably) to his glorious deceased older brother. When James was occasionally caught in an error, and called on it by an interviewer, James just turned up his smile another notch and blamed his uncertain memory on residual problems from his head injuries in the crash. And then no one would push it, for fear of seeming to bully an invalid.

The undoubted highlight of James’s media rounds was a guest appearance on that most popular of vid soaps:
The Quality.
By then in its triumphant fifth season, with two shows every day and a compilation at weekends,
The Quality
presented a highly idealized view of sin, scandal, and outrageous clothes among the aristocrats of the Empress Lionstone’s time. It was required viewing all across the Empire, if only so one could join in on what everyone else was talking about.

James played his ancestor Finlay Campbell—badly. He had charm but no talent, and his performance was more wooden than most of the furniture, but no one cared. You didn’t watch a soap like
The Quality
for the subtlety of the performances anyway. James appeared opposite the undisputed star of the show, the almost impossibly beautiful and radiant Treasure Mackenzie, who played the social butterfly Chantelle. She wasn’t that great an actress herself, but since it had been said truly of her that if she’d been any more voluptuous she would have been in 4D, no one gave a damn. As long as she kept smiling, taking deep breaths, and threatening to lose her clothes at every twist and turn of the plot, people kept watching. So Treasure floated becomingly around James, who read his lines carefully from the idiot boards and concentrated on looking good.

That episode gained the highest ratings the show had ever known.

Douglas turned the viewscreen off and studied himself in the mirror. He looked good. He’d burned off all the flab, and he looked like a fighter again. His mind was sharp and clear, and he was more than ready to remind his many enemies that a Campbell was never more dangerous than when he had nothing left to lose. But it would have to be done slowly, and subtly. He would have to continue to act confused and beaten down in public—especially when Finn and Anne were around—until he could prove to the people who mattered that he was his old self again and pick up some useful allies. The problem was, whom to trust? How deep had the rot gone? During his self-pitying seclusion, Finn had taken the opportunity to quietly replace all the King’s people with new faces loyal only to the Durandal. Douglas’s guards, and even his servants, were gone; and a lot of people he’d considered his friends wouldn’t even answer his calls anymore. Douglas had been very carefully isolated, so that even if he did recover from his fugue, he’d have no one to turn to.

But there were still a few people that even Finn couldn’t corrupt. Emma Steel, for example, the Paragon from Mistworld who was now patrolling Logres. And maybe Stuart Lennox, Lewis’s replacement Paragon from Virimonde. If only Douglas could work out a way to contact them privately.

And sometimes he still thought about Lewis and Jesamine. And wondered quietly if, since he’d been so wrong about so many other things, just maybe he might have been wrong about them too. He wanted to believe they’d never been traitors. He had loved them both, after all.

Next to Douglas, James had the biggest and most luxurious set of private chambers in the palace. Anne had provided them for him, by the simple expedient of kicking out the original occupants and defying them to do anything about it. The original owners had enough sense to see which way the wind was blowing, and left without making any fuss. They in turn kicked out someone lower in status than they, and took over their quarters. For the next few days, no one could move in the palace, because the corridors were full of people changing rooms. The order to house James in the palace had King Douglas’s name on it, but everyone knew it really came from Anne—and by extension, Finn.

James didn’t actually like his new quarters much. They were too big, too opulent, too overpowering. He wandered from room to room feeling lost and ill at ease, afraid to touch anything in case he broke it. His quarters were full of state-of-the-art tech that he didn’t know how to work. He wasn’t allowed any personal servants—they might learn something, and talk. James had a favorite chair, tucked away in one corner of his bedroom, in which he spent most of his time off. The problem was, these were quarters fit for a King, and James didn’t want to be a King. The thought alone scared him. He was just as scared of being James Campbell, given all the expectations that came with the name. But he was even more frightened of Finn Durandal, so he kept all these thoughts strictly to himself. The only person he ever dared to say anything to was Anne, but although she was never too busy to smile and comfort him, she never really listened to anything he said.

James belonged to Finn and Anne. He knew that. They owned him, body and soul. He was their creation.

He was busy practicing sincere smiles in front of the parlor mirror when Finn arrived late one morning, bringing with him the clone representative Elijah du Katt. James started trembling the moment he saw du Katt. It was a terrible thing to meet one’s own maker. James still had nightmares about some of the invasive surgeries du Katt had put him through, on Finn’s orders. But he didn’t make any fuss when du Katt unpacked his diagnostics kit; he just took off his frilly shirt and stood waiting patiently. He didn’t want to make Finn angry. Du Katt took his time with the diagnostics, checking James’s readings carefully against the expected optimums. He finally sniffed a few times and started packing away his equipment. James relaxed just a little, and quietly put his shirt back on as du Katt talked with Finn about him as though he weren’t there.