Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

morbid… but shouldn’t there be a hell of a lot of bodies lying around? Or bits of bodies, or… something? All I can see is miles and miles of mud.”
    “You’ve got a point,” said Owen slowly. “It is a bit… tidy, isn’t it? I wasn’t aware anyone had sent in a clean-up crew yet. Hang on a minute.” He accessed his AI. “Oz, where are all the bodies?”
    “Damned if I know, Owen. According to the records, there was a major battle right here, between the incumbent peasants and the invading forces.” “Scan the area, Oz. Find me some bodies.”
    “Scanning. Now, that is interesting. I’m picking up some decayed animal remains mixed in with the mud, but absolutely no trace anywhere of human remains, in any form. I have no explanation for this.”
    “So what the hell happened to the bodies? Could Shub have paid a visit here, looking for raw materials for their Ghost Warriors?” “Unlikely,” said the AI. “Even allowing for the current scattered state of the Imperial Fleet, such a visit would hardly have gone unreported. And you can forget about a clean-up crew. There isn’t enough manpower available to deal with the needs of the living right now, never mind the dead. Unless… Valentine had them removed.”
    “Why would he do a thing like that?”
    “To show he’s sorry, and make amends?”
    Hazel cut in, demanding to know what Oz was saying. Owen told her, and she snorted dismissively.
    “You can forget that. Valentine never apologized for anything in his life.”
    “But I’ll bet he does know what happened,” said Owen. “It’s the kind of thing he’d want to know. So I guess we’ll just have to slog our way through the mud to my old Standing, haul him out by the scruff of the neck, and ask him.” “Sounds like a plan to me,” said Hazel. “Is it okay if I stick my gun in his ear while you question him?”
    “Be my guest.”
    Owen started out across the sea of churned mud in the direction he thought his old Standing lay. The distance was concealed behind a gray haze, grimly enigmatic. According to Oz, his old home was just over two miles away, so he and Hazel were just out of range of the castle’s sensors. Unless Valentine had souped them up too. Owen smiled humorlessly. It didn’t matter a damn if Valentine had. Let him know his death was coming. There might only be the two of them, against an unknown number of enemies, but Owen didn’t care. Even an army couldn’t stop him now. The thought pulled him up short,
    and he scowled. More and more these days he found himself thinking things that scared him. He wondered what he was becoming. The changes the Madness Maze had worked in him seemed to be accelerating, if anything. At first he’d just been a man with an edge, and then a man with unfamiliar esp abilities, but he hadn’t been merely human in a long time. He was leaving his humanity behind, and he knew it, and it scared him. Which was perhaps why he clung so desperately to his old, human, beliefs in honor and justice.
    He sighed tiredly. He’d come a long way from the simple minor historian he’d been the last time he was here. But he’d lost everything when he was outlawed, and had no choice but to become the warrior his Clan had always wanted. Become what he despised most, or die. He’d achieved a great deal, righted wrongs and meted out justice high and low, but at the end of the day there was just so much blood on his hands… Most of it from people who deserved to die, but not all. For every clear villain who’d died at his hand, there’d been a hundred men who were just soldiers following orders, doing what they thought was right. Protecting a corrupt Empire because all the other alternatives seemed worse. Brave fighters who’d died because they were unfortunate enough to stand between Owen Deathstalker and his destiny. So many faceless dead. He dreamed of them sometimes.
    There was a child he’d crippled and killed in the grimy back streets of Mistport. It had been an accident.
    And she had been trying to kill him at the time. But none of that mattered. He’d struck out blindly, in the rage of battle, and the result was a young girl lying in the blood-spattered snow. He’d never forgiven himself for that, and never would. If there was any purpose to the warrior he’d become, it was to put an end to a system that produced children like that. And perhaps to protect people like that from people like him. That was what it meant to be a