Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

outside these gardens. There were artificial lakes brimming with all kinds of decorative life,
    tumbling streams crossed by delicately carved wooden bridges, and not far from the center of the garden there was a great hedge maze of cunning design. Douglas got lost in it once, when he was a small child.
    He'd been forbidden to enter it on his own, so of course he did. He was that kind of child. Eventually his increasingly tearful cries led his family to him. He still had nightmares about the maze, sometimes, though he never told anyone that. Whenever he came home, he always made it a point to walk through the maze from end to end, in and out, just to prove to himself that it no longer had any control over him. Except of course if it hadn't, he wouldn't have needed to do it every damned visit. Douglas was smart enough to know that, but he did it anyway. Because.
    (He sometimes wondered if this was why he had such ambivalent feelings about the Madness Maze. He hoped not. He'd hate to think his subconscious was that petty. And, indeed, that obvious.) He left the landing pad behind him, and walked off into the gardens, following the neat gravel paths when he felt like it, and wandering defiantly across the open lawns when he didn't. There was no one to tell him not to anymore. He was the King. The sky was a clear, clear blue with hardly a cloud in sight, and the air was full of the scent of blooming flowers and fresh-cut grass, of rich wet turf, and growing things. Such a peaceful place, whose only movement was the slow turning of the seasons that even the weather control could only soothe, not interfere with. Birds sang and insects buzzed, and somewhere off in the distance Douglas could hear the slow, mournful cries of the peacocks, calling to each other. He walked on, taking his time, strolled down a shadowy tunnel of inward-leaning trees, and was suddenly struck by a nostalgia so overwhelming it was almost painful. He knew every inch of these gardens. When he'd been a child, they'd been his whole world. He hadn't known there was another, harsher world outside it, and wouldn't have cared if he had.
    His parents had kept his duty and his destiny from him for as long as they could. They wanted him to enjoy his childhood.
    He crossed an old stone bridge, so artfully constructed it didn't need mortar to hold the stones together.
    A fast-moving stream bubbled and burbled beneath him, stocked with every kind of fish a fisherman might desire. (Unless you wanted one of the big bastards, the kind that fight back, in which case there was an ocean only half an hour or so away.) There were animals in the garden too, but they were there to be petted and enjoyed, not chased or hunted. The gardens were a place of peace, of contemplation.
    Everything in its place, so nothing ever changed. The gardens had been carefully planned so that the seams were never visible, designed and laid out centuries ago, long before even Lionstone's time; by a master landscaper who knew he'd never live long enough to see it all come into its final glory. The Campbell who'd ordered the garden had known the same thing, but hadn't cared. It was for his Family.
    The Campbells took the long view, in those days. When they thought Clan Campbell was forever, and nothing would ever change . . .
    And now the old Empire was thrown down, the old ways had been put aside . . . but the gardens still flourished. Clan Campbell was not what it had once been, but that was probably a good thing. Douglas walked through the ancient gardens, and thought dark thoughts about the impermanence of man and his plans. Man could disappear tomorrow, and the gardens would survive quite happily without him. Though of course there'd be no one to grieve as the gardens went slowly to the wild, and lost their artificially maintained beauty.
    Finally he came to the very center of the gardens (ignoring the hedge maze for now) and there was his brother James's grave. It was a simple affair; just a basic stone with James's name on it, to mark his final resting place, topped with a flame that always burned and always would. Brother James. The man who should have been King. One brother stood and looked down at another, and envied him his peaceful sleep; while off to one side their father looked on, waiting as requested. When James died his sudden,
    stupid, and entirely unexpected death, public sentiment and the media had called loudly for him to be laid to rest in the old Campbell mausoleum, along