Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

offguard. 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?
    It was all Finn Durandal's fault. He'd put this up to Parliament as treason, and then stirred them all up to demand the death penalty. The King had seemed too dazed and shocked to contribute anything. Emma scowled. She didn't trust Finn Durandal anymore, and with increasingly good reason. Working through a series of trusted and well-bribed intermediaries, Emma had been able to obtain copies of most of the media coverage of the Neuman not. And for hour after hour, she'd sat studying the images on her computer screen, speeding them up and slowing them down, and zooming in to pick out important details. And not just the transmitted images, but all the recordings, from all the angles. Slowly, obsessively, she'd worked her way through every single recording, from the beginnings of the riot to the end. From the death of the Paragon Veronica Mae Savage, to the arrival of the pacifying oversoul. But most of all, she studied the recordings of Finn Durandal fighting the rioters, from before she arrived to help him.
    She'd had her suspicions even at the time, that none of his actions had been what they seemed. But now she was sure that the fighting had been fixed; just a setup for the cameras, to make the Durandal look good. It had clearly all been arranged in advance. Finn was never in any real danger. And neither were any of the people he was pretending to fight, until she turned up; at which point the Durandal had cold-bloodedly killed his own partners in deceit, just so she wouldn't suspect. Emma scowled. That insight, appalling as it was, wasn't the worst of it. If Finn had planned his mock fighting in advance, then he must have known in advance that the not was going to happen. Perhaps he even helped plan and orchestrate it, right down to the murder of his fellow Paragons. What kind of a man could do that?
    She'd also been studying media recordings of the ELF attack during the Parade of the Paragons. The Durandal's actions there were highly suspect too. All right, there was clearly no fakery in his fighting this time. He'd killed ELFs with a cold verve and enthusiasm that anywhen else she would have applauded.
    But . . . how could Finn have known where and when the ELFs were going to ambush the Paragons? No one had ever been able to inflitrate the ELFs' support structures before. The ELFs could read suspicious thoughts in a mind half a mile away; and there was no way they'd ever have let anyone have access to their plans who was using any kind of esp-blocker. People hadn't asked any of these rather obvious questions because . . . they hadn't wanted to. They wanted to enjoy their victory over the ELFs. They wanted to believe in their hero, their miracle worker, the Durandal.
    The answers to all of this lay somewhere in the Rookery; Emma was sure of that. She had fought her way in on several occasions now, but she hadn't been able to get anyone to talk to her about Finn Durandal. Not even in the most general terms. This, in a place where everything, most especially information, was supposed to be always up for sale. Most people seemed too scared to talk, even with the edge of Emma's sword set against their quivering throats. Neither bribes nor brutality had got her
    anywhere, and she was frankly lost for a third alternative. People actually ran away rather than even discuss Finn Durandal; what did that say about the man's true nature? But for all her hard work, all Emma really had were suspicions, and one growing conviction . . . that Finn Durandal wasn't the legend she and everyone else had believed in; and possibly never had been .. . And even if she could dig up some proof; who could she take it to? Who would believe her? Finn was the hero of the moment, at a moment when people desperately needed to believe in heroes. Bad enough that the Deathstalker had let them down; ask them to believe that the Durandal was crooked, and they'd laugh in her face, in self-defense. She couldn't even talk to her