Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

quietly.
    Deathstalker luck. Always bad. Ask Owen.
    If you could find him.
    The Empress Lionstone XIV, tall and lithe and impossibly beautiful, sat in state upon her great Throne of black iron and gleaming jade, wrapped in the snow white furs of extinct animals, the diamond Crown of Empire shining on her elegant head like a star. She smiled her approval on the thirteen members of the Shadow Court as they assembled before her, to bow and curtsey and show their respect. Lionstone, glorious and adored, powerful beyond hope and mercy, last of a fabled line. It was a pity she was just a hologram recording, but the Shadow Court was used to having to make do with second best.
    The thirteen men and women, anonymous in enveloping black cloaks and black silk masks, even their voices electronically masked and altered, met in secret once a month, to plot the downfall of King and Parliament and the modern order, and plan sedition. The old ways of revenge and vendetta had never been forgotten. Each one present was a descendant of a once-mighty Family, and dreamed of the day when the Clans would rise again, to tear down the hated institutions of democracy and mediocrity, and
    take back the power and influence that was theirs by right. The old names were long gone, of course. No more Wolfes or Chojiros or Shrecks. The old names had become curses on the lips of the modern Empire. But though the Families had long ago given up their ancient names along with their long-established privileges, to make new identities for themselves in the worlds of trade and business, still they never forgot what they had once been, and had sworn to be again. One day.
    Thirteen men and women, all of them rich and powerful in their own right, who hungered always for the one thing their riches couldn't buy them. To be acknowledged by all as naturally superior.
    None of them had ever seen each other's faces, so that even if captured they couldn't be made to betray each other. It was enough that they were of the Families; for one aristo can always spot another. They met together in the most obvious place of all, Lionstone's old Court, in its steel bunker miles below the surface of the planet, deep and deep beneath the bedrock on which the Parade of the Endless rested.
    Officially the old Court had been abandoned and closed down hundreds of years ago; too full of bad memories even to be preserved as a museum. Armed guards had been set to watch over the only entrance, and only a few people now knew exactly where the old Court was. Lionstone herself didn't even have a grave or a tombstone.
    The Shadow Court never forgot. So they gradually replaced the guards with their own people, over a period of years, and slowly and carefully infiltrated the security forces and made them theirs too. And then the old Court was theirs again, to do with as they wished. The Shadow Court didn't dare awaken the bunker to its full glory, when wide-reaching holos had transformed the old Court into a world all of its own, full of wonders and marvels. That much power use would have surely been noticed somewhere.
    But they indulged themselves with the single holo of Lionstone's ghost, watching from her Throne. A taste of a more glorious past. They liked to think she would have approved of them and what they meant to do.
    It never occurred to them that they were ghosts, shadows of what the Families had once been.
    Secure behind his concealing mask, Tel Markham, MP for Madraguda, sat at ease in his very comfortable chair, looking out across the antique ironwood table at his fellow conspiritors. Tel Markham was a man of many secrets. He was a well-established, even honored politician, a public supporter of all the right good causes, and a member in good standing of many secret societies, including Pure Humanity; but all his roles, public and private, were nothing more than means to an end: to making Tel Markham a man of real power, in a new order where he wouldn't have to endlessly scrape and bow to lesser people and . . . breeds. When his word and every whim would be law, and life and death were his to control and decide. When he could be a Silvestri once again, and hold his head up high. The better to look down his nose at everybody else.
    The Families who had once been Clans were nearly all very rich these days, and wielded all kinds of influence on all kinds of levels, but that was not enough for them, not nearly enough. And since they weren't strong enough to force the changes they