Deathstalker 07 - Deathstalker Return

created the Darkvoid in a moment of panic. He knows better now. I never got to see him, after I left him in the Maze's embrace, a thousand years ago. But Owen saw him, and spoke with him. I never got to see how my son grew up. Perhaps you will."
    "Owen," Lewis said patiently. "Tell us about Owen."
    "The voice spoke to him directly," said Giles. "It told him many things. Secret things. Far more than it told anyone else."
    "This voice," said Jesamine. "If it knows so much, perhaps we have a friend, or at least an ally, from somewhere else. Maybe even equal in power to the Terror!"
    "Perhaps," said Giles. "I have no way of knowing. It could be just the sole survivor of an earlier assault by the Terror. There are many players in this game, and only some of them have revealed their true nature."
    Lewis remembered the little gray man who'd given him the Deathstalker ring atDouglas 's Coronation.
    He said he was Vaughn, an old friend of Owen's, but Lewis had seen Vaughn's grave on Lachrymae Chnsti. So what was he really? A ghost? Lewis scowled at Giles's holo, his ugly face taking on even uglier lines. Of late, Lewis's whole life had been haunted by the past, by ghosts who refused to lie quiet, and he was getting pretty damned sick of it.
    "Tell me about Owen," he said flatly. "Tell me what happened to him."
    "Some say he's dead. Some say he isn't." Giles's holo shrugged easily. "If you want answers you can trust, you'll have to go to Haden, to the heart of the Madness Maze, and speak with the child. Only he knows for sure."
    "Even though the odds are the Maze will madden and murder us?" said Lewis.
    "Deathstalker luck," said Giles, smiling nastily. "The Maze is the key. Everything else turns around it, and always has. You must go in, cousin. It is your destiny."
    "It might be his, but it sure as hell isn't mine," said Brett. "I'm not going in, and you shouldn't either, Lewis. The odds suck, big time."
    "Don't worry," said Rose. "I'll hold your hand."
    "That thought doesn't help much, actually," said Brett. He folded his arms across his chest and looked determinedly in another direction, his lower lip protruding sulkily.
    "You know, an awful lot of people seem really determined that we should all enter the Maze," said Jesamine. "A suspicious—or even only partly paranoid—person might well suspect that we are being manipulated. Guided. Used, by other people, for their own purposes."
    "I just had a really spooky thought," said Brett, so taken with his new idea that he forgot he was busy being upset and outraged. "What if… what if it's the Madness Maze itself that's behind all this? Could the Maze, or the child within, have been manipulating events all along from behind the scenes, just to bring a Deathstalker back to it?"
    "You're right, Brett," said Lewis. "That is a really spooky thought. If you have any more thoughts like that, do feel free to keep them to yourself.
    "Look, if we really are going to go to Haden, and I still hope and pray that an outbreak of rational thought and good sense will prevail so that we don't have to," said Brett. "If we really are going to that bloody hellworld, it is one hundred percent guaranteed certain to be quarantined and very heavily guarded. You can bet serious money that Finn will have reinforced the usual patrols with every nasty and vicious defense he's got. We are talking starcruisers, orbiting minefields, battle espers and mindbombs.
    Which means if we really are going, we're going to need powerful weapons of our own. So how about it,
    Giles? You got anything here we can use?"
    "Go out of here, by the main doorway," said Giles. "Follow the signs, down the corridor and down nine levels, and you will come to a stash of First Empire high tech and weaponry, held inviolate behind a stasis field for over a thousand years. Even I don't know what's in there. The real Giles inherited it from his ancestors, long before he assumed the Deathstalker name, and either he never got the chance to use it or he never found the nerve to try. First Empire tech can be very dangerous. We have all fallen a long way since those days."
    "First Empire weapons!" said Brett, all but rubbing his hands together. "Oh, people, we are talking serious serious money here!"
    "Shoot first, make money later," said Lewis. "Let's take a look."
    "Say good-bye first," said the holo of Giles Deathstalker. "We won't be meeting again. This Standing has come to the end of its days. The castle was badly damaged, inside and