Deathstalker 07 - Deathstalker Return

quietly made their way to Logres, and to the floating
    city ofNew Hope , where they holed up behind powerful protections and waited for the people to come to their senses again.
    They should have known better. The people had a new hero to believe in, and they didn't want their precious fairy story spoiled.
    Douglasexercised ceaselessly, ate all the right foods, and pushed his soft body back into shape again. He worked out regularly with his sword and shield, and the old skills came flooding back. He wanted to be ready for when Finn dropped the other shoe.
    He missed Jesamine, and Lewis. He missed having people around him he could trust. But he had no time to indulge his own problems, when the Empire's problems were clearly so much bigger.
    Douglasseemed to be the only person in the whole Empire who wasn't impressed by James. This larger-than-life hero on the viewscreen wasn't the easygoing, intelligent, deeply moral manDouglas had heard about all his life. This new James was just too perfect. He always knew the right thing to say, even if it didn't seem to mean much on closer examination. He always came out with the right answers, even if they didn't always fit the question. He was a great one for the barbed sound bite, delivered with a flashing smile and just a hint of a wink, and the public ate it up with spoons.
    Douglasthought James was beginning to look overrehearsed, and he still wasn't very good at the personal stuff. He was fine at shaking hands with people and asking interested questions, but he couldn't ad-lib to save his life. Fortunately, there were always some of Finn's people close at hand to whisk him away on urgent business, if it became clear James was getting out of his depth.Douglas thought James was hollow, all surface charm, with nothing original in his head that hadn't been put there. It botheredDouglas greatly that no one else could see it. None so blind… he supposed.Douglas hadn't been allowed to meet with James since that first day, but he kept pushing. Sooner or later, Finn and Anne would have to let the two brothers meet again, because it would look decidedly odd if they didn't. And when that finally happened,Douglas was determined to be ready with a whole bunch of really awkward questions.
    He no longer had any doubts that James was a fake of some kind. For all his coaching, this James still made occasional factual errors about his life before the accident. Small things, perhaps, that only another member of Clan Campbell could have known, butDouglas spotted them immediately. His whole early lifeDouglas had been compared (usually unfavorably) to his glorious deceased older brother. When James was occasionally caught in an error, and called on it by an interviewer, James just turned up his smile another notch and blamed his uncertain memory on residual problems from his head injuries in the crash. And then no one would push it, for fear of seeming to bully an invalid.
    The undoubted highlight of James's media rounds was a guest appearance on that most popular of vid soaps: The Quality. By then in its triumphant fifth season, with two shows every day and a compilation at weekends, The Quality presented a highly idealized view of sin, scandal, and outrageous clothes among the aristocrats of the Empress Lionstone's time. It was required viewing all across the Empire, if only so one could join in on what everyone else was talking about.
    James played his ancestor Finlay Campbell—badly. He had charm but no talent, and his performance was more wooden than most of the furniture, but no one cared. You didn't watch a soap like The Quality for the subtlety of the performances anyway. James appeared opposite the undisputed star of the show, the almost impossibly beautiful and radiant Treasure Mackenzie, who played the social butterfly Chantelle. She wasn't that great an actress herself, but since it had been said truly of her that if she'd been any more voluptuous she would have been in 4D, no one gave a damn. As long as she kept smiling,
    taking deep breaths, and threatening to lose her clothes at every twist and turn of the plot, people kept watching. So Treasure floated becomingly around James, who read his lines carefully from the idiot boards and concentrated on looking good.
    That episode gained the highest ratings the show had ever known.
    Douglasturned the viewscreen off and studied himself in the mirror. He looked good. He'd burned off all the flab, and he looked like a fighter again. His