Deathstalker 01 - Deathstalker Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the sun, staring up at the ceiling high above. When he did finally choose to get up, his most recent history was waiting in the computers for him to take up work on it again.
    It was a good piece, sharp and pointed and full of new insights. The kind of
    work he'd always known he was capable of, if he could just get away from interfering distractions like having to train with sword and gun every morning and study military tactics every afternoon in order to be the warrior his line demanded of him. No one had ever asked him if he wanted to be another bloody fighter like all this revered ancestors. But that was all behind him now. His father was dead, he'd inherited the title, and his life was his own at last. In short, he'd got it all. No doubt eventually he'd start getting bored with such perfection in several years or so, but until then he was determined to enjoy every minute of it. And why not? He was a nice guy; he deserved it.
    He looked around the huge stone chamber with its hanging tapestries and centuries-old holos. The Deathstalker Standing hadn't changed outwardly in generations. Every modern convenience was in place, ready to hand or call, but expertly concealed behind the traditional overlay. The Standing had been the home of the Deathstalker Clan for generations beyond counting, serving all their various needs with calm efficiency. When Owen had bought the Lordship of Virimonde, he'd had the entire castle dismantled, stone by stone, and had it and its contents shipped to Virimonde, where it was reassembled surprisingly quickly by a small army of fanatical experts. You can do things like that when you're a Lord. The Standing was his, wherever he decided to plant his roots; all that was required of him was that he preserve it and hold it in trust for future generations. Assuming he ever got around to marrying and producing a next generation. His mistress was a delightful sort, but not at all the kind of person one married. As head of one of the oldest Families in the Empire, he had a duty to marry someone of his own rank and station. And he would. Eventually.
    Owen looked thoughtfully at the giant holo on the wall opposite his bed, showing the original Deathstalker in all his fearsome aspect and martial glory: Warrior
    Prime of the Empire and founder of the Clan that still bore his name. He looked a bit rough and ready in his thick furs and steelmesh tunic, bristling with weapons, his head shaved in a mercenary's scalplock, but it didn't take too much imagination to transform his warrior's arrogance into a lord's nobility.
    According to Family history, he'd been the greatest fighting man of his day, unanimously elected Warrior Prime and elevated to the Peerage by popular acclaim. Hard man by all accounts, and a bit of a bastard, but the public liked that in their heroes. Bloodied his sword on a hundred worlds, and never backed away from an insult or a war.
    He was also the creator and wielder of the Darkvoid Device, which put out a thousand suns in a moment and left their planets to sail silently through an endless night. The Dark void. But no one talks about that anymore outside the Family.
    Pity about what happened to him in the end, but that's politics for you. His son had taken over as Warrior Prime to the Empire, and things went on as they should. Owen wondered vaguely what the old man would have made of his most recent descendant. Probably would have had him put down the moment he showed any sign of intellectual tendencies. Owen couldn't bring himself to really give a damn. He'd always known he was a writer, not a fighter. He'd had a proper training in weaponry and all the martial arts, as befitted his station and inheritance, but it had never interested him. His interest lay in researching and piecing together the Empire's somewhat tangled history. Nothing excited him like reaching into the morass of legend and myth that made up so much of the past and producing one indisputable new fact, clear and sharp as