Free Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy by Simon R. Green Page A

you. It saves a lot of time. Though deja vu's a bit of a pain in the arse."
    "You've heard about the ELFs," said St. Nick. There was no point in avoiding the subject; the esper had to know it would be on his mind. It was on everyone's mind right now. The ELFs, and what had happened at the Arena.
    "They're not espers," the esper said, very coldly. "They're monsters. To keep us from intervening, they abducted a low-level telepath and ripped his mind open, so they could fill it with horror. They smuggled him into New Hope, home and heart of the esper commonwealth, and he walked among us, broadcasting cannibalism memes. It took us hours to find him and shut him down. Now our streets are full of blood and death and the grieving of survivors. What happens to one of us, happens to all of us. We all ate human flesh. We all fed on others, or on ourselves. We will have a vengeance for this. The oversoul will not rest until every ELF is dead, and their foul philosophy with them."
    "The Paragon Finn Durandal seems to have started without you," said St. Nick.
    The esper representative nodded slowly. "Yes. We would have preferred to take our vengeance personally. And it was a ... disturbing sight, a human executing espers. But the ELFs are dead, and
    burning in Hell, and we must take comfort from that."
    St. Nick nodded thoughtfully and continued on his rounds, and if he had any different thoughts on the matter, he kept them to himself.
    The next group in his path were the Ecstatics; but St. Nick decided that there were limits, even for Santa Claus. The Ecstatics were a relatively new sect, religious extremists on the very edge of the organized Church. They'd all had their brains surgically altered so that they now existed in a continuous, never-ending state of orgasm. Heaven on earth. Pure pleasure in every waking moment, and God knew what they dreamed about. They shook and shuddered constantly, their gaze tended to wander, their smiles were downright disturbing, and they tended to burn out fast. But while they lasted they were supposed to be capable of accessing all kinds of altered states of consciousness, without the need for drugs or esp. There was no denying they saw the world very differently from everyone else. They had been known to achieve depths of insight and inspiration that were startling, and sometimes they could prophesy with uncanny accuracy, though in such obscure terms that it might take years to discover what the hell they'd been talking about. And sometimes they just talked complete crap.
    The Ecstatics, who lived short happy lives and cared for no one but themselves.
    One of them reached out suddenly and grabbed St. Nick by his red sleeve as he passed, fixing him with a happy, unwavering stare. "I know ... who you are . . ."
    "Of course you do," St. Nick said gently. "Everyone knows Father Christmas."
    "No," said the Ecstatic, his wide smile never faltering as he spoke. "I know who you are. Who you used to be. The circle is turning. He's coming back. The lost one. Thrones will fall, worlds will burn, and just possibly the universe will come to an end, very soon now."
    "Well," said St. Nick, considering the matter judiciously. "That's all very interesting, but I can smell your neurons frying from here. So, I think I'll go and talk to someone else who's currently on the same planet as I am."
    "Lot of people say that," said the Ecstatic.
    St. Nick watched the Ecstatic wander away, shook his head a few times, and then braced himself. Next in line on his rounds, the aliens. And unlike the Ecstatics, where everyone sympathized, he couldn't avoid the aliens without risking a diplomatic incident.
    Aliens were, in theory, an equal part of the Empire these days. In practice, both humans and aliens tended to be wary of each other. Of the dozen or so alien species who'd made a showing for the Ceremony, most had turned up as holo images. Partly for the very practical reason that they couldn't exist under human conditions without a