Rule of Two

  He leapt forward and cut the first red-robed figure down before he—or she—had a chance to react, a single slash of his lightsaber bisecting the unfortunate opponent horizontally, just above the waist.

  The other seven swarmed him, thrusting their force pikes forward to deliver the deadly electrical charge stored in the tips. Bane never even bothered to parry the incoming blows, relying on his orbalisk armor to protect him as he adopted a strategy of pure offense.

  His unexpected tactics caught two more of the assassins completely unprepared, and they walked right into a sweeping two-handed cut that disemboweled them both.

  The remaining five struck Bane almost simultaneously, their force pikes sending a million volts of current through his body. The orbalisks absorbed most of the charge, but enough filtered through to jolt him from his teeth down to his toes.

  The Dark Lord staggered and fell to his knees. But instead of rushing in to finish him off, the assassins simply stood their ground. The idea that anything smaller than a bantha could withstand a direct hit from a force pike set to maximum charge—let alone five pikes at the same time—was inconceivable. Their miscalculation gave Bane the second he needed to shake off the effects and rise to his feet, much to the amazement and horror of his enemies.

  “Zannah was right about you,” a voice from behind Bane called out.

  He whirled around to see a small man in his fifties, clad all in black, standing on the far edge of the camp. In his hand was a green lightsaber, though it was obvious from the way he gripped it that he had never received any proper training in how to handle the exotic weapon.

  At the man’s side was Bane’s own apprentice; she had not drawn her lightsaber.

  Bane snarled in anger at her betrayal, his rising anger fueled by the chemicals the orbalisks were pumping into his system.

  “Today is the day you die, Darth Bane,” the man said, charging forward to attack.

  At the same time, the five red-robed figures rushed in from behind him. Bane spun and thrust his open palm toward them, lashing out with the power of the dark side. Like the Jedi and Sith, one of the first techniques Shadow Assassins learned was the creation of a Force barrier. Channeling their power, they could form a protective shield around themselves to negate the Force attacks of their enemies. But if an opponent was strong enough, a concentrated attack could still breach the barrier. Darth Bane, Dark Lord of the Sith, was definitely strong enough.

  Two of the assassins were stopped in their tracks, knocked to the ground as if they had run into an invisible wall. Two more, weaker and less able to defend themselves against Bane’s power, were sent flying backward. Only the fifth was strong enough to resist the Sith Lord’s throw and continue his charge.

  However, without his brethren at his side to harry and distract his foe, he found himself the sole focus of Bane’s wrath. Unable to defend against the savage sequence of lightsaber cuts and thrusts, he fell in a matter of seconds, half a dozen fatal wounds scored across his chest and face.

  While the four remaining assassins regained their feet, Bane wheeled back to their leader. Wisely, the man in black had stopped his own charge and was gathering the Force. As Bane stepped toward him the man unleashed it in a single long, thin bolt of indigo lightning. Bane caught the blast with his lightsaber, the blade absorbing the energy. In retaliation he struck back with lightning of his own—a storm of a dozen bolts arcing in toward his target from all angles.

  The man leapt high in the air, flipping backward to avoid the deadly electrical conflagration. He landed on his feet ten meters away, a small, smoking crater marking the spot where he had been standing only an instant before.

  “Zannah!” the man shouted. “Do something!”

  But Bane’s apprentice didn’t move. She merely stood off to the side, biding her time and observing the action.

  The assassins fell on Bane again, but instead of repelling them with the Force, he allowed his body to become a conduit, turning himself into a physical manifestation of the dark side’s tumultuous power. As he spun like a whirlwind, his blade seemed to be everywhere at once: hacking, slashing, and slicing his enemies to ribbons.

  All four assassins died in the attack, though one managed to land a single blow with his force pike before his throat was slit, the wound so deep it nearly severed his head. Fueled by rage and fury, Bane shrugged off the deadly electrical shock like a rancor shrugging off the bite of a venn-bug.

  Once again he turned his attention to the man in black. Bane marched slowly toward him as his adversary stood frozen in place, paralyzed by the terrifying knowledge of his own imminent death.

  “Zannah!” the man cried out to her again, holding his lightsaber vertically before him as if it were a talisman that could hold the approaching demon at bay. “Master! Help me!”

  Bane chopped down with his own weapon, severing the man’s sword arm at the elbow. The man screamed and dropped to his knees. An instant later his voice went silent as Bane ran him through with a single hard thrust, the lightsaber entering his chest just below his heart and protruding a full half a meter out the back of his shoulder blade.

  Bane slid his blade back out. As the old man’s body fell face-forward into the dirt, the Dark Lord turned to his apprentice. Zannah merely stood there, watching him.

  “You betrayed me!” he roared and leapt at her.

  Zannah had watched the battle with interest, taking careful note of Bane’s tactics and tendencies and storing them away for later. Her Master easily dispatched Hetton and his minions, as she had expected … though there had been a brief instant near the start of the battle when Bane had appeared vulnerable. Apparently the orbalisks were not able to fully protect him against the electrical current of the force pikes—another fact she made a point of filing away for later.

  When it was over her Master turned to face her. She waited for him to demand an explanation, but instead he let loose with a cry and flew at her. Zannah barely had time to ignite her twin blades to meet his completely unexpected attack.

  She fell into a defensive posture as she so often had during their training sessions. But this was no drill, and her Master came at her with a speed and ferocity she had never faced before. Giving in to his orbalisk-fueled bloodrage, he was like a wild animal, raining savage blows down on her from all angles, the strikes coming so fast it seemed as if he wielded a dozen blades at the same time. Zannah fell into a full retreat, desperately giving ground beneath the overwhelming assault.

  “I did not betray you, Master!” she shouted, trying to make Bane see reason before he cleaved her in two. “I lured Hetton here so you could kill him!”

  She ducked under a horizontal cut from his lightsaber, only to catch a heavy boot in her ribs. She rolled with the kick, narrowly avoiding the return cut of his blade. She parried a sharp descending blow, gathered her feet under her, and launched herself backward, flipping ten meters clear.

  “Listen to me, Master!” she shouted now that she had put some distance between them. “If I wanted to betray you, why didn’t I help them during the—oooffff!”

  Bane hit her with a powerful Force throw, sending her hurtling backward. Only the barrier she had instinctively thrown up at the last second to shield herself saved her bones from being shattered by the concussive force of the impact.

  She scrambled to her feet and twirled her lightsaber before her, creating what she hoped would be an impenetrable wall of defense. Instead of trying to pierce her guard, Bane leapt high in the air and came down almost right on top of her. She deftly parried his blade, redirecting it to the side as she spun away to keep his body from slamming into her. But Bane caught her on the chin with his elbow as she turned, the blow snapping her head back. Her body went limp, her weapon dropped from her nerveless fingers, and she crumpled to the ground.

  For a second she saw nothing but stars. Her vision cleared to reveal the image of Darth Bane looming above her, his blade raised for the coup de grâce.

  “I only did this fo
r you, Master!” she shouted up at him, ignoring the throbbing pain in her jaw. “I only wanted to bring you the key to creating a Holocron!”

  Bane hesitated, her words finally piercing the bestial madness that had enveloped him. He stared down at her on the ground, his head tilting to the side as his blood-lust slowly faded.

  “You did this for me?” he asked suspiciously.

  Zannah nodded frantically, even though it made her head spin. “Hetton recognized me as a true Sith. I had to find some way to eliminate him and his minions to keep our existence secret.”

  “So you led them here to ambush me,” he said, his skepticism obvious.

  “I had to win his trust,” Zannah explained, speaking quickly and reaching into the folds of her clothes to pull out the datacard Hetton had given her. “I had to trick him into giving me this, so I could then give it to you.”

  She held the datacard up toward her Master, marveling at the fact that it had survived the punishment he had inflicted on her during their confrontation. Bane reached out to take it from her grasp, lowering his lightsaber and extinguishing the blade.

  He gave a brief nod and took a step back, allowing her room to stand. Zannah retrieved her own lightsaber from where it lay on the ground, then rose slowly to her feet. Her head was still swimming from the elbow to her jaw, making it difficult to stand without swaying slightly.

  “I knew you had the strength to defeat them, Master,” Zannah said. “That was why I didn’t come to your aid during the battle.”

  “And what if you were wrong?” Bane asked in a quiet, menacing voice. “What if they had somehow killed me?”

  “Then you would have been weak, unworthy of being the Dark Lord of the Sith,” Zannah answered boldly. “And you would have deserved to die.”

  “Precisely,” Bane said with his familiar grim smile, and Zannah knew her Master approved.

  16

  Winter was still a new—and not entirely welcome—phenomenon on Ruusan. Originally it had been a temperate world, its climate controlled and moderated by the vast boreal forests that dominated the planet’s surface. But during the prolonged conflict between the Brotherhood of Darkness and the Army of Light, millions of hectares of old-growth trees had been decimated, turning a huge swath of Ruusan’s northern hemisphere into a desolate and arid wasteland.

  Alone, the dramatic changes in the geographic features of the world might not have been enough to affect a significant climatic shift. However, the damage to the environment left the world more vulnerable to the terrible devastation of the thought bomb. In the wake of Kaan’s ultimate weapon, a powerful Force nexus was created: an invisible maelstrom of dark- and light-side energies capable of permanently altering the planet’s weather patterns.

  As a result, even in the regions of the planet where the forests still stood, snow—a rarity in generations gone past—became a regular yearly occurrence. The unprecedented winters typically lasted only a few months, but they were particularly brutal on an ecosystem that had evolved in a much warmer clime. Some of the flora and fauna of Ruusan, like the humans who still inhabited the world, had learned to adapt. Other species simply died off.

  Over the years Darovit had learned there were three keys to surviving the harsh cold. The first key was to always dress in layers. His hooded overcloak was a gift from a farmer he had treated for a bad case of fungal rot. The thick sweater beneath had been offered as payment by a miner after Darovit mended the man’s foot; he’d accidentally crushed it with his own pneumatic jack. In fact, every garment on his person—the long-sleeved shirt, his heavy trousers, his warm padded boots, the fur-lined glove on his left hand, and the custom-made cuff covering his amputated stump—had been given to him by locals who had come to his isolated home seeking aid from the “Healing Hermit.”

  The second key to surviving the winter wind and snow was to stay dry. He learned to watch the sky, seeking shelter at the slightest sign of precipitation. If he allowed his clothes to become wet, hypothermia could easily set in before he was able to find help. It was one of the disadvantages that came with living alone deep inside the forest, but Darovit had become too accustomed to his life of solitude to give it up now.

  In his first years he had been a wandering vagabond, exploring the wilds of Ruusan as he traveled between the small pockets of civilization scattered across the land. But as he learned to hunt and forage for himself, he found fewer and fewer reasons to venture into the towns and villages he came across.

  Six years ago he had wearied of his nomadic existence. Locating a suitably remote location beneath a large stand of sheltering trees, he had constructed a simple hut of branches and mud. The hut gave him a sense of permanence and stability while still allowing him to enjoy the inner peace he had found in his self-imposed isolation.

  There were no other human settlements within ten kilometers of his home, and even the closest bouncer colony was almost five kilometers away. Yet that didn’t mean he was without visitors. From the teachings of the bouncers and the experiences of his youthful travels, he had become wise in the lore of herbal medicines and natural remedies. Three or four times a month he would be visited by someone imploring him to treat some malady or injury. Darovit never turned these people away, asking only that in return they respect his privacy … though often patients bestowed small gifts on him, like the clothes he now wore, as tokens of their gratitude.

  The third key to surviving the inhospitable Ruusan winters was to never venture out at night. Bone-chilling temperatures, the chance of becoming lost and unable to find shelter, and even the occasional predator made risking the darkness a dangerous and foolish proposition.

  Yet here Darovit was in the dead of night, his feet crunching over the wind-crusted snow. He’d left the warmth of his hut many hours behind him as he set out to see with his own eyes if the rumors he’d heard from many of his recent patients were true.

  Darovit angry?

  “No,” he whispered to the small green-furred bouncer hovering above him. “Just curious.”

  For reasons he still didn’t fully understand, the bouncers had developed a particular fascination with him. During the day there were always two or three of them circling his domicile. And each time he left his hut at least one of the unusual creatures accompanied him.

  Perhaps they felt responsible for his well-being after rescuing him from the cavern of the thought bomb. Or maybe they were drawn to him by their shared vocations: the bouncers eased the mental anguish of those suffering or in pain, and Darovit had chosen to share his healing talents with any who came to him seeking succor. It was even possible they simply found him entertaining or amusing, though in truth Darovit didn’t know if bouncers had a sense of humor.

  He had quickly grown used to their constant company. They were gentle companions, and they seemed to sense when he was in the mood for conversation and when he just wished to be left alone with his thoughts. Most of the time he found their presence calm and soothing, though some bouncers were less soothing than others. The young female accompanying him now, Yuun, seemed to be more talkative than her compatriots.

  Darovit home now.

  “Not yet,” he whispered.

  Two of Ruusan’s Three Sisters moons were waxing full tonight, their light reflecting off the silver layer of frost and the white blanket of snow that had accumulated over the past few weeks. Darovit was crouched behind a copse of trees, leaning on his walking stick for support and reaching out with the stump of his right hand to push the branches aside so he could peer through without being spotted. Through the vapor clouds of his own breath, he studied the scene that confirmed the rumors were true: the Jedi had returned to Ruusan!

  Darovit had openly scoffed the first time a patient mentioned that the Republic was going to build a monument to honor those who had fallen on Ruusan. It made no sense to undertake such a project now, Darovit had argued, a decade after the battle. Yet there was no denying what he saw through the branches.

  A large plot of
land on the edge of the forest had been cleared of snow, revealing the frozen, scrub-covered fields beneath. The perimeter had been marked with stakes and surveyor’s chains, and the groundbreaking had already begun. The deep furrows of soil dug up by the construction droids to lay the foundations struck Darovit as a wound upon the planet itself.

  Several dozen large stones were scattered about the site, each brought to Ruusan from the birth world of one of the dead Jedi the monument was meant to honor. To Darovit’s eye the alien rocks stuck out like a Wookiee in a crowd of Jawas: unwelcome interlopers defacing the Ruusan landscape.

  “They have no right to be here,” he whispered angrily.

  Hurting nobody, Yuun suggested.

  “This land is only just now beginning to heal itself from their kriffing war,” he answered. “It’s taken ten years for the people to put this all behind them. Now the Jedi want to open old wounds.”

  Senate approved. Not Jedi.

  “I don’t care what the official story says. I know the Jedi are behind this. It will lead to trouble.”

  Trouble?

  Yuun was too young to remember the war that had ravaged her world. She hadn’t witnessed the senseless death and suffering that drove hundreds of bouncer colonies into madness. Damaged beyond all hope of salvation, the wounded bouncers had projected thoughts of pain and torment, attacking and even killing other living creatures until they were slain by Jedi teams sent to wipe them out.

  “The Jedi and their war nearly destroyed Ruusan,” Darovit told her. “Countless thousands of men, women, and children died. The forests burned. And your species was hunted almost to extinction.”

  Sith started war.

  “The Sith couldn’t have had a war on their own. They needed someone to fight, and Hoth was more than willing to throw his Jedi followers against them,” Darovit argued, wondering how much the bouncers—and Yuun in particular—knew of his past. “Both sides were equally to blame.”