“Taking care of me!” Scout cried, outraged. “Who was pinned to the railing by his butler droid while I was trying to get down there? Who snuck off to hear stories about his so-called real family in the first place?” she said, white with anger.
Yoda set his bowl of gumbo regretfully aside. “Hear it working, do you?”
“Hear what?” Whie snapped.
“The dark side. Always it speaks to us, from our pain. Our grief. It connects our pain to all pain, our hurt to all hurt.”
“Maybe it has a lot to say.” Whie stared at the starscape hovering over the projector table. “It’s so easy for you. What do you care? You are unattached, aren’t you? You’ll probably never die. What was Maks Leem to you? Another pupil. After all these centuries, who could blame you if you could hardly keep track of them? Well, she was more than that to me.” He looked up challengingly. Tear tracks were shining on his face, but his eyes were still hard and angry. “She was the closest thing I had to a mother, since you took me away from my real mother. She chose me to be her Padawan and I let her down, I let her die, and I’m not going to sit here and stuff myself and get over it!” He finished with a yell, sweeping the plate of crêpes off the projection table, so the platter went sailing toward the floor.
Yoda’s eyes, heavy-lidded and half closed like a drowsing dragon’s, gleamed, and one finger twitched. Food, platter, drinks, and all hung suspended in the air. The platter settled; the crêpes returned to it; Whie’s overturned cup righted itself, and rich purple liquid trickled back into it. All settled back onto the table.
Another twitch of Yoda’s fingers, the merest flicker, and Whie’s head jerked around as if on a string, until he found himself looking into the old Jedi’s eyes. They were green, green as swamp water. He had never quite realized before how terrifying those eyes could be. One could drown in them. One could be pulled under.
“Teach me about pain, think you can?” Yoda said softly. “Think the old Master cannot care, mmm? Forgotten who I am, have you? Old am I, yes. Mm. Loved more than you, have I, Padawan. Lost more. Hated more. Killed more.” The green eyes narrowed to gleaming slits under heavy lids. Dragon eyes, old and terrible. “Think wisdom comes at no cost? The dark side, yes—it is easier for them. The pain grows too great, and they eat the darkness to flee from it. Not Yoda. Yoda loves and suffers for it, loves and suffers.”
One could have heard a feather hit the floor.
“The price of Yoda’s wisdom, high it is, very high, and the cost goes on forever. But teach me about pain, will you?”
“I…” Whie’s mouth worked. “I am sorry, Master. I was angry. But…what if they’re right?” he cried out in anguish. “What if the galaxy is dark. What if it’s like Ventress says: we are born, we suffer, we die, and that is all. What if there is no plan, what if there is no ‘goodness’? What if we suffer blindly, trying to find a reason for the suffering, but we’re just fooling ourselves, looking for hope that isn’t there? What if there is nothing but stars and the black space between them and the galaxy does not care if we live or die?”
Yoda said, “It’s true.”
The Padawans looked at him in shock.
The Master’s short legs swung forth and back, forth and back. “Perhaps,” he added. He sighed. “Many days, feel certain of a greater hope, I do. Some days, not so.” He shrugged. “What difference does it make?”
“Ventress was right?” Whie said, shocked out of his anger.
“No! Wrong she is! As wrong as she can be!” Yoda snorted. “Grief in the galaxy, is there? Oh, yes. Oceans of it. Worlds. And darkness?” Yoda pointed to the starscape on the projection table. “There you see: darkness, darkness everywhere, and a few stars. A few points of light. If no plan there is, no fate, no destiny, no providence, no Force: then what is left?” He looked at each of them in turn. “Nothing but our choices, hmm?
“Asajj eats the darkness, and the darkness eats her back. Do that if you wish, Whie. Do that if you wish.” The old Jedi looked deep into the starscape, suns and planets and nebulae dancing, tiny points of light blazing in the darkness. “To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness, Padawan.” His matted eyebrows rose high over his swamp-colored eyes, and he poked Whie with the end of his stick. Poke, poke. “Be a candle, or the night, Padawan: but choose!”
Whie cried for what seemed like a long time. Scout ate. Fidelis served. Master Yoda told stories of Maks Leem and Jai Maruk: tales of their most exciting adventures, of course, but also comical anecdotes from the days when they were only children in the Temple. They drank together, many toasts.
Scout cried. Whie ate. Fidelis served.
Yoda told stories, and ate, and cried, and laughed: and the Padawans saw that life itself was a lightsaber in his hands; even in the face of treachery and death and hopes gone cold, he burned like a candle in the darkness. Like a star shining in the black eternity of space.
10
Château Malreaux stood on a high bluff on the north side of the Bay of Tears, a deep-water harbor guarded by sudden shoals. The River Weeping, which ran into the bay, had hollowed out a fantastic labyrinth of caves through the coastal cliffs. These features—a harbor friendly to those who knew her secrets, and death to those who didn’t, and the chained galleries of caves that honeycombed the shore—had made the Bay of Tears the perfect smuggler’s port. The first Count Malreaux had been a pirate, extorting his grant of nobility from the surrounding territory in exchange for a promise, only occasionally broken, to stop plundering passing ships.
The view from the bluff had a kind of bleak grandeur: the windswept point, bare but for the ubiquitous covering of Vjun moss, glowed a venomous green between leaden skies and a pewter sea. The wind blew hard, driving long rollers before it to smack heavily into the cliff face. Thin strings of rain bent and whipped in the air, mingling with spray blowing off the sea. A few pirate gulls, black with silver markings, wheeled and screamed over the little inlet.
The system of caves and tunnels that led up from the beach had exits everywhere, including, of course, the cellars of Château Malreaux. One of these underground passages opened into the side of a tall hillock, crowned with thorn-trees, half a kilometer inland. From the cover of these thorns, an interested observer watched as an old B-7 freighter, accompanied by two wasp-winged Trade Federation fighter craft, came lumbering in, apparently intending to set down on the deserted landing pads in the ruins of Bitter End, a city on the far side of the bay from the château. Bitter End had numbered some sixty thousand souls before plagues and madness had rendered it a ghost town a decade before.
The freighter lurched suddenly, as if experiencing a problem with its attitude thrusters. It slipped rapidly sideways, spinning convincingly, and disappeared into a cleft between two rocky hills. A nicely judged performance, the observer thought. The Trade Federation fighters balked, jerked, and finally finished their descent into Bitter End.
One hundred twelve seconds later, the first landspeeders came screaming down the road from Bitter End to the cliff across the bay from Château Malreaux. The road ended there, at the famously scenic vista.
From his hidden observation post, Solis dialed up his T/Z telescopic sniperscope with the implanted reticle to identify the troops spilling out of the landspeeders and heading into the rugged terrain. Ten, twelve, fifteen humans in all, plus ten elite assassin droids like the ones Ventress had brought to Phindar Spaceport, and two platoons of grunt droids to help beat the bushes. There would be more specialized trackers in soon, no doubt; this would be the reception committee Dooku had sent to be Yoda’s “guard of honor.”
There was a cave entrance within three minutes’ hard scramble of where the B-7 had touched down. Yoda’s crew should make it in plenty of time, Solis thought. Once inside the caves they should lengthen their lead, at least until the hunters brought in some pretty fancy sensors.
All in all, nothing unexpected—reasonable opening moves by both sides, each intent on a meeting, both pref
erring to control the time and manner of that encounter.
Solis nodded to himself. Time to head for the caves.
“You’re late,” Count Dooku said mildly as Whirry waddled into his study, flushed and gasping.
“Which I’m certain I’m sorry, for that I was looking for Miss Vix—but there she is, the pet!” Whirry cried, for the Count was holding the brindled fox. He had one large hand beneath the animal’s chest, holding it, while with the other he stroked its red-brown pelt. The fox struggled and whined in his hands. It was gasping, and its eyes were round and terrified.
Dooku’s fingers passed behind its ears, and his big hand ran over its thin shoulder blades, fragile as twigs. “I told you we had guests coming; one I invited, and a couple I did not.” Dooku stroked the terrified fox. “I’ve been looking through some house records. When your husband went mad, you gave a child up to the Jedi.”
“The Baby,” Whirry whispered. “Which they stole him, the brutes. Took me when my mind was all ahoo. Blood all over my dress.” She glanced absently down at her ball gown, looking at the splotches on the hem and cuffs, the dull stains darker than plain grime. “They stole him from me.”
“There was a droid here at that time,” Dooku said. “A Tac-Spec Footman who served the House Malreaux for twelve generations, but then mysteriously disappeared. No mention of it these last ten years. Curiously, Asajj met such a droid eight days ago, traveling with a Jedi Padawan on his way here.”
Stroke, stroke: the little fox trembling and whining.
“Were you thinking of having a little homecoming without telling me, Whirry? That would be…disappointing.”
“Which it was supposed to be a surprise, like,” the old woman whispered.
“I don’t like surprises.”
“Oh. All right, then.” She swallowed.
“You can communicate with this droid, I assume?”
“Yes.”
The Count looked at her.
“Yes, Master,” she said quickly.
Dooku ran his hand softly down Miss Vix’s back. The fox twitched and yelped. Dooku lifted his hand. His fingertips were full of fur. “Hm,” he said. He flicked the fur off his hand and returned to his stroking. Another yelp. More fur. He paused, as if at a sudden thought, and turned the fox, to show its mutilated pelt. “Here, Whirry—would you like to read your future?”
The housekeeper looked from her master to her fox and back, mouth trembling. “What do you want me to do?”
“What’s wrong with your gentlegadget?” Scout asked Whie. They had been scrambling through the caves for some time, following the glow of Yoda’s lightsaber, when the droid came to a sudden halt, as if his programming had hung.
“Fidelis?” Whie’s voice, sharp and commanding. Echoes rattled away into the chambers on either side.
A whirring, clanking sound. Fidelis seemed to wake up. He shook his head. “Yes, Master Whie?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Not at all, sir. Just, ah, just running through my internal maps, sir.”
“Come,” Yoda said. “A large chamber there is. Rest there we will.”
“I don’t need rest,” Whie said. His step, always graceful, was electric, and his voice hummed with suppressed excitement. “I need to get home.”
It was all Scout could do to pick her way through these sinister caverns, eyes aching with the effort of peering into the gloom. She had already scraped her shins badly, twice, in the first dash into the cave system. Whie, on the other hand, was moving as if it were broad daylight. His eyes were bright, almost manic. “The Force is strong here,” he said, and he laughed with the pleasure of it.
He was right about the Force. Even Scout could feel it: a nervous prickle running deep inside her, as if the world were full of magnets and she could feel them tugging on the iron in her blood. Whie found it exhilarating. Scout thought it was creepy. There was something edgy about the Force here: a sharp, unbalanced feeling, as different from the gentle glow of the Jedi Temple as the damp, acid wind of Vjun was from the air back home.
Whie bounded on ahead, with Fidelis pattering behind. Scout came up more slowly. Master Yoda took her lightly by the arm. “Soft now,” he breathed. “Listen a moment, Padawan. Leave you here, I must.”
“Leave us!” she hissed.
“Whether Fidelis may be trusted, I know not. Keep your fellow Padawan safe, I know he will: but Jedi business is a different thing.”
True enough, Scout thought, remembering Solis’s betrayal.
Yoda snuffed. “A way to the surface nearby there is; I can smell the air. Take it I will. You and the others stay in the caves. If all goes well, come to you, I will. If met in twelve hours we have not, head back to the ship, and send a message to the Jedi Temple, saying Yoda will not return.”
“But—!”
The hand squeezed her arm. “Your fellow Padawan, watch you must! Vjun calls to the dark side in him.”
“Check it out!” Whie called from somewhere up ahead. “Skeletons!”
“What am I supposed to do with him?” Scout whispered—but Yoda was gone.
Cursing under her breath, Scout scrambled up a series of limestone ledges. The only light came from the faint glow of Whie’s lightsaber, far ahead. The floor was covered in a gray dust, fine as ash. Nothing grew here, although every now and then Scout saw small bones—animals that had fallen down a hole into the caves, or been carried here by floodwaters. Somewhere in the distance, water was dripping into an underground pool, drip, drop, drip: each drop with an echo that faded and died.
The idea got into Scout’s head that each drop was like a life: swelling into being on the cavern’s unseen roof; then life itself, a brief plunge ending with a smack into cold water; then echoes, like the memory left on those behind: faint, fading, gone.
“What do you suppose happened to Scout?” she heard Whie say in a strange, comical voice. “I better go check!” Whie answered himself, in a high, squeaky voice. There was a clatter, like old sticks clacking together. Just as Scout scrabbled up to the lip of the next cavern, a grinning white skull peered down at her. A bony arm reached out with a skeletal hand at the end of it. Whie was using the Force to make the frail bones hover in the air. “You look like you could use a hand,” he said, in that high, squeaky voice, and the floating finger bones clutched around her wrist.
Scout screamed and smacked her arm down on the limestone. The bones snapped and splintered. The floating skeleton—no bigger than a child—held its hand, now missing its fingers, up in front of its empty eye sockets. “Whoa. Now I’m stumped,” he squeaked in his little-boy voice.
A second skeleton, this one the size of a grown man, came bobbing through the air to join the first. “Careful there, junior,” Whie said in an ugly parody of a mother’s voice. “This one’s feisty.”
Scout’s heart hammered in her chest. “Whie. Stop it.”
“Just having a little fun,” Whie said, appearing. “Scout, it’s incredible. There’s something about this place—can’t you feel it? I’ve never felt the Force so strongly. Normally I would have to concentrate just to hold all these bones in the air, but here…” He hummed, waving his lightsaber like a conductor’s baton. The two skeletons joined hands and began to dance.
“Put the bones down,” Scout said, doing her best to keep her voice steady.
“Why? The original owners aren’t using them.”
“It’s not respectful,” Scout said.
“I don’t see—”
“Whie. I’m begging you. Please,” Scout said.
Silence.
“All right.” Whie turned away. The bones dropped to the floor with a clatter. “I guess it’s not nice to scare little girls.”
Scout waited for her heart to stop racing. “Whie?”
“Yeah?”
“You know you don’t sound right, don’t you?”
Silence.
“I know.”
“It frightens me,” Scout said. “The Force is very stro
ng here. If even I can feel that, I can only imagine what it must be like for you. I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to use it unless we absolutely have to. It’s like…air with too much oxygen. The dark side is just waiting to catch fire.”
“I’ve got news for you, Scout. The dark side is here,” Whie said, tapping his chest. “We carry it with us wherever we go.”
He flicked off his lightsaber.
Instantly the darkness was absolute. Somewhere a drop of water gathered, fattened, dropped into a lightless pool. Drip-drop-op-op-p.
Silence.
Stars had come out in the darkness, little gleams of light spangling the cavern ceiling. “I’ve seen those lights before,” Whie said.
“Glow-worms,” Fidelis answered. “We used to come down here when you were an infant, Master. You and I and your brother and your father, before his, ah, illness.”
“What happened to him?”
Scout drew her own lightsaber and flicked it on at the lowest power setting, just to make a light.
“The better families on Vjun have traditionally had very high midi-chlorian counts,” Fidelis said. “It was a mark of status. Vjun only established significant trade with the Republic in the last couple of generations; before then, the Jedi had not yet had a chance to—forgive me for speaking plainly—keep the inhabitants subjugated by their usual practice of kidnapping all children of unusually high ability. In times past, Vjun has had some contact with the Sith, but the recent advances of the Republic marked the first prolonged exposure to the Jedi cult. Interest in midi-chlorian phenomena had always been high, of course, but the arrival of the Jedi baby hunters naturally spurred the best families into thinking of how they could augment their own abilities and safeguard themselves from the threat posed by—” He coughed delicately. “—outsiders.
“The Count your father was part of a consortium involved in genetically enhancing the natural midi-chlorian levels of Vjun’s populace. The experiment was, in fact, wildly successful.”
“You mean they created a whole planet of Force-sensitives with no mental training for handling it?” Scout said, appalled.