by Tim Lebbon
At the far corner of the room was a wall display of martial objects—blades, spears, maces, other striking weapons, all of them powered by the bearer alone. It did not surprise Lanoree that Kara might be a collector of such antiquities, and they did not interest her. What might be behind the display did.
There was no obvious door, but she sensed a hollow beyond the wall.
And she did not have time to find the hidden opening mechanism.
Lanoree drew her sword and struck. Sparks flew, and an intense surge of energy webbed across the display of old weapons, lighting them briefly with the Force. She struck again and a wall panel gave way. Several crossbows clattered to the floor.
Lanoree shouldered her way through the opening into the narrow space behind the wall.
“Those elevators are pretty close!” Tre called.
“Lock the doors. Barricade them. Give us as much time as you can.” Her voice sounded muffled in the small, unlit room, as if swallowed by something soft. Lanoree took a small glow rod from her belt and flicked it on.
The light flooded the room, and seeing what was in there gave context to the curious musty smell.
Books. Perhaps a dozen of them, each sitting on a plinth in a separate display case. It had been a long time since she’d even seen a book. Her parents had one—an old instruction tome written by the great Je’daii Master Shall Mar more than three millennia ago—and they showed it to her whenever she asked. She loved the printing, the care and attention that went into the production processes. But these …
She opened the first case, caught a whiff of must and age, and as she opened the book she realized that it was unique.
Not printed. Not mass-produced. This was handwritten.
Tre’s voice called, muffled by the wall between them. “They’re outside!”
Lanoree knew they did not have very long. “Ironholgs, how far away are you?” Her droid replied that the Peacemaker was moments away. “Good. Drop low, wait until you see me, then come in close.” A quizzical buzz from the comm. “Don’t worry. You won’t be able to miss us.” Opening the rest of the display cases, she winced at the damage she might be doing to these books. But time was not on her side. Flipping pages, her heart settling yet her mind moving faster than ever, at last she found what she was looking for.
She slipped the thin book into her jacket and left the room.
“Quickly!” Tre whispered. He was in the center of the large room, standing on one of the low seating areas so that he did not have to look down. Lanoree thought he was actually shaking with fear, his lekku touching nervously beneath his chin.
Kara groaned, her bulk shifting in a sickly, fluid movement. A comlink on the table beside her was glowing softly, call unanswered. Her security would already know that something was very wrong.
Lanoree dashed across to the wide, tall windows and beckoned Tre Sana after her.
“There?” he asked.
“You think we can leave any other way?”
Something crashed against the wide doors, three heavy impacts. A low table that Tre had upended against the doorway tilted and fell, smacking against the crystal floor.
Lanoree squinted through the window at the sea of lights below and around them, and then she saw the shape she wanted. She breathed a sigh of relief.
“Battle droids,” Tre said, arriving by her side. “All the rich hire them, private security, get them chipped and reprogrammed, more heavily armed. Some of them fought in the Despot War. I’ve even heard that some retain memories of their battles with the Je’daii, don’t like them, hate them, and some even dream of—”
“You’re babbling,” Lanoree said. “And droids don’t dream.”
“I told you, I don’t like heights.”
More impacts from beyond the room. And then a louder, deeper thud vibrated through the floor and the doors burst open in a blast of smoke, flame, and torn metal.
Lanoree drew her sword again and faced the door. Three droids entered, short, thin units designed for speed and offering narrow targets for any aggressor to hit. Their fist-sized heads twirled as they scanned the room.
Lanoree pressed her hand to Tre’s chest to still him, and she felt his heart hammering against her palm.
And then without warning the droids opened fire.
Lanoree swept her sword left and right, catching and deflecting blasts from their weapons. Tre shrank down behind her. She concentrated, her stance perfectly balanced, and with her free hand she Force-punched a droid back against the wall. It struck, fell, and then quickly rose again. It was scarred with several old blast injuries. Battle hardened.
“Get ready!” Lanoree shouted.
“For what?”
“You’ll know when it happens.” She angled the sword and deflected several blasts back against the window. Crystal shattered, and a large slab of the window burst outward with a heavy crump! Wind whistled into the room, sweeping food-laden plates from the table, and Lanoree saw Kara’s eyes flicker open.
Sword still shifting before her, Lanoree clawed her left hand, lifting one droid and flinging it at another. A blast caught it and it blew apart, a brief shriek of tortured metal followed by a hail of white-hot components ricocheting around the room.
Lanoree knew she didn’t have much time. She could Force-jump across the room and take on the two remaining battle droids, but right then destroying them was not the priority.
The priority was escape.
She turned, grabbed Tre around the waist, and leaped from the shattered window.
The wind stole her breath. It grabbed them and spun them around as they spiraled down from Kara’s overhanging apartment, drawing them in close to the tower so that windows flitted by in a blur. It roared in her ears. Lanoree squinted, ignoring Tre’s scream of terror as they plummeted, struggling to hold him.
Laser blasts flashed by them and there was nothing she could do, no way she could gather her thoughts to protect them from the sustained fire coming from the shattered window above. She only hoped—
The Peacemaker drifted from the shadow of the tower and dipped below them, dropping, engines roaring, matching their speed so that the impact as they struck its upper surface was as gentle as possible. Lanoree grunted and clasped Tre as they hit, flailing with her other hand that still held the sword. Given a choice of which to drop, she knew the weapon would win out. But she hoped she did not have to make that choice.
Laser blasts ricocheted from the ship’s curved hull, but Ironholgs remote piloted the ship perfectly. They flew a gentle circle around the tower so that the droids could no longer hit them with fire from above, then the craft hovered to give them the chance to get inside.
The Peacemaker’s top hatch whispered open.
“After you,” Lanoree said.
Tre scrambled across the ship’s smooth back and tipped inside headfirst.
Lanoree dropped in beside Tre, landing softly on her feet, and the hatch closed above her. At home once more, she hardly even swayed as the ship powered away from Rhol Yan and out across the dark sea.
“Are you mad?” Tre shouted. “Insane? What if your ship hadn’t been there, what if—”
She raised one hand, silencing him, and took a deep, calming breath. “A simple thank you would be fine.”
With the Peacemaker’s computers patched in to Kalimahr’s nav sats and the ship flying across the ocean toward the Khar Peninsula, Lanoree wanted to use the time to take stock. At first Tre Sana tried to talk, but she held up a finger in warning and nodded at her cot.
“Sit. Still. Quiet. You’re on my ship now. It was easy getting you on board. It’d be even easier for me to fling you off.”
“You call that easy?” he spat.
“The cot! And silence.”
Tre sat, his lekku so pale they were almost pink. He was all front, but Lanoree could see his relief at having a chance to rest.
She turned the cockpit seat toward the front and sat back for a moment, staring at the sea flashing by bel
ow. Moonlight caught the waves. Ships’ lanterns speckled the surface, and here and there the navigation lights of airborne craft moved across the night. It was clear, and a swath of stars smeared the sky. Her ancestors had come from somewhere out there, and now her brother was preparing to risk everything to travel there once again.
Her brother, and others.
Lanoree was aware of the dreadful danger Dal’s efforts might be putting Tython and the wider system in, and it chilled her to even imagine him getting close to his aims. But at moments like this, looking up at the stars, she could not hold back her interest. Her fascination. In many ways she was as curious as anyone about their origins, but she went about feeding that curiosity in different ways.
Kara had appeared quite open about her affiliation with the Stargazers. Her Je’daii past was a mystery, especially as she now exuded dislike for their society and beliefs. If the information she’d imparted was correct, she had willingly sent them to a Stargazer temple, and perhaps one step closer to Dal. Yet she had also been hiding secrets.
Lanoree had brought one of them with her.
Quietly, she took the book from her jacket and placed it on the control panel before her. She sensed no movement from Tre. If he so much as stood from the cot in the living area behind her, she would be aware, and she did not need any Je’daii senses to know this. The Peacemaker ship was as much her home as the one with her parents had ever been, and she knew every waft of air, every creak of loose paneling, and every shadow cast by the ceiling lights or control panel indicators. She was safer here than anywhere.
The book was leather bound, its cover worn around the edges and blank. It was thin; perhaps fifty pages. Age emanated from it, a combination of its hand-worn appearance; the faint smell of dust; and the mere fact that it was a book of paper, card, and ink. There were those who still produced books, but only as novelty or special items.
This was the real thing.
How many have touched this? she wondered. How many have stared at it as I am now, readying themselves to see inside? Haunted by history—the scent of lost times, the feel of ages—it represented something that no flatscreen or holo display ever could.
She opened the cover and looked at the first page. The little that was printed there was in a strange symbology she only faintly recognized. She ran her fingertips across the page and felt grittiness beneath them, the dust of ages.
Stroking a pad on the arm of her seat, she listened for Tre as a small globe rose from the Peacemaker’s control panel. He was silent and still.
Lanoree picked up the globe and twisted it to aim at the book. It floated beside her right cheek, and when she touched the pad again it flickered on and started to hum softly. A faint blue light splashed on the book, and beneath it the symbols started to shiver.
It took longer than she had expected. The print seemed to flow and shift, though only within the globe’s blue light, and at last the shimmering settled into words she could read.
The Gree, and Everything I Have Found of Them in the Old City. The name below was Osamael Or. And that name rang in Lanoree’s memory.
Frowning, she leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes to concentrate. Who was it? Where did she know that name from? She looked again, out at the stars so far away from everything she knew and loved, and the concept of exploration came to her. What was she, if not an explorer? A Ranger of the Je’daii, a traveler of this system that still contained countless unknowns even though it had been inhabited for ten thousand years. There was so much more to know—mysteries, confusions, ambiguities. There were …
“There are depths,” she whispered. These, too, were the words of Osamael Or, and she remembered where she had heard them before. A bedtime story from her father, told so long ago and never remembered again until now. Even after everything that had happened with her and Dal, the Je’daii temples, the search, and what she had found of him. Even then she had not thought of that time almost twenty years before when her father sat in the chair beside her bed, long hair loosened to flow across his shoulders, hands folded on his chest as he relayed the cautionary tale of Osamael Or and his final, greatest adventure—in the depths of the Old City, where he insisted there were secrets still to be found. So he embarked on his next expedition alone, because by then no one wanted to go with him anymore. They said he was mad. They said there were more important things to do across Tython, and that the surroundings were too dangerous. This was nine thousand years ago, you have to remember, back at a time when dreadful Force Storms still ravaged the planet and the Je’daii were sometimes swept along with them, instead of taking power and balance from them. There were many like Osamael Or back then. Frontiersmen, they called themselves, but for Osamael Or the greatest frontiers did not necessarily exist at the greatest distances. So he went down into the Old City on Talss alone. And he was never seen again. They searched for him. His family felt a sense of responsibility, though they thought him mad as everyone else. So they looked, but nothing was ever found, and no one was willing to go deep. “There are depths,” Osamael had told his sister the night before he went, and she repeated his final words whenever anyone asked her about her brother. Because she was the one member of the family who insisted he was still alive. “He’s still exploring down there, in those depths,” she’d say. “He’s going deeper, and finding more, and one day he’ll emerge with news that will astound us all.” But he never did come back. And that’s why the Old City is such a dangerous place, my sweet Lanoree. Because there are depths.
“Osamael Or’s diary,” Lanoree whispered, awed. For her to be holding this, now, nine thousand years later … he must have come back.
A chill went through her, as if someone from a great distance touched the deepest part of her, and knew her.
She turned the page and started reading.
CHAPTER SIX
OLD MYTHS
No one can fight without balance.
—Master Rupe, Stav Kesh, 8,466 TYA
Stav Kesh. The name itself inspires a shiver of anticipation, a frisson of excitement. For Lanoree, Qigong Kesh was a place of contemplation and immersion in Force Skills, nursing and nurturing them, and considering what the Force meant to her. At the Martial Arts Temple of Stav Kesh, she will learn to fight.
It is dawn as Lanoree and Dal approach the temple. They’d camped several kilometers to the north, and breaking camp when the sun rose above the eastern horizon is an incredible moment. The air here is thin, the mountains high, and they are both dizzy with breathlessness. But the thin air seems to purify the amazing colors of dawn.
Dal seems excited. He was always good in a fight, as several arguments with the children of other Je’daii at Bodhi Temple had proved. Lanoree hopes that he will find the Force here and truly welcome it at last. When he sees what it can do … when he feels how it might help …
“This is my time,” he says as they stand on a rocky cliff path, a shallow ravine to their right. Snow had fallen in the night, and a light covering softens their harsh surroundings. “Don’t try to be my teacher here, Lanoree. And don’t try to be Mother and Father. You’re my sister, that’s all. Whatever happens to me here is my responsibility.”
“Our parents made you my responsibility.”
“We’re not children anymore. And I’m my own man.” It’s a surprising thing for Dal to say. But as he walks ahead of her toward the temple, and she sees the strength in his stance and the determined set of his shoulders, it does not seem ridiculous at all.
The breeze is picking up. Snow dances through the air. The landscape is harsh, weather likewise. Lanoree knows that Stav Kesh is never an easy place to be.
“My name is Tave, and I’m one of the Masters of the temple. We’ve been expecting you. How was your journey south from the sea?”
“No problems,” Dal says. He does not mention the fire tygah, and when Master Tave glances at the healing burns across his forearms, Dal says nothing.
After a brief pause, the Noghri Master smil
es. “Good. Wait here and I’ll send a droid to show you to your quarters. You have the morning to perform breathing exercises, acclimatize to the altitude. After lunch your training begins. This afternoon, Force breathing.”
“Breathing?” Dal says. “I thought this was the Martial Arts temple.”
Master Tave stares at Dal, glances at Lanoree, then turns his back on them both.
“Dal!” Lanoree whispers. “Don’t be rude!”
“Rude?” he asks, but at least he’s keeping his voice low. “But—”
“Don’t you think Master Tave knows what he’s doing?”
“Yes. Well. But breathing?”
“I’m sure it’ll all make sense.” She walks past Dal and between the wide temple doors, suddenly afraid that they will swing closed and shut her outside. Perhaps this is how Dal sometimes feels, she thinks. Her brother follows her inside, and together they take in their surroundings.
She has seen plenty of holos of Stav Kesh, and heard many stories from those Journeyers who visited there before Bodhi Temple in their own Great Journeys of learning. But nothing could have prepared her for the real thing.
The strength of the Force, for a start.
Lanoree can feel the Force here as an almost physical presence, Ashla and Bogan exerting a gravity upon her that seems to stretch, pull in all directions, and give her body an incredible lightness. It is easy to let herself fall into the flow, and the talents she honed at Qigong Kesh feel even more refined here. The Force is close, and it takes so little effort to become one with it.
She glances at Dal. He is looking about him in wonder, and she hopes that some of it is recognition of the Force. But after what he said outside, she will not ask him.
