by Greg Bear
“Just what did you do to earn such disgrace?” Anakin asked. Without thinking, he tilted his head to one side, and three fingers on his right hand curled.
“I killed my benefactor’s son,” Ke Daiv said. “It was prophesied he would die from a severe head wound in battle. So his father beseeched the clan that his son would never fight. The clan agreed, but ordered him to go on a ritual hunt to fulfill his training. I was an orphan brought into their family, and the head of the clan appointed me to protect my benefactor’s son. I accompanied him on the hunt. We fought with a wild feragriff in the ritual preserves on a moon over Coruscant.” The Blood Carver’s nose flaps had spread wide now, a motion Anakin had learned to interpret as uncertainty, questing for sensation, information, confirmation. He’s weaker now. His past makes him weak, just like me.
Anakin saw Jabitha enter the doorway. She would not see.
“The prophecy came true. You killed him with a stray shot,” Anakin finished the story.
“It was an accident,” the Blood Carver murmured. Ke Daiv straightened. His face became sharp again, and he pushed the lance forward, poking at Anakin to get him to go through the door after the girl.
“No,” Anakin said.
Sky mines jagged wildly just a few hundred meters overhead, their engines screeching in the thin air. Anakin saw another silhouette at an even greater distance: a droid starfighter. Just one. The invaders were concentrating their forces in the north, but sky mines were cheap. They could be spread everywhere. In time, they might even blanket the planet. Someone might be planning to kill all living things on Zonama Sekot: Jabitha, Gann, Sheekla Farrs, Shappa, Fitch, Vagno, Obi-Wan. And all the others.
“You still have honor,” Anakin said. “You can still make up for what you did.” But something else built inside, a shadow far thicker than the descending night. It could easily fill his being.
The Blood Carver had hurt Obi-Wan, threatened Jabitha, called Anakin a slave. For these things there was no possible redemption. The banked anger threatened to spill over, unconverted, pure and very raw, hot as a sun’s core. Anakin’s fingers curled tighter.
“My benefactor cursed me,” Ke Daiv said.
Let it be done now. Anakin had made his decision, or it had been made for him. No matter.
Anakin let the fingers go straight.
Ke Daiv closed on the boy, swinging his lance.
“Stop that,” Anakin said coldly.
“What will you do, slave boy?”
It was the connection Anakin had sought, the link between his anger and his power. Like a switch being thrown, a circuit being connected, he returned full circle to the pit race, to the sting he had felt with the Blood Carver’s first insult, with the first unfair and sneaky move that had sent Anakin tumbling off the apron. Then, back farther, to the dingy slave quarters on Tatooine, to the Boonta Eve Podrace and the treachery of the Dug, and to the last sight of Shmi, still in bondage to the disgusting Watto, to all the insults and injuries and shames and night sweats and disgrace piled upon disgrace that he had never asked for, never deserved, and had borne with almost infinite patience.
Call it instinct, animal nature, call it the upwelling of hatred and the dark side—in Anakin Skywalker, all this lay just beneath the surface, at the end of its journey out of a long, deep cave leading down to unimaginable strength.
“No! Stop it, please!” Anakin yelled. “Help me stop it!” The rumbling of his ascending power drowned out this plea for his master to come and prevent a hideous mistake. I am so afraid, so full of hate and anger. I still don’t know how to fight.
Jabitha appeared in the doorway, eyes wide, watching the boy crouched low before the Blood Carver. Ke Daiv lifted his lance. What would have once seemed quick as lightning was now, in the eyes of the young Padawan, a slow, curiously protracted swing.
Anakin raised his hands in the twin and supremely graceful gestures of Jedi compulsion. Pure willful self flooded his tissues. The urge to protect and to destroy became one. He straightened and seemed to grow taller. His eyes became black as pitch.
“Stop it, please!” Anakin shouted. “I can’t hold it back any longer!”
They have many more ships than we suspected,” Tarkin observed. He looked down in wonder at the battle unfolding on the planet below. Sweat appeared on his brow. Sienar, resigned to whatever might happen, took some comfort in Tarkin’s concern.
Magnified scenes of conflict spaced themselves around the command bridge of the Rim Merchant Einem. The sky mines themselves were sending signals back to their delivery ships, and the ships forwarded them to the command center.
Droid starfighters engaged countless ships rising from opening hangars in the jungle, swarms of ships like green and red insects. These defenders seemed lightly armed but highly maneuverable. Their principal tactic was to catch up with the starfighters, grasp them in tractor fields, and drag them down to impact in the jungle below. Tarkin was losing a great many starfighters this way.
“They will not escape the sky mines,” he said. Indeed, many mines were finding their targets, destroying the red and green defenders before they could fly far from their concealed bases.
But Sienar saw something else was happening. It was subtle at first. The rectangular bulges in the jungle they had noticed earlier now cast long shadows as the terminator between night and day approached. Natural enough, but the shadows were lengthening faster than the lowering angle of sunlight would explain. The rectangles were rising.
Sienar estimated the tallest of them stood more than two kilometers above the jungle.
They reminded him of trapdoors slowly opening.
But he said nothing to Tarkin. This was no longer Raith Sienar’s fight.
Tarkin murmured under his breath and moved his viewpoint farther south. Thousands of projected images flashed before him like revealed cards. “There,” Tarkin said, a note of triumph in his voice. “There’s our prize, Raith.”
Parked on the extreme edge of a talus-covered field on the only mountain to rise above the southern cloud deck was a Sekotan ship. No figures were visible in its proximity. It seemed to have been abandoned.
Raith leaned forward to see the ship in more detail. It was larger than any he had heard of and different in design, as well. The very sight of it made his mouth water. “Are you going to destroy it?” he asked Tarkin bitterly. “To complete my disgrace?”
Tarkin shook his head, saddened by Sienar’s mistrust. To the captain he said, “Direct sky mines away from the mountain. And let’s take care of that pesty YT-1150. Put all the mines in that sector on its track.” He faced Sienar with the expression of a beast of prey about to pounce. “We’re going to capture that ship and take it back to Coruscant. To be fair, I’ll give you credit, Raith. Some credit.”
The mines are dropping below the clouds,” Shappa observed. “We won’t be safe here much longer. But they seem to be abandoning the Magister’s mountain.”
Obi-Wan flexed his fingers and leaned forward in the seat. “Is Anakin still on the mountain?”
Shappa swallowed hard and nodded. “Your ship reports her passengers are outside, not visible. Her mind is young, Obi-Wan. She does not understand what is happening, and she misses contact with her pilot. But something else is causing alarm. I’m not sure what.”
“The mines?”
Shappa shook his head. “I doubt it.”
“If we are not safe here …” Obi-Wan ventured.
“Then we should attempt a rescue,” Shappa concluded. “The Magister’s daughter was on that ship.”
Shappa raised his vessel from the dark and desolate rocky prairie and quickly ascended through the clouds. “Our sensors will warn us of immediate mines, but these ships are not designed to be weapons of war, or to understand defensive maneuvers. I will do my best.”
Obi-Wan nodded, still flexing his fingers. He knew that Anakin was alive, but he also knew that something significant had happened, a minor unknotting in the boy’s pathway. He could not
tell if the outcome was positive or negative.
To bring back a spiritually damaged boy of Anakin’s abilities might be worse than finding him dead. It seemed cruel, but Obi-Wan knew it was a simple truth. Qui-Gon would have agreed.
“The sky mines are concentrating on your YT-1150,” Shappa said, studying the displays closely as they flew toward the mountain. “It is eluding them, so far.”
“Charza Kwinn is one of the best pilots in the galaxy,” Obi-Wan said.
Jabitha walked across the landing field toward the two figures crouched next to each other. Their struggle, if struggle it had been, had lasted only a few seconds, and yet somehow they had moved into the shadow of a huge boulder, where she could barely make out their outlines. She walked slowly, fearful of what she might find. She did not want to feel the Blood Carver’s lance once again, nor did she wish to find the boy dead. But she dreaded something else almost as much.
Her skin crawled at the thought that this young boy could have survived against so formidable an opponent.
“Anakin?” she called, a few steps away from the rock.
The Blood Carver emerged from the shadow, triple-jointed arms loose by his sides. He seemed exhausted. In the last of the daylight, his skin glimmered a deep orange color, and Jabitha’s heart filled her throat. He was still alive. The boy had not moved from beneath the overhang.
“Anakin!” she called out again, her voice trembling.
Ke Daiv stepped toward her and lifted a hand. She was almost too afraid to look at his face, but when she did, she screamed. His eyes had turned white, and the flesh around his head and neck had cracked. He was bleeding profusely, and his dark orange blood dripped down over his shoulders. He was trying to say something.
Jabitha backed away, speechless with terror.
“I tried to control it,” Anakin said, and emerged into the twilight. The pinwheel’s purple glory illuminated them with the fading of the dusk. The Blood Carver lurched forward step by step toward the edge of the field, away from the Sekotan ship.
“Stop him,” Anakin said. “Please help me stop him.”
Jabitha walked beside the boy toward the pitiful figure of their enemy.
“Is he dying?” she asked.
“I hope not,” Anakin said as if ashamed. “By the Force, I hope not.”
“He was going to kill you,” she said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Anakin said. “I should never have let it loose like that. I did it all wrong.”
“Let what loose?”
He shook his head, trying to erase a nightmare, and grabbed the Blood Carver’s arm. Ke Daiv swung about as if on a turntable and fell to his knees. Blood dripped from his mouth.
Jabitha stood before the two, the young boy with the short, light brown hair and the tall, gold-colored Blood Carver who might be dying. She shook her head in desperate confusion. “You saved us, Anakin,” she said.
“Not like this,” he said. “He was being brave in the only way he knew, the only way they taught him. He’s like me, but he never had the Jedi to help.” To Ke Daiv, he said, “Please be strong. Don’t die.”
Jabitha could stand this no longer. “I have to find my father,” she said. She turned and ran toward the ruins.
Anakin gripped Ke Daiv’s arm and glanced up at the sky. The awful glyphs written by the mines were fading, contrails pointing east now, drifting and diffusing in the winds over the clouds.
Ke Daiv spoke in his native language. Each sound cost him an agony. By the cadence, he was repeating something familiar, a poem or a chant. He fell to one hand, then lowered himself to the ground.
Anakin stayed beside him, holding his arm, until he died. Then the boy rose, turned around once, and screamed, heard only by the mountain, the skies, the broken and charred stones, the crumbling ruins of the Magister’s palace.
Anakin Skywalker understood the nature of the Force—the many natures of the Force—better than a century of teaching in the Temple could have taught him. And he understood now that his trial was far from over. He had to remove Jabitha from the mountain and get back to Obi-Wan, and he had to wrestle with what he had discovered about himself.
But the wrestling would have to wait. A Jedi with responsibilities had to put away the personal and get on with his duty, no matter what it might cost him.
The entrance to the ruin was dark. Dust sifted from a shattered stone lintel. He wiped the dust from his eyes and crawled into the darkness, until the rubble cleared and he faced a long, black corridor.
His senses had become marvelously acute, sharper and more intuitive than ever before. Despite the darkness, the corridor offered no mysteries. It was simply a hallway in what was left of the palace. He saw himself at the end of the hallway, turning right.
And when he reached the end of the hallway and turned right, he saw ahead to another corridor, larger, its thick roof supporting much of the mass of talus and rubble that covered the ruins. That corridor led to the chamber where Obi-Wan and Anakin had first met the Magister.
Jabitha was in the chamber already, so it was not far away. He walked there, his footsteps sure but his thoughts a painful riot.
The ceiling shuddered with a sound like a dying bantha. Other groans and shrieks of rock grinding against rock echoed down branching hallways, and somewhere, very close, rock tumbled into a corridor and sealed it off, then crushed it completely. A blast of air and dust blew out over him like the penultimate breath from the dying palace.
He stepped over tendrils that crept along the cracked floor, new tendrils. Sekot still lived here, still felt its way through the broken shafts and voids. There was still life here, and something like the voice of their ship, soft in his thoughts, almost drowned out by the tumult of Ke Daiv’s death.
Anakin thought for a moment that he saw Vergere gleaming softly ahead, and wondered if she had died on Zonama and left behind a spirit to guide him. But the image was not there when he reached that point, and Anakin shook his head. He was dreaming, hallucinating. Perhaps he was going insane.
His mother had many waking dreams, disturbing and strange, she had once told him. That had scared him a little.
He came to the circular chamber with its high, thickly vaulted roof, the skylight now collapsed, and a thick pillar of rubble fanning out. Jabitha stood by one side of the rubble, on her knees, her head bowed.
Anakin approached her. She looked up and held a powered torch beam on his face. She had found the light somewhere in the rubble, perhaps in her rooms in the palace.
Sticking out between two large carved stones was an arm, most of the flesh gone now. On one finger gleamed a thick steel ring set with a pentangle of small red stones. Anakin recognized one of the old signet rings once handed out to Jedi apprentices.
“He’s dead,” Jabitha said. “Only the Magister could wear this ring. It meant he was linked with the Potentium.”
“We have to go,” Anakin told her softly. The corridors echoed with more groans, more shrieks and rumbles. The floor beneath them trembled.
“He must have died during the battle with the Far Outsiders,” Jabitha said. She shone the torch beam around the chamber, looking for any others. The chamber was deserted. “But who was sending his messages?”
“I don’t know,” Anakin said. Then once again, from the corner of his eye, he caught a gleam of light in the darkness, away from Jabitha’s torch. He turned and saw the feathered Jedi Knight standing on her reverse-articulated legs, feet splayed as if prepared to leap, staring at him with no apparent emotion.
Jabitha could not see her. Nor did the girl see the figure become the Magister, her father. The transformed figure stepped forward.
Anakin felt no fear. He felt instead in the presence of another young person very like himself, a friend. This made him consider once again the real possibility that he was going insane.
“I sent the messages,” the figure told Anakin.
The girl remained crouched over her dead father. Anakin bent and touched the top
of her head, and she fell asleep, slumping gently to one side. He caught her and made sure she was comfortable, then stood and faced the image.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice cracking.
“A friend of Vergere,” it said. “I think my name, to some, is Sekot.”
To prepare the way for a retrieval ship to land on the mountain, Tarkin ordered a swarm of droid starfighters to take on any other ships in the area. He watched with satisfaction from his lofty orbit, Sienar at his side, as the starfighters harried the outmoded YT-1150 and another Sekotan ship.
“We’ll sacrifice one to gain another,” Tarkin said.
“Take care with the larger Sekotan vessel,” Sienar said, though he was not at all sure that Tarkin was willing to hear reason. “It may be exceptional.”
“Sir,” the captain said, “we are losing most of our starfighters over the inhabited valleys in the north. Their defenses are relentless and apparently without limit. And there are—”
“Quiet!” Tarkin shouted. “I think you overestimate these primitives. Once we are done with our primary mission, we will sweep up the rest by main force. No more delicacy. If they do not submit, we will destroy them utterly.”
Anakin stayed close by Jabitha, as much for his sake as for hers. The atmosphere within the chamber was thick with dust. Dust sifted from the ceiling, puffed from the outer halls as ceilings collapsed elsewhere in the ruin.
Tendrils on the floor moved with deliberation toward Jabitha, encircled her. Sekot itself would protect the Magister’s daughter. In some fashion Anakin could not yet fathom, the figure before him regarded the Magister’s children as brothers and sisters.
“You are the Jedi apprentice,” the image said.
Anakin nodded.
“And your master is elsewhere, fighting the new invasion.”
“I feel him out there,” Anakin said.
“How I would love to learn the secrets of the Jedi! What can you teach me?”
