But he had not learned just how to fight. His master’s teaching had encompassed far more than that. He had also learned stealth, subterfuge, intrigue.
What is done in secret has great power.
One of his earliest memories was that of being taken to the Jedi Temple. Both he and Sidious had been disguised as tourists. His master’s command of the dark side had been sufficient to cloak them from being sensed by their enemies, as long as they did not enter the building. That had been unlikely anyway—the Jedi Temple was not open for tourism. They had stood there for the better part of the day, Darth Sidious pointing out to him the various faces of their foes as the latter came and went. It had been thrilling to Maul to realize that he could stand in the presence of the Jedi, could listen to his master whisper to him of their ultimate downfall, without them having any inkling of the fate that ultimately awaited them.
That was the great glory and hidden strength of the Sith: the fact that there were only two, master and apprentice. Their clandestine operations could take place practically under the very noses of the Jedi, and the fools would not suspect until it was too late. The day of the Jedi’s downfall would be soon—very soon.
It could not happen soon enough for him.
Anger is a living thing. Feed it and it will grow.
The Twi’lek he had fought had not been the first Jedi he had crossed lightsabers with, but he was not far from having that honor. It had been exhilarating to know that he, Darth Maul, was better in combat than his hated foes. He longed to battle one of the truly great Jedi warriors: Plo Koon, perhaps, or Mace Windu. That would be a true test of his skill. And he had no doubt that such an opportunity would come to him. His hatred of the Jedi was strong enough that it alone would bring such a confrontation into existence.
Soon.
He came to his senses, realizing he was lying in a pile of trash not far from where the Jedi had engineered his own doom and nearly that of Maul’s, as well. A Devaronian scavenger was about to appropriate his lightsaber, which lay nearby. Maul glared at the encroacher, who lost no time in making himself scarce.
Maul seized his lightsaber and rose to his feet. His muscles, bones, and tendons screamed in pain, but pain meant nothing. The only important question was, was his mission finally complete?
A hundred meters down the street lay the wrecked remains of the skycar. Maul investigated it. It had been smashed beneath large chunks of ferrocrete and durasteel that would take too long to move, even with the aid of the Force. He opened his senses, trying to determine if his enemies’ bodies lay beneath the rubble. What the Force told him made him clench a fist in fury.
The skycar was empty.
It was possible that the explosion had flung them clear before the debris collapsed. If so, their bodies might have been dragged away by those who scrounged the streets. But he wasn’t certain that was what had happened. Given the kind of luck the Corellian had had so far, Maul knew he would have to see Pavan’s dead body—preferably after his head had parted company with his shoulders, thanks to Maul’s lightsaber—before he would feel comfortable reporting to Lord Sidious that the problem was at last resolved.
Maul was actually starting to feel something of a grudging respect for this Lorn Pavan. Although some of the hustler’s continued avoidance of his fate could be ascribed to luck, some, the Sith apprentice had to admit, was due to Pavan’s survival instincts. Of course, he would not have lasted as long as he had downlevels if he had not had a roachlike ability to sense and avoid danger. Nevertheless, Maul was slightly impressed. Not that it mattered. His quarry’s skill at staying alive would just make Maul’s inevitable triumph all the more satisfying.
He began to search the area, questing along the filaments of the dark side, seeking the route they had taken. He saw the kiosk almost immediately. Even without the Force to guide him to it, he knew this could be the only logical escape route. Unfortunately, the skycar’s explosion had covered the underground entrance with debris.
Maul was running out of patience. Five meters farther up the street he spied a ventilation grid that appeared to open onto the same underground conduit as the kiosk. He lit one end of his lightsaber and jabbed it into the grid. The blade sliced easily through the metal slats. In a second the grate had dropped down into the conduit, and Darth Maul followed it.
He landed lightly. The entire tunnel was shaking as with the roar of some titanic beast. Maul looked up to see a driverless freight transport bearing down on him at better than one hundred kilometers an hour.
Anyone else, even a trained athlete raised in a heavier gravity field, would have been crushed to paste. But Maul seized the Force, let it whip him up and to the side as if he were attached to a giant elastic band. The metal behemoth missed him by millimeters.
Maul found himself standing on the narrow lip of a walkway that ran along one side of the conduit. He looked about, questing with his eyes and his mind. Yes—they had escaped down here. The trail still remained.
They could run, but they couldn’t hide.
Darth Maul resumed the hunt.
Lorn’s first thought as he returned to partial consciousness was to wonder why someone had gone to the trouble to kidnap him off Coruscant and drop him on one of the galaxy’s gas giant worlds—Yavin, possibly. Obviously this was what had happened, because gravity and atmospheric pressure were slowly crushing him into a boneless putty. His head, particularly. And whatever it was that he was breathing, it wasn’t anything close to a comfortable oxygen-nitrogen mixture.
Or maybe he’d been parked in a too-close orbit around the event horizon of a black hole, and the tidal forces were pulling him apart. That would explain why his head hurt so abominably, and why he couldn’t feel his hands and feet.
Lorn blinked, then saw dim light the color of verdigris. He realized he was lying on a cold stone floor, his arms and legs bound. The light, faint and sickly though it was, was still too much for his headache to deal with. Must’ve really tied one on this time, he thought. Maybe I-Five’s right about those liver cells, not that I’d ever admit it to him.
But something was still wrong with this picture. He knew he could be a fairly obstreperous drunk on occasion, but he’d never reached the point of obnoxiousness where he’d had to be trussed up. Hmm. Maybe he’d better open just one eye again—carefully, of course—and take another look around.
Staring at him from no more than a handbreadth away was a face unimagined in his worst nightmares.
Lorn gasped and instinctively jerked backwards, trying to get away from the monstrous apparition. The sudden movement set off a thermal detonator that someone had unkindly implanted in his skull, and the pain was so amazingly intense that for a moment he forgot about the thing that had been inspecting him.
But only for a moment.
It moved closer to him, staring at him—no, Lorn corrected himself, not staring: You had to have eyes to stare. Just about every component of its face was repulsive in the extreme, but the eyes were unquestionably the worst. Worse than the dead bluish-white skin and the stringy, mosslike hair, worse than the wide lipless gash of a mouth, like a cavern entrance filled with yellowed stalagmites and stalactites, worse even than the skull-like nub of a nose, with two vertical slits for nostrils.
The eyes were definitely worse than all that.
Because it didn’t seem to have any. From the heavy ridges at the sloping base of the forehead down to the gaunt cheekbones, there was nothing but albino skin. Behind that skin, where the orbital sockets should have been, Lorn could see two egg-shaped organs moving restlessly, swiveling independently of one another. Occasionally they were occluded by darker hues, as if membranes beneath the skin were sliding over them.
Lorn had dealt with a large variety of alien species in the past few years. One grew used to seeing all kinds of creatures on the streets and skywalks of Coruscant. But something was terribly, obscenely wrong about this monster’s appearance—him and the others like him, for now that Lorn’s eyes had
adjusted to the wan light, he saw that there were at least a dozen, maybe more, hunkered down in a semicircle around him.
He backed up still farther, scrabbling on his heels and elbows—not an easy task considering that his head still felt large enough to warrant its own orbit. The creatures moved closer to him, shambling grotesquely on bent legs and knuckles. Lorn glanced around desperately, looking for I-Five, feeling the beginnings of a scream welling in his throat. He saw Darsha Assant lying about two meters away from him on the filthy stone floor, and I-Five an equal distance on the other side. The Padawan seemed to be unconscious, but she was breathing normally as far as he could tell. He noticed with no great surprise that her lightsaber no longer dangled from her utility belt. I-Five was lying with his face turned toward Lorn, and the human could see that the droid’s photoreceptors were dark. His master control switch had been turned off.
They were in a large chamber, the ceiling supported by groined pillars. The light—what there was of it—emanated from more of that phosphorescent lichen covering the walls. The place looked like a junkyard; pieces of broken equipment and machinery were lying here and there. It smelled like a charnel house.
Looking closer, he saw that scattered among the technological debris were what looked like gnawed bones of various species.
Lorn carefully adjusted his position, getting his legs underneath him. His head was still screaming like a Corellian banshee bird, but he tried to ignore the pain. If he could reach I-Five and flip the master switch on the back of his neck, the droid could probably make short work of these subterranean horrors. Their ears seemed to be abnormally large; no doubt they relied primarily on hearing to guide them through the darkness. One good screech from I-Five’s vocabulator should send them stampeding back into the shadows where they belonged.
He was fairly certain he knew what they were now, although the knowledge gave him little comfort. Quite the opposite, in fact. Occasionally, since his fall from grace had landed him on the mean streets of Coruscant, he had heard rumors of devolved humanoid creatures called Cthons, lurking deep within the underground labyrinths of the planetary city. Dwelling in darkness for thousands of generations had robbed them of their eyes, so the story went. Supposedly they retained some rudimentary working knowledge of technology, which would explain the electroshock net they had used to capture Lorn and his comrades.
Supposedly also they were cannibals.
Lorn had never given any credence to the stories before now. He had assumed they were just tales used to scare recalcitrant children into obedience, just another of the many stories that sprouted like mushrooms on the downlevels streets. But now it was obvious that this particular rumor was all too real.
The Cthons moved closer. One of them positioned himself—or herself; though they were all naked save for ragged loincloths, their skins were so loose and flabby that it was hard to determine what sex any individual was—between Lorn and I-Five.
This is the way it ends, Lorn thought, feeling surprisingly little fear. What a unique career arc: To go from being a prosperous business affairs clerk in the employ of the Jedi to a fugitive about to be devoured by mutant cannibals in the bowels of Coruscant. Didn’t see that one coming.
The Cthons moved closer still. One reached out a pale, hirsute arm toward him. Lorn tensed. He would fight, of course. He would not be led like a nerf to the slaughter. He could at least do that much.
I’m sorry, Jax, he thought as they closed in on him.
Obi-Wan Kenobi activated the descent repulsor array and dropped out of the airstream traffic flow. As his skycar descended in a tight spiral down toward the blanket of mist that marked the inversion layer, the young Padawan watched the lights in the monads and skyscrapers all around him blinking on. It was just before sunset, and the cerise light faded fast as he descended.
He glanced at the instrument panel, reassuring himself that he was homing in on the coordinates for the safe house in the Crimson Corridor. He noted some deterioration in the appearance of the buildings as the skycar dropped deeper—peeling paint, a few broken windows—but it wasn’t until he passed through the mist that he noticed a real change. Now shattered and lightless windows gaped like wounds on all sides, and the few skywalks stretching between the structures were deserted, their railings sagging or broken.
It’s a different world, he thought. Descending through the cloud layer was almost like making a hyperspace jump to some decrepit outlying planet. Obi-Wan had known that slums like this existed here and there on Coruscant’s surface, of course; he just hadn’t realized that one lay this close to the Jedi Temple—less than ten kilometers away.
Once through the mist, the skycar’s head- and groundlights activated, and he could see fairly clearly. The vehicle came to a hovering stop a few centimeters from the cracked surface of the street. The area was relatively deserted, save for a dozen or so mendicants of various species who fled as his skycar touched down. That was odd, Obi-Wan thought; one would expect them to crowd around, begging, instead. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that this was Raptor territory after dark.
He looked around and saw Darsha’s skyhopper parked not far away, in the shadow of a building. He deactivated the safety field and vaulted over the skycar’s edge.
When Master Qui-Gon had told Obi-Wan that Darsha Assant was missing, the Padawan had volunteered to search for her before his mentor could tell him to. He and Darsha were not close friends, but she had been in several of his classes and he had been quite impressed with the way she had excelled in her studies. He had mock-dueled with her twice: he had won one match, she the other. They had even shared a mission once. She was bright, and she knew it; she was quick-witted, and she knew that, too. But she didn’t come across as conceited. Obi-Wan thought that Darsha had the makings of a fine Jedi Knight in her. And it wouldn’t take much coaxing to get him to admit that she was pleasant to look at, as well.
Even if she had been someone he couldn’t stand to be around, he would have accepted without question the assignment to search for her. It was, after all, his duty. But Darsha, he felt, was special, even among the Jedi. He hoped she had not come into harm’s way. Now, however, looking at her skyhopper, he found that hope fading fast.
For the craft had been gutted. There was little left of it except the frame; the drive turbines, the power generators, the repulsor engines, and just about everything else that wasn’t too heavy to carry had been stolen. The instrument panel had a huge gash in it, as if some kind of vibroblade had punched through it, although there was no weapon in sight.
Obi-Wan checked the craft’s interior carefully, using a small but powerful glow light. He found no evidence of foul play in the vehicle, but he did see a few spots of blood on the ground nearby. It was impossible to tell if it was human blood or not.
Something flickered at the edge of his vision.
Obi-Wan froze, then slowly turned to look. He saw nothing threatening in the vespertine shadows. Nevertheless, there had definitely been movement—stealthy, furtive movement. He had been thoroughly briefed on the dangers of street gangs and predators, both human and nonhuman, in the Crimson Corridor. It did not take an overactive imagination to assume that one of these threats might be lurking nearby, ready to strike. If there was a whole gang of footpads sizing him up, he would be hard put to defend himself, even with a lightsaber.
Fortunately, the lightsaber was not the only defense at his disposal.
Obi-Wan Kenobi reached out for the Force. It was there for him, as it always was. He let his awareness expand outward along its invisible corrugations, a psychic radar that searched and probed the darkness. If danger existed, the Force would find it.
His mind touched that of another: a will that felt weak and serpentine, more used to striking furtively from the shadows than in direct confrontation. A human mind.
Before the lurker was fully aware that he was being probed, Obi-Wan seized his will. The Force, Master Qui-Gon had told him more than once, can have a strong inf
luence on the weak-minded. Though Obi-Wan was by no means anywhere near as accomplished a practitioner as his tutor, it didn’t take much more than the skill of a novice to influence a mind as weak as this one.
“Come here,” he said, his tone quiet and authoritative.
From out of the dusk emerged a young human male—probably around sixteen or seventeen standard years old, Obi-Wan estimated. He was wearing mostly rags and leather, topped by a ten-centimeter-high thatch of green hair held in place by an electrostatic field. The Padawan could feel the sullen guilt and fear in the other’s mind—the fear that his captor somehow knew that he and his gang had assaulted the other Jedi.
“Where is she?” Obi-Wan asked.
“I—I don’t know who you’re—”
“Yes, you do. The Jedi Padawan who owned this skyhopper. Tell me quickly, or—” Obi-Wan let his hand drop, to rest suggestively on the lightsaber hilt hanging at his belt. He wouldn’t go so far as to actually use it, but even a veiled threat could work wonders.
He could feel Green Hair’s fear and hatred, like an acid in his brain. It was difficult to keep his composure.
“All right—we messed with her a little, but we took the hint when she chopped off Nig’s hand, y’know? I mean, she wanted the ship so bad, she could have it, right?”
“Where did she go?”
Green Hair shook his head and shrugged. Obi-Wan listened to the Force and knew he was telling the truth.
“Was there a Fondorian male with her?”
“Him?” Green Hair grinned crookedly. “The hawk-bats got him. What was left, the street trash dragged off.”
Obi-Wan felt despair pushing in on him, as bleak as the downlevels darkness that surrounded them. It appeared that Darsha’s mission had been a total failure that might very well have culminated in her death. He would, of course, comb the area, ask any other locals he could find, and try to sense her through the Force, but given the time that had passed and the inhospitable environment he was searching …
Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter Page 14
