The Last Jedi

by Michael Reaves

  Coward, she called herself, and followed him onto the plain, glassy flakes of obsidian grinding to dust beneath her feet. She reached him just as he stepped out into the debris field, then jerked her head up at a familiar sound.

  Rancor.

  She could hear them now. One, maybe two. She swiveled her head—there, to the east, in the lee of the great mountain.

  “Rancor?” the Jedi asked. He had stopped and turned back to look at her.

  She nodded. “I’ll go ward them away. I wouldn’t want you to be eaten while in my care,” she added, flashing a toothy grin.

  Liar, she called herself as she picked her way across the slag toward the fringe of forest. Rancors never came up onto this devastated plain, but the Jedi was not to know that.

  Jax directed his steps toward the center of the plateau. He reckoned it was about a dozen kilometers long from end to end, perhaps five across. To the west, the plateau seemed to drop off the edge of the world; to the east, it merged into a forest of smoke-colored trees.

  That was where his escort had headed. He could see her leaping lightly over obstacles, once executing a stunning somersault before touching softly down atop a boulder the size of a rancor’s head.

  He wondered at her reason for parting from him. There were no signs of rancors out here—none. Indeed, there was no reason for a rancor—who was an intelligent beast, after all—to venture onto this blasted landscape. He knew he’d driven her away. Perhaps he’d done it instinctively, just as he’d set course for Dathomir.

  He turned his gaze back to the center of the high plateau. Several shards of native rock and twisted metal—each as long as the Aethersprite and as big around as a Toprawan cedar—jutted out of the tortured ground, their crowns canted toward one another like saber points saluting a coming battle. Just beyond and to the east of that structure was a gash in the surface into which a ship twice the size of the Delta-7 could have disappeared without a trace. A cascade of black rock was frozen in its plunge over the edge like a waterfall made of glass.

  Jax took a deep breath and struck out toward the two features, feeling the tug of energies of which he could only dimly discern the contours.

  Yes, this area was the source of the displacement he’d sensed in the Force. But where should he start? Indeed, what should he do when he found where to start? The sky was darkening as the Dathomiri sun kissed the mountaintops. Clouds scudded overhead through the silver sky, and a ground mist was beginning to rise out of the shadowed vales. Darkness would come in two hours, maybe less.

  Jax pulled the Sith Holocron out of his pocket, hoping he might use it like a compass. But while it was clearly reacting to the energies eddying about this place, it offered no indication of which of the features of the destroyed temple he should explore.

  He had just closed his eyes and sent out the first ribbons of Force sense when something tugged at him. He opened his eyes and turned them toward the rock spires to the west, many meters away. A graceful figure moved among the titanic saber points, halting when his gaze touched it.

  How had she done that? How could Magash have possibly gotten from the last place he’d seen her—almost a klick away—to the broken temple? More to the point, why would she? Showing off her prowess for the inferior being, perhaps?

  His heart beat faster. Maybe she’d found something. Maybe she knew more about this place than Mother Djo suspected. The matriarch had said the sisters avoided the ruins, but Magash had been eager to accompany him, and watching her navigate the uneven ground, Jax could well believe this hadn’t been her first trek out here.

  All right. He’d follow her lead, then. He made for the spires, using the Force to avoid falling into the increasingly alarming rents in the surface of the plain.

  He looked up at the formation as he drew nearer. The woman was waiting for him, all but obscured by the rising ground mist, seeming, at times as if she were part of the vapor herself. He covered the last several meters in a series of Force-assisted bounds and reached the spot where she had been.

  She was gone.

  “Magash?” He paused to listen. A cold breeze wended its way among the glassy spires, crying disconsolately.

  He hesitated. Had he angered the Witch so much that she might ambush him? She could pretend he’d fallen into a crevasse or been eaten by a rancor. He’d felt her anger, but nothing so lethal as hatred.

  “Magash!” he called again.

  When there was still no answer, he drew his lightsaber and stepped into the shadow of the spires. Almost immediately his senses were caught in a wash of warm static. He found himself panting, disoriented.

  He spun at a touch on his shoulder, but there was no one there.

  Yet … yet, in that split second before he’d reacted, he’d expected to see Laranth standing behind him. Standing with him. Now, not seeing or sensing her, he was bereft.

  Jax groaned aloud. What was this place? What forces lingered here to tear at him in this way?

  In his right hand, his lightsaber hummed, bathing the shadows in cool aquas. In his left, the Sith Holocron spiked with sudden heat and cast the molten gleam of fire over the slick surfaces of the half-fallen stone spears that met above his head.

  He turned slowly, watching the clashing wash of radiance slide over the glassy rock. He stopped, facing the largest of the massive shards, seeing himself in it. Seeing, fleetingly, the reflection of the woman standing behind him.

  Not Zabrak. Twi’lek.

  Not Magash. Laranth.

  He spun.

  The space behind him was empty. The closest thing to him a curl of ground mist.

  He turned back to the twisted mirror—

  —and stepped into the fore-and aft-passage of his dying ship. The lightsaber still hummed, shedding radiance into the semi-darkness; the orange light was not from the Sith Holocron, but from the fires eating the Far Ranger’s bone and blood. And there, before him in the flickering darkness, Laranth stood beneath the open weapons bay, with Den Dhur at her side, struggling with the ladder.

  He took a step forward. Another. And another.

  “Laranth! Den! Now! It’s over! Let’s go!”

  They looked at him. Den said something to Laranth, then ran aft, toward Jax.

  “Laranth! Now!” Jax put the full energy of the Force behind the words. “Yimmon needs us.”

  She glanced up into the weapons bay, looked at Jax … and came aft to safety.

  The reflections wavered, eddied, re-sorted themselves. Laranth lay on the deck, dying, a shard of metal piercing her neck.

  Jax uttered an inarticulate roar of anguish, emptying himself utterly, until he felt as if he’d been turned inside out. Before he could draw breath again, the images eddied once more, and Laranth was standing before him … and Laranth was lying dead at his feet.

  He sucked in a cold breath. Two paths. Two pasts. The one he had created through indecision and choice; the one he might have created had he not hesitated. He wished with every last atom of his being that he could take one more step and make that choice anew.

  For a fraction of a second it seemed to him that he could, and in that second, he stepped forward again, crying Laranth’s name.

  He stumbled in the rocky debris and went to his knees. His lightsaber deactivated, the Holocron tumbled from his hand. He put out the hand to arrest his fall and hissed in pain as a shard of obsidian sliced through his palm.

  He rocked back on his heels and looked up. He was fully among the ruin of the Star Temple. All remnants of the past were gone. Wind moaned through the spires, shadows lengthened.

  Had it been real? Was he really standing in some sort of temporal nexus? Or was it something else? And if the nexus were real, could he somehow force it open again?

  Focus. You came here for Yimmon.

  Had he? Or had he come here for something else? Someone else? Hadn’t he had, in the back of his mind, some idea that there must be some way to cheat Death? To cheat time?

  There is no death; there is t
he Force.

  He shoved the thought away, even as he recognized that it must be accepted. And he had accepted it … once. Or thought he had.

  Now he wasn’t sure.

  He took a deep breath and tried to reorient himself. He looked about again, realizing that he was kneeling on some sort of artificial structure—a flat, reasonably level piece of bedrock that might have formed part of the floor of the temple, or an altar—or a control matrix.

  He looked around near where he knelt and recognized the peculiar character of the stone shards lying about him. They seemed to have some sort of writing or drawing on them. He clipped his lightsaber to his belt and reached for one of the glistening chips of black rock—a piece the length of his hand. It did have some sort of symbols on it, and he realized, as he turned it in the amber light of the late-afternoon sun, that its contours were too regular for it to be natural.

  His pulse accelerated. He suspected he’d been led to very near the heart of the Star Temple. Which meant … what? That energies were unstable here? Might time, itself, be unstable?

  A flash of radiance in the corner of his eye caused him to turn toward the Holocron, which lay roughly half a meter away. It was pulsing, its facets and engraved surfaces running with beads of light.

  He reached over and picked it up, balancing it in the palm of his undamaged hand. Here, atop the slab of stone on which he knelt, the pulsation of the Sith artifact deepened, and now he could feel the reverberations in the Force. The Star Temple, too, teemed with energies—energies that had driven the Infinity Gate and that had been bent to the service of the dark side.

  The Holocron responded to them, but did that mean it was any closer to opening?

  Jax concentrated his own energies on the Holocron, letting his Force sense touch it, sample it, taste its texture. It was acid and oil. It was quicksilver and glass. It was fire and ice.

  He closed his eyes, still seeing the artifact in his mind’s gaze. With tendrils of the Force, he followed the facets, traced the intricate etched ideograms, pressed and pulled. Where his mind touched, the sigils leapt to brilliant life.

  He was close. He could feel it.

  He raised his left hand over the apex of the Holocron, bracketing it, as he focused all his senses on it, wrapping it in a fabric of Force energy. And suddenly, suddenly and far too easily, a panel slid open and another folded back. A holoprojection filled the air before him, alphanumerics and complex formulas rising upward.

  Jax remembered I-Five speaking of watching Yanth, the Hutt crime lord, skillfully manipulating the Holocron’s exterior plates, to reveal information in the electron lattices of the Holocron’s outer shells. But Holocrons were composed of many layers—almost infinite, in fact—and the Sith had been devious beyond time and space. I-Five had posited that a catalyst of some sort might be necessary to expose the deeper layers.

  A drop of blood fell from Jax’s wounded palm, struck the crown of the artifact, and traced a zigzag down the incised face.

  The Force within and around Jax shuddered, and the Holocron beat with a single sanguine pulse. The bottom corner facing Jax turned on an unseen axis.

  A catalyst.

  Stunned, Jax dropped the Holocron.

  Magash never reached the forest. Her steps grew slower and slower still, until she was literally dragging her feet. She berated herself for being seven kinds of a coward. The Jedi had threatened her sense of identity, and she had abandoned him to the heath.

  She stopped and stared at the smoke trees.

  No. He hadn’t threatened her identity—but only upheld his own. If that was enough to cause her to disobey her Clan Mother …

  She turned back to the blasted plain. He had confused her, that was all.

  No, she had let herself be confused.

  But what, realistically, was the alternative? If she was not willing to sift through his ideas and confront the ones that merited confronting, what more could she do but ignore them? Was that the way of the Singing Mountain Sisterhood—to shrink from unpleasant ideas in preference for unruffled ignorance?

  The Jedi had asked what prevented the Dathomiri sisterhoods from doing what the Jedi Order had done—teaching adepts of all genders to channel the Force. Magash did not know the answer to that because she had never contemplated it.

  What if what the Jedi proposed was true? What if there were, among the male denizens of Dathomir, potential Force-users who were withering because they were not allowed to develop? What if potential talent was being wasted … because of fear?

  Wouldn’t Mother Augwynne know this? Wouldn’t she—and even Magash, herself—know if a male in her presence possessed latent Force abilities? Or did the expectation that there were no abilities to develop and the fear of dire consequences ensure that none were found?

  Magash turned back toward the ruins. She could see the Jedi moving about the base of the fallen black spires. A shiver coursed down her spine.

  You are afraid!

  She freely admitted it, then. As often as she had stolen out here to sample the strange atmosphere, seeking any hint of the ancient knowledge that might remain in the Kwa temple the Nightsisters had plundered for their own ends, the place still unsettled her. So much so that she had allowed the Jedi to wander the ruins alone because he made her uncomfortable. What if he found what she had sought? Or what if he were injured or killed because she wasn’t there to prevent it? In either case, how could she explain to Mother Augwynne why she had abandoned him?

  With a snort of disgust at her own weakness, Magash Drashi headed back to the ruins. She had gone no more than two strides when the black pinnacles across the Infinity Plain were lit by warring bursts of aqua and crimson light. The whipcord response in the Force almost knocked her from her feet, and her soul was raked by a raw wave of anguish from the Jedi.

  Cursing herself, Magash moved faster.

  Blood.

  Darth Ramage’s Holocron was sealed with blood.

  Knees drawn up to his chest, retreating into himself, Jax stared at the Holocron where it lay atop the black slab of rock in a pool of pulsing crimson light.

  Anathema.

  It shouldn’t have surprised him as much as it did. Ramage had been a Sith, and a particularly ruthless Sith, at that. His science had centered on the destructive use of power and had been steeped in darkness.

  How much blood does it require? Jax wondered. And what kind?

  He glanced at his hastily bandaged hand. The Holocron had responded to his blood, of course, but that trickle had caused only one corner closure to respond—and then only to open slightly. That hinted that a significant amount of blood was necessary. Clearly, if the adept opening the Holocron was also the one whose blood facilitated its opening, the drain on his neurological processes would make it difficult, if not impossible, to wield the Force as needed to probe the artifact’s arcane locks.

  What then?

  The implications were sickening.

  Jax got to his feet. There was only one way to test the ideas that were making chaos of his thoughts.

  He extended his Force sense, probing the nooks and crevices around the ruin. There was life, he found, even here. Some sort of large insect there, a reptile here, and there beneath that tumble of small rubble, a weak mammalian energy. He found himself moving toward it before he’d half thought through what he meant to do. He raised a hand over the rubble—small rocks lifted and sand shot away to reveal the nest of an endothermic rodentlike creature not much larger than the Holocron itself.

  The creature, suddenly dispossessed, tried to scurry away, but Jax caught it with the Force, lifting it into his hand. It peered at him out of huge glittering eyes, its nostrils wide in alarm, trying to understand what sort of monster had plucked it from the safety of its home.

  Jax carried the little rodent over to the Holocron and reached out with the Force, tracing the artifact’s energy pathways, facets, and incisions as before. Then, jaw clamped so hard it hurt, he picked up one of the shards of slag
ged obsidian and quickly, deftly nicked the animal’s tail. The creature struggled, and a large drop of blood welled and fell onto the Holocron.

  There was no reaction—none.

  Jax sat down, hard, on the rocky altar. Almost reflexively, he sent the rodent a calming, healing—and apologetic—touch. Then he released it. It scurried away to disappear back into its slag heap.

  Icy as was the wind that rose around the temple, chilled as he was, Jax was sweating. He wiped perspiration from his forehead with his bandaged hand.

  Not just any blood then, apparently, would appease Darth Ramage’s little crimson god. It wanted the blood of a sentient. Most likely the blood of a Force-user. But the amount of blood necessary would cripple the would-be knower of Ramage’s secrets so much that he would lose the ability to draw them out; the key had to be the combined application of spirit and matter.

  The intent was clear: Darth Ramage intended that the seeker of his dark knowledge commit a dark act—the sacrifice of another Force-user’s blood. Possibly enough blood to kill. Perhaps his intention was to make sure that no one from the light side would ever make use of his research.

  I should destroy the thing, Jax thought. I should take it and throw it down a deep, dark hole.

  There was such a fissure only meters away.

  But within the artifact was potentially the salvation of Thi Xon Yimmon and the resistance.

  Jax pressed his forehead to his knees, wrapped his arms over his head. It was impossible. It couldn’t be done.

  Wrong, the still, small voice within him whispered. It can be done, but you can’t do it. You can’t even think of doing it.

  “Jedi? What’s wrong?”

  Jax raised his head to see Magash Drashi standing at the edge of the altar, the Force strong and bright within her.

  Thirty-Nine

  The Laranth/Corsair had been at Keldabe for less than a day, but in that time they had refueled, arranged for the delivery of cargo, and picked up some small arms. Sacha Swiftbird looked with favor on the DH-17 blaster she’d purchased, but found, when she was in Jax’s quarters, that her gaze went again and again to the weapon he’d left behind.