Restraint

by James Luceno

  Before Maul was a Sith—before he was Darth Maul—he was a young man, made to hide his true nature as he learned the ways of combat.

  In the shadows, though, Darth Sidious taught him about the cruelty and power of the dark side of the Force.

  It was the only world he knew, and he yearned for the chance to embrace what he knew to be his destiny.

  But then his past came to reclaim him, and his whole world changed….

  RESTRAINT

  An all-new Darth Maul short story

  by James Luceno

  Above the frozen floor of the Vale of Pale Tears, young Maul zigzagged for cover, the scuffed toes of his combat boots digging into fragile ground, black-gloved hands seeking purchase where the grade steepened. Once more the gritty soil shifted under his feet and he fell hard on his right knee.

  Low-energy blaster bolts fired from below struck the slope to all sides of him, flinging hot shingle into his unprotected face. A bolt caught him in the calf as he scrambled upward, and he cursed his carelessness. As it was, his utility suit was holed from previous strikes, and his body was rashed with coin-sized welts and burns. If the goal of the pursuit had been elimination rather than capture, he would already be lying dead on the frigid bank of the valley’s meandering river.

  A tall pinnacle of eroded stone provided momentary shelter. Maul narrowed himself behind it as blaster bolts added to the abuses nature had wrought. Breathless in the thin air and favoring his right knee, he lowered himself to peer from behind the base of the pillar. Ordinary eyes wouldn’t have been able to trace the movements of his would-be captors, but eyes enhanced by the Force allowed him to outsmart the camouflage provided by their suits. In the lead hurried the human, Meltch Krakko, who would have shot Maul years ago if not for Trezza’s intervention. Flanking him loped two of the short-snouted Rodians Meltch had trained, Hubnutz and Fretch, skilled in both tracking and sharp-shooting.

  Even holding his genuine powers back, he had enjoyed a solid lead until a surprise move by Meltch had forced Maul to divert from his original plan. Splashing through the iced river, clambering into the rugged terrain of the valley’s north wall … Beings from hot, humid worlds shouldn’t have been able to keep up with him. But along with the mimetic suits, the Rodians were sporting respirator masks. As for Meltch, he was built for any climate, any terrain, and decades of combat on diverse worlds had transformed him into a kind of super-soldier. Not extraordinary in the way Maul was, but powerful in another way.

  A profane way, as he had been taught to think of it.

  Pressing his back to the pocked spire, he scanned his immediate surroundings, then lifted his gaze to the summit of the slope, limned against the cloudless blue-green sky. This part of Orsis was a landscape more suited to the planet’s outermost moon, and the reason the valley and its sinuous river were known as Pale Tears. Descending raggedly from the face of a volcano ten kilometers high, the river spilled onto a deeply fissured tableland, and over the eons had fashioned from the valley wall a veritable forest of mesas and towering pinnacles, cleaved by crevasses and dotted with spiny cacti whose translucent juice was said to cause hallucinations in some species.

  A blaster bolt whizzed past the vestigial horns that crowned Maul’s hairless black and red skull, and he shot to his feet. A quick follow-up glance revealed that his pursuers were attempting to surround him, covering for one another as they raced between protective outcroppings, trusting in the masking properties of their high-tech outfits. Maul raised his blaster and drew a bead on the nearest Rodian, forefinger trembling on the trigger, as if urging him to shoot. And he would have, if not for the blowback that would follow from seeing what he shouldn’t have been able to see. Frustrated, he bared his teeth to the cold dry wind sweeping down from the glacier and muttered another curse.

  Only when he was compelled to remain in the profane world did his feet slip out from under him and his lungs strain to deliver sufficient oxygen to his muscles. Only in the profane world was he forced to play the inferior quarry to safeguard his strength in the Force.

  Better to wait, he told himself. Better to lead the three of them to higher ground, where the air was even thinner and the mimetic suits would be hard-pressed to provide concealment. There he would turn the tables in what might at least appear to be an ordinary way.

  In his thoughts, his Master spoke to him: Imagine your trail, and the Force will open it.

  Backing out of the pinnacle’s meager shadow, he deliberately showed himself for an instant before commencing another upward slalom. Blaster bolts dogged his churning footsteps, then caught him in the same calf—and in the right shoulder. This time he engulfed the pain, and used it to fuel his mounting anger. But Meltch had to be wondering why his prey wasn’t slowing down or accepting defeat. So Maul stumbled before resuming his pace. A climb of some four hundred meters brought him just short of the valley rim, where water and wind had created a maze of spires and pinnacles.

  How simple it would be to soar through them, leaving scarcely an imprint of my boots. But not here, not now; not in the profane world.

  Well-aimed bolts caromed and ricocheted from the spires, filling the air with particulate debris.

  Maul turned once to return fire, missing wildly, as he should. The shooting stopped as he threaded his way deeper into the stony labyrinth, edging through tight passages, crawling through others, leaping narrow chasms. With the rim in sight, he began to formulate a plan for catching his pursuers unaware. Meltch would be harder to fool than the Rodians. By now the Mandalorian knew all of Maul’s tricks, and indeed was responsible for his learning some of them. But Maul had learned some of Meltch’s tricks that the human hadn’t meant to teach, and was counting on the fact that the Mandalorian would send the Rodians to outflank him, while he himself continued to hound Maul from behind.

  Emerging from the spires, he crouched for a moment in the whistling silence. At the head of the valley loomed a snow-capped conical mountain, lording over all it surveyed, a sole cloud wafting from its summit like a lavender banner. Cautiously, Maul ascended to the top of the slope, only to spy Meltch not 50 meters in front of him, standing with his back to a jagged rend in the broken terrain.

  How Meltch had gotten past him, Maul couldn’t guess. Some Death Watch technique, he supposed.

  But Maul wasn’t supposed to be able to see him, so he steeled himself and advanced into the pain.

  Meltch’s first bolt struck him in the right shoulder, spinning him partway around, but Maul completed the turn of his own volition and began a mad dash for the edge of the snaking crevasse. With near-misses from the Mandalorian’s blaster prodding him forward, he realized suddenly that his eyes had deceived him. More gaping than it had appeared from his earlier vantage, the chasm should have proved an impossible leap for a fifteen-year-old Zabrak—even for one who had spent almost a decade in combat training. Meltch would expect him to stop short of the edge and surrender, but instead he quickened his pace and jumped, arms and legs pumping as if to grant him greater momentum.

  He allowed himself to slam into the far wall, using the Force to cushion the impact and hooking his hands over an outcropping a few meters below the rim. Having found a narrower gap, Meltch and the Rodians weren’t long in reaching him, gathering in their supposed invisibility on the rim to gaze down at him. Maul had himself convinced that his rash move—his leap of faith—had earned him the respect of his fellow warriors. But only until they began to taunt him by kicking debris from the rim in the hope that Maul would lose his grip and plunge to an accidental death.

  Scarcely the first under the Mando’s watch.

  Anger consumed Maul. How much longer would he be required to conceal his real abilities, to be made to seem mediocre—like some still struggling neophyte—when he was
so much more?

  Calling on the Force again, he launched himself from the chasm, somersaulting and half-twisting in mid-air, so that when his boots struck the resilient ground he was facing the backs of his hunters with his blaster in hand. By the time the three of them whirled—Meltch’s lined face contorted in bafflement—Maul was already triggering bolts, as if firing at beings he couldn’t see but knew to be in front of him.

  Still trusting in the suits, they scattered, shooting blindly on the run. Though not a bolt found Maul, the Force guided his to their targets, and each pained outcry elated him. The blaster was almost depleted when Meltch deactivated his suit and shouted for Maul to stand down. But Maul ignored him. Swept up in the grip of sadistic delight, he kept firing, the dark side writhing through him like an aggrieved serpent.

  And one day he would be able to unleash bolts of electricity from his fingertips!

  Above him, cutting through the reports of the overheated blaster and the Mando’s calls for capitulation, an amplified voice Maul had known since childhood ordered him to cease fire.

  Around the smoothed top of a low, bone-dry hill, an airspeeder came into view, settling into levitation mode as it put down at the edge of the chasm, a short but powerfully built Falleen seated at the controls. Aiming a glance at Meltch and the now-visible Rodians, the reptilian biped leapt from the speeder and approached Maul, snatching the blaster from his grip and tossing it aside.

  “What were you thinking?” Trezza said under his breath.

  Meltch had holstered his weapon and was gazing into the dark chasm, at the spot where Maul had seemingly been hanging on for dear life. When he swung around his eyes were narrowed in suspicion.

  “How did you—?”

  “I pushed off from a ledge,” Maul said.

  Meltch took a second look and scowled. Turning back to Maul, he said, “How did you manage to target us?”

  “The suits were glitched. They couldn’t decide how to blend you into the background.” Meltch glanced to the Rodians, who shook their heads. Furious, then, he stormed past Trezza.

  Maul sensed the punch coming long before the Mando put his weight behind it. Standing still, he turned his head in the direction of the gauntleted blow and managed to remain on his feet. Spitting blood to the ground, he glared at the Mando.

  Meltch snorted and offered up his square chin. “Go ahead, Maul, since you seem bent on making this personal.”

  “You’ve made it personal for two years.”

  “To push you to your limits,” Meltch said. “To make you a warrior.” Meltch held Maul’s yellow-eyed gaze. “Personal or professional. You can’t have it both ways.” A head shorter than both Maul or Meltch, Trezza stepped between them. It was never a good sign when a Falleen took on color, and Trezza’s face was shifting through the spectrum.

  “Enough,” he said. “No points for either side.”

  Meltch scoffed. “He’ll never make the grade, Trezza. Not until he decides to be honest with us.

  Until then, we’re wasting our time.”

  In the training camp’s headquarters astride the turbulent sea, Trezza inspected the burns that covered Maul’s torso, which like his head and face was marked with esoteric black and red sigils.

  “These require treatment.”

  Trezza summoned a medical droid forward, but Maul shoved it away with his feet.

  “Not from bacta,” he snarled. “I’ll heal myself.”

  “And revel in the pain.”

  “There is no pain.”

  “So you’ve said.”

  Maul looked at him. “You can’t understand.”

  “Admittedly,” Trezza said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you appear to have forgotten more than you’ve learned.”

  Maul tugged the upper portion of the utility suit over his shoulders. “Perhaps I’ll know a thing or two when I’ve lived as long as you have.”

  Trezza shrugged. “Continue dishonoring your oath, and you’ll be fortunate to see sixteen years.”

  “That’s my concern.”

  “Ultimately, it is.”

  The Falleen had been silent during the return trip from the high valley, releasing pheromones meant to pacify Maul, even though he was largely immune to their effects. Nearing two hundred standard years, Trezza had spent half his life training mercenaries and paramilitaries for planetary governments throughout the Republic—not to mention supplying professional combatants for the Petranaki Arena on Geonosis and the Cauldron on Rattatak, and forging assassins and intelligence agents for royal houses and criminal cartels alike. An even more skilled fighter than Meltch, he was also the closest Maul had to a protector—in the ordinary world.

  “Meltch is intent on goading you into revealing your true nature. Members of the Death Watch were brutally honest with one another and loyal to a fault.”

  “Then why did the group splinter?”

  “They underestimated a rival they thought they had eliminated. With their leader dead, the rest scattered and Meltch wound up here, because, we, too, value loyalty and tradition. If not an ideal trainer, he’s a gifted strategist. And he was correct about your making this personal. Especially now that your powers are increasing.”

  Trezza met Maul’s silence with a faint grin. “The vault from the chasm was a brilliant move. But you demeaned it by giving in to your emotions.”

  “I could have done far worse than tag Meltch and the Rodians with bolts,” Maul said.

  Trezza’s smile collapsed. “You and I know that, but that’s how it should remain.” He paused briefly. “It’s not my place to question the purpose of keeping secret the full extent of your powers.” Maul glowered. “Pretense.”

  “You led me to believe that you were willing to accept it as part of your training.”

  “Once,” Maul said.

  Trezza placed his hands on Maul’s shoulders. “I wish you’d come to me under different circumstances, Maul, but we both need to honor the arrangement as it stands. Meltch has long suspected that you have the Force, and now you’ve given him further reason to distrust you. Perhaps he’s envious, or perhaps he’s one of those who doesn’t view the Force with favor. For my part, I’d sooner see you succeed here without employing the Force. As would your benefactor.” He fell silent, then said, almost as an afterthought: “He’s here, you know.” Maul looked startled.

  Trezza nodded. “He came to observe the exercise. He’s expecting you.” In the cavernous main hall of the ancient manse his Master maintained at Blackguard Gorge on Orsis, Maul kneeled, waiting for Sidious to speak. During the lengthy speeder bike trip, he had tried to purge himself of anger and misgiving. He had hoped, in fact, for some being or creature to wander out in front of his racing machine on the aimless tracts that cut through the arid foothills. But none had, and so he had arrived at the stone castle the Muuns had raised with his emotions in the same raw state. His periodic absences from Trezza’s combat school had been going on since the start of his training, but he wasn’t the only trainee who came and went, and so they had ceased to be a topic of speculation.

  “You’re not entirely to blame for what happened,” Sidious said at last, coming to a halt in front of him. “The dark side has taken a serious interest in you, and is gauging if you might be a proper vessel for its power. Seeking expression and loathing restraint, the dark sides tests us continually, competing with our will and our self-imposed priority for secrecy.” A human of middle age and average height, Sidious wore a long, dark-blue cowl that often left his face in deep shadow.

  “Yes, Master,” Maul said. “I was overcome.”

  Sidious’ eyes blazed from the darkness of the robe’s hood. “Overcome? You dare aggrandize your mistake with a lie?”

  Maul lowered his gaze to the stone cold floor.

  “I said that you weren’t entirely to blame. The willingness of the dark side to cooperate in your pitiful and prideful demonstration doesn’t exonerate you from debasing the vow you made to me and from jeopardizing m
y plans for you.” Sidious towered over him. “Did you actually imagine that you could come here and dodge responsibility for your blunder? That you could portray yourself as the guileless victim in all this?”

  Maul wanted to ask for forgiveness but his steadfast anger wouldn’t permit it. In any case, what was the point, since he had received beatings for being right as often as he had for being wrong. Welling up from some unreachable source, rage lifted his head and set his tongue flapping.

  But barely a word passed his lips when he felt his throat pinched closed by a negligent gesture of Sidious’ right hand.

  “Don’t interrupt,” Sidious warned.

  He paced away from Maul, eventually allowing him to breathe, then turned to him.

  “In using the Force to extricate yourself from the trap your opponents fashioned, you have called unwanted attention to yourself. I’m aware that the Jedi have been continuing to harass Trezza for creating assassins and proxy armies, so consider what might have happened had a Jedi been present during the exercise. A Jedi would not only have grasped that you are strong in the Force, but that you have received training in the dark arts, endangering my position. And by the way, your little ploy at the chasm would have elicited little more than laughter from a Jedi Master, in much the way a clown provokes laughter from an audience.”

  Once more he stood before Maul. “Now—what did you wish to ask me earlier?” Maul began tentatively, as if testing his ability to speak.

  “How long must I go on being one thing here and another there? Trained in the Force here, and trained to do without it there? What are your plans for me, Master? What am I to you?” Sidious sniffed. “You are my student, Maul, and one day you may become my apprentice.”

  “Your apprentice,” Maul said, not sure what to make of the designation.

  “Perhaps. But if that is meant to be, it will come at the end of many trials that will make these present ones seem insignificant. Removed from the shelter of Orsis, you will begin to understand that the Republic is built on deceit, and that it only survives because the Jedi Order wishes it to survive.