appetites. I can wait on my kills, and use them better. And for now, you might
disagree, but you dare not disobey." And here, with a small smile, he lifted
just one finger.
She blanched. "True," she said.
Dooku let his finger drop.
In the hologram on the desk, baby mantises were squirming from their father's
body. They groped blindly about them with their spindly hooked limbs until one,
a little larger than the others, chanced to find that the sickles on his hind
legs fit like a collar around a sibling’s neck. Driven by primitive instinct, he
jerked and tore off his brother's head.
"In a perfect world," Dooku said, "one could feed an apprentice just enough
to keep him growing—just enough to keep him wanting more. The Master could
promise him fame, glamour. That's a good one to deliver on," he said. "He could
do the Master's bidding, be his public face. Then if any of the Master's plans
went wrong, why, he could take the fall." Dooku looked up, his eyes suddenly
sharp and very much in the present. "Does that sound good to you, Asajj? Would
you truly like to be my apprentice? I could make you the most feared woman in
the galaxy. All the Jedi would come looking for you, while I sat safe and sound
in Coruscant, biding my time."
Asajj licked her lips again. "Let them come," she said.
"Ah, to be young and full of hate!" Dooku chuckled. "You would be a
star—great to everyone but me. But I'd have to keep you humble, you realize. I'd
have to goad and needle and hurt you, to keep you in your place. Every secret
the apprentice learns, he pays for dearly. Oh yes, he pays . . ." The Count
paused, his eyes closing for a moment as if to shut out some terrible memory.
Asajj regarded him narrowly. "You don't think I'm worthy."
"You're not listening, are you?"
"You're not saying anything to the point," Ventress said angrily. "Was it
that Jedi, Jai Maruk? Should I have killed him? I was following your orders, but
perhaps that was the test." Her eyes narrowed. "I should have showed more
initiative. That's what you're waiting for.
You don't need a . . . minion. Those you have in plenty. You need something
more."
The Count watched her, bemused. "How strange it is, to know your every
thought before you think it."
"Not even the dark side can give you that power," Ventress said, unnerved.
The Count smiled. "I have a power greater than the dark side, my pet. I am
old. Your fresh furies are my ancient mistakes."
Mantises squirmed and hunted in the vision over his desk. He snapped off the
holocron and consulted a monitor. "Ah. Our latest batch of guests is arriving.
Loyal beings and true, for the Trade Federation cause and a ten percent profit.
Go meet them at the door. You always make such an impression on visitors."
"Don't patronize me," Asajj said coldly.
Dooku looked around. "Or what?"
Her face went pale.
Dooku lifted that one finger, and this time he tapped it in the air, as if
pushing a needle into a pincushion. Ventress crumpled to her knees. Her voice
came out clotted with pain. "Please," she said. "Don't."
"It doesn't feel very good, does it? Like sharp stones in your throat and
chest." Dooku made another little patting motion, and Ventress slammed to the
tile floor. "It's the blood vessels I hate," Dooku said. "The way they stretch
inside, like balloons about to pop."
"P-p-p-please . . ."
"But worse than anything is the memories," he said, more softly still. "They
crowd around, like flies on meat. Every despicable thing, every petty vice,
every little act of spite." A cruel, strange quiet stretched out as Ventress
panted on the stone floor. Rain ticked against the window glass, and the Count's
soft voice went dark and far away. "All the things you should have stopped, but
didn't, and nothing will ever be right again. And the things you've done," he
whispered. "By the pitiless stars, the things you've done . . ."
The comm on Dooku's desk beeped. He shook his head, like a man waking from a
dream. "The Troxan delegation is at the door."
Ventress crawled to her feet. Her face was bruised and her cheeks were wet
with tears. Both pretended not to notice. "Tell them I'll be right down," Count
Dooku said.
Physically, the Count's age was rarely a handicap. Deft as he had become with
the Force—unimaginably more subtle than the boy who had watched waterskeeters in
the Jedi gardens all those years ago—he wore his eighty-three standard years
better than most humans half his age. He was still in superb physical shape,
senses keen, health undiminished by even the memory of a cold.
Only in this situation, stooped before the image of his Master, did he feel
his years. Even via hologram, the flickering figure of Darth Sidious, hideous in
blue and shadows, seemed to strip his false youth away, leaving his bones
brittle, his joints worn thin and knotted with tension.
"These are the envoys from Troxar," his Master said. How could he know? Dooku
didn't ask. Darth Sidious knew. He always knew.
"They are considering surrender," Dooku said. "They claim they have a
resistance planned, ready to rise in insurrection when the clone troops
withdraw."
"No!" the flickering figure said sharply. "The war has already damaged the
planet too much to make it worth saving. Its only value now is to chew up more
troops and resources. Tell them they have to fight on. Promise them
reinforcements—tell them you will be deploying a new fleet of advanced droids to
retake the whole system within a month, if only they can hold on. Explain that
such weapons will not be put in the hands of those who surrender."
"And when the month passes, and no reinforcements arrive?"
"Help will come within another month at most. Promise them that, and make
them believe it. I've shown you how."
"I understand," Dooku said. How casually we betray our creatures.
The hooded figure cocked its head. "Having an attack of conscience, my
apprentice?"
"No, Master." He met the hooded figure's hideous eye. "It was their own greed
that brought them to you," he said. "In their heart of hearts, they always knew
what they were getting into."
The Château Malreaux was alive with eyes.
The spectacular security system installed by the seventeenth (and last)
Viscount Malreaux in the final months of his descent into madness was one of the
reasons Dooku had chosen the château for his current base of operations. Optic
recorder studs littered the mansion, disguised as upholstery rivets in the
parlor, screw heads in the kitchen cabinets, painkiller pills in the
apothecary's pantry, and the black eyes of birds woven into the tapestries of
the Crying Room. Top-of-the-line infrared swatches, originally developed as
prosthetics for tongue-damaged Sluissi, were grafted into the cream-and-crimson
Malreaux livery of the table linen and carpets and drapes. The faux walls that
had been built at enormous expense to riddle the château with secret passageways
were pocked with spyholes. Microphones nested like spiders in dozens of drawers
an
d linen closets, under every bed, taped to the roof by each of the eleven
chimneys, and even glued on the base of a priceless bottle of Creme D'Infame in
the wine cellar.
The seventeenth (and final) Viscount Malreaux, convinced he was being
poisoned, had murdered his kitchen staff and then fled into his secret tunnels,
coming out only at night. The last anyone saw of him was a murky glimpse shot
from a security cam hidden in a fake onion in a hanging basket in the kitchen: a
thirty-second recording of a skeletal figure creeping from a hidden grate into
the kitchen to drink two hurried gulps of tap water and gnaw a handful of raw
flout
If it hadn't been for the smell, the corpse of the seventeenth (and terminal)
Lord Malreaux would never have been found.
Someone hidden in the secret passage that ran over the study, for example,
would have been able to watch the whole of the conversation between Dooku and
Asajj Ventress through a peephole gimlet in the ceiling. If that person had been
patient, and waited until Ventress was well away, he or she would have seen the
conference between Dooku and the hologrammic apparition of Darth Sidious.
And if the watcher had waited a good while after Dooku left the room, he or
she might have seen a section of shelving swing out unexpectedly, admitting a
small, quick, evil creature, a Vjun fox, its coat a brindled red and cream, with
clever prehensile hands instead of paws.
After pausing a moment to sniff, it advanced warily into the room,
speculatively at first, but almost immediately coming to the spot where Dooku
had dropped Jang Li-Li's thawing severed hand. The floor was tiled in the
Malreaux check, half fusty crimson, half dirty cream, like dried blood and
curdled milk. The hand, landing with a wet thud on one of the dirty-cream tiles,
had left a splotch. The fox sniffed, and its thin pink tongue showed between its
lips.
"Not yet, my sweet." A wheezing older woman limped through the secret door.
She was dressed in dirty tatters of what had once been fine clothing—a pink ball
gown gone black at its raveled hems, torn stockings, and the remains of what had
once been a pair of gold lame slippers. Around her neck she wore a fur stole
made from foxtails tied together. "Wait a bits. Which Momma wants to take a
look-see." She lowered her bulk to the floor with a grunt and bent forward to
peer at the stain.
She gasped. "Oh, precious," she whispered. She leaned over to stare more
intently at the splotch, and her eyes, small and hard as little black marbles,
went wet and shiny. "Oh," she said. She sat slowly back on her haunches, rocking
and rocking. "Oh, oh, oh!"
The fox looked up at her.
The old woman looked back with an expression of such savage triumph that the
fox recoiled, baring its little yellow needle teeth. "Oh, such a day for Momma,
sweetness! Which she's been waiting such a long time for this," she whispered.
She met the foxy eyes. "Can't you see, honeypot? Can't you smell it? The Baby's
coming home!"
She stood up. Emotion made her hams shake, and the thick flesh of her upper
arms. "Time to get ready," she muttered. "Clean the Baby's room. Make his little
bed." She limped quickly back into the passageway.
The fox waited with pricked ears until the sound of her mutters dwindled
slowly into the darkness. Then it bent its head to the bloodstained floor, and
with its long pink tongue licked the tile clean.
Count Dooku's meeting with the Troxan delegation went well. He made a cold
kind of game of it, trying to see how little he could say, letting them do all
the lying for him. "There are new battle droids in production," he had remarked.
That was all it took; they did the rest.
"Surely you'll be sending them to our quadrant," said the under-palatine for
patriotic liaisons.
"Really, we're key to the entire region," his assistant said.
"Of course, you understand our need," another said. "What other planets have
fought so bravely for the cause?" a fourth asked.
Each of these fine hopes he reinforced with a smile and pushed into their
minds with the Force, like a seal pressed into warm wax, so it felt like
certainty. In fact, using the Force was hardly necessary. What man—or Troxan,
either—would choose to believe that with every sentence he was betraying
thousands of his fellows to death, when he could see himself as a hero instead?
So much for the urge to Do Good, Dooku thought. Shown up again as just another
illusion blinding creatures to the stark universe the dark side alone showed in
all its bitter clarity.
What are we, Dooku?
Alone. Alone. Alone.
Watching the Troxans hang themselves was middling sport at best, too easy to
take much pleasure in. Dooku moved rapidly to bring the meeting to a close and
send them back to their slaughterhouse. "Anything else?" he asked.
The delegates looked at one another. "Actually, there was one other curious
incident," said the under-palatine, a portly middle-aged Troxan with a bulbous
nose and purple gills. "As you may know, I was honored with the title of first
diplomatic legatee, and sent to the second round of talks with Republican
negotiators. Nothing came of it, of course; the Senate has dropped even the
pretense of debate now, and it's all threats and bluster these days." He rippled
his throat gills dismissively. "It hardly alters the impression, as I mentioned
to the Senatorial committee years before hostilities even began—"
The flustered under-palatine sucked in his cheeks. "I was getting to that. At
the end of the session, I was approached by Senator Amidala of Naboo, who asked
me to deliver something to you." With plump, nervous hands he brought out a
small box, marked with the Jedi seal. "Let me assure you, we have taken every
precaution here, used the most advanced scanning techniques—"
"We thought it might be a bomb," his assistant volunteered.
"Or a bug," another said.
"I still think it could be poisoned," a fourth said. "Believe me when I say,
your safety, of course, has been uppermost . . ."
Dooku reached for the box. He found to his surprise that his hands were
shaking. Odd. He had been almost as surprised as Ventress to see himself sparing
the gaunt Jedi, Jai Maruk. It had been a sudden whim, sending him back. A hook
dropped for Yoda, as he had told Sidious afterward. A hook baited with the pink
squirm of an old memory.
Darth Sidious had given him a curious look, then, one that passed through him
like a flush of fever, a weakness inside. "Do you still love him?" his Master
said.
Dooku had laughed and braved it out. The idea was ridiculous.
"Ridiculous?" his Master had said, in that soft, terrible voice of his. "I
hardly think so." And then, his voice like honeyed poison, "A good student
always loves his teacher."
There was always a risk, talking with Sidious. Sometimes the conversation
would go badly, and Dooku would fail to please somehow. It was a terrible thing,
failing to please his Master.
He shook his head
. These were a boy's weak fears. If Yoda had truly taken his
lure, he would come, and if he did—what a gift for Sidious that would be, a
nine-hundred-year-old head! That wheezing old half-crippled sage was stuck in
the Republic like a cork; pull him out and, with a pop, the dark side would come
rushing through. Then his Master would see how loyal a servant Dooku truly was.
He grabbed the box. He could feel Yoda's touch still lingering on the edges
like a distant echo. Vividly his mind went back to their last meeting, on
Geonosis: swords drawn at last, and finally equal. What a bittersweet moment—to
see Yoda again, and be a match, or more than a match for him . . . but not to be
seen by him. No, they had gone their separate ways, and Yoda had newer Jedi to
look after. Kenobi and, worse yet, young Skywalker.
Oh, yes, and wasn't everyone watching him. Even Darth Sidious, with a gleam
in his eye, mentioned the boy as one strong in the Force. "Just a little piece
in a great game," his Master had said; but a stab of jealousy had gone through
Dooku when Sidious lingered over the name. Skywalker, yes . . . The Force is
strong in him.
The same Anakin Skywalker who, he had learned, had recently killed a clone of
Count Dooku of Serenno. Poor foolish clone. Another changeling, another Dooku
abandoned by his parents, left to be chopped up by some upstart Jedi butcher in
the name of a corrupt Republic.
Dooku rather thought that if he weren't so old and wise, he would probably
hate this Anakin Skywalker. At least a little.
His flipped back the clasps on the box. Strange that his hands should still
be shaking so.
The under-palatine for the Bureau of Patriotic Defense looked over his
shoulder. "We studied it exhaustively," the diplomat said, flapping his gills in
puzzlement, "but all our experts agree it's nothing more than a plain wax
candle."
2
On the top of a dilapidated skyrise in the Temple district of Coruscant, two
droids were playing dejarik in the rain. They played extremely fast, moving each
piece with blinding speed and precision; their fingers fell and rose like
sewing-machine needles plunging through reams of syncloth.
The two droids were built to an identical design, humanoid and tall, but
there the resemblance ended, as if they had been twins separated at birth, one