Leem?" She nodded. "Your second?"
"Third. Rees Alrix was my first. She is fighting with the clone troops at
Sullust. My second . . . my second was Eremin Tarn," she said reluctantly.
Eremin had become a follower of Jeisel, one of the more outspoken of the
dissident Jedi, who believed the Republic had lost the moral authority to rule.
Eremin had always resisted authority—including hers when she was his Master—but
he was fiercely principled. Intellectually, Maks could understand his decision
to withdraw from the Order, but it had torn a hole in her Gran heart to see her
very own Padawan, one she had taught from thirteen years to the status of a full
Jedi Knight, deliberately cut himself out of the Order.
As if reading her mind, Yoda asked, "Does he fill that empty place in your
heart, this new Padawan?" Maks flushed and looked away.
"No shame in this, there is. Think you the relationship between Master and
Padawan is only to help them?" Yoda cocked his head to one side and looked at
her with ancient, knowing eyes. "Oh, this is what we let them believe, yes! But
when the day comes that even old Yoda does not learn something from his
students—then truly, he shall be a teacher no more." He reached up to give her
hand a little squeeze, his three fingers around her six. "No greater gift there
is, than a generous heart."
Tears came to Maks Leem, and she let them come. "Attachment is not the Jedi
way, I know. But . . ."
Yoda gave her hand another squeeze, and then returned to considering the
handle of the lightsaber. For a moment she saw his finger stop on a little piece
of metal, surprisingly clean and fresh looking, as if it had escaped the blast
or been added afterward. Yoda frowned. "This Padawan of yours—ready for the wide
galaxy, is he?"
"Whie? No! And yes," she said. "He is young. They are all so young. But if
any of them are ready, he is. The Force is strong in him. Not so strong as in
young Sky-walker, but in the next level down: and between you and me, he carries
it better than Anakin ever has. Such calm. Such serenity and poise; truly it is
incredible in one so young."
"Truly."
Something in Yoda's voice caught her ear. "You think it impossible?"
"I think he wishes to please you very much," the old Master said carefully.
Before she could ask him what he meant, a gong sounded the hour. "Ah—my
class!" Maks said, slapping one hand against her forehead horns. "I am supposed
to be teaching hyperspace navigation in Tower Three."
Yoda bugged out his eyes and made little shooing motions with his hands.
"Then engage your hyperdrive you must!" He watched, chuckling, as she ran from
the chamber with the hem of her robe flapping excitedly around her hairy ankles
and her boots thudding into the distance.
When he was sure he was alone, he tabbed the power switch on what had once
been Jang Li-Li's lightsaber. As he had suspected, the weapon had been modified;
instead of Jang's blue blade humming to life, a hologram appeared: Count Dooku,
ten centimeters tall, as if standing on the lightsaber handle. He looked old . .
. much older than he had on Geonosis. Careworn. He was sitting at an elegantly
appointed desk. There was a window behind him spattered with rain; behind it, a
cheerless gray sky. Before him on the desk lay the candle Yoda had sent.
"We should talk," Dooku said. He did not look at the holocam, as if, even
across weeks of time and the endless black chasm of space, he was afraid to look
his old Master in the eye.
"There is a cloud around me now. Around all of us. I felt it growing in the
Republic years ago. I fled it then, and tried to bring the Order with me. You
wouldn't come. Cowardice, I thought then. Or corruption. Now . . ." He rubbed
his face wearily. "Now I don't know. Perhaps you were right. Perhaps the Temple
was the only lantern to keep the darkness at bay, and I was wrong to step
outside, into the night. Or perhaps the darkness was inside me all the time."
For the first time he looked up. His eyes were steady, except for a faint
flicker of pure anguish, like the sound of weeping from a locked room. "It's
like a sickness," he whispered. "A fever in the blood. War everywhere. Cruelty.
Killing, and some in my name. Blood like rain. I feel it all the time, the cries
of the dying in the Force, beating in me like a vein about to burst." He
gathered himself; shrugged; went on. "I have come to the end of myself. I don't
know what is right anymore. I am tired, Master. So tired. And like any old man,
as the end nears, I long to go home."
The tiny hologrammic Dooku touched the candle Yoda had sent, turning it over
in his old fingers. "I want to meet. But nobody outside the Temple must know. I
am always watched, and you are betrayed more profoundly than you guess, Master.
Come to me; Jai will show you the way. We will talk. I promise nothing more. I
cannot think you corrupt, but even you, Master, are snared beyond your
understanding. If word reaches my allies of your coming, they will stop at
nothing to kill you. If they guess why you are coming, they will stop at nothing
to destroy me."
His eyes came fully back into the present: shrewd and practical. "I would be
disappointed if you took my invitation as a tactical opportunity. If I see even
the slightest sign of new forces deploying in the direction of the Hydian Way, I
will abandon my current location, and carry the war forward until droid battle
cruisers burn the life out of Coruscant with a rain of plasma fire. Bring none
but Jedi with you." He gave a sad, crooked smile. "There are some things that
should be kept inside the family . . ."
Count Dooku of Serenno, warlord of a mighty army, among the richest beings in
the galaxy, legendary sword-master, former student, notorious traitor, lost son,
flickered in front of Yoda's ancient eyes, and went out.
Yoda tabbed the lightsaber's power switch and watched the recording again,
three more times. He clambered back onto his favorite rock, deep in thought.
Somewhere above him, in his private quarters, messages from the Republic would
be piling up: dispatches from military commanders, questions from far-flung Jedi
about their various assignments and commands, perhaps a summons from the Senate
or a meeting request from the Chancellor's office. He had come to know the
weight of all those anxious eyes far too well. Today they would have to wait.
Today, Yoda needed Yoda's wisdom more than anyone else.
He breathed deeply, trying to clear his mind in meditation, letting thoughts
rise up before him.
Dooku's hands on that candle, the hum of emotion like a current, making his
fingertips tremble.
Jai Maruk giving his clipped report in the Council Chamber with the charred
welt of a lightsaber burn on his gaunt cheek.
Farther back, he and Dooku in a cave on Geonosis. The hiss and flash of
humming lightsabers, darkly beautiful, like dragonflies, and Dooku still a boy
of twenty, not the old man whispering on top of poor dead Jang's blade. Yoda's
ears slowly drooped as he sank deeper into the Force, time melting out beneath
his mind like rot
ten ice, setting past and present free to mix together. That
proud boy in the garden sixty years ago who murmured, Every Jedi is a child his
parents decided they could live without.
Little Jang Li-Li, eight years old, misting the orchids in the Room of a
Thousand Fountains. A bright day, sunlight pouring through transparisteel
panels, Li-Li making puffs of water with her mister and shrieking with laughter
as every little cloud she made broke a sunbeam into colors, fugitive bars of red
and violet and green. Master, Master, I'm making rainbows! Those colors hadn't
come to mean military signals, yet, or starship navigating lights, or lightsaber
blades. Just a girl making rainbows.
Dooku newly brought from Serenno, grave-eyed, old enough to know his mother
had given him away. Old enough to learn one can always be betrayed.
Water bubbled and seeped and trickled around Yoda, time past and time
present, liquid and elusive: and then Qui-Gon was beside him. It would be wrong
to say the dead Jedi came to Yoda; truer would it be to say Qui-Gon had always
been there, in the still point around which time wheels. Qui-Gon waiting for
Yoda to find his way down the untaken path and pass through the unopened door
into the garden at the still heart of things.
Yoda opened his eyes. The feel of Qui-Gon in the Force was the same as
always: stern and energetic, like a hank of good rope pulled into a fine
sailor's knot. Become a wave he has, Yoda thought. A wave without a shore.
Yoda tapped the handle of Jang Li-Li's lightsaber. "You saw?"
I did.
"Cunning, it is. If I move to see him, I must keep any Republic ships away
from the Hydian Way. Deny the chance of peace utterly, must I, or else give him
extra months unharried in his lair."
He is a fencer, Qui-Gon agreed. Leverage, position, advantage—they are as
natural to him as breathing.
"My old student—your old Master, Qui-Gon. The truth he is telling?"
He thinks he is lying.
Yoda's ears pricked up. "Hmm?"
He thinks he is lying.
A slow smile began to light Yoda's round face. "Yessssss!" he murmured.
A moment later Yoda felt a vibration in the Force, a ripple rolling out from
the student dormitories far below, like the faint sound of distant thunder.
Qui-Gon shivered and was gone, as if the Force were a pool of water and he a
reflection on its surface, broken up by the splash of whatever disturbance had
just struck the Temple.
They didn't happen often, the true dreams. To be honest, Whie tried not to
have them.
They weren't like regular nightmares at all. He had plenty of those,
too—almost every night for the last year. Rambling, confused affairs, and in
them he was always failing: there was something he should have done, a class he
was supposed to attend, a package he had meant to deliver. Often he was pursued.
Sometimes he was naked. Most of these dreams ended with him clinging desperately
to a high place and then falling, falling: from the spires of the Temple, from a
bridge, from a starship, down a flight of steps, from a tree in the gardens.
Always falling, and down below, waiting, a murmuring crowd of the disappointed,
the ones he had failed.
The true dreams were different. In those he came un-stuck in time. He would
go to sleep on his dormitory cot, and then wake up with a jerk in the future, as
if he had fallen through a trapdoor and landed in his own body.
Once, going to sleep when he was eight, he had woken to find himself eleven
years old and building his first lightsaber. He worked on it for more than an
hour before another boy entered the workshop and said, "Rhad Tarn is dead!" He
tried to ask, "Who is Rhad Tarn?" but heard his own voice say something quite
different. Only then did he realize that he wasn't the Whie building the
lightsaber—he was just riding around in his head like a ghost.
There was nothing—nothing—worse than the horrible feeling of being buried
alive in his own body. Sometimes the panic was so intense he woke himself up,
but other times it would be hours before he jerked upright in bed, weeping and
gasping with relief at the sound of an alarm, or the touch of a friend's hand.
This time he fell through the true dream and landed in a strange room, richly
furnished. He was standing on a deep, soft rug embroidered with a tangled
woodland pattern, thorn-trees and thorn-vines and venomous green moss; in the
shadows, the glinting eyes of evil birds. The rug was spattered with blood. From
the burning pain in his left arm and the slow dull ache in his ribs, he guessed
some of the blood was his.
An ancient chrono, hanging in a metal case crafted to look like a tangle of
thorns and brambles, ticked dully in the corner of the room. The beats seemed
slow and erratic, like the beating of a dying heart.
There were at least two other people in the room. One was a bald woman with
stripes painted on her skull and lips the color of fresh blood. He could smell
the dark side on her like wood smoke, like something burning on a wet night. She
scared him.
The other was another Jedi apprentice, a red-haired girl named Scout. In
waking life she was a year older than Whie, bossy and loud, and had never paid
much attention to him. In the dream, blood was dripping down her face from a cut
on her scalp. She was staring at him. "Kiss her," the bald woman whispered.
Voice soft. Red teardrops crept from the girl's cuts, spilling by her mouth.
Blood trickled in a red line down her throat to soak into the lapels of her
tunic just above the tops of her small breasts. "Kiss her, Whie."
The dreaming Whie recoiled.
wanted to.
Blood dripped. The chrono ticked. The bald woman grinned at him. "Welcome
home," she said.
"Whie!"
"Hnn?"
"Wake up! Whie, wake up. It's me, Master Leem." Her kind face was looming
over him in the darkened dormitory, all three eyes worried. "We felt a
disturbance in the Force."
He blinked, gasping, trying to hold on to a now that still felt slippery as a
bar of wet soap.
The boys who roomed in the dorm with him were clustering around his bed.
"Were you having one of those dreams again?"
He thought of the girl, Scout—another Jedi apprentice!—the trickle of blood
along her throat. His guilty desire.
Master Leem laid her six fingers on his hand. "Whie?"
"It was nothing," he managed to croak. "Just a bad dream, that's all."
The boys around the bed began to drift off, disappointed and disbelieving.
They were still young enough to want to see miracles. They thought having
visions would be fun. They couldn't understand how terrible it was, to see a
moment loom out of the future like a pillar suddenly revealed on a foggy road,
and no way to keep from hitting it.
Who had the bald woman in the vision been? She stank of the dark side, and
yet he hadn't been fighting her. Would some strange fate make them allies? And
the girl, Scout—how would blood come to spill red onto her red lips, and why
wou
ld she—someday look at him with such intensity? Perhaps Scout would become an
ally of the evil bald woman. Perhaps she would give in to her desires, her
anger, her lust. Maybe she would try to trap him, too; seduce him; deliver him
to the dark side.
"Whie?" Master Leem said.
He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, trying to sound more normal. "Just a
bad dream," he said again. He kept insisting, politely and gratefully, that he
would be fine, just fine, until she finally left the dorm.
Another interesting thing about the true dreams: they had haunted Whie like a
curse all his life, but this was the first time he had ever woken into a place
other than the Jedi Temple. And never once, in a score of visions, had he found
himself in a body much older than the one he had now.
His death was coming. Soon.
3
The white walls of the Combat Training Chamber in the Jedi Temple had been
newly cleaned, the white floor scrubbed, and new white mats laid down in
preparation for the day's tournament. Nervous Jedi apprentices in sparkling
white tunics prepared for the upcoming test, each according to personality. In
her mind, Jedi apprentice Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy—nicknamed Scout—had
them loosely grouped into four categories:
Talkers, who clumped together, murmuring in low voices to distract themselves
from the mounting tension;
Warm-ups, who stretched their muscles, or ligaments, or pulse-fibers; cracked
various numbers of knuckles; and jogged, or hopped, or spun in place, according
to their species-specific physiological needs;
Meditators, whose usual approach to sinking into the deeper truth of the
Force, in Tallisibeth's opinion, mostly involved keeping their eyes shut and
assuming an affected expression of smug serenity; and
Prowlers.
Scout was a prowler.
Probably she should try a little meditation. Certainly her history suggested
that getting too tense and excited was her worst problem. At the last
tournament, back before the devastation on Honoghr and the Rendili Fleet Crisis,
she had gone out in the first round, losing to a twelve-year-old boy she nearly
always beat when they sparred. The defeat had been all the more humiliating