Star Wars - I, Jedi Part 10

Master Skywalker floated to the ground unharmed and again set himself to receive Gantoris' attacks. Gantoris shortened his blade and came on. Luke gave ground, blocking the attacks in closer to him than before. He gave the impression that he was tiring, weakening. I guessed it was a ploy to draw Gantoris on, but the apprentice was not thinking clearly enough to see that. He pressed forward, slas.h.i.+ng his way through leafy ferns and chopping apart nebula orchids.

Suddenly Luke went down and I couldn't see him. Gantoris rushed forward, his spitting blade shredding the jungle. I started to sprint toward them, cursing the fact that I couldn't lift Gantoris up the way I had Tionne only hours before. I tried to think of what image I could project into Gantoris' mind to deflect him and distract him, but I never got the chance.

Gantoris' purple blade came down in an overhand strike that burned its way through the underbrush. I heard a startled squeal, then an orange furred runyip broke from the brush, darting into the clearing right behind Gantoris. As he turned to face this new threat, his lightsaber flew up out of his hands and the blade died.

Luke plucked the lightsaber from the air, then extinguished his own blade. The two of them stood there, facing each other. Sweat streamed down their faces and their breath came ragged, vet neither one wanted to show any sign of weakness. In the absence of the lightsaber hissing, the fading sounds of the run-yip's squeals and the normal sound of the rainforest fought for supremacy.

Then Luke did something that stunned me. He flipped Gantoris' lightsaber around and extended it to him hilt first. Gantoris accepted it timidly, clutching it in both hands. He studied it, turning it over and around as if seeing it for the first time, then he looked back at Luke.

The Jedi Master nodded. "Good exercise, Gantoris, but you must learn to control your anger. It could be your undoing."

I dropped to my knees in utter astonishment. I watched Gantoris turn away and retreat into the rainforest. The other apprentices seemed as surprised at what had happened as I was. They whispered together in little knots as Luke emerged from the undergrowth, clipped his lightsaber to his belt, and pulled his cloak back on.

He looked around calmly and even gave us the hint of a smile. "Perhaps, after last evening, we started too early today. We will reconvene this afternoon." In his words I felt a gentle urging to go back to my room, but I resisted it. The others did not and melted away unseen into the rainforest.

Luke glanced back at me, a half-smile on his face. "I thought w)u would still be here. You did not see the beginning?"

I shook my head. "The ending was more than enough. What are you going to do?"

"Do? This is done already."

My jaw dropped open. "Unless I missed something, one of your apprentices found or somehow constructed a lightsaber and just tried to kill you with it. You don't see this as cause for alarm?"

"How can it surprise you that Gantoris has found a way to fas.h.i.+on a lightsaber? You and Kam already possess one. We've talked about Gantoris'

compet.i.tion with you."

I held my hands up. "That may be an issue, but not the core one as I see it."

Luke's eyes narrowed. "So your vision here is paramount." I hesitated and felt my stomach collapse in on itself. "No, Master Skywalker, it is not.

I mean no disrespect." I sighed. "I just want to understand. Gantoris has gotten into something he shouldn't have. You have to discipline him."

"He's going to be a Jedi Knight. I cannot treat him like a child." Luke shook his head. "To do that would stunt his devel-opment. He's very good and one of the best students here. He just needs guidance."

"Then give it to him." My hands convulsed into fists, then I forced them open again. "You're a.s.suming that he will see the error of his ways and never do this again. He attacked you! He's already shown he's not scanning right and wrong correctly. He can't begin to figure out where the line between them runs if you don't find a way to punish him when he crosses that line."

The Master shook his head slowly. "I can tell you that Gantoris already regrets what he has done here. Stretch out with your feelings. You'll feel it, too. He is teaching himself where the line is and how to stay on the light side of it."

I did as I was bidden and did sense both remorse and confu-sion from Gantoris. "You are right, Master. I know you believe in redemption. What you say about Gantoris is true. I guess I don't see why he should not be punished for having done some-thing wrong."

"You're not supposed to see it, Keiran, you're supposed to feel it." Luke rubbed a hand against his forehead. "Retribution leads to the dark side."

I sighed. "I know. I would argue that a little punishment now could prevent a disaster later, but I don't think that will get me anywhere."

"You see, Keiran, you grow in wisdom as well as the Force." I didn't want to laugh, but his comment was funny. Still, coming from someone my age, it also rankled a bit. Luke obvi-ously deserved the t.i.tle Jedi Master, but part of me wished we weren't the group on which he first practiced being a teacher. He clearly had his ideas about how we should learn, and we were all making progress. Some faster than others.

Even so, I wasn't used to his methods. I flashed on Iella's heart and mind split and knew it was a key to my problem. "I shall think further on my ignorance, Master, that I may see how nluch wisdom I yet need to learn. If you would permit it, though, I want to ask you a question." --Please."

I scratched at the back of my neck. "What did you ask Gantoris and what did he shout at you before he cut down the tree'?"

"I asked how he had learned what he needed to know to make a lightsaber."

Luke s.h.i.+fted his shoulders stiffly. "He re-plied that I was not the only teacher of the Jedi way."

"Not a very good answer. Do you think he would have gotten the knowledge from the Holocron?"

"I can't see how. The Holocron detects a student's ability and holds back things they are not prepared to know." He smiled carefully. "It works so well, in fact, that I do not know if there arc things there that I have yet to learn."

"If not from Bodo Baas, then from whom did he learn?" I frowned. "I couldn't teach it to him. I don't think Kam would and you, I take it, have not. Who did?"

Luke remained very still for a moment, then slowly shook his head. "I don't know."

"But it would have to be a Jedi, or someone with the knowl-edge of the Jedi ways and, presumably, considerable power in the Force."

"I think so, yes."

"And yet, last night, when we were all so open to the Force that we were able to catalog stars, we didn't feel the presence of such an individual right here?"

Luke's eyes became sapphire slits. "No."

I s.h.i.+vered, and it wasn't because I was soaked in sweat.

"Does that worry you as much as it does me?"

"More, I think, Keiran." Luke's cloak rippled with a shudder.

"Much more."

Running down the hallway toward Gantoris' room I caught a whiff of the poisonously sweet scent I'd smelled a couple of times before during my days with CorSec. I didn't want to look inside the room be-cause I knew what I would see. The knot of students at the doorway s.h.i.+elded me from the sight, but did nothing to block the scent.

I heard Master Skywalker say, "Beware the dark side," then a greasy thread of smoke twisted through the apprentices, driv-ing them apart.

Several turned away and stumbled down the corridor with hands over their mouths. Streen and Kam Solusar hung on either side of the doorway, ashen-faced and staring inside. I slipped between them, raising the neck of my tunic to cover my nose. They turned away, leaving me alone with Luke and what was left of Gantoris.

Gantoris' body lay near the far wall of his small stone cham-ber-at least I a.s.sumed it was Gantoris because it did not much look like him. He had been burned to death. Carbonized flesh had crumbled to ash at some points, revealing blackened bone. The heat had contracted his muscles, arching his spine and pulling his head back. His mouth remained open in a wordless scream. Smoke still rose from the charred remnants of his Jedi robes, and his lightsaber had rolled over to rest against the wall itself.

Luke Skywalker stood over him, staring down at his black-ened remains.

"What happened here? Did he attack you again?"

Luke turned to look at me with haunted, red-rimmed eyes and I could tell this wasn't the first time he'd seen a body in this condition. "Do you think I did this?" The pain in his voice knifed right through me.

"I wasn't accusing you. I just want to know what happened." I crouched by the body. "Occupational hazard. Who found him?"

"Dorsk 81 came for me, so I suppose he did. The others gathered after we got here."

I nodded. "I'11 want to talk to them."

Luke blinked away some of the shock in his eyes. "You are going to investigate this situation?"

My head came up. "Shouldn't I?"

The Jedi Master hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, of course you should. We need to know what happened here."

"Right." I pointed toward the body and circled my finger around the general area. "I can give you some basics right now. The lack of a consistent pattern of charring, as well as the absence of a chemical scent, suggests no accelerant was used. In other words, no one poured something flammable over him and turned him into a torch."

Luke winced at that description. "I see."

"Take a look at the fingers and ears."

"Badly burned."

"Right, but they're not gone. Bodies lit on fire tend to have those little bits burn off quickly. And the fact that he's still got clothes on him, albeit badly charred ...."I let my voice trail off because the conclusion I was being led toward ran counter to my previous experience.

"It almost seems as if he was burned from the inside out. That would require an incredible amount of energy: a lightning strike or lots of microwaves, and we don't have either here."

"Yes, but he had such energy." Luke's voice dropped to a whisper. "His anger."

"You think he was consumed by his anger?"

"I do. I think he used it to unleash dark-side forces he could not control. Had you not been able to shunt aside the energies you absorbed last evening in the grotto, you, too, might have been burned up by them."

I reached a hand out toward the lightsaber, but could feel no heat from it, nor see any signs that it had been damaged by the fire. "I'd like to get a full laboratory work-up on the lightsaber. Fingerprints, tissue residue matches, the works, both inside and out."

Luke shook his head. "You will find that only Gantoris and I have touched that lightsaber."

"How do you know?"

"I know." Luke raised his hands. "If you open yourself to this room, you can feel the residue of Gantoris' last moments. There is much pain and much anger, as well as doubt and out-rage. The pain is physical, of course, and mental. It feels as if he was tortured before he died."

I stood again. Gantoris' body lay between us like a wall.

"Who would have done that to him?"

Luke shook his head. "None of you. Shock and surprise and horror radiates off everyone else very openly. They were not involved."

"And me?"

"Some surprise, certainly, but also a determination to solve this puzzle." Luke regarded me through half-lidded eyes. "If you were to kill him, you would have goaded him into a duel or used an illusion to make him have a fatal accident. You wouldn't have been this clumsy or left this sort of evidence, you would have been subtle."

"Thanks, I think." I folded my arms across my chest. "So if we didn't do it, who did?"

"I don't know." Luke's face darkened. "Gantoris did have premonitions of disaster, however. Even when I first met him, he wondered if I were the 'dark man' who would bring him to ruin. He said 'If I go with you, I am lost.' At the time I thought he was just afraid of what would happen to his people if he left them. Then, last evening, as he was leaving the grotto he told me that I was not the dark man."

I chewed my lower lip for a moment. "So Gantoris positively identified his dark man. You told me that Gantoris also men-tioned to you that you were not the only teacher of the Jedi way. I don't think it's a stretch to think this dark man might be the other instructor. The fact that you can't feel this other indi-vidual here is not a good sign."

"He cannot remain hidden forever."

"I don't think he intends to."

"What do you mean?"

I glanced down at Gantoris' body. "You said that if I wanted to kill Gantoris, I'd have been subtle. This death is anything but subtle. We have someone dead by means that are impossible, and he was killed right here in the heart of the academy. You can see by that one diagonal cut on the wall there that Gantoris apparently tried to strike at his attacker, but that did no good.

"In my time with CorSec I helped track a sociopathic killer or two.

Leaving a body out in the open like this was a taunt. It was the killer saying that he's smarter than we are, more power-ful and more cunning.

Gantoris tried to kill him with a light-saber and failed. That means the rest of us have little chance of hurting him. He is challenging us and challenging you. He obvi-ously won one of your students over to the dark side, then left him here like a discarded plaything to show his contempt for you."

Luke hugged his arms around himself. "I think he may have been even more direct."

I shook my head. "I'm not tracking here."

"Tonight I had a nightmare. I stood with my father on top of this temple, but it was back when the Ma.s.sa.s.si people still lived. It must have been millennia ago. My father tried to explain to me how it was Obi-Wan's fault that he had been corrupted by his studies of Sith material. What he told me seemed to make sense for the most part, but then he invited me to follow him down that path, which I knew my father never would do. I accused him of not being my father. The image then s.h.i.+fted into that of a shadow that swallowed everything. At that point Artoo awakened me, so I don't know what else would have happened."

"He became a shadow?" I s.h.i.+vered. "Gantoris' dark man?"

"Obi-Wan suggested there was no such thing as coincidence. I would have to suppose that all this is related." Luke's expres-sion hardened. "I have to decide very carefully how to proceed from here."

"If you will, let me suggest two things."

"Go ahead."

"First, this dark man apparently managed to convince Gantoris that he could offer him things you could not or would not. Gantoris' knowledge of and control of the Force was insuf-ficient to allow him to avoid such seductive ideas. I think you need to use the Holocron as a way to instill in us a sense of history and purpose for what we're doing, so we have even more incentive to help rebuild the Jedi."

"And avoid the easy solutions offered by the dark side."

"Exactly."

The Jedi Master thought for a moment, then nodded. "And the other thing?"

"In this dream you said you saw the Ma.s.sa.s.si and the pyra-mids the way they were millennia ago. I think we might want to do some investigating to see what we can learn about Yavin 4 and the Temples. The Holocron might well be able to give us information. If we can put a face and name to this dark man, or figure out what he's after here, we'll have a better chance of stopping him."

"Both plans seem to make sense." Luke smiled at me grimly. "I shall work on the first. Tionne is spending a lot of time pulling legends from the Holocron, so she can help me. With your background as an investigator, you should handle the gathering of information about our dark man."

"I'11 build a profile on him. If we can figure out what he wants and how he thinks, we have him."

"Good." Luke glanced back down at Gantoris' body, then up at me. "If the New Republic is to thrive, we can't allow the Jedi to be destroyed."

There was no returning to sleep that night, so I made my way to the small library where we studied the Jedi Holocron. I really didn't feel up to beginning any investigation at the moment, but playing around with the Holocron and learning how it worked seemed to be something I could handle. The greenish glow making its way out into the corridor told me someone else was using the device, and my curiosity carried me right into the room.

There, bathed in the green glow from Bodo Baas, sat Tionne. She looked long and lean and lovely, with the greenish tint the light gave her hair looking far better on her than it ever did on me. She would have been unarguably gorgeous, except that her hands covered her face and her shoulders shook with sobs.

Bodo Baas' image reached a clawed limb toward her. "For a Jedi, there is no emotion, there is only peace."