Star Wars_ Traitor Part 14

Jacen felt that, too: an eyeflash of blackout that staggered him.

When his eyes cleared, three warriors had him boxed. Knowing how they would attack wouldn't help; no one alive could move fast enough to dodge.

The warriors slashed at him, amphistaffs lengthening with whipcrack speed. None of the blades even grazed him.

He had not moved. To the nerve nodes that served as all three amphistaffs' primitive brains, Jacen suddenly appeared to be a--small, disturbingly misshapen, but still unmistakable--amphistaff polyp; uncounted millennia of natural selection had hardwired amphistaffs against cutting polyps.

Well, that worked okay, Jacen thought. But once they drop them and come after me barehanded, I'm cooked. So he attacked.

He took three running steps for momentum toward the one on the left and sprang into the air. The warrior's instinctive reaction--to lift his amphistaff and spear Jacen through the guts--did him no good at all, because the amphistaff dropped limp between his hands and the warrior could only gape in astonishment as Jacen slammed both feet into his chest and flattened him as if he'd been hit by a speeder.

Jacen hit the ground running, and never looked back. They came after him like hungry gundarks, snarling fury. He dashed blind through the storm, slipping, skidding, head down, navigating by the feeling in the middle of his chest: toward where the Yuuzhan Vong weren't. He could feel them spot him, could feel surges of rage and feral blood l.u.s.t from all directions as hunters glimpsed him, vaguely, wraithlike through the rain and hail, and felt every flash of stark joy when they spotted him in the stuttering blue-white strobe of lightning.

Thud bugs tracked him, blasting splinters off walls, scattering chunks of sodden moss. Shouts from all sides: harsh coughs with too many consonants, half smothered in rain, half buried in thunder. He didn't speak the language, but he could feel the meaning. They had him surrounded, and were closing in. This, he said to himself, would be a really good time for Vergere to show up. As if summoned by his thought, an invisible hand shoved his shoulder, knocking his headlong dash into a diagonal stagger. Before he could recover his balance, an invisible rope hobbled his ankles and brought him cras.h.i.+ng to the ground... Which collapsed under him with the dull rip of rotten fibertile, and dumped him headfirst four meters down to a damp stone floor that he hit like a cargo sack.

He lay there, half stunned, gasping, wind knocked completely out of him, staring at the sudden constellations that wheeled around his head but shed no light into the surrounding gloom. A section of wall slid aside, revealing another room beyond, dimly lit by glow globes in conservation mode. The light from the far room haloed a small, slim avian silhouette in the doorway.

"Jacen Solo. It is time to come in from the storm." He looked up at the Jacen-sized hole in this room's ceiling, and let the icy rain that poured in on him wash the stars out of his head.

"Vergere?..."

"Yes."

He felt the confusion of the hunters above: as far as they could tell, he had simply vanished.

"Uh, thanks, I guess..."

"You're welcome."

"But..."

"Yes?"

Slowly, he pulled himself up. No bones seemed to be broken, but his whole body ached.

"You couldn't have just, maybe, said 'Hey, Jacen! Run this way!'?"

Her head canted a centimeter, and her crest seemed to glow a deep burnt orange. She extended a hand toward him.

"Hey, Jacen," she said. "Run this way."

After one last glance through the hole above at the black, lightning-lashed clouds, he did. Deep into the planet, deep into the darkness...

Running.

Glow globes dead, or pulsing feebly; flashes of rooms, bare and sterile, the only life flattened cartoons of foliage spidering across walls in mosaic tiles; hard clap of boots on stone, harsh breath rasping through dust-filled throat, over lips and teeth coated with sand...

Running.

Sweat burned in Jacen's eyes, blurring Vergere's back; she streaked ahead, turning corners, ducking through doorways, diving down stairwells, leaping into abandoned turbolifts to slide the guardrails, and he followed desperately...

Deeper into the planet. Deeper into the darkness.

Running.

That calm open hollow at his center evaporated somewhere along the way; he didn't feel the Yuuzhan Vong anymore. Gasping, losing Vergere and catching sight of her again, his sprint dipping into a stagger, he couldn't know if the Yuuzhan Vong were gaining, falling behind, circling ahead. His imagination crowded the corridors at his back with fierce sprinting warriors, but to look behind risked losing Vergere forever.

Daggers of fire stabbed into his lungs with every step. Ragged black blots danced in his vision, growing, blending, twisting until they suddenly billowed and swallowed him whole.

Deep in the darkness...

He awoke on the floor. Warm rain trickled down his cheeks as he sat up. The palm of one hand was skinned raw. A drop of that warm rain touched his lips, and he tasted blood. Vergere crouched nearby, half shadowed in the weak amber light from a single glow globe well down the corridor. She watched him with feline patience.

"Until your head becomes as hard as these flagstones, I'd suggest you avoid knocking it into them," she said.

"I..." Jacen's eyes drifted closed, and opening them again cost him tremendous effort. His head thundered like the storm above. The corridor swirled around him, and darkness pressed in on his brain.

"I can't... get my breath..."

"No?"

"I... can't keep up, Vergere. I can't... draw on the Force like you do, I can't get... strength..."

"Why not?"

"You know why not!" Black fury ignited his heart, blood steaming in his head, spinning him to his feet. Two strides put him above her.

"You did it to me! I am sick of your questions. - - sick of your training.. ." He pulled her to her feet, then off her feet, holding her dangling above the floor so close that his teeth might as well have been clenched in her flesh. "And most of all," he growled, low, murderous, "I am sick of you."

"Jacen..." Her voice sounded oddly thick, oddly tight, and her arms fell limp to her sides--And Jacen discovered that his hands were locked around her throat. Her voice trailed to a fading hiss.

"That... twisssst..."

My species has a particularly vulnerable neck...

His hands sprang open, and he took a step back, and another, and another until his back came hard against the sweating stone of the wall.

He covered his face with his hands, blood from his palms painting his face, blood and sweat from his face stinging his skinned palm. His chest heaved but he couldn't quite breathe; he never had managed a really good breath; his strength fled along with his rage and his knees turned to cloth, and he sank down to huddle against the wall, eyes squeezed shut behind his fingers.

"What?..." he murmured, but he couldn't finish. What is happening to me?

Vergere's voice was warm as a kiss.

"I told you: here, the dark side is very, very strong."

"The dark side?" Jacen lifted his head. His hands shook, so he clasped them together and pinned them between his knees.

"I, ah... Vergere, I'm sorry..."

"For what?"

"I wanted to kill you. I almost did."

"But you didn't." Waves of trembling rippled through him. He ventured a shaky laugh.

"You should have left me behind. I probably have less to fear from the Yuuzhan Vong than I do from the dark side."

"Oh?"

"All the Yuuzhan Vong can do is kill me. But the dark side..."

"Why is it so to be feared?"

He turned his face away. "My grandfather was a Lord of the Sith."

"What? Of the Sith?" He turned back to find Vergere staring at him in blank astonishment. She tilted her head one way, then another, as though she suspected he might change appearance when viewed from a different angle.

"I had thought," she said carefully, "that you were of Skywalker blood."

"I am." He hugged himself against the shaking. Why couldn't he breathe?

"My grandfather was Anakin Skywalker. He became Darth Vader, the last Sith Lord..."

"Anakin?" She settled back into herself, openly stunned--and clearly, astonis.h.i.+ngly, saddened. "Little Anakin? A Lord of the Sith?

Oh... oh, could it not have been otherwise? What a tragedy... What a waste."

Jacen stared at her in turn, his mouth hanging open.

"You say that like you knew him..." She shook her head. "Knew of him, more. Such promise... Do you know, I met him once, not five hundred meters above where we now sit? He couldn't have been more than twelve, perhaps thirteen standard years old. He was.... so alive.

He burned..."

"What... what would Darth Va... I mean, my grandfather... what was he doing on Coruscant? What were you doing on Coruscant? Five hundred meters above us? What was this place?"

"Do you not know? Has this been lost, as well?" She rose, and extended a hand to help him to his feet. She touched the wall nearby, her fingers skittering through a complex pattern on a sweating rectangular slab, which slowly swung wide, opening a doorway into a gloom-filled chamber beyond.

"This way." The chamber threw back a dark resonance, as though she spoke beside a drum. Her gaze was steady once more, and expressionless as the stone of the walls. Lost in wonder, Jacen stepped past her into the darkness.

"This was our tower of guard: our fortress watch upon the dark,"

she said.

The doorway narrowed into a dim yellow stripe of globe-glow, then vanished.

"This was the Jedi Temple."

"This...?" Awe squeezed his chest, and he floundered in the dark; he had to gasp harshly in order to speak. "You--you are a Jedi!"

"No, I am not. Nor am I Sith."

"What are you, then?"

"I am Vergere. What are you?" In the darkness her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

He turned, seeking her blindly. "No more games, Vergere."

"This has never been a game, Jacen Solo."

"Tell me the truth..."

"I tell you nothing but truth." She sounded so close by that Jacen reached for her in the dark.

"I thought everything you tell me is a lie..."

"Yes. And the truth."

"What kind of truth is that?"

"Is there more than one? Why even ask? You will find no truth in me."

This time her voice came from behind him; he whirled, extending his hands, but found nothing he could grasp.

"No games," he insisted.

"There is nothing that is not a game. A serious game, to be sure: a permanent game. A lethal game. A game so grave that it can be well played only with joyous abandon."

"But you said..."

"Yes. It has never been a game. And it always has. Either way, or both: you had better play to win."

"How can I play if you won't even tell me the rules...? "

"There are no rules." A scamper of footsteps to his right; Jacen moved toward them silently. "But the game does have a name," she said from the opposite side of the room. "We are playing the same game we have been playing ever since Myrkr: we are playing 'Who is Jacen Solo?'"

He thought with longing of the glow rod, lost with his sliced-open knapsack in the crater above. Thinking of the glow rod, of bright golden light springing from his fist, made him suddenly ache for his lightsaber: he thought of that clean green glow filling the room, cutting through all shadows, making everything clear again. His hands burned to hold it one more time.

In building that lightsaber, he had built himself an ident.i.ty. He had built himself a destiny. He had built himself.

"If that's the game," he said, "I can end it right now. I know who I am, Vergere. No matter what you do to me. No matter what new torture you put me through. If I never touch the Force again. It doesn't matter.

I know."

"Do you?"

"Yes," he said solidly into the darkness. "I'm a Jedi."

A long, long silence, in which he seemed to hear the entire room drawing a slow, slow breath.