Fate of the Jedi: Backlash (16 page)

Luke rejoined his son at the fringes of the crowd and toweled off with a cloth from the cargo speeder. He gave his son a significant look. “Anything?”

Ben, back in his customary black—he did not want Olianne or others to become accustomed to seeing him in more concealing garments when he was with his father—shook his head. “She’s the conversational equivalent of a monkey-lizard on too much caf. Here, there, everywhere, and it’s impossible to pin her down.”

“Pity.”

“She did say something about liking the Dathomiri, wishing her people could learn from them. It was innocuous … but it kind of sent chills down my spine.”

Luke looked around. “That’s good. Good awareness on your part. And if we can figure out what she wants to learn, maybe we can determine a weakness in her Sith Order. What do the Dathomiri have that the Sith don’t?”

“Unique Force abilities. Interesting mating habits.”

Luke snorted.

“Dad, is it true that Teneniel Djo tried to marry you against your will?” Teneniel Djo, mother of Tenel Ka, had been a Witch of Dathomir.

“If
marry
is the word, yes. So be careful who you smile at around here. I’m not ready to be a grandfather. Or even a father-in-law.”

“Don’t worry. What are my prospects here? A bunch of women who are used to ruling their men, and one Sith girl.”

Ben spent time in the shadow of the cargo speeder, using macrobinoculars borrowed from Carrack to spy on Vestara.

But, blast her, she didn’t do anything suspicious.

She watched the competitions with interest and enthusiasm. She spoke often with Raining Leaves, especially Olianne, and not infrequently with Kaminne and Halliava.

Vestara chatted and cheered, was warm to some and chilly with others. She moved with a dancer’s grace that was at odds with the slight awkwardness of any young woman her age.

She was, to Ben’s increasing aggravation, like most teenage girls he had met. Nothing about her screamed
Sith
. She was not surrounded by a miasma of evil, not even by the sort of implacable drive and focus that had been characteristics of Jacen Solo as he became darker.

Ben wished intensely to find some personal reason to dislike the girl, and couldn’t.

He was distracted by a competition—by Han Solo stepping up to the front of a crowd of competitors. Belatedly, Ben realized that it was a blaster pistol competition for those without the Arts. He had been hearing the slow, rhythmic blasts of methodical shooting for some time.

Now Han stood at the front of the line as targets, small clay plates, were stood on end in brackets atop ten wooden posts.

The clan members setting up the targets had barely gotten to a safe distance from them when Han drew and began firing. Unlike the previous competitors, he shot from the hip. His shots came so fast that Ben could barely distinguish between them. In less than three seconds all ten plates were smashed into expanding clouds of clay and gas. Han grinned, twirled his blaster on his finger, and reholstered it.

Ben smiled, too. Han was taking a chance that the reduction in accuracy he’d suffer from firing so fast would be more than offset, if he cleared his targets, by the dismay his show would cause in other competitors.

And he was right. Ben saw faces fall among the other shooters. Many in the audience cheered the ostentatious display of skill.

Tasander Dest, leader of the Broken Columns, stepped up, seeming not at all disheartened. The organizers of the event set up ten new targets. When they were clear of the posts, Dest drew and fired just as Han had. Ten targets exploded into clay fragments.

Han made an unhappy face. Ben snickered. It was good for his uncle to run up against people who could give him a hard time.

There was, to Ben’s surprise, a speeder bike race. Enough members of the Raining Leaves and Broken Columns had acquired the vehicles, whether by trading or stealing Ben didn’t know, to warrant such a competition. There was only one race, for those without the Arts, and eight competitors lined up to participate. Ben supposed that there were not enough Force-users with speeder bikes to hold a heat.

As the speeders roared from the starting line, Ben realized that something was working at him. Nagging him. He pulled down his macrobinoculars and thought about it. Something he’d missed? He was still bothered by Vestara’s claims of having lost her lightsaber. He couldn’t imagine losing his that way, but questions put by Luke and Ben to members of the Raining Leaves made it clear that Vestara had come into their company with nothing but the clothes on her back, with no way to have carried a concealed lightsaber.

No, although that question did concern Ben, it wasn’t what was eating at him. He tried to drift away from thoughts and puzzles, to feel the ambient flow of the Force through him.

There was malevolent intent at work here in the camp.

He could feel it, a faint tinge of malice, very scattered, very diffuse. He immediately thought of Vestara, but, to his surprise, even resuming his observation of her through the macrobinoculars, he did not feel that it emanated from her.

And as the sun rose higher, that sensation grew, even though it became no more focused.

Near noontime, Ben greeted the other offworlders and Tribeless Sha as they returned for the midday meal. “I saw you shooting,” he told Han. “How’d you do?”

“First place, of course. Seventy of seventy.” Han’s tone was matter-of-fact. “That fancy boy from the Broken Columns came in second, sixty-nine of seventy.” He jerked a thumb toward two of their companions. “Carrack and Yliri tied at sixty-eight, and they had a shoot-off to break the tie. Yliri smoked him.”

Carrack scowled. “I don’t practice much with pistols. If a target is close enough to be in pistol range, I’ve fouled up somehow with my rifle.”

“Excuses, excuses,” Yliri said cheerfully. She held up a medallion, circular and about five centimeters in diameter; it was of yellow porcelain, had the image of a pistol on it, and hung from a leather thong. “They give out awards.”

Han held up his. It was glossy black and had apparently been carved from onyx and then polished rather than fashioned from clay. “I think I’ll win six or eight more and have a complete set of coasters.”

Tarth and Sha took over the maintenance of the campfire and the pot of stew over it—Ben’s ostensible reason for staying at the camp all this time—and the others settled down to eat. Luke, Leia, and Ben sat apart, a Jedi cell.

“Do you feel it?” Luke asked.

Leia and Ben nodded. Leia glanced toward her husband. “It has something to do with him.”

“Really?” Luke sounded surprised. “He hasn’t been here long enough to give anyone reason to harm him—”

“That doesn’t take Han very long,” Leia assured him.

“—meaning that it may have something to do with his relationship with Dathomir from before. When he theoretically won it gambling.”

Ben shook his head. “If it were just him, maybe. But I’m feeling malice that’s more widespread.”

They quieted for a minute as Tarth and Sha moved among them, distributing bowls of stew. Ben ate, surprised at how hungry he’d become just from hours of spying. He himself had assembled the stew from ingredients provided by the Dathomiri and scavenged from the supplies brought by the offworlders. It was largely made up of Redgill fish, sliced tree tubers from the rain forest, and tart clusterfruit leaves, all seasoned by Ben to spicy Corellian standards. He had to admit that it had turned out pretty well.

Then he felt just a trickle of alarm and wondered if, somehow, the stew had been poisoned while he wasn’t looking.

Luke and Leia felt it, too. It appeared that Dyon did as well; the man’s head snapped up, and he looked around.

Leia rose in a smooth motion and walked over to her husband. “Don’t move, Han.” Her voice was pleasant enough.

He stopped with a wooden spoon halfway to his mouth. “You want to remember me just like this, right?”

“Sure.” She leaned over him, past him, and grabbed at something on the ground. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

When she straightened, she had a serpent in her hand, gripping it just behind the neck, and it was in the process of coiling around her arm. It was mostly green, with red and yellow bands decorating it. The color scheme was one of warning.

Han came upright as if he were a puppet yanked to his feet by an overly energetic child. His stew splashed across Carrack’s legs. He spun around, somehow keeping an eye on Leia’s snake while also scanning every meter of ground near him. “What the …”

“Kodashi viper.” Sha’s tone was flat, but her eyes were big. “Most poisonous serpent in the rain forest. It bites you, you die in minutes, no antidote. But they’re good to eat.”

Leia displayed the serpent to Sha. “Are they found around here?”

Sha shook her head. “It’s too cold here at night.”

“It was directed.” Luke kept his voice low, but everyone at the offworlders’ camp heard him. “That’s what we were feeling. It was directed through the Force—”

There was a cry from elsewhere in the camp, a man’s cry of pain and dismay. It was so visceral that it brought the rest of the offworlders to their feet, and they craned their necks to look in the direction of the noise. It came from a campfire in the Broken Columns camp, and they could see, at this distance, a group of men standing in a circle, some of them bending over, swinging burning brands at something on the ground. Finally, one of them drew a blaster pistol and fired. The others waited for a moment, then backed away and turned their attention to something on the ground a couple of meters away, something Ben could not see.

Luke, Ben, and their companions headed in that direction, as did scores of Dathomiri … and then there was another cry, again a man’s cry, from elsewhere in the Broken Columns camp.

Half an hour later, what had been mystery and puzzlement had been revealed as tragedy.

At the same time the serpent in the offworlders’ camp was coiling to strike at Han, five more kodashi vipers were preparing to strike elsewhere in the camp—all in the Broken Columns area. One had been speared before striking, but the other four had been successful. Four men, all winners of various events at these games, had been poisoned, had suffered agonizing pain from the serpents’ neurotoxins, and had died within minutes. Gone were the winners of the speeder bike race, the wrestling, the long footrace, and the spear-throw, all for those without Arts.

Within minutes a man of the Broken Columns—bearded, burly, dressed in tan leather vest and kilt—moved out to the gap between the two camps, only meters from the offworlders’ campfire, and began to shout. “It was them!” His voice, grating and deep, was loud enough to carry to every corner of the camp. He pointed into the center of the Raining Leaves encampment. “They say they want to unite, but they mean they want us as slaves again. They’ll kill any man who stands out above the rest—”

“Liar!” That was Firen, trainer of rancors. She ran out into the gap between camps, redness and an expression of anger suffusing her face.
She charged the shouting man and, despite his effort to twist away, struck him an open-palm blow to the chest. The impact took the man off his feet and sent him to the ground.

Ben headed that way. Women and men from all over the campsite also moved in the direction of the altercation.

The bearded man, despite the raw power of the blow that had taken him down, rolled away from Firen and stood in a single graceful motion. Though somewhat bent over from the obvious pain in his chest, he was fully functional, and his hand fell on the hilt of his sheathed knife.

Ben put on a burst of speed, though his experience slowed down as his sense of time distorted.

In what seemed like exaggerated slow motion, the man drew his knife, which had a double-edged blade that was probably thirty centimeters long. He held his left hand, his empty hand, before him, his knife hand drawn back, as he stepped toward Firen.

And then Ben was upon them. He drew his lightsaber, ignited it, and struck all in a single motion. The glowing blade hit the man’s knife just ahead of the crossguard. The noise of energy blade meeting steel was almost musical as the lightsaber sheared the knife in half. Ben deactivated his weapon and took half a step back before the bearded man and Firen could even react.

The bearded man, stunned, looked down at his ruined weapon. Firen, her angry expression unchanged, now kept an eye on Ben and drew away from him.

Luke was there, too, all of a sudden, in their midst. When he spoke, his voice was nowhere near as loud as the bearded man’s, but it seemed to carry just as far. “Tell me. Who thinks for the Broken Columns?”

Onrushing Dathomiri were now skidding to a halt. Eager a moment ago to mix it up with other tribesmen, they seemed far more wary of assaulting armed Jedi. One man cried out, “What do you mean, who thinks for us? You mean, who speaks for us.”

“No.” There was considerable scorn in Luke’s voice. “Clearly, this man
speaks
for you. It’s just as clear that he doesn’t think at all.”

“I spoke the truth.” The bearded man hurled the knife hilt down between them. “No man of the Broken Columns would send vipers
against us. Killing our own champions. It was them.” He pointed variously among the Raining Leaves gathered around, and his finger stopped when it found Halliava. “It was her! She even dresses in kodashi colors.”

Halliava fixed the man with a look of mixed irritation and pity. “Many of us do. Some of
you
do. Their stealth and power are to be admired. But would I dress in their colors and then send them against you, implicating myself? I’d have to be as stupid as you. Besides, who among us could control so many snakes at once?”

That question did make them think. Tribesmen and tribeswomen began looking around for a likely suspect. As often as not, their attention became fixed on the Jedi.

“That’s an easy one to answer.” The speaker was Tasander Dest, just arriving. He stepped out into the open space, joining the Jedi, the bearded man, and Firen. Kaminne Sihn was right behind him.

He clapped the bearded man on the shoulder. “Drola, think about it. Who has the Arts to command the serpents? Who wants to return things to the way they were generations ago? Who would be happy for brave men to die and for Raining Leaves women to take the blame?”