Rule of Two (2 page)

There was movement on the far edge of the battlefield. Squinting against the sun, Darovit saw half a dozen figures slowly making their way through the carnage, gathering up the fallen bodies of friend and foe alike. He wasn’t alone—others had survived the thought bomb too!

He ran forward, but his excitement cooled as he drew close enough to make out the features of those tasked with cleaning the battlefield. He recognized them as volunteers from the Army of Light. Not Jedi, but ordinary men and women who’d sworn allegiance to Lord Hoth. The thought bomb had only taken those with sufficient power to touch the Force: Non-Force-using folk like these were immune to its devastating effects. But Darovit wasn’t like them. He had a gift. Some of his earliest memories were of using the Force to levitate toys for the amusement of his younger cousin Rain, when they were both children. These people had survived because they were ordinary, plain. They weren’t special like he was. Darovit’s survival was a mystery—just one more thing about all this he didn’t understand.

As he approached, one of the figures sat down on a rock, weary from the task of gathering the dead. He was an older man, nearly fifty. His face looked drawn and haggard, as if the grim task had sapped his mental reserves along with the physical. Darovit recognized his features from those first few weeks he’d spent in the Jedi
camp, though he’d never bothered to learn the old man’s name.

A sudden realization froze Darovit in his tracks. If he recognized the man, then the man might also recognize him. He might remember Darovit. He might know the young man was a traitor.

The truth about the Jedi had disgusted Darovit. Repulsed him. His illusions and daydreams crushed by the weight of harsh reality, he’d acted like a spoiled child and turned against the Jedi. Seduced by easy promises of the dark side’s power, he’d switched sides in the war and thrown himself in with the Brotherhood of Darkness. It was only now that he understood how wrong he’d been.

The realization had come upon him as he’d witnessed Bug’s death—a death for which he was partly responsible. Too late he had learned the true cost of the dark side. Too late he understood that, through the thought bomb, Lord Kaan’s madness had brought devastation upon them all.

He was no longer a follower of the Sith; he no longer hungered to learn the secrets of the dark side. But how could this old man, a devoted follower of General Hoth, know that? If he remembered Darovit, he would remember him only as the enemy.

For a second he thought about trying to escape. Just turn and run, and the tired old man still catching his breath wouldn’t be able to stop him. It was the kind of thing he’d once done all the time. But things were different now. Whether it was from guilt, maturity, or simply a desire to see it all end, Darovit didn’t run away. Whatever fate awaited him, he chose to stay and face it.

Moving with slow but determined steps, he approached the rock where the man was sitting, seemingly lost in thought. Darovit was only a few meters away when the man finally glanced up to acknowledge him.

There was no glint of recognition in his eyes. There was only an empty, haunted look.

“All of them,” the man mumbled, though whether he was talking to Darovit or himself wasn’t clear. “All the Jedi and all of the Sith … all gone.”

The man turned his head, fixing his vacant stare on the dark entrance to a small cave nearby. A chill went through Darovit as he realized what the man was talking about. The entrance led underground, through twisting tunnels to the cavern deep beneath the ground where Kaan and his Sith had gathered to unleash the thought bomb.

The man grunted and shook his head, dispelling the morbid state he had slipped into. Standing up with a weary sigh, his mind was once more focused on his duty. He gave Darovit a slight nod but otherwise paid him no further heed as he resumed the macabre task of rolling the corpses in cloth so they could be collected and given honorable burials.

Darovit turned toward the cave. Again, part of him wanted to back away and run. But another part of him was drawn to the black maw of the tunnel. Maybe there were answers to be found inside. Something to make sense of all the death and violence; something to help him see the reasons behind the endless war and bloodshed. Maybe he’d discover something to help him grasp some purpose behind everything that had happened here.

The air grew steadily cooler the deeper he descended. He could feel a tingling in the pit of his stomach: anticipation mixing with a sick sense of dread. He wasn’t sure what he’d find once he reached the underground chamber at the tunnel’s end. More bodies, perhaps. But he was determined not to turn back.

As the darkness enveloped him, he silently cursed himself for not bringing along a glow rod. He had a
lightsaber at his belt; getting his hands on one of the fabled weapons was one of the temptations that had lured him over to the Sith. But even though he’d betrayed the Jedi just to lay claim to it, in the darkness of the tunnel, he no longer felt any desire to ignite it and use its light to guide him. The last time he’d drawn it had resulted in Bug’s death, and the memory had tainted the prize he had sacrificed everything to gain.

He knew that if he turned back, he might never gather enough courage to make the trip down again, so he pressed on despite the darkness. He moved slowly, reaching out with his mind, trying to draw on the Force to guide him through the lightless tunnel. Even so he kept tripping over the uneven ground, or stubbing his toes. In the end he found it easier just to run one hand along the rocky wall and use it to guide himself.

His progress was slow but steady, the tunnel floor becoming steeper and steeper until he was half climbing down it in the darkness. After half an hour he noticed a faint light emanating from far ahead, a soft glow coming from the distant end of the passage. He picked up his pace, only to trip over a small outcropping of stone jutting up from the rough-hewn ground. He fell forward with a cry of alarm, falling and tumbling down the sharp slope until he came to rest, bruised and battered, at the tunnel’s end.

It opened into a wide, high-ceilinged chamber. Here the dim glow that had drawn him forward was reflected from flecks of crystal embedded in the surrounding stone, illuminating the cavern so he could see everything clearly. A few stalactites still hung from the roof high above; hundreds more lay smashed on the cavern’s floor, dislodged when Kaan had detonated the thought bomb.

The bomb itself, or what remained of it, hovered a meter above the ground in the very center of the cavern—the source of the illumination. At first glance it appeared
to be an oblong, metallic orb four meters from top to bottom, and nearly three meters across at its widest point. Its surface was a flat, dusky silver that projected a pale radiance but at the same time devoured all light reflected back to it by the crystals trapped in the surrounding walls.

Rising to his feet, Darovit shivered. He was surprisingly cold; the orb had sucked all the warmth from the air. He took a step forward. The dust and debris crunching below his foot sounded flat and hollow, as if the thought bomb were swallowing not just the heat of the cavern, but the noise as well.

Pausing, he listened to the unnatural silence. He couldn’t hear anything, but he definitely felt something. A faint, thrumming vibration running through the floor and up into his body, a steady, rhythmic pulse coming from the orb.

Darovit held his breath, unaware he was doing so, and took another tentative step forward. When nothing happened he let the air escape from his lungs with a long, soft sigh. Gathering his courage, he continued his cautious approach, reaching out a hand but never taking his eyes from the sphere.

He drew close enough to see dark bands of shadow slowly twisting and turning beneath the shimmering surface, like black smoke trapped deep within the core. Two more steps and he was close enough to touch it. His hand trembling only slightly, he leaned forward and pressed his palm against the surface.

His mind exploded with wails of pure anguish; a shrieking cacophony of voices rose from the orb, all the victims of the thought bomb screaming out in torment.

Darovit wrenched his hand free and staggered back, dropping to his knees.

They were still alive! The bodies of the Jedi and Sith had been consumed by the thought bomb, crumbling into dust and ash, but their spirits had survived, sucked
into the vortex at the heart of the bomb’s blast only to be imprisoned forever.

He had only touched the surface for the briefest of seconds, but the keening of spirits had nearly driven him mad. Trapped inside the impregnable shell, they were condemned to an eternity of endless, unbearable suffering. A fate so horrible that Darovit’s mind refused to fully grasp the implications.

Still hunched over on the ground, he clasped his head in his hands in a gesture of helpless futility. He’d come here seeking answers and explanations. Instead he’d found an abomination against nature itself, one from which every part of his being instinctively recoiled.

“I don’t understand … I don’t understand … I don’t understand …”

He muttered the phrase over and over again, huddled on the ground, rocking slowly back and forth on his heels and still clutching his head in his hands.

1

Peace is a lie. There is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken
.

The Code of the Sith

D
arth Bane, the only Sith Lord to escape the devastation of Kaan’s thought bomb, marched quickly under a pale yellow Ruusan sun, moving steadily across the bleak, war-torn landscape. He was two meters tall, and his black boots covered the ground in long, sweeping strides, propelling his large, powerfully muscled frame with a sense of urgent purpose. There was an air of menace about him, accentuated by his shaved head, his heavy brow, and the dark intensity of his eyes. This, even more than his forbidding black armor or the sinister hook-handled lightsaber dangling from his belt, marked him as a man of fearsome power: a true champion of the dark side of the Force.

His thick jaw was set in grim determination against the pain that flared up every few minutes at the back of his bare skull. He had been many kilometers away from the thought bomb when it detonated, but even at that range he had felt its power reverberating through the Force. The aftereffects lingered, sporadic bursts shooting through his brain like a million tiny knives stabbing at the dark recesses of his mind. He had expected these attacks to fade over time, but in the hours since the blast, their frequency and intensity had steadily increased.

He could have called on the Force to keep the pain at
bay, cloaking himself in an aura of healing energy. But that was the way of the Jedi, and Bane was a Dark Lord of the Sith. He walked a different path, one that embraced suffering, drawing strength from the ordeal. He transformed the pain into anger and hate, feeding the flames of the dark side until his physical aspect seemed almost to glow with the fury of a storm it could barely contain.

The terrifying image Bane projected contrasted sharply with the small figure that followed in his wake, struggling to keep up. Zannah was only ten, a waif of a girl with short, curly blond hair. Her clothing was simple and plain to the point of being rustic: a loose-fitting white shirt and faded blue coveralls, both torn and stained from weeks of continuous wear. Anyone who saw her scampering along after Bane’s massive, black-clad form would have been hard-pressed to imagine she was the Sith Master’s chosen apprentice. But looks could be deceiving.

There was power in the child. He’d seen ample proof of that at their first meeting, less than an hour earlier. Two nameless Jedi were dead by her hand. Bane didn’t know all the details surrounding their deaths; he had arrived after the fact to find Zannah crying over the body of a bouncer, one of the telepathic, green-furred species native to Ruusan. The still-warm corpses of the Jedi had been sprawled beside her, their heads lolling at grotesque angles atop broken necks.

Clearly the bouncer had been the child’s friend and companion. Bane surmised that the Jedi must have inadvertently killed the bouncer, only to meet a similar fate when Zannah exacted her revenge. Unaware of her power, they’d been caught off guard when the child—driven by mind-numbing grief and pure, abject hatred—had unleashed the full fury of the dark side on the men who’d slain her friend.

They were victims of cruel misfortune: in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet it would have been inaccurate to call their deaths pointless. In Bane’s eyes, at least, their sacrifice had allowed him to recognize the young girl’s potential. To some the series of events would have seemed preordained, as if the hapless Jedi had been inexorably drawn to their grim end with the sole purpose of uniting Bane and Zannah. No doubt there were even those who would profess that fate and the dark side of the Force had conspired to present the Master with a suitable apprentice. Bane, however, was not one of them.

He believed in the power of the Force, but he also believed in himself: He was more than just a servant of prophecy or a pawn of the dark side, subject to the whims of an inevitable, inescapable future. The Force was a tool he had used to forge his own destiny through strength and cunning. He alone among the Sith had truly earned the mantle of Dark Lord, which was why he alone among them still lived. And if Zannah was worthy of being his apprentice, she would eventually have to prove herself, as well.

He heard a grunt behind him and turned back to see that the girl had tumbled to the ground, falling in her haste to try to keep up with the relentless pace he’d set. She glared at him, anger etched across her features.