by Troy Denning
The threat came to a crashing end, and Abeloth’s tentacle tore free as she went flying backward on a bolt of Force lightning as thick as Ben’s leg. He dropped to his knees, his agony fading quickly. Blood poured from his nose.
Abeloth dropped to the ground about three meters ahead, limned in blue and still pinned against the cobblestones by the Force lightning. As she writhed, her tentacles were twining around themselves, coalescing back into arms. Her long golden hair grew silky and dark, her eyes became oblong and normal, and her skin darkened into the lavender tones of a Keshiri Sith.
Vestara came up beside Ben. Her hands were still extended toward Abeloth, pouring Force lightning into the fallen Keshiri.
“Ben?” Vestara asked. “Are you hurt?”
Instead of replying, Ben continued to kneel on the cobblestones, looking up at Vestara. Her hair and clothes remained relatively dry, and he saw no redness in her face or hands to suggest she had actually put them into the steaming waters and drunk. But as she continued to pour Force lightning into the Keshiri, he could feel the font’s dark energy flowing across the courtyard, swirling over him and through him, filling him with the cold queasy ache of its corrupting power.
“Ben?” Vestara asked again. “Answer me!”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Then get up!” Vestara said. There was a glow in her face, and Ben kept telling himself that it was not joy, that it had to reflect something other than the usual Sith thirst for power. “Together, we can kill Abeloth.”
Ben spun on his knees and wrapped one arm around Vestara’s legs. He rose to his feet, throwing her over his shoulders and using his free hand to catch her far arm and hold her in place.
“No.” He started across the courtyard, away from the Font of Power. “Not like this, we can’t.”
The white points at the bottom of Abeloth’s eyes flared into nests of blue lightning, which kept growing larger and flashing brighter until they finally spilled out of the sockets to engulf her whole head. Luke hurled another blast of Force energy in her direction, then braced himself to take the most devastating counterattack yet. The counterattack never came.
Instead, the Force blast rocked Abeloth up on one leg, where she hung teetering over the Lake of Apparitions for a thousand heartbeats. Luke’s chest was a searing ache around a fist-sized scorch hole, and his Force essence was bleeding out from a dozen smaller wounds, leaving a crescent of twinkling light spread across the dark water. He sprang anyway.
Abeloth only seemed to sag, and it appeared that she might tumble into the water in the eternity it was taking to reach her. But that would have been too easy. Luke and the Sith stranger had been hurling Force attacks at her for a lifetime—or perhaps it was a mere eyeblink—and this was the first time she had shown any reaction.
Then Luke was there at Abeloth’s side, stomp-kicking her legs, knife-handing her throat, grabbing for her head. It was like cotton striking gauze—no popping ligaments or crunching cartilage, just Force essence pushing into Force essence. But the damage was done. Luke’s foot went through Abeloth’s knee; her leg buckled. His hand sank into her larynx, and she drew back wheezing.
He pivoted around behind her, swinging one arm around her shoulder and grabbing for her chin, slipping the other arm up under hers and pressing his wrist into her neck. But grappling was different beyond shadows. There were no pressure points or joint locks or choke holds, only his presence merging with hers, binding him to her in a writhing knot of energy.
Tentacles began to lash at his face, probing for his nose and ears and mouth. A pair of gray tips shot into view, blurring and growing large. Luke closed both eyes and turned away, but not quickly enough. The right eye socket exploded in pain, and everything went dark on that side of his head.
The tattooed stranger stepped in from the left, then slid to the front and drove his stiffened fingers deep into the pit of Abeloth’s stomach. A black spray erupted from the wound, and she writhed in pain as the stranger probed for something to grab.
Abeloth loosed a Force blast, trying to drive the stranger off. He held tight. So did Luke, and all three went tumbling across the lake in a snarled mass of limbs and tentacles.
Then Luke felt an icy twinge between his shoulder blades. The twinge became a sting, and he began to feel something cold flowing down the center of his back. His first thought was Abeloth, that she had sunk a tentacle into his spine—until the lashing of her tentacles slowed and she began to shudder.
Luke did not understand until an eternity later, when the stranger rolled up on his feet and jerked them all to a halt. The Sith seemed to be growing stronger as Abeloth grew weaker, and there were wisps of dark fume swirling off his shoulders and head. It did not take a Jedi Grand Master to understand that Luke was being betrayed by a Force-draining technique.
Still holding Abeloth tight, Luke shifted his hips, rolling them both onto their sides, and kicked a foot through the stranger’s knee. The joint buckled, and the Sith dropped onto the surface of the dark water, still on the opposite side of Abeloth from Luke.
“I’ll release her!” Luke warned.
“Abeloth?” The stranger shook his head. “Never.”
Despite the Sith’s words, the cold stinging inside began to subside, and Luke realized the stranger was not pulling as hard. Abeloth continued to struggle, slipping a pair of tentacles around Luke’s throat and trying to tear herself free. But she was growing weak faster than Luke.
The draining seemed to continue for days; then the stranger threw back his head and screamed in anguish, and it suddenly seemed that only a breath had passed. Shiny black Force energy began to pour from the Sith’s wounds into the lake, spreading outward around them in an oily slick so hot the water began to steam and hiss. Still, the stranger continued to drain Abeloth, and Luke realized that he was not being betrayed—the Sith was suffering as much damage from the attack as was Luke.
Abeloth whipped her chin free of Luke’s hand, ripping the energy knot where they had joined and sending a sparkling line of both of their Force essences splattering across the surface of the lake. She began to roll her head around, gnashing and spitting, trying to sink her fangs into Luke’s arm or the stranger’s—anything she could reach.
Luke slipped his arm down around her throat and pulled hard, merging his form into hers, doing his best to keep her under control.
“Keep going,” Luke urged the stranger. “Pull harder!”
The red glow in the eyes of the shadow-ghouls faded suddenly to pink, and openings began to appear in their staggered-gauntlet formation. Saba sprang into the first gap, holding her ignited lightsaber between her and the nearest ghoul, trying to reach the body to which it was attached by a long writhing tail. The thing kept trying to slip around the blade’s purple-white glow to slash at a head or shoulder or hip.
Saba advanced behind a whirling shield of blocks and slashes, cutting through a shadowy arm here, a leg there, even a neck or body. The pieces dropped away, withering into nothingness before they hit the floor, and the ghoul instantly grew a replacement. Still, the constant hacking was enough to keep the thing from touching Saba, and at last she reached the body itself. She cut the tail free of the corpse’s chest, at the same time kneeling down and reaching for its face.
As quick as she was, the ghoul had already reemerged from the corpse. It came diving in at her, sinking two shadowy hands into her thigh. Saba’s entire leg went numb, then erupted in icy anguish as the thing’s shadowy claws began to slide through her muscle.
Saba used two fingers to close the corpse’s eyes, then rose hissing and cursing and limped away. Olazon was at her side instantly, hitting the corpse with a blast from his flamegun and incinerating it. As he worked, Tahiri was already leaping past them to wave back the next shadow-ghoul. They had tried incinerating the bodies from a distance—before closing the eyes—but that had only complicated matters. The shadow-ghouls had stayed attached to the scorched remains, and it was impossible to make them
go away as long as the eye sockets were uncovered.
Once Olazon had finished, his voice came over the reception bud in Saba’s ear. “You’re getting quicker,” he said. “And only one hit that time. You okay?”
Saba put her weight on her aching leg and, when the muscle merely clinched with cold agony and did not collapse, nodded.
“Yesss, but this one is not growing quicker,” she said. “They are growing slower. Keep going.”
“You sure, Master Sebatyne?” This from Stomper Two, also speaking over the comm net. “I don’t like the changes in their eyes—or how their formation has opened up. This feels like a trap.”
The Void Jumper’s caution was understandable. The pack had advanced only fifteen meters, and already they were down to four hunters. A shadow-ghoul had gotten inside Stomper One’s power armor and caused it to self-destruct, which was why Stomper Two was now at the rear of the pack, carrying a badly dented EMP bomb. And no one was quite certain what had become of Braan, the wounded demolition man. A wave of terror had simply rolled through the Force from his direction, and then a thermal detonator had gone off.
But Saba suspected the change was a good sign. During their strategy meeting on Coruscant, the Jedi had realized it was possible to temporarily weaken at least one of Abeloth’s avatars by killing another. Kill one, weaken the others. The theory was that Abeloth had only a single Force presence, shared by her avatars, so harming any of her avatars would make it easier to defeat all of them. Assuming that the shadow-ghouls were being animated by Abeloth—and Saba saw no other possibility—then they were growing weaker because Luke was succeeding in the Maw.
And that made it even more important to succeed here—and to succeed quickly. It would do the galaxy no good to kill Abeloth in the Maw if she survived here.
Tahiri dropped to a knee, reaching over to close a corpse’s eyes, and a second ghoul drifted over, reaching for her from behind. Saba sprang to her defense, slashing off the thing’s shadowy arms, then slipping in to drive it back with a flurry of lightsaber strikes and sweeps.
As she fought, Saba sneaked a glance up the corridor. Between the flashing of their lightsabers and the fiery glow of Olazon’s flamegun, her infrared vision was completely washed out, and it was impossible to tell how far they still had to go. But the eyes of the ghouls were still visible, and there were at least a dozen pairs glaring out of the darkness ahead.
Too many, too long.
Saba cut the next shadow-ghoul down the center, then leapt through its coalescing body toward the body to which it was connected. She landed astride its chest, aching and chilled to the bone, and quickly closed its eyelids—then popped a thermal grenade off her harness, armed the fuse, and rolled the corpse over on top of it.
“Grenade!” she yelled, and leapt at the next set of glowing eyes.
The Keshiri was trembling in agony. Greasy dark smoke was rising from a shoulder that had been so badly scorched it looked like a burned nerf roast. Her cheeks were hollow, her complexion was so wan it was pale blue, and her sunken eyes were rimmed in red.
But she was still standing, coming at them across the courtyard’s mossy cobblestones.
Even knowing what the woman was, Ben could barely believe his eyes. Vestara had hit her with a bolt of Force lightning powerful enough to take out a Canderous-class hovertank. Still, the avatar had returned to her feet the instant Vestara had been carried too far away from the Font of Power to continue drawing on its power. And now Vestara was standing at his side, shaking even worse than the Keshiri, her complexion still shadowed by its dark energy, her eyes dulled by Force overload.
When the Keshiri snatched her lightsaber off its belt hook and ignited its crimson blade, Ben was almost relieved. It was such a mundane threat that it made him think perhaps Vestara’s attack had driven out Abeloth after all—perhaps all they had to fight now was a simple Sith Lord.
Then the Keshiri spoke, and his hope evaporated. “We are done with patience,” she said in a thousand voices. “Drink together—or die together.”
Ben opened himself to the Force completely, shielding himself from the Font of Power’s darkness by drawing its energies through the power of all he loved in the galaxy, through his faith in the Jedi purpose and the promise of the future—through his confidence in Vestara and the sure knowledge that she would soon join him in the ranks of the Jedi Knights. The Force came pouring into Ben from all sides, irresistible and pure, a flood of light and purpose that no being in the galaxy could deny. He felt himself become the Force, a swirl of power and energy, and he focused all that he was on the approaching Keshiri, hitting her with a Force blast that would have knocked a frigate out of orbit.
The blast caught the avatar square in the chest and rocked her shoulders back at least a couple of centimeters. She paused almost noticeably before she took her next step.
Ben staggered back, exhausted, and nearly fell before Vestara’s hand clamped around his biceps. She pulled him to his feet and began to retreat, pulling him toward the cloud of steam still enveloping the Font of Power.
“So, Ben, what was that supposed to be?” she asked. “The power of the light side?”
“You didn’t do much better,” Ben replied. He pulled his arm free and stopped a few meters outside the steam. “And you were drawing on the font.”
“Yeah … because I’d kind of like to survive this,” Vestara replied, reluctantly stopping with him. “What’s your point?”
“That we don’t have to surrender to her,” Ben whispered. He glanced across the courtyard toward the ruined arcade, then used the Force to lift a section of broken pillar and bring it spinning toward the back of the avatar’s head. “We just have to work together.”
There was no time for Vestara to waste with a witty reply. She simply raised her hands and unleashed another fork of Force lightning, this one far less powerful than when she had been drawing on the font’s power. The Keshiri’s hand rose so fast that Ben barely even saw it move, and he realized their ploy could actually work—that even an avatar could fall prey to a tactical diversion.
The Keshiri caught the lightning bolt in the palm of her hand, and its white-hot energy dwindled to a spark. But the pillar kept coming, striking the back of her head with a sickening thud and sending a bloody spray of skull and brain all the way across the courtyard to splatter Ben and Vestara’s legs.
The avatar did not instantly drop dead. She staggered a few steps forward, carried by the momentum of the impact, then raised her smashed head to reveal that one eye had been knocked free of the socket and was now dangling on her cheek.
The other eye fixed its gaze on Ben.
“Sheeka, Ben!” Vestara took a step away from him—not because she was abandoning him, Ben felt sure, but because it was the smart tactical move. “I think you really made her mad.”
“Let’s make her even madder,” Ben said, reaching out for another section of pillar. “Hit her agai … rrgh!”
The order came to a strangled end as he felt himself flying back into the arcade. His shoulders hit a pillar dead-center, folding so far backward that both shoulder blades touched stone. Then a tremendous crack sounded inside his skull, and his head exploded into dark pain. He felt himself sliding down the pillar toward the cobblestones below, and the last thing he saw was Vestara retreating toward the Font of Power, disappearing into the yellow steam with the avatar close behind.
Abeloth lay tangled in Luke’s arms, a writhing mass of Force energy that had suddenly gone limp a second or a day ago, only to explode an hour or a nanosecond later into a flailing tempest that had sent them all rolling and bouncing across the Lake of Apparition’s dark waters. The stranger was tumbling with them, his hand still buried in Abeloth’s chest, now wailing in agony as gleaming black Force energy steamed from his wounds.
They bounced so close to the shore, Luke grew worried that Abeloth was trying to carry them away from the lake into some new place beyond shadows. And then what? His back hit the water aga
in, and he spun them all around so that his feet were toward the shore. He planted his feet against a moss hummock and kicked off—and sent them all somersaulting back toward the center of the lake. Abeloth stopped struggling and seemed to shrink in his arms, and Luke dared to think that maybe, just maybe she had finally lost hope, that they had exhausted her to the point that she was no longer capable of fighting.
Then she was gone, leaving the stranger and Luke with nothing between them but twenty centimeters of space and the stump of the Sith’s hand, now pointed at Luke’s chest and still drawing Force energy, draining it not from Abeloth now, but directly from Luke.
They stayed like that for an eternity, a void of cold nothingness growing inside Luke as the stranger continued to hang in the air above, draining him. It seemed to Luke that the Sith’s betrayal was premature, that they at least ought to make certain Abeloth was truly dead before they turned to fighting each other … but that was not the way Sith did things.
Luke started to bring his hand up, intending to hit the stranger with a Force blast. But before he could loose it, the Sith’s feet dropped to the water’s surface, and he raised his stump and pointed toward the far end of the lake.
“There!”
Luke craned his neck and saw Abeloth’s silhouette backing into the Mists of Forgetfulness—with the stranger’s wrist still protruding from her chest.
“Stop her!” Luke yelled. “If she disappears into that fog …”
Luke left the sentence unfinished as a fountain of oily black Force energy erupted from the protruding wrist. Abeloth’s mouth gaped open, and her piercing shriek broke over the lake, reverberating across the water like a clap of thunder. Luke glanced over and saw the stranger standing beside him, pointing in her direction, using the Force to draw his missing hand back toward its stump.
Abeloth did not come dancing in to counterattack, did not even try to stand off defensively and weaken them with a blast of Force lightning. She did not have time for such tactics. Luke doubted she would have fled the battle in the first place if she were not already dying, and with her Force essence gushing out of her like a geyser, she had to attack now.