by Star Wars
That was when he heard it—the unmistakable servo whir of mechanized belt treads moving up from behind.
He spun around to see a small maintenance droid advancing blithely toward him, carrying more bones with it. When the droid saw Maul, it stopped and squawked at him in some form of machine language.
“What are you doing here?” Maul asked it.
The droid didn’t move. Then, with a panicked chirp, it reversed its treads and tried to get away, but Maul lunged for it and hoisted it up, arresting its escape.
“Easy, Jagannath,” a voice said. “There’s no need to terrorize my droid, now is there?”
Maul set the thing aside and looked around to face the diminutive inmate standing behind him, beaming serenely up at him. It was the Chadra-Fan he’d met in the mess hall, the only one who hadn’t reacted to the explosion in the kitchen.
“Coyle?”
“Lost your way among the great unwashed, did you, brother?” Brushing the droid off, Coyle patted it on its head and sent the thing on its way. “What are you doing all the way down here, we wonder?”
“I followed the clawbird,” Maul said.
“Bird?” Coyle blinked at him. “Now that’s a riddle worth pondering, isn’t it? Why did the prisoner chase the bird?” Then, without waiting for Maul’s answer, he knelt down and began gathering the bones that the droid had dropped, humming quietly to himself as he did so. “Mind giving me a hand with these, brother? Got a work in progress around here somewhere, doesn’t we?”
Maul looked at the bone sculptures. “All these are yours?”
“Hobby of mine, isn’t it?” Coyle gave the armload of bones a fretful glance. “These aren’t going to be enough. I was supposed to meet a couple of the Kings here—they were bringing me another shipment.” He swung one arm, encompassing the sculptures. “I build things, you see. And around a place like this, bones are some of the most common construction materials. Catch my meaning, do you?”
He gestured across the vacant darkness to the other side of the conveyer belt by the opposite wall, and Maul looked up. The Chadra-Fan’s newest sculpture was a towering convocation of femurs, ribs, and vertebrae with sleek, skeletal wings and a face built completely out of skulls. It rose into the uppermost shadows of the factory floor, at least eight meters high.
But there was an aspect of it that Maul hadn’t noticed before. Viewed from a certain angle, the bones crisscrossed to form a pattern. Like a mathematical equation or some foreign alphabet, a code that defied immediate interpretation.
He cocked his head, stepping closer. There was something inside the sculpture, something he couldn’t quite see from here.
“What does it mean?”
“Mean? Mean?” Coyle chuckled again. “It means you still haven’t answered my riddle, brother.”
“What question?”
“Why does the prisoner follow the bird?” The Chadra-Fan peered up at his own sculpture for a moment, then, without waiting for Maul’s answer, tucked a pile of slender bones under one arm and scurried up a ladder to the top of a maintenance gantry alongside the sculpture.
Maul glared up at him. “What else do you build down here?”
“Oh, all sorts of wonderful things.”
“Weapons?”
“Ah, that’s another riddle, isn’t it?” Coyle gazed down at him, and this time his rodent-like face bore no trace of expression. “Anything can be a weapon,” he said quietly, “isn’t that so?” Then another glint of a smile as he ran his fingers along the underside of the gantry arm and held them up for Maul to see the faint reddish-black residue. “ ‘Slimy to touch, greasy to feel, but mix me with blood and I’ll eat through steel.’ ” His eyes twinkled. “Do you take my meaning, brother?”
“Enough riddles.” Maul felt the last of his patience draining away. He grabbed the Chadra-Fan by the shoulder, drawing him close. “I know that I’m getting closer to Iram Radique. I need to talk to him soon. My employer has business to transact.”
“Your employer?” a cool voice spoke up from behind him. “And what employer might that be?”
Maul released Coyle and spun around. The Twi’lek was standing less than a meter away, his gaze fixed on Maul’s. His approach had been absolutely silent, as if he’d been borne forth on a current of dark smoke.
“Zero,” he said.
“Jagannath.” The Twi’lek nodded at him in acknowledgment, then turned his attention to the unfinished bone sculpture next to the maintenance gantry. “Ah.” He touched it with what appeared to be genuine admiration. “This is coming along very well, Coyle. You’ve made great strides.”
“I thank you,” Coyle said. “I’m still not finished, though. I need more bones.”
“No shortage of those. What is it that we say?” The Twi’lek considered. “ ‘The worm turns …’ ”
Coyle smiled, finishing the saying: “ ‘And there are always more bones.’ ”
“Worm?” Maul asked.
“Ah,” Coyle said, turning back to Maul. “That’s the next question, isn’t it?” He smiled, but this time there was very little warmth in it, as he spoke in that same sing-song rhyme: “ ‘The nightmare had a nightmare of its own, deep inside the darkness, fully grown.’ ”
Maul turned to Zero for an explanation. “What is he talking about?”
“My friend here speaks of the Syrox,” Zero said, “the Wolf Worm of Cog Hive Seven. The one that moves in the ductwork of the prison, where it lives and grows fat on the blood from the matches. A nightmare within our nightmare, if you like. You may have already encountered its offspring, Jagannath—and you no doubt will again. But the thing itself, well …” He stopped and shuddered with revulsion. “At night sometimes, in the lowest maintenance shafts, if you put your ear to the wall …”
“Horror stories don’t interest me,” Maul said.
“Being one yourself,” Coyle piped up, “I would think they might, wouldn’t it?”
Ignoring the Chadra-Fan, Maul kept his attention focused on Zero. “I met the man you told me about,” he said. “The one who came here looking for Iram Radique. The one who saved his life. His name is Artagan Truax.”
“Truax …” The Twi’lek’s expression was impossible to read. “Is that right?”
“Radique exists,” Maul said. “And I know he’s in here somewhere. The gangs serve him … or someone who works for him. They smuggle the weapons parts in on the supply shipments. There’s a chain of command, and Radique uses it protect his identity.” He waited for Zero to deny any of this, but the Twi’lek just regarded him thoughtfully. When he spoke again, his voice was low and careful.
“Assuming that you are one step closer to finding the truth,” Zero murmured, “you’ll need to look much harder than that.”
“Who’s above the gangs?” Maul asked. “Who’s the go-between?”
Zero gazed at him. “You know, Coyle is right. Cog Hive Seven is a nightmare. And yet …” The Twi’lek regarded him silently for a moment. “You have already witnessed courage within these walls as well, have you not? And perhaps even selflessness?”
Maul felt his forehead growing hot with anger. “I see only weakness. And weakness is its own punishment, just as strength is its own reward.”
“Is it so simple, then?” the Twi’lek inquired, but the remark didn’t seem to have anything to do with what Maul had said. “And meanwhile, you remain unswerving in your mission.”
“Yes.”
“The search for Iram Radique.”
“Yes,” Maul said again. And in that moment he glimpsed another possibility, one that hadn’t consciously occurred to him before now. What if all of this—even these oblique riddles, this maddening uncertainty, the questions that themselves seemed pointless and incidental—might all be part of some larger test from Sidious, a means of evaluating his capabilities as a Sith Lord before he allowed Maul to participate fully in the Grand Plan?
He narrowed his eyes at the Twi’lek.
“I need to know every
thing.”
“In that case, Jagannath, I invite you to look upon the answer to your own riddle. Do you remember it?” He gestured up at the bone sculptures.
“Why does the prisoner chase the bird?” And now Maul saw what was moving inside it, flapping its black wings in the shadows. “I don’t—”
“Because it’s a rook,” Zero said.
Maul turned back around to look at him. But the Twi’lek had already turned and started to walk away from Maul, descending into the darkness.
24
WISHLIST
“Boy. Wake up.”
Maul watched as Eogan opened his eyes and stared directly up at the red, tattooed face peering down at him. When Eogan tried to sit up, Maul held his shoulders down, pinning him flat to his bunk, leaning down to speak into his ear.
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s still in medbay,” the boy said. “His leg—”
Maul shook his head. “I just checked. He’s not there. Where was he taken?”
“Taken?” The bewilderment in Eogan’s face erupted into panic. His face looked haggard and terrified, his cheek still bruised and swollen from where Voystock’s elbow had struck it, and then realization began to seep through his features. “Why would anyone—”
“Your father knew Radique,” Maul said.
“Who?”
“Iram Radique. Your father saved his life and followed him here to Cog Hive Seven. That’s why he brought you here. In medbay he told me that you have information about where I can find him. He said you know everything that he knows.”
“That’s not …” Eogan shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that, I swear.”
Maul resisted the urge to shake him just to see what might come loose. It had not been a good night. Since leaving the factory floor and his highly unsatisfactory meeting with Zero and Coyle, he’d prowled the holding cells restlessly, making his way to medbay, only to find it deserted. The old man’s cell was empty, too. Maul had questioned the gang members, but no one knew anything of Artagan Truax’s whereabouts. Having spoken Radique’s name aloud, the old man seemed to have vanished completely, swallowed whole by the system that imprisoned him.
“Look, you have to believe me,” Eogan said. “If I knew anything, I’d tell you.” He gaped up at Maul beseechingly. “I’ve never even heard of this guy Radique.”
Maul looked down at him. Maddening as it was, everything the boy said rang true. His ignorance on the topic of Radique and his father’s connection to the arms dealer sounded absolutely authentic.
There was only one part of the story that didn’t make sense.
“If you don’t have any connection with Radique,” Maul said, “then why are you still alive? Why didn’t the guards terminate you and your father after you tried to escape?”
To this, the boy had no answer.
Maul left him there in his bunk and went back out to the concourse, up the long hallway to the silence that lay beyond.
“Jagannath?” Izhsmash’s voice whispered. “It’s me.”
Maul paused and glanced down to where the other inmate was crouched back against the wall outside the prison laundry facility. Even here amid the leftover reek of detergent, he’d smelled the Nelvaanian before he’d seen him, the dampish, feral odor of the inmate’s fur already familiar to his nostrils.
“Brought you something,” Izhsmash said, digging into the hip pocket of his uniform and slipping a tightly folded rectangle of flimsiplast into Maul’s palm. “Just downloaded it off a utility server. Not the easiest thing to get, either, on account of—”
“Is it complete?”
“Uh-huh.” There was no mistaking the trace of pride in the Nelvaanian’s voice. “That’s everybody, far as I can tell.”
Maul scanned the list of inmates—two hundred and eighteen names in all, with numbers, cell assignments, and criminal histories in reverse chronological order, some of them going back several years. His own name was the most recent addition: a single name, Jagannath, and a list of trumped-up mercenary charges and crimes that Sidious had provided for him before he’d dispatched Maul on this mission.
Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware of Izhsmash beginning to edge away into the shadows.
“Wait.”
The Nelvaanian stopped.
“Who’s this?” Maul pointed to a name midway down the list, one that had leapt out at him instantly, echoing the last word he’d heard spoken from Zero, down on the factory floor.
“Rook?” Izhsmash looked up at him, eyes widening ever so slightly.
“Who is he?”
The Nelvaanian shook his head. “Don’t know. Never heard of him before.”
“He’s here in Cog Hive Seven. What species is he?”
“No idea.” Izhsmash shrugged. “Look, there’re lots of inmates on this list I’ve never met,” he said. He was already beginning to back away again, casting longing glances at the hallway. “Now, if there’s nothing else you need—”
“There is.” Maul’s hand fell to the other inmate’s shoulder, stopping him. “I need you to hack back into the system again—get into the algorithm itself. Fix the next match so I’m fighting Rook.”
“What?” Izhsmash shot him a look of pure incredulity. “Do you have any idea how difficult that’s going to be? Especially after I’ve hacked it once already?” He shook his head. “After what happened in medbay, the guards will be looking for anything out of the ordinary.”
“You’ve done well,” Maul said, nodding at the list of inmates. “You’ve already proven yourself more valuable to my cause than the one who was leading you. Strabo will learn his place beneath you,” Maul said. “If he has not already.”
“I’ll need time.”
“You’ll have till the next match. By my count that gives you three hours.”
“But—”
“I’ll create a diversion,” Maul said. “I suggest you take advantage of it.”
“How will I know when the time is right?”
“I’ll be in contact with you.”
He took the list and walked away.
25
SKULL GAME
There was no meal being served at the moment, but Maul found Coyle in the mess hall anyway, on his hands and knees. The Chadra-Fan was humming to himself jauntily as he burrowed through the refuse bins in the corner, digging for scraps and tossing them onto a spare tray that he’d scavenged from the kitchen. Maul waited until Coyle stopped, straightened up, and turned around, his whiskers dripping with something thick and pasty.
“Jagannath,” the Chadra-Fan said, beaming, as convivial as ever. “Ready to fight again, are you?” He rubbed his hands together. “We’re all expecting to see you victorious, and very soon.”
Maul didn’t answer. His response, when it came, was to reach out and dump a small handful of bones onto Coyle’s tray. The Chadra-Fan frowned at them, momentarily flummoxed, then looked back up at Maul, blinking quickly.
“What are these?”
“For you,” Maul said. “To use in your work.”
“Is that so?” Coyle picked one of the bones up and examined it thoughtfully. “Yes, I might have use for it, yes, indeed, I might. I thank you, Jagannath. You have my gratitude, yes, you do, although it makes me wonder—”
“I’ve been looking into your background,” Maul said. “Why you were sent here to Cog Hive Seven in the first place.”
Coyle’s eyebrows twitched. “Oh yes?”
“You weren’t always a sculptor. Before you came here, you made … other things.” He waited. “Counterfeit currency, to be exact. Credits on demand.”
The rodent’s face became the very picture of serene innocence. “Did I?”
“If I were to ask you to ply your trade again for me,” Maul said, “I could supply you with any number of bones for your sculptures in exchange.”
“How much are we talking about, exactly?”
“Three hundred thousand credits.”
“And what would you be wanting it for?”
“I need to buy something.”
“Well.” Coyle rubbed his hands together and bobbed his head from side to side thoughtfully. “Well, well, well. I would need materials, of course. A means of fabrication, a craftsman’s best friends are his tools. And the end product—”
“Make a list,” Maul said. “Give it to Zero. He’ll get what you need.”
“And for me?”
Maul stopped and turned back. “What do you want?”
“My newest work,” Coyle said. “I believe you’ve seen it. It could benefit from a certain type of skull. A larger one—saurian, perhaps?” His tongue flicked out and moistened his lips. “I hear there’s a Deathspine varactyl locked up in one of the lower cellblocks …”
“A varactyl?”
“Intriguing creatures, have you seen them, brother? Fifteen meters long.” The Chadra-Fan grinned. “You see, it’s a fascinating thing, the way the sinuses in their armor-plated skulls are designed to funnel and amplify sound, to create a certain specific type of noise when the air passes through—”
Maul nodded. “It’s done.”
26
OLD MAN
Artagan Truax awoke to the sound of voices in the darkness, two of them, conferring in hushed tones from a place he couldn’t see. At first he wasn’t even sure they were real.
The floor beneath him was cold and hard. He didn’t know how long he’d been lying here—the pain in his leg, or what remained of it, was playing tricks with time, stretching it out while it sucked him in and out of consciousness. He was shaking and trembling, spasms that only made the agony more intense. His forehead was blazing with fever.