by Sean Stewart
They stared at one another as the still air of the cavern suddenly began to puff and quarter, like a crazy wind. The floor of the passage shook beneath their feet. “Uh-oh,” Scout whispered.
“Keep running!” Fidelis shouted. “We’re almost there!” Moving swiftly in the gloom, he raced through another passage, carrying Scout so high and fast her feet missed the floor for steps at a time.
A rumble, a roar, a deafening crash. “One of the lakes has slid!” Fidelis said. Scout was still trying to puzzle out what he meant when a wall of water dropped suddenly on top of them. Some fissure must have opened up in one of the great underground pools, and what had once been a quiet and predictable little lake was suddenly a moving waterfall that dropped from above, smacking Scout’s head against the droid’s metal side so hard it made her ears ring.
“Master!” the droid cried. In the strobing flare of Whie’s lightsaber, Scout could see him in flashes, knocked down by the sudden rush of water and swept back along the passageway. There was another titanic crash as the roof collapsed on the cavern they had just abandoned.
Fidelis threw Scout clear and darted back into the passage, which had now become a temporary riverbed. The current was driving Whie toward the edge of a newly created waterfall that thundered down into the abyss. Whie’s pale face strobed up out of the freezing water and he stretched out a hand, grabbing for a bump in the rock to hold on to against the river pushing him to his death.
Ignoring the shock of the freezing water and the ringing in her head, Scout summoned all the strength she could and added her will to Whie’s own, using the Force to pin his hand to that rock.
A few seconds later the danger was past. The pool of water had emptied, the current went slack, and Fidelis had reached his Master. The droid picked him up and carried him forward. Enormous relief flowered in Scout’s chest.
“Thanks,” Whie gasped.
“For what?”
“I felt you grab me. The rock was too slippery, I tried for it but I was slipping off. Then you grabbed me, and I held on.” He smiled, gasping, face wet and bruised. “So, thanks for saving my life. Even if I am a pompous arrogant show-off.”
“Yeah, well—you’re my arrogant show-off,” Scout growled. She was flushing with pleasure. “That’s what Jedi do for each other.”
The ground shook under their feet again, and somewhere uncomfortably close a few hundred more metric tons of rock collapsed onto itself. “Come on!” Fidelis said.
He pushed them forward along the passageway, past one side cave, a second, turning in at the third. Then along another thin fissure, so narrow Scout had to turn sideways to make it through, and suddenly there were flagstones underfoot. They were in a dark passageway, like an empty sewer. A few moments later, a door.
Fidelis pulled it open. “Quickly!” Brightness lanced out, dazzling to their dark-adjusted eyes, as the droid pushed them inside and closed the door behind them.
Blinking in the sudden light, Whie realized they were not in a dusty cellar or dungeon, but in a comfortably appointed room, with hangings on the walls and a fire crackling in a carved fireplace. There was a fine carpet on the floor, tapestried with a woodland scene in a border of crimson and cream.
It was the room from his dream.
It was the room from his dream, only there were six assassin droids waiting for them with weapons at the ready, and standing behind them, beside the door they had just stumbled through, was Asajj Ventress. “Master Malreaux,” she said lazily. “Welcome home.”
11
As long as anyone could remember, Yoda had spent most of his time in the Jedi Temple with the very young. Playing with them at ages two and three—hide-and-seek, dodge-bolt, Force tag. The early rambling lessons in the garden where he taught them the secret lives of vegetables, the irresistible burst of shoots, and flowers playing dress-up; clustering them around to watch an orb-spider weave its web, or a bee bumble its way into a mass of blossoms.
When the first combat training started, with falls and rolls and footwork games, Yoda led them. For one thing, he was just their size. The first touch of genuine combat Dooku could remember was playing a game called push-feather with the Master. The point of the game was to become aware of even the faintest, tiniest changes in pressure and balance, and to learn to counter one’s opponent’s force not by blocking with greater force of one’s own, but by turning the opponent’s energy back on him or her.
As one got better at the game—and Dooku was much the quickest learner in his year—it became more and more like sparring, with victory going to whichever fighter could make his or her foe lose balance first. As they got older, they more often started in a fighting stance, fingers lightly on one another’s forearms. Dooku’s first push would come light and fast, or slow and heavy; the energy would come up from below or drop from above, or come in a sudden thrust right to the chest. He won the Twelve-and-Under Tournament when he was nine, using the trick of starting with very gentle probes, as if feeling his enemy out in the kid’s version of the game, and then suddenly popping the pressure point inside his enemy’s elbow and attacking in the instant of shock and pain.
But as good as he got, he never beat Master Yoda. No matter what trick he tried—a Force push from behind, a slap to the eyes—the Master always felt the blow coming before it landed and twitched aside, like a stingfly dodging angry hands. Every time Dooku thought he had the old Jedi set up and made his final push, Yoda would melt away from the blow, and like someone walking down a staircase with two steps inexplicably missing, Dooku would find himself flailing, the old familiar lurch and loss of balance. The drop.
What made it more frustrating was that Yoda frequently lost these games of push-feather. He would shove out at some little boy or girl with half Dooku’s talent, who would twist clumsily to the side, and the Master would pitch comically to their feet, making woeful faces while the kid giggled and shrieked with jubilation. He let them win on purpose, Dooku could tell. He was building confidence in them. But he never lost to Dooku, never once. It was unfair; blatantly unfair, and for six months Dooku attacked with greater and greater fury, trying anything to win, but at the same time making his own balance ever more vulnerable, so when he lost—and he always lost, always, always, always—he did it in progressively more spectacular fashion. He made a point of losing badly, painfully. Daring everyone else to notice how unfairly Yoda was treating him.
Dooku was twelve years old the last time they played. Yoda had been coming to the unarmed combat classes once a week or so, and that whole spring they had sparred through a long series of humiliating defeats in which Dooku found himself taking an increasingly proud, contemptuous, bitter kind of satisfaction. He was twice the Master’s height now, and still Yoda had never let him win, not even once. Never admitted what he was doing, either, and Dooku would certainly never give him the satisfaction of crying about it, or complaining.
As they bowed to one another, Dooku decided that he would make this loss something spectacular: so blatant that everyone would have to acknowledge what was going on. He decided he would break his own arm.
They straightened from their bows. Dooku settled into his ready stance, calming himself and preparing for the pain to come.
“I win,” Yoda said.
“What!” Dooku had yelped. “We haven’t even started!”
“When one fighter his balance has lost, win his opponent has,” Yoda said mildly. “I win.”
—And at that instant, again, as always, the sudden lurch: the falling: and Dooku saw Yoda was right. As soft as Dooku had made his limbs, his pride was still stiff, and that’s where Yoda had pushed by never letting him win, until he was so wound up in his rage and humiliation that he had gone into the match intending to lose.
The realization was so big he could hardly hold it. He blinked, dazzled by the genius of the Master’s teaching: showing him a weakness he would never have found, no matter how many times he beat his fellow students. “Th-thank you,” he had stamme
red, his insides all mixed up between rage and humiliation and abject gratitude: and the old Jedi’s face had broken into a smile. He had gripped Dooku’s hand and brought him close and hugged him, laughing. “When you fall, apprentice…catch you I will!”
That night, lying on his cot, two sensations were still mixing uneasily in Dooku’s chest. The lurching, tipping, drop into space, unbalanced again, outfoxed and tumbling: and Yoda’s tight, delighted hug afterward, a physical promise, delivered skin-to-skin—when you fall, catch you I will.
It was the lurch and drop, the loss of balance, and the sudden helpless fall that gripped Dooku again after all these years as he stared out in wonder at the ancient grinning goblin who squatted, dripping, on his window ledge.
He had a brief fantasy of letting go with a single blast of Force energy, shattering the window, flaying the old Master with the shards. He imagined Yoda tumbling through the air, bloody and insensible, dashing his brains out on the flagstones far below. Then it would all be mercifully over and Dooku wouldn’t have to feel this strange, jumbled confusion. His hands would stop shaking and he would be dry inside and tight: dry and tight and empty as a drum, just a drum for Darth Sidious to play. How easy that would be.
But Yoda would be prepared for that; it would never be so easy. Count Dooku prided himself on his ability to see reality for what it really was.
He opened the casement window. “Master! Come in.”
Yoda hopped from the window ledge to Dooku’s desk, stamping through the various landscapes being broadcast to the holomonitors there and shaking like a dog, so a shower of Vjun rain spattered off him, splotching the desk top, and the spines of several of the more valuable titles in Dooku’s outstanding collection of rare books. Yoda had his lightsaber, but for now it was still belted at his side. In one hand he held his stick—of course he had somehow clambered to a fifth-story window ledge without letting go of his stick. In the other he had a Malreaux rose, white petals trimmed in blood red.
“You’ve been picking the roses from my hedge?” Dooku said genially.
Yoda held up the rose. “Yes. A pretty thing it is,” he said, examining the needle-sharp spines. Gingerly he tipped the cream-and-crimson flower head toward himself and snuffed. He closed his eyes and sighed with pleasure at the fragrance. It was an old, wild perfume: heady and sharp and tingling like a childhood secret.
“Actually, the roses are why I decided to stay here,” Dooku remarked. “There are other mansions on Vjun that would have done as well. But we had roses in the great house on Serenno; I suppose these reminded me of home.”
“Remember them, did you?” Yoda asked lightly.
“Obviously. I just said—”
“From before?”
“Ah.” Dooku gave a little laugh. “As a matter of fact, yes. One of the very few memories I have from before I came to the Temple. It was a hot day, I remember that; a bright day, and the sun heavy in the sky. The rose smell was very strong, as if the sun were beating the fragrance out of them. Burning them like slow incense. I was hiding in the rose garden and my finger was bleeding. I guess I must have been playing in the bushes and pricked myself. I can still remember sucking the blood. The way it welled up from this hole in my finger.”
“Hiding?”
“What?”
Yoda squatted down on Dooku’s desk. “Hiding, you said you were.” He stuck his short legs over the edge and let his feet swing. A holofeed from Omwat played unheeded on the back of his head. “Why went you not into the house to find a bandage, or get a kiss?”
“My mother got angry if I hurt myself.”
Yoda looked at him curiously. “Angry?”
Silence.
“It’s not our way,” Dooku said abruptly. “The Counts of Serenno do not complain and cry. We are born to take care of others. We don’t expect others to take care of us.”
“And yet, your finger…hurt, did it not?”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Dooku said. He felt angry at the old Jedi, absurdly angry and for no reason.
Off balance.
There was a knock on the door. “What?” Dooku called sharply.
The door rattled open, and Whirry came into the room in an obvious agitation of spirits. “The Baby!” she said. “The Baby’s back! But the land is all slipping too fast for me to read the fortune, and I’m worried your young lady will do him a mischief, begging your pardon, Count.”
The little Vjun fox padded into the room from between her legs. It caught sight or scent of Yoda, stopped stiff-legged, arched its back, and hissed. Yoda glared down at the thing from the desktop, bared his teeth, and hissed back.
Whirry jumped with a little shriek. “Which it’s one of they nasty cellar-goblins,” she cried, staring at Yoda. “Don’t worry, Your Lordship—I’ll get a broom and knock it on the head.”
“Master Yoda may be small and old and shriveled up like an evil green potato,” Count Dooku remarked, “but he is my guest, and I would prefer you not hit him with a broom unless I particularly desire it.”
“Oh! Which it is Your Lordship’s guest, is it?” the housekeeper said dubiously. “Each beau his own belle, so they say. —But come, will you talk to your young lady with the knifing eyes and check her before she does the Baby any mischief? I did what you asked, Lordship; the droid brought them in right as whip-smelt in a net,” she added piteously, and her large chest quivered with emotion under her grimy pink ball gown.
“At the moment, I am occupied,” Dooku said sharply. “Asajj may play with her scrap mice any way she likes for all I care.”
“But sir—!”
“Don’t pretend you love him,” the Count said. “If you loved him, you would have kept him.”
Whirry looked at him, shocked. “Love the Baby? Of course I always loved—”
“You had a fine house, wealth, everything a person could desire, and you gave him up,” Dooku said. “The Jedi arrived like beggars on your doorstep and asked for your firstborn, your heir, your precious Baby…and you gave him up.” The Count’s face was white. His traitorous hand was shaking and shaking. “You sent him away to a distant planet, never a letter or a message, sent him from the only home he had ever known and let them lock him up in the Temple and steal everything that should rightfully have been his, and now you have the impudence to come here and say you loved him? Loved him?” the Count shouted.
Whirry and her fox were backing from the room, frightened. Dooku mastered his voice. “Mother? Son? Love?” he said wearily. “You don’t know the meaning of the words.” He waved at her with his hand. “Leave us.”
The housekeeper turned and fled. For a moment the fox stayed in the doorway, staring at Dooku and Master Yoda. Then it, too, turned tail and scampered away.
Dooku rubbed his forehead with a tired hand. “Forgive me. As you know, most of Vjun ran mad, and Whirry is no exception.”
“Everyone on Vjun, goes mad I think,” Yoda murmured. “Later or sooner.”
“Forgive my comments on the Temple. You know I have never doubted your goodness,” Dooku said. “But—and I say this with all respect—there are things you choose not to see, Master. The Jedi principles—your principles—are noble ones: but the Jedi have become a tool in the hands of a corrupt Republic. If you truly want to see real justice—”
Yoda looked up and met Dooku’s eyes with a look of such infinite, distant boredom that the Count’s speech staggered to a halt. “No lies for me, Dooku,” Yoda said, knocking a rather fine statuette off the desk with a lazy whack of his stick. “Through the motions, do not go. No Sora Bulq am I, to be caught in a web made of ideals. Pfeh. Thin stuff. Save it for the young.
“I am not young,” he said, turning his deep green eyes wholly on Dooku. “The old, easily bored are. Even Yoda, though I try not to hurt feelings by showing it. But come across the galaxy to hear you tell me about nobility and justice?” Yoda laughed. It was by far the tiredest, bitterest, most unpleasant sound Dooku had ever heard him make.
/> He had thought he was beyond shock: but the disgust in Yoda’s voice was shocking to him.
Yoda looked down at the floor, making little patterns in the air with his stick. “Something real, tell me about. Show me another way we can end this war. Tell me something Dooku knows that Yoda does not.” The Count looked at Yoda, baffled. “Come across the galaxy I have for one thing, Dooku.”
“Yes, Master?” Dooku said, hating the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. He only had one Master now, and a jealous one.
“Obvious, is it not, Dooku?” And then Yoda was doing it to him again—the unexpected lurch, his balance gone, and the world turned inside out as Yoda said, “Turn me, Dooku. I beg you. Show me the greatness of the dark side.”
Far below, in the Crying Room of Château Malreaux, Scout snarled and reached for her lightsaber.
Ventress raked her with a vicious clawing strike across the head, knocking her to the ground. “Stay still until I tell you to move,” she said.
A fire burned in a grate across the room. The wood was wet, making the flames gasp and sputter. Thin strings of bitter smoke crept from logs and drifted toward the ceiling.
Scout gasped, crouched on her hands and knees, waiting for the stars to clear from in front of her eyes. Blood trickled from the cuts in her forehead and scalp, dripping onto the richly embroidered rug. Little red drops, pit-pat. Red spots appearing on the carpet.
Pit, tick, pat, tock, drip.
“Thank you,” Asajj said, glancing at Fidelis. “Who doesn’t relish a nice spot of gentleman’s personal gentle-treason? Oh, don’t look so shocked,” she said to Whie. “Did you think it was just your bad luck I was waiting here?”
Whie turned to Fidelis. “But…you’re supposed to look after me.”