Book 0 - The Dark Lord Trilogy

by James Luceno

  His farce had suddenly, inexplicably, spun from humorous to deadly serious and was tumbling rapidly toward terrifying. Realization burst through Dooku’s consciousness like the blossoming fireballs of dying ships outside: this pair of Jedi fools had somehow managed to become entirely dangerous.

  These clowns might—just possibly—actually be able to beat him.

  No sense taking chances; even his Master would agree with that. Lord Sidious could come up with a new plan more easily than a new apprentice.

  He gathered the Force once more in a single indrawn breath that summoned power from throughout the universe; the slightest whipcrack of that power, negligent as a flick of his wrist, sent Kenobi flying backward to crash hard against the wall, but Dooku didn’t have time to enjoy it.

  Skywalker was all over him.

  The shining blue lightsaber whirled and spat and every overhand chop crashed against Dooku’s defense with the unstoppable power of a meteor strike; the Sith Lord spent lavishly of his reserve of the Force merely to meet these attacks without being cut in half, and Skywalker—

  Skywalker was getting stronger.

  Each parry cost Dooku more power than he’d used to throw Kenobi across the room; each block aged him a decade.

  He decided he’d best revise his strategy once again.

  He no longer even tried to strike back. Force exhaustion began to close down his perceptions, drawing his consciousness back down to his physical form, trapping him within his own skull until he could barely even feel the contours of the room around him; he dimly sensed stairs at his back, stairs that led up to the entrance balcony. He retreated up them, using the higher ground for leverage, but Skywalker just kept on coming, tirelessly ferocious.

  That blue blade was everywhere, flashing and whirling faster and faster until Dooku saw the room through an electric haze, and now Kenobi was back in the picture: with a shout of the Force, he shot like a torpedo up the stairs behind Skywalker, and Dooku decided that under these rather extreme circumstances, it was at least arguably permissible for a gentleman to cheat.

  “Guards!” he said to the pair of super battle droids that still stood at attention to either side of the entrance. “Open fire!”

  Instantly the two droids sprang forward and lifted their hands. Energy hammered out from the heavy blasters built into their arms; Skywalker whirled and his blade batted every blast back at the droids, whose mirror-polished carapace armor deflected the bolts again. Galvened particle beams screeched through the room in blinding ricochets.

  Kenobi reached the top of the stairs and a single slash of his lightsaber dismantled both droids. Before their pieces could even hit the floor Dooku was in motion, landing a spinning side-stamp that folded Skywalker in half; he used his last burst of dark power to continue his spin into a blindingly fast wheel-kick that brought his heel against the point of Kenobi’s chin with a crack like the report of a huge-bore slugthrower, knocking the Jedi Master back down the stairs. Sounded like he’d broken his neck.

  Wouldn’t that be lovely?

  There was no sense in taking chances, however.

  While Kenobi’s bonelessly limp body was still tumbling toward the floor far below, Dooku sent a surge of energy through the Force. Kenobi’s fall suddenly accelerated like a missile burning the last of its drives before impact. The Jedi Master struck the floor at a steep angle, skidded along it, and slammed into the wall so hard the hydrofoamed permacrete buckled and collapsed onto him.

  This Dooku found exceedingly gratifying.

  Now, as for Skywalker—

  Which was as far as Dooku got, because by the time his attention returned to the younger Jedi, his vision was rather completely obstructed by the sole of a boot approaching his face with something resembling terminal velocity.

  The impact was a blast of white fire, and there was a second impact against his back that was the balcony rail, and then the room turned upside down and he fell toward the ceiling, but not really, of course: it only felt that way because he had flipped over the rail and he was falling headfirst toward the floor, and neither his arms nor his legs were paying any attention to what he was trying to make them do. The Force seemed to be busy elsewhere, and really, the whole process was entirely mortifying.

  He was barely able to summon a last surge of dark power before what would have been a disabling impact. The Force cradled him, cushioning his fall and setting him on his feet.

  He dusted himself off and fixed a supercilious gaze on Skywalker, who now stood upon the balcony looking down at him—and Dooku couldn’t hold the stare; he found this reversal of their original positions oddly unsettling.

  There was something troublingly appropriate about it.

  Seeing Skywalker standing where Dooku himself had stood only moments ago … it was as though he was trying to remember a dream he’d never actually had …

  He pushed this aside, drawing once more upon the certain knowledge of his personal invincibility to open a channel to the Force. Power flowed into him, and the weight of his years dropped away.

  He lifted his blade, and beckoned.

  Skywalker leapt from the balcony. Even as the boy hurtled downward, Dooku felt a new twist in the currents of the Force between them, and he finally understood.

  He understood how Skywalker was getting stronger. Why he no longer spoke. How he had become a machine of battle. He understood why Sidious had been so interested in him for so long.

  Skywalker was a natural.

  There was a thermonuclear furnace where his heart should be, and it was burning through the firewalls of his Jedi training. He held the Force in the clench of a white-hot fist. He was half Sith already, and he didn’t even know it.

  This boy had the gift of fury.

  And even now, he was holding himself back; even now, as he landed at Dooku’s flank and rained blows upon the Sith Lord’s defenses, even as he drove Dooku backward step after step, Dooku could feel how Skywalker kept his fury banked behind walls of will: walls that were hardened by some uncontrollable dread.

  Dread, Dooku surmised, of himself. Of what might happen if he should ever allow that furnace he used for a heart to go supercritical.

  Dooku slipped aside from an overhand chop and sprang backward. “I sense great fear in you. You are consumed by it. Hero With No Fear, indeed. You’re a fraud, Skywalker. You are nothing but a posturing child.”

  He pointed his lightsaber at the young Jedi like an accusing finger. “Aren’t you a little old to be afraid of the dark?”

  Skywalker leapt for him again, and this time Dooku met the boy’s charge easily. They stood nearly toe-to-toe, blades flashing faster than the eye could see, but Skywalker had lost his edge: a simple taunt was all that had been required to shift the focus of his attention from winning the fight to controlling his own emotions. The angrier he got, the more afraid he became, and the fear fed his anger in turn; like the proverbial Corellian multipede, now that he had started thinking about what he was doing, he could no longer walk.

  Dooku allowed himself to relax; he felt that spirit of playfulness coming over him again as he and Skywalker spun ’round each other in their lethal dance. Whatever fun was to be had, he should enjoy while he could.

  Then Sidious, for some reason, decided to intervene.

  “Don’t fear what you’re feeling, Anakin, use it!” he barked in Palpatine’s voice. “Call upon your fury. Focus it, and he cannot stand against you. Rage is your weapon. Strike now! Strike! Kill him!”

  Dooku thought blankly, Kill me?

  He and Skywalker paused for one single, final instant, blades locked together, staring at each other past a sizzling cross of scarlet against blue, and in that instant Dooku found himself wondering in bewildered astonishment if Sidious had suddenly lost his mind. Didn’t he understand the advice he’d just given?

  Whose side was he on, anyway?

  And through the cross of their blades he saw in Skywalker’s eyes the promise of hell, and he felt a sickening prese
ntiment that he already knew the answer to that question.

  Treachery is the way of the Sith.

  JEDI TRAP

  This is the death of Count Dooku:

  A starburst of clarity blossoms within Anakin Skywalker’s mind, when he says to himself Oh. I get it, now and discovers that the fear within his heart can be a weapon, too.

  It is that simple, and that complex.

  And it is final.

  Dooku is dead already. The rest is mere detail.

  The play is still on; the comedy of lightsabers flashes and snaps and hisses. Dooku & Skywalker, a one-time-only command performance, for an audience of one. Jedi and Sith and Sith and Jedi, spinning, whirling, crashing together, slashing and chopping, parrying, binding, slipping and whipping and ripping the air around them with snarls of power.

  And all for nothing, because a nuclear flame has consumed Anakin Skywalker’s Jedi restraint, and fear becomes fury without effort, and fury is a blade that makes his lightsaber into a toy.

  The play goes on, but the suspense is over. It has become mere pantomime, as intricate and as meaningless as the space–time curves that guide galactic clusters through a measureless cosmos.

  Dooku’s decades of combat experience are irrelevant. His mastery of swordplay is useless. His vast wealth, his political influence, impeccable breeding, immaculate manners, exquisite taste—all the pursuits and points of pride to which he has devoted so much of his time and attention over the long, long years of his life—are now chains hung upon his spirit, bending his neck before the ax.

  Even his knowledge of the Force has become a joke.

  It is this knowledge that shows him his death, makes him handle it, turn it this way and that in his mind, examine it in detail like a black gemstone so cold it burns. Dooku’s elegant farce has degenerated into bathetic melodrama, and not one shed tear will mark the passing of its hero.

  But for Anakin, in the fight there is only terror, and rage.

  Only he stands between death and the two men he loves best in all the world, and he can no longer afford to hold anything back. That imaginary dead-star dragon tries its best to freeze away his strength, to whisper him that Dooku has beaten him before, that Dooku has all the power of the darkness, to remind him how Dooku took his hand, how Dooku could strike down even Obi-Wan himself seemingly without effort and now Anakin is all alone and he will never be a match for any Lord of the Sith—

  But Palpatine’s words rage is your weapon have given Anakin permission to unseal the shielding around his furnace heart, and all his fears and all his doubts shrivel in its flame.

  When Count Dooku flies at him, blade flashing, Watto’s fist cracks out from Anakin’s childhood to knock the Sith Lord tumbling back.

  When with all the power that the dark side can draw from throughout the universe, Dooku hurls a jagged fragment of the durasteel table, Shmi Skywalker’s gentle murmur I knew you would come for me, Anakin smashes it aside.

  His head has been filled with the smoke from his smothered heart for far too long; it has been the thunder that darkens his mind. On Aargonar, on Jabiim, in the Tusken camp on Tatooine, that smoke had clouded his mind, had blinded him and left him flailing in the dark, a mindless machine of slaughter; but here, now, within this ship, this microscopic cell of life in the infinite sterile desert of space, his firewalls have opened so that the terror and the rage are out there, in the fight instead of in his head, and Anakin’s mind is clear as a crystal bell.

  In that pristine clarity, there is only one thing he must do.

  Decide.

  So he does.

  He decides to win.

  He decides that Dooku should lose the same hand he took. Decision is reality, here: his blade moves simultaneously with his will and blue fire vaporizes black Corellian nanosilk and disintegrates flesh and shears bone, and away falls a Sith Lord’s lightsaber hand, trailing smoke that tastes of charred meat and burned hair. The hand falls with a bar of scarlet blaze still extending from its spastic death grip, and Anakin’s heart sings for the fall of that red blade.

  He reaches out and the Force catches it for him.

  And then Anakin takes Dooku’s other hand as well.

  Dooku crumples to his knees, face blank, mouth slack, and his weapon whirs through the air to the victor’s hand, and Anakin finds his vision of the future happening before his eyes: two blades at Count Dooku’s throat.

  But here, now, the truth belies the dream. Both lightsabers are in his hands, and the one in his hand of flesh flares with the synthetic bloodshine of a Sith blade.

  Dooku, cringing, shrinking with dread, still finds some hope in his heart that he is wrong, that Palpatine has not betrayed him, that this has all been proceeding according to plan—

  Until he hears “Good, Anakin! Good! I knew you could do it!” and registers this is Palpatine’s voice and feels within the darkest depths of all he is the approach of the words that are to come next.

  “Kill him,” Palpatine says. “Kill him now.”

  In Skywalker’s eyes he sees only flames.

  “Chancellor, please!” he gasps, desperate and helpless, his aristocratic demeanor invisible, his courage only a bitter memory. He is reduced to begging for his life, as so many of his victims have. “Please, you promised me immunity! We had a deal! Help me!”

  And his begging gains him a share of mercy equal to that which he has dispensed.

  “A deal only if you released me,” Palpatine replies, cold as intergalactic space. “Not if you used me as bait to kill my friends.”

  And he knows, then, that all has indeed been going according to plan. Sidious’s plan, not his own. This had been a Jedi trap indeed, but Jedi were not the quarry.

  They were the bait.

  “Anakin,” Palpatine says quietly. “Finish him.”

  Years of Jedi training make Anakin hesitate; he looks down upon Dooku and sees not a Lord of the Sith but a beaten, broken, cringing old man.

  “I shouldn’t—”

  But when Palpatine barks, “Do it! Now!” Anakin realizes that this isn’t actually an order. That it is, in fact, nothing more than what he’s been waiting for his whole life.

  Permission.

  And Dooku—

  As he looks up into the eyes of Anakin Skywalker for the final time, Count Dooku knows that he has been deceived not just today, but for many, many years. That he has never been the true apprentice. That he has never been the heir to the power of the Sith. He has been only a tool.

  His whole life—all his victories, all his struggles, all his heritage, all his principles and his sacrifices, everything he’s done, everything he owns, everything he’s been, all his dreams and grand vision for the future Empire and the Army of Sith—have been only a pathetic sham, because all of them, all of him, add up only to this.

  He has existed only for this.

  This.

  To be the victim of Anakin Skywalker’s first cold-blooded murder.

  First but not, he knows, the last.

  Then the blades crossed at his throat uncross like scissors.

  Snip.

  And all of him becomes nothing at all.

  Murderer and murdered each stared blindly.

  But only the murderer blinked.

  I did that.

  The severed head’s stare was fixed on something beyond living sight. The desperate plea frozen in place on its lips echoed silence. The headless torso collapsed with a slowly fading sigh from the cauterized gape of its trachea, folding forward at the waist as though making obeisance before the power that had ripped away its life.

  The murderer blinked again.

  Who am I?

  Was he the slave boy on a desert planet, valued for his astonishing gift with machines? Was he the legendary Podracer, the only human to survive that deadly sport? Was he the unruly, high-spirited, trouble-prone student of a great Jedi Master? The star pilot? The hero? The lover? The Jedi?

  Could he be all these things—could he be any o
f them—and still have done what he has done?

  He was already discovering the answer at the same time that he finally realized that he needed to ask the question.

  The deck bucked as the cruiser absorbed a new barrage of torpedoes and turbolaser fire. Dooku’s severed staring head bounced along the deck and rolled away, and Anakin woke up.

  “What—?”

  He’d been having a dream. He’d been flying, and fighting, and fighting again, and somehow, in the dream, he could do whatever he wanted. In the dream, whatever he did was the right thing to do simply because he wanted to do it. In the dream there were no rules, there was only power.

  And the power was his.

  Now he stood over a headless corpse that he couldn’t bear to see but he couldn’t make himself look away, and he knew it hadn’t been a dream at all, that he’d really done this, the blades were still in his hands and the ocean of wrong he’d dived into had closed over his head.

  And he was drowning.

  The dead man’s lightsaber tumbled from his loosening fingers. “I—I couldn’t stop myself …”

  And before the words left his lips he heard how hollow and obvious was the lie.

  “You did well, Anakin.” Palpatine’s voice was warm as an arm around Anakin’s shoulders. “You did not only well, but right. He was too dangerous to leave alive.”

  From the Chancellor this sounded true, but when Anakin repeated it inside his head he knew that Palpatine’s truth would be one he could never make himself believe. A tremor that began between his shoulder blades threatened to expand into a full case of the shakes. “He was an unarmed prisoner …”

  That, now—that simple unbearable fact—that was truth. Though it burned him like his own lightsaber, truth was something he could hang on to. And somehow it made him feel a little better. A little stronger. He tried another truth: not that he couldn’t have stopped himself, but—

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, and now his voice came out solid, and simple, and final. Now he could look down at the corpse at his feet. He could look at the severed head.