Book 0 - The Dark Lord Trilogy

by James Luceno

  And it was darkening.

  Anakin could feel how the Force fed upon the shadow’s murderous exaltation; he could feel fury spray into the Force though some poisonous abscess had crested in both their hearts.

  There was no Jedi restraint here.

  Mace Windu was cutting loose.

  Mace was deep in it now: submerged in Vaapad, swallowed by it, he no longer truly existed as an independent being.

  Vaapad is a channel for darkness, and that darkness flowed both ways. He accepted the furious speed of the Sith Lord, drew the shadow’s rage and power into his inmost center—

  And let it fountain out again.

  He reflected the fury upon its source as a lightsaber redirects a blaster bolt.

  There was a time when Mace Windu had feared the power of the dark; there was a time when he had feared the darkness in himself. But the Clone Wars had given him a gift of understanding: on a world called Haruun Kal, he had faced his darkness and had learned that the power of darkness is not to be feared.

  He had learned that it is fear that gives the darkness power.

  He was not afraid. The darkness had no power over him. But—

  Neither did he have power over it.

  Vaapad made him an open channel, half of a superconducting loop completed by the shadow; they became a standing wave of battle that expanded into every cubic centimeter of the Chancellor’s office. There was no scrap of carpet nor shred of chair that might not at any second disintegrate in flares of red or purple; lampstands became brief shields, sliced into segments that whirled through the air; couches became terrain to be climbed for advantage or overleapt in retreat. But there was still only the cycle of power, the endless loop, no wound taken on either side, not even the possibility of fatigue.

  Impasse.

  Which might have gone on forever, if Vaapad were Mace’s only gift.

  The fighting was effortless for him now; he let his body handle it without the intervention of his mind. While his blade spun and crackled, while his feet slid and his weight shifted and his shoulders turned in precise curves of their own direction, his mind slid along the circuit of dark power, tracing it back to its limitless source.

  Feeling for its shatterpoint.

  He found a knot of fault lines in the shadow’s future; he chose the largest fracture and followed it back to the here and the now—

  And it led him, astonishingly, to a man standing frozen in the slashed-open doorway. Mace had no need to look; the presence in the Force was familiar, and was as uplifting as sunlight breaking through a thunderhead.

  The chosen one was here.

  Mace disengaged from the shadow’s blade and leapt for the window; he slashed away the transparisteel with a single flourish.

  His instant’s distraction cost him: a dark surge of the Force nearly blew him right out of the gap he had just cut. Only a desperate Force-push of his own altered his path enough that he slammed into a stanchion instead of plunging half a kilometer from the ledge outside. He bounced off and the Force cleared his head and once again he gave himself to Vaapad.

  He could feel the end of this battle approaching, and so could the blur of Sith he faced; in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear. Easily, almost effortlessly, he turned the shadow’s fear into a weapon: he angled the battle to bring them both out onto the window ledge.

  Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half-kilometer drop.

  Out where the shadow’s fear made it hesitate. Out where the shadow’s fear turned some of its Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete.

  Out where Mace could flick his blade in one precise arc and slash the shadow’s lightsaber in half.

  One piece flipped back in through the cut-open window. The other tumbled from opening fingers, bounced on the ledge, and fell through the rain toward the distant alleys below.

  Now the shadow was only Palpatine: old and shrunken, thinning hair bleached white by time and care, face lined with exhaustion.

  “For all your power, you are no Jedi. All you are, my lord,” Mace said evenly, staring past his blade, “is under arrest.”

  “Do you see, Anakin? Do you?” Palpatine’s voice once again had the broken cadence of a frightened old man’s. “Didn’t I warn you of the Jedi and their treason?”

  “Save your twisted words, my lord. There are no politicians here. The Sith will never regain control of the Republic. It’s over. You’ve lost.” Mace leveled his blade. “You lost for the same reason the Sith always lose: defeated by your own fear.”

  Palpatine lifted his head.

  His eyes smoked with hate.

  “Fool,” he said.

  He lifted his arms, his robes of office spreading wide into raptor’s wings, his hands hooking into talons.

  “Fool!” His voice was a shout of thunder. “Do you think the fear you feel is mine?”

  Lighting blasted the clouds above, and lightning blasted from Palpatine’s hands, and Mace didn’t have time to comprehend what Palpatine was talking about; he had time only to slip back into Vaapad and angle his blade to catch the forking arcs of pure, dazzling hatred that clawed toward him.

  Because Vaapad is more than a fighting style. It is a state of mind: a channel for darkness. Power passed into him and out again without touching him.

  And the circuit completed itself: the lightning reflected back to its source.

  Palpatine staggered, snarling, but the blistering energy that poured from his hands only intensified.

  He fed the power with his pain.

  “Anakin!” Mace called. His voice sounded distant, blurred, as if it came from the bottom of a well. “Anakin, help me! This is your chance!”

  He felt Anakin’s leap from the office floor to the ledge, felt his approach behind—

  And Palpatine was not afraid.

  Mace could feel it: he wasn’t worried at all.

  “Destroy this traitor,” the Chancellor said, his voice raised over the howl of writhing energy that joined his hands to Mace’s blade. “This was never an arrest. It’s an assassination!”

  That was when Mace finally understood. He had it. The key to final victory. Palpatine’s shatterpoint. The absolute shatterpoint of the Sith.

  The shatterpoint of the dark side itself.

  Mace thought, blankly astonished, Palpatine trusts Anakin Skywalker …

  Now Anakin was at Mace’s shoulder. Palpatine still made no move to defend himself from Skywalker; instead he ramped up the lightning bursting from his hands, bending the fountain of Mace’s blade back toward the Korun Master’s face.

  Palpatine’s eyes glowed with power, casting a yellow glare that burned back the rain from around them. “He is a traitor, Anakin. Destroy him.”

  “You’re the chosen one, Anakin,” Mace said, his voice going thin with strain. This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade. “Take him. It’s your destiny.”

  Skywalker echoed him faintly. “Destiny …”

  “Help me! I can’t hold on any longer!” The yellow glare from Palpatine’s eyes spread outward through his flesh. His skin flowed like oil, as though the muscle beneath was burning away, as though even the bones of his skull were softening, were bending and bulging, deforming from the heat and pressure of his electric hatred. “He is killing me, Anakin—! Please, Anaaahhh—”

  Mace’s blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. “Anakin, he’s too strong for me—”

  “Ahhh—” Palpatine’s roar above the endless blast of lightning became a fading moan of despair.

  The lightning swallowed itself, leaving only the night and the rain, and an old man crumpled to his knees on a slippery ledge.

  “I … can’t. I give up. I … I am too weak, in the end. Too old, and too weak. Don’t kill me, Master Jedi. Please. I surrender.”

  Victory flooded through Mace’s aching body. He lifted his blade. “You Sith disease�
�”

  “Wait—” Skywalker seized his lightsaber arm with desperate strength. “Don’t kill him—you can’t just kill him, Master—”

  “Yes, I can,” Mace said, grim and certain. “I have to.”

  “You came to arrest him. He has to stand trial—”

  “A trial would be a joke. He controls the courts. He controls the Senate—”

  “So are you going to kill all them, too? Like he said you would?”

  Mace yanked his arm free. “He’s too dangerous to be left alive. If you could have taken Dooku alive, would you have?”

  Skywalker’s face swept itself clean of emotion. “That was different—”

  Mace turned toward the cringing, beaten Sith Lord. “You can explain the difference after he’s dead.”

  He raised his lightsaber.

  “I need him alive!” Skywalker shouted. “I need him to save Padmé!”

  Mace thought blankly, Why? And moved his lightsaber toward the fallen Chancellor.

  Before he could follow through on his stroke, a sudden arc of blue plasma sheared through his wrist and his hand tumbled away with his lightsaber still in it and Palpatine roared back to his feet and lightning speared from the Sith Lord’s hands and without his blade to catch it, the power of Palpatine’s hate struck him full-on.

  He had been so intent on Palpatine’s shatterpoint that he’d never thought to look for Anakin’s.

  Dark lightning blasted away his universe.

  He fell forever.

  Anakin Skywalker knelt in the rain.

  He was looking at a hand. The hand had brown skin. The hand held a lightsaber. The hand had a charred oval of tissue where it should have been attached to an arm.

  “What have I done?”

  Was it his voice? It must have been. Because it was his question.

  “What have I done?”

  Another hand, a warm and human hand, laid itself softly on his shoulder.

  “You’re following your destiny, Anakin,” said a familiar gentle voice. “The Jedi are traitors. You saved the Republic from their treachery. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “You were right,” Anakin heard himself saying. “Why didn’t I know?”

  “You couldn’t have. They cloaked themselves in deception, my boy. Because they feared your power, they could never trust you.”

  Anakin stared at the hand, but he no longer saw it. “Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan trusts me …”

  “Not enough to tell you of their plot.”

  Treason echoed in his memory.

  … this is not an assignment for the record …

  That warm and human hand gave his shoulder a warm and human squeeze. “I do not fear your power, Anakin, I embrace it. You are the greatest of the Jedi. You can be the greatest of the Sith. I believe that, Anakin. I believe in you. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you.”

  Anakin looked from the dead hand on the ledge to the living one on his shoulder, then up to the face of the man who stood above him, and what he saw there choked him like an invisible fist crushing his throat.

  The hand on his shoulder was human.

  The face … wasn’t.

  The eyes were a cold and feral yellow, and they gleamed like those of a predator lurking beyond a fringe of firelight; the bone around those feral eyes had swollen and melted and flowed like durasteel spilled from a fusion smelter, and the flesh that blanketed it had gone corpse-gray and coarse as rotten synthplast.

  Stunned with horror, stunned with revulsion, Anakin could only stare at the creature. At the shadow.

  Looking into the face of the darkness, he saw his future.

  “Now come inside,” the darkness said.

  After a moment, he did.

  Anakin stood just within the office. Motionless.

  Palpatine examined the damage to his face in a broad expanse of wall mirror. Anakin couldn’t tell if his expression might be revulsion, or if this were merely the new shape of his features. Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.

  “And so the mask becomes the man,” he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. “I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve.”

  He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office’s ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine’s hand.

  He remembered playing a Force game with a shuura fruit, sitting across a long table from Padmé in the retreat by the lake on Naboo. He remembered telling her how grumpy Obi-Wan would be to see him use the Force so casually.

  Palaptine seemed to catch his thought; he gave a yellow sidelong glance as the robe settled onto his shoulders.

  “You must learn to cast off the petty restraints that the Jedi have tried to place upon your power,” he said. “Anakin, it’s time. I need you to help me restore order to the galaxy.”

  Anakin didn’t respond.

  Sidious said, “Join me. Pledge yourself to the Sith. Become my apprentice.”

  A wave of tingling started at the base of Anakin’s skull and spread over his whole body in a slow-motion shockwave.

  “I—I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.”

  Anakin shook his head and found that the rest of him threatened to begin shaking as well. “I—came to save your life, sir. Not to betray my friends—”

  Sidious snorted. “What friends?”

  Anakin could find no answer.

  “And do you think that task is finished, my boy?” Sidious seated himself on the corner of the desk, hands folded in his lap, the way he always had when offering Anakin fatherly advice; the misshapen mask of his face made the familiarity of his posture into something horrible. “Do you think that killing one traitor will end treason? Do you think the Jedi will ever stop until I am dead?”

  Anakin stared at his hands. The left one was shaking. He hid it behind him.

  “It’s them or me, Anakin. Or perhaps I should put it more plainly: It’s them or Padmé.”

  Anakin made his right hand—his black-gloved hand of durasteel and electrodrivers—into a fist.

  “It’s just—it’s not … easy, that’s all. I have—I’ve been a Jedi for so long—”

  Sidious offered an appalling smile. “There is a place within you, my boy, a place as briskly clean as ice on a mountaintop, cool and remote. Find that high place, and look down within yourself; breathe that clean, icy air as you regard your guilt and shame. Do not deny them; observe them. Take your horror in your hands and look at it. Examine it as a phenomenon. Smell it. Taste it. Come to know it as only you can, for it is yours, and it is precious.”

  As the shadow beside him spoke, its words became true. From a remote, frozen distance that was at the same time more extravagantly, hotly intimate than he could have ever dreamed, Anakin handled his emotions. He dissected them. He reassembled them and pulled them apart again. He still felt them—if anything, they burned hotter than before—but they no longer had the power to cloud his mind.

  “You have found it, my boy: I can feel you there. That cold distance—that mountaintop within yourself—that is the first key to the power of the Sith.”

  Anakin opened his eyes and turned his gaze fully upon the grotesque features of Darth Sidious.

  He didn’t even blink.

  As he looked upon that mask of corruption, the revulsion he felt was real, and it was powerful, and it was—

  Interesting.

  Anakin lifted his hand of durasteel and electrodrivers and cupped it, staring into its palm as though he held there the fear that had haunted his dreams for his whole life, and it was no larger than the piece of shuura he’d once stolen from Padmé’s plate.

  On the mountain peak within himself, he weighed Padmé’s life against the Jedi Order.

  It was no contest.

  He s
aid, “Yes.”

  “Yes to what, my boy?”

  “Yes, I want your knowledge.”

  “Good. Good!”

  “I want your power. I want the power to stop death.”

  “That power only my Master truly achieved, but together we will find it. The Force is strong with you, my boy. You can do anything.”

  “The Jedi betrayed you,” Anakin said. “The Jedi betrayed both of us.”

  “As you say. Are you ready?”

  “I am,” he said, and meant it. “I give myself to you. I pledge myself to the ways of the Sith. Take me as your apprentice. Teach me. Lead me. Be my Master.”

  Sidious raised the hood of his robe and draped it to shadow the ruin of his face.

  “Kneel before me, Anakin Skywalker.”

  Anakin dropped to one knee. He lowered his head.

  “It is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?”

  There was no hesitation. “Yes.”

  Darth Sidious laid a pale hand on Anakin’s brow. “Then it is done. You are now one with the Order of the Dark Lords of the Sith. From this day forward, the truth of you, my apprentice, now and forevermore, will be Darth …”

  A pause; a questioning in the Force—

  An answer, dark as the gap between galaxies—

  He heard Sidious say it: his new name.

  Vader.

  A pair of syllables that meant him. Vader, he said to himself. Vader.

  “Thank you, my Master.”

  “Every single Jedi, including your friend Obi-Wan Kenobi, have been revealed as enemies of the Republic now. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, my Master.”

  “The Jedi are relentless. If they are not destroyed to the last being, there will be civil war without end. To sterilize the Jedi Temple will be your first task. Do what must be done, Lord Vader.”

  “I always have, my Master.”

  “Do not hesitate. Show no mercy. Leave no living creature behind. Only then will you be strong enough with the dark side to save Padmé.”

  “What of the other Jedi?”

  “Leave them to me. After you have finished at the Temple, your second task will be the Separatist leadership, in their ‘secret bunker’ on Mustafar. When you have killed them all, the Sith will rule the galaxy once more, and we shall have peace. Forever.