Star Wars: Red Harvest (19 page)

And the Sickness was
laughing
.

At first that laughter had sounded so mocking, so bitter and cold, that the Neti had only cowered before it. Even the Sith themselves couldn’t match the dark malevolence in its voice.

Old fool
, it had said,
foolish old creature, your life has been wasted here among your books
.

The Neti had tried to respond, to tell it no, that these scrolls and texts
were
his life, but the Sickness hadn’t shown the slightest bit of interest in that. It had more to say, and the Neti realized that he was a captive audience.

It’s not too late
, the Sickness said.
I have given you new life, and a new purpose, and you will know it if you seek my face. Will you, old tree? Will you seek my face?

What is it?
the Neti asked.
What is your face?

Mine is the face of blood and fire
.

And with those words, everything changed. Looking around now at the contents of the library, the countless scrolls and ancient texts, the holdings and stacks that he had spent his lifetime accumulating here, organizing and cataloging for a thousand years or more, he saw them for what they were.

Fuel.

The flesh is our fuel
, the Sickness counseled, and its voice was like thunder now,
and the books are our fuel, and this planet is our fuel, all things are fuel, they exist only so that they can be consumed by us
.

Yes, yes—

They are meat for the beast
.

Yes
.

And the beast is you
.

Yes
.

From there, the Neti discovered that everything came to him with oily, gratifying ease. Giving himself up utterly to the Sickness, he had started the fire without the slightest hesitation. There were years of fuel
here, plenty here to burn. Within minutes, the central wing of the library was ablaze, and the seeping, maddened grin of the Neti shone with reflected orange firelight.

Although there were no mirrors here, no means of seeing his reflection, Dail’Liss knew that the Sickness had changed him. Whole chunks of its once-proud bark had begun molting, dropping off in patches, its branches curling and blackening, dripping with thick, foul-smelling drainage that gathered around its roots. But the most profound transformation had happened within him. The Sickness had taught him. He had sought its face. And now the Neti laughed into the fire—its once-kind eyes were twisted now, tightened into knotty slits, its mouth coiled into a wide, salivating grin as it spoke out in the voice of the orchid.

Come, Hestizo Trace. Hurry. Come to the library
.

More scrolls, more holobooks, tumbled into the fire. Sap boiled in the coals.

I await your arrival eagerly, I wish to see you here, I have urgent need of you—

He stopped and turned, branches whispering.

She was already on her way.

“L
OOKED BIGGER ON THE HOLO,
” M
AGGS SAID, HIS VOICE MUFFLED BY HIS HAND
.

He and Ra’at and the others were all standing in front of the wall, covering their noses and mouths. The end of the tunnel was filled with a smell so rancid that it almost transcended the definition of the word. In the single breath that Ra’at had inadvertently sucked in without covering his lips, he’d actually been able to
taste
it on the back of his tongue and the roof of his mouth. It was the horribly organic ripe-rot-reek of once-living tissue whose life force had evacuated it, leaving only a mass of stinking weight.

“What’s it made of?” Maggs muttered.

“Looks like scavenged metal, debris …”

“Metal doesn’t stink like this.”

“It’s not just metal.”

“So what is it?” Kindra asked.

“Well …” Ra’at pointed at a white blade-like shaft sticking out. “I’m pretty sure that’s a shinbone.”

“Human?”

Ra’at nodded.

Hartwig swallowed. It took him a few tries. “Gah.”

“Looks …,” Ra’at started to say, and stopped. He was going to say
partially digested
, and decided that that observation probably wouldn’t bring anything helpful to the conversation. If the expressions of the others were any indication, they were holding just this side of gastric mutiny.

“The exit’s on the other side,” Kindra said, and activated her lightsaber.

“Hold on.” Ra’at turned and looked back. He’d felt something—not much more than a ripple in the fabric of the Force, but he’d long ago learned to trust such quirks of perception as far more meaningful than anything gleaned by eyes and ears. He shot a glance at Maggs. “Lightsaber. Now.”

Instantly Maggs joined him and Kindra, and Ra’at pointed silently into a pool of shadow just beyond a bank of massive metal cases that looked as though they’d been turned into storage for droid parts. Something was moving visibly on the other side of the storage bins, and an instant later it came staggering into view.

“What in the name…,” Hartwig said. It was the first thing he’d said since the confrontation with Kindra over the lightsaber. “What’s wrong with him?”

“What’s wrong?” Maggs made a sick noise. “What’s
right
?”

Ra’at recognized the Sith acolyte making his way toward them, but only barely—he was the fifth-year known as Rucker. The left side of Rucker’s face had been ripped cleanly away to reveal the gleaming infrastructure of cheekbone and jaw. His gelid eyes quivered in their sockets like a pair of infected red eggs. He was naked except for a pair of black breeches torn open at the front, and the massive bulge of his swollen abdomen was so badly distended that he could hardly carry it forward.

He—it—stared at them for a long beat. Then it threw back its head, jaws wrenching open, and screamed.

“Kill it!” Hartwig said.
“What are you waiting for
?”

Still screaming, the Rucker-thing whirled and staggered toward the wall. Ra’at saw its mouth open even wider, the mandible popping loose from its hinges completely now, and the scream became a gargled gush as it disgorged a flood of reddish gray directly onto the barrier, its belly shrinking visibly as it did so.

Watching helplessly, Ra’at felt a nauseating roundelay of terror swerve through him, like the shadow of some far-distant flying object—a latecoming refusal, despite everything he’d seen so far, to fully accept this monstrosity at face value.
Am I seeing this?
he thought.
Am I really?

Still dribbling, the thing flung its hands up to pack the mess together, working it tightly into the wall. Almost despite himself, Ra’at thought of the cosm-wasps he’d read about, and the way they built nests by filling their bellies and regurgitating the pulp.

We’re pulp, too
, he thought, and the smell hit him in the most vulnerable part of his own stomach, making his gorge rise. The only thing that stopped him from losing total control of his gag reflex was the even more potent realization that the thing was swiveling back toward them, moving much faster now.

“Take him down,” he heard Kindra murmur, almost to herself, and she, Maggs, and Ra’at himself advanced in a single coordinated strike. Kindra sliced its head off with one sweep, while Maggs took out its legs. Ra’at’s blow slashed down the front of the body, cleaving it almost perfectly down the middle. Less than five seconds later the Rucker-thing’s corpse lay on the floor, drawn and quartered, still twitching.

“What happened to the others?” Maggs breathed, gesturing at the empty space.

“Good question,” Ra’at said. “It’s a dead end here. Where’d they go?”

“Forget it.” Kindra turned to the wall. “Let’s get to work on this.”

Ra’at nodded but didn’t move. His gaze went back to the steel droid bins, near the shadowy area where the thing had originated. He was still thinking about that scream it had let out, high and shrill, like
the blast of a living air horn. What if it had been a signal to the others, some kind of—

One of the steel droid bins fell over with a clang.

And Ra’at saw.

The students of the Sith academy of Odacer-Faustin were gathered here after all, had been here the entire time. They’d just been waiting in silence, watching.

“How many?” Maggs murmured.

“Ten,” Ra’at said, “maybe twelve—”

The silence exploded in a scream, and the things came spilling forward in one coordinated wave, surging into the open tunnel like a single organism.

“Precision killing box,” Kindra snapped. “Right and left.” She flicked a hand at Hartwig and Maggs. “Get us through that wall.”

Ra’at broke right, as directed, letting his lightsaber lead him like a natural extension of his will. He pivoted and swung it down into the head of the first Sith-thing that he came to, splitting its skull down to the tonsils. But its hands flung upward blindly toward him like a pair of carrion birds, and it kept fighting. Turning, he came up from below and took out its legs just above the knees, leaving the thing in a slimy mess of its own dissolution. Two more came at him, and he chopped them down with an absolute economy of motion.

To the right. To the left. Behind. Move. Move. Move
.

Ra’at unplugged his mind and let his training take over. It was just like the drills in Master Hracken’s pain pipe. He’d already begun to see the fight through the mirror-bright lens of a warrior, reducing the battle to a sequence of movements, like a series of doors he had to pass through to get to the other side.

The things were screaming around him again, that pulsing, deliberate scream. Like the smell, it blanketed everything and made his skull feel as if it was going to pop. As he chopped another of the things in half, a white-hot shock of pain sprang up through his right shoulder. His hand went numb, just like that, the last three fingers dead around the handle of his lightsaber, and he spun around, snatching it from the
air with his left hand before it hit the floor. Everything was happening with crazy tricked-out speed, and he both saw and didn’t see the thing that had attached itself to his biceps, grinning up as its incisors raked his flesh. Blood splashed around its lips like tawdry lipstick.

Kindra flashed into his peripheral vision and thrust her blade crosswise through the thing’s upper thorax, slashing it down in a meaty spray. Its jaws stayed locked onto Ra’at’s arm, until Ra’at swung his own blade down on top of it, working left-handed, cutting the thing’s head apart. Across the tunnel he glimpsed Maggs hacking his own hole through the group, his blade a fan-like blur, but the tide of bodies was too thick. If they kept coming like this, the things would have him cornered. Ra’at saw the black oval of Maggs’s mouth shouting something, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

We’re losing
, Ra’at thought, and then:
How can we be losing?

A sudden crash of electricity exploded across the cave. Ra’at saw one of the Sith things go rag-dolling backward into the wall as if it had been jerked away on invisible wires. Now Ra’at could smell the ozone in the air, along with the unmistakable smoky odor of burned hair and skin.

In front of him, Hartwig lunged into view, eyes bulging, his forehead a map of veins, but the look on his face was pure confusion.

That’s not possible
, Ra’at thought,
only Sith Masters can use Force lightning, how—

“Stand back!”
a voice shouted, and when Ra’at looked behind Hartwig he saw Master Hracken standing there. Hracken’s arms were thrust out, with both hands extended. “Down, now!”

Maggs and Kindra had taken down three more of the things between them, and stepped over the bodies as the Combat Master flung his hands up and outward, hurling out streams of Force lightning. The tunnel shuddered, erupting with an electrical firestorm so intense that for an instant Ra’at couldn’t see past it. He smelled his own scorched eyelashes. Even after he shut his eyes, the afterimage of the cave, the bodies, and the others lay imprinted on his corneas in bleeding plaid patterns of red and black.

The Sith Master kept his hands in front of him, muscles straining, jaw clenched with fury. For a moment he disappeared yet again behind a vast crackling hood of electricity. It shattered the length of the tunnel with a massive, ear-rending
KRACK
that rocked the entire structure to its foundation and sent loose particles of building materials skittering down the walls.

Ra’at rubbed his eyes, waiting for what he saw to make sense. Part of the permasteel ceiling above his head was torn loose by electrical shock and dangled on a slew of cables. All around him, the floor was filled with smoking corpses, severed limbs and heads, still writhing as if trying to find a means of knitting themselves back together. Some of them were actively on fire. Others lay blind, their eyes cooked in their sockets. The heat from the Force lightning had literally melted off their skin, leaving webs and rivulets of liquefied tissue trickling from piles of blackened bones while the things shifted and squirmed, tried to stand and collapsed back into their own murk.

In front of the foul-smelling wall, Hracken stood trembling. A tendon twitched and jigged in his jaw, and Ra’at saw that the Sith Master had bitten his lip hard enough to draw blood.

“Through this way,” he said.

Kindra pointed to the wound on Ra’at’s arm. “How bad is it?”

“Not bad.”

“Did one of those things do that to you?”

“I’m fine.” Ra’at tore a scrap of his pant leg loose and started hurriedly tying it around his upper arm as a makeshift tourniquet. But the blood was already soaking through the fabric, sluicing down his elbow to his forearm with alarming eagerness. Kindra was looking at that, too, along with Maggs and Hartwig and Master Hracken, and Ra’at realized the power dynamic of the group had already shifted. As quickly as the battle had ended, he, Ra’at, had become a liability. Weight to be carried.

Or cut loose.

Out of the game, just like that.

“I can fight just as well with my left,” Ra’at said weakly. “You saw. You all did.”

Kindra just nodded, her face inscrutable, a map of unspoken strategy. Master Hracken said nothing, didn’t even seem to be paying attention. None of the others spoke, either. Ra’at ignited his lightsaber again in his left hand and swung it down on top of the wall that the things had built here, slashing deep into the pile of scrap metal and congealed viscera, driving it home, carving out a massive chunk of debris and kicking it loose. It dropped to the floor with a soggy clank.