Star Wars: Red Harvest (22 page)

“Hestizo Trace,” he said, extending one hand. “It’s good to see you again. I hope you won’t bother trying to run.”

She opened her mouth to speak and realized she couldn’t breathe. Scabrous gestured with one hand, and she felt herself yanked forward, down the corridor, and into his grasp. Within seconds she was so close to him that she had to look up to see his face.

“This library,” he said, “is the oldest part of the academy, older even than the tower itself. It was constructed over a thousand years ago by a Sith Lord named Darth Drear. He founded the academy, back when the planet itself was young. The ancient writings tell about how he used his first students as laborers. For hundreds of years, the Masters at the academy believed that a good many of those students died down in these very chambers, using the Force to move hundreds of tons of snow and ice and dig out these corridors and chambers to house
Drear’s vast collection of … specimens. It was thought that Drear worked the students until they died from exhaustion.” He smiled without the slightest gleam of humor. “The true genius of the structure lies beneath it. Under these floors, Drear built himself a secret temple, where he practiced the rituals and rites of the ancients, encoded in the Sith Holocron.”

Zo’s lungs began to unlock enough for her to sip in a small breath.
Grow
, she called out to the orchid,
oh please, if you’re there, if you’re there at all, grow, grow in him, grow now—

But there was nothing.

“When I first discovered the Holocron,” Scabrous said, “I did not fully understand its protocols.” He gestured to his face, at the horror of its ongoing decay.
“But I understand them now.”

“What do you want from me?” Zo asked.

“Ah.” Scabrous’s cheeks sucked in, and he licked his lips so that she could see the dead gray surface of his tongue like a lizard coiled against the yellow stones of his teeth. “Darth Drear wrote that he had found an elixir for staving off death itself, the ingredients of which he recorded in the Holocron—including, of course, your beloved orchid. The mixture was complete in and of itself, with a single flaw—” He gestured at his own face. “The inevitable dissolution of the tissue. It struck immediately upon exposure, spreading first through the brain, where it drove the victim into a state of homicidal madness, and then through the rest of the body, shutting it down. The flesh would remain animate, but insensate—living only to hunger, to feed and kill.”

“If you knew all that,” Zo asked, “why would you ever try to recreate the experiment yourself?”

Scabrous’s grin seemed to dangle from the sides of his face, a prehensile thing all its own. “Before he died, Darth Drear wrote of the final stage of the process—the step that he himself was never able to achieve. He dispatched his sentries to a nearby planet to abduct a Jedi and bring him to the secret temple underneath the library. After ingesting the elixir, in the final hours before his body gave in completely, under exactly the right circumstances and conditions, Drear planned to
use a ceremonial Sith sword to cut open the Jedi’s chest while he was still alive, and eat his heart. Only then, with that final infusion of midi-cholorians still warm from the Jedi’s blood, would the decay process be held back—granting the Sith Lord his ultimate immortality.”

Zo stared at him. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

“Unfortunately,” Scabrous said, “the sentries failed to bring back a Jedi with a suitable quantity of midi-cholorians in his bloodstream before Drear’s disease overtook him. But tonight, with your assistance, I am in the unique position of being able to fulfill that destiny personally.”

Zo felt something curl around her arms, snapping them back with a sharp jerk and forcing her shoulder blades back. Thick green vines had looped over her elbows and squirmed up her sides. She craned her neck to the right, and when she looked around, she saw them.

The dead ones: the corpses that she had faced on the rocky overhang, outside the tower. Their heads were still gone, blown off their shoulders. Instead, the riot of catastrophic vegetation that she had coaxed from inside their skulls had grown more profuse since she’d seen them last, grown with utter abandon. These were the runners and vines that had ensnared her now, stretching from the stumps of their necks, dozens of slick green ropes gripping her arms and holding her fast.

As Zo stared at them, she saw, to her immeasurable horror, that the stems were topped with dozens of tiny black orchids, budding everywhere. In her mind, she could hear the flowers hissing and shrieking, crackling hysterically, hungrily, insanely. They pricked her arms like thirsty syringes, questing after her blood.

No
, she thought.
No, no, please—

“You grew them,” Scabrous said. “How lovely that they recognize you.”

The headless, vine-stricken corpses pushed in closer, groping and shoving, until Zo realized that she could smell them. They stank like a freshly disinterred grave, full of black dirt and mold and rotten meat. She felt their cold skin pushing against her even as the vines constricted tighter around her arms, squeezing, twisting, pinching her skin.

Scabrous stepped forward, shoulders rising up until he towered over the things.

His mouth opened wide and he screamed.

His breath was fetid, the breath of a thing that had already died and was decaying from the inside out. Zo felt the things responding immediately to the scream, recoiling, pulling her back with them. And when they screamed their response, it was a terrible, throatless noise that came throbbing up from their severed necks, vibrating up and out of the stalks, one solid blast of high-pitched sound that rose, shifted frequency, and dropped again, a message composed entirely of high-pitched, almost ultrasonic oscillation.

They swung her around.

In an act of pure desperation—some part of her must have already known she would fail—Zo tried to use the Force on them, tried to reach out and connect with the plant-presence inside them. At the instant she made contact, a sharp jolt of toxic energy crackled through her, slamming through her brain like an ice ax and making her cry out loud. The inner landscape of her eyelids swirled with sere colors, shades of burnt bronze and anemic yellow.

The vines were dragging her down the corridor of the library, across the cold floor. Zo’s eyes widened. Up ahead, a great rectilinear hole gaped open in the floor to reveal a shadowy pit whose depths seemed bottomless, even from here.

Yet there were strange lights below, shimmering from deep within.

And she knew where she was going.

Under these floors, Drear built himself a secret temple, where he practiced the rituals and rites of the ancients …

Scabrous gestured, and they pulled her down.

T
RACE CROSSED A LONG DESOLATE STRETCH OF NOTHINGNESS BETWEEN TWO HIGH
featureless walls, the night’s storm barreling down over him like a demon with a debt to collect. Up ahead—still perhaps a hundred meters in the distance—stood the tower. He was almost there.

Despite his urgency, he knew he had to move more carefully now. Since the death of the Sith Blademaster, he’d seen no more of the things like the one inside the wall, but he’d known they were there. Extrasensory perception, telemetric ability, was no longer necessary. He could
hear
them screaming. And the screaming got louder the closer he came to the tower—more intense, somehow. And hungrier.

He had never seen anything like the abomination that had ripped the Blademaster apart: a living corpse, a dead thing whose flesh and muscle still moved, even as it decayed before his eyes. He sensed their presence around him, below and behind the unseen temples and stone outbuildings. Could a lightsaber dispatch a creature like that, or would
it merely tear it into individual pieces that would, in turn, continue to pursue their prey?

And what about Hestizo? Had the things found her as well?

He stopped again, stretching out with his feelings, the Force casting a wide psychic net in search of any sign of his sister, but it retrieved nothing. He still believed that she was here—perhaps in the tower, perhaps not—but the silence within him was far more disturbing than the screaming in the distance.

Keep going. You will find her. You will
.

For another ten minutes, he scrambled forward. He took another step and faltered again, raising his head slightly, sniffing the air.

He smelled smoke.

Clamoring to the top of a broken pillar, he looked in every direction until a glint of firelight in the distance caught his eye, a flickering orange glow inside a vast half-sunken stone structure, perhaps a quarter kilometer away. Trace watched it for a moment. He wanted to be sure. By itself, a fire would have meant nothing, especially on a planet of ruins where the Sith ruled and the dead had been restored to life.

But he also suddenly felt his sister’s presence inside.

She’s in there. She is
.

Leaping down off the broken pillar, Rojo Trace began to run.

Twenty seconds: the time it took him to reach the entryway, shoving his way through, unmindful of the darkness, the snow and clutter, and the thickening stink of smoke. Loose objects lay strewn randomly around the floor—books, scrolls, unidentifiable debris. Rows of low stone tables like marble slabs. It was some type of vast library. He kept going.

Hestizo, it’s me, are you there? It’s Rojo. I’m coming, I’m—

An arm hooked him from behind, lurching him upward.

“Have a care, Jedi.”

An ancient voice, it croaked in front of him. Each word came out deliberately, as a glottal, sawdusty reverberation that seemed to move
the air molecules themselves. “You seem to have forced your way into my sanctum sanctorum. Perhaps a modicum of restraint is in order.”

Trace felt himself being swung up into the air, and realized that he was hanging from the limbs of an immense tree. Looking down,
far
down, he saw the warty knuckles of its roots plunged deep into the floor itself, causing its variegated tiles to buckle and bulge. The thing’s trunk rose upward to spread dozens of sinuous gray limbs throughout the cavernous and gloomy room around it. Its upper branches clutched his wrist tighter than ever, swinging him around, and Trace observed that the walls around him were lined floor-to-ceiling with shelves of holobooks, scrolls and grimoires, and various cluttered arcana crammed back in every available notch and crevice.

“This is my dwelling place, yes?” the tree creature’s voice burbled up from somewhere inside its trunk. “And you have intruded here.”

Trace’s hand eased back for his lightsaber. There was a sharp whip-crack and a sting as one of the branches slapped it aside, and Trace saw the lightsaber go pinwheeling away. It landed below the shelves, in the corner, by the outer edge of a glimmering hearth, where the orange coals of a fire seethed and flickered.

“No need for your weapon here,” the voice said. “Not in this place of learning. We
are
both learned beings, are we not? Enlightened and informed by the written word. No need for the encumbrances of physical violence.” It uttered another bulky, dusty chuckle. “Look upon me, if you like.
Seek my face.”

Trace smelled a tangy, musty odor pass beneath his nose, and turned to see the librarian’s enormous wooden head craning toward him between its barren branches. It was a Neti, he realized, and it was sick. Whatever contagion had infected this planet had spread to it as well. Along its back side, the plant creature’s once-majestic form had taken on an altogether different cast. The formidable branches hung like clumps of atrophied muscle. Clusters of open sores had devoured the bark, and the exposed heartwood oozed a steady trickle of dark leakage that had collected on the floor around its roots. Whole shoals of holobooks and Sith texts floated like skiffs in the sprawling puddle
of fluid. Whatever had befallen the Sith students here, it had jumped across species without losing any of its virulence.

“I’m looking for a Jedi named Hestizo Trace.”

The Neti didn’t respond right away, except to shift his branches. Trace saw now that the creature’s limbs were loaded with mountains of holobooks, hundreds of them, some piled so high that whole avalanches went spilling in one direction or another whenever he moved.

“Of course I know about her,” the Neti replied. “You are her brother, yes?” The branches trembled, and more books fell. “Alas. She is lost.”

Trace felt a sudden chill run through him, as if he’d just been poisoned and was only now beginning to realize it. “How do you know?”

“What does it matter? Through the bond of leaf and vine.” A faint pause. “I summoned her here at the request of Lord Scabrous, and he killed her.”

“You’re lying.”

“Am I now?” The withered face didn’t seem overly offended by the accusation; if anything, it looked intrigued. “You don’t sound so sure of yourself, Jedi. Not so sure at all. I have lived for more than a thousand years, and now I have come to glimpse my final hours. Perhaps before I pass into the next stage of my evolutionary development, you would like to peer inside my mind and see whether or not I’m telling the truth?”

Trace started to say something, but his voice broke off. The branch around his wrist clasped harder, turning him idly around, gouging into the bone. Archaic limbs rustled behind him, and he smelled a different odor coming out of them now, something far worse than the thing’s breath. It was the enormous boggy stench of the disease, something deeply and profoundly wrong.

“Go on,” the Neti said. It sounded almost giddy now. “Look into my mind, Jedi. See what awaits you there.
Seek my face
.”

Trace felt something encircle his right leg at the ankle and pull tight, even as the branch tugged harder at his wrist, exerting a steadily increasing tension.

Seek my face
.

The Neti repeated itself, forgoing speech entirely now, shouting the words directly into Trace’s mind.

Seek my face!

Helpless, Trace felt himself sucked into the mire of the thing’s thoughts. It was like plunging his hand into a vat of warm black ooze. He groped for a moment in total blindness, trying to make some sense of the random shapes and impressions swimming around him in the Neti’s palatial memory.