Star Wars: Red Harvest (23 page)

And he saw.

It was a different part of the Sith library, the holobooks and archives neatly arranged. Trace understood that he was seeing it through the Neti’s eyes
before
it had gotten sick, and now he grasped the true dimensions of the librarian’s collection—it didn’t fill just this single room, but a series of other halls winding off in manifold directions. For the millennium or more that the Neti had held court here as the academy’s librarian, it had been accumulating holobooks and charts, records and ephemera.

Scouring the inner landscape for any sign of Hestizo, Trace’s inner vision glided down one of these halls, moving as the Neti’s limbs had moved, winding around a corner, beneath the shadowy recesses and through gigantic horseshoe archways. The architecture changed here, becoming less monastic and more ornate, resembling more of a battlement than a library. The winding, incorporeal branches of the Neti’s mind carried Trace deeper, past a recessed gallery, over a parapet, pausing here or there over endless accumulations of texts and writings.
This is my fortress
, the voice inside him intoned,
my bastion of knowledge acquired over the millennia, but now it is my FUEL
. And always the echoing, mindless call for acknowledgment:
Do you see, Jedi? Do you understand FUEL?

And Trace felt himself nodding in perfect understanding. He
did
see. The Force help him, he did. Whether or not he had actually
become
the Neti in that moment, he wasn’t sure … but their consciousness had melded, the two of them sharing a fundamental commonality that
transcended simple thought and expression. He heard strange noises in his head, plosives and sibilants, making a somehow-familiar name.

Dail’Liss
.

It was the librarian’s name, Trace realized, his patronymic, and somehow he knew that on his home planet it meant “lover of knowledge,” a perfect choice for—

All at once the quality of light changed.

The memory grew brittle, harsher, more severe: an opening in the floor, a chasm of immeasurable depth leading down into silent gray volumes of cold subterranean space. Here, at the bottom, Trace saw a hooded silhouette standing in a dusty shaft of overhead light, surrounded by piles of rubble. Part of the wall had collapsed, or been torn away, to reveal a hidden chamber inside it—a hidden Sith temple. The cloaked figure fell to his knees and knelt there, face hidden from view, galvanized by whatever he saw.

Trace watched as the man reached in with both hands to take out a large gray case, ornately filigreed with hieroglyphs glinting in the meager light. A moment of stillness shivered past. Then the figure turned the case on its side, smooth pink hands. They slid over it to find a recessed release-switch.

And activated it.

The box sprang open, and in that instant Trace caught sight of a black pyramidal shape, its depthless surface reflecting back no light, only the pale face of the man gazing raptly into it.

A Sith Holocron
, Trace thought.
Here in this library, this is where Darth Scabrous found—

The pyramid was vibrating ever so slightly, and Trace saw the man’s reflection change as his lips moved, murmuring words he couldn’t hear. The pyramid began to vibrate more steadily, practically purring in the man’s fondling embrace.

The image hit him head-on, cannonballing him out of the Neti’s thoughts and back into the present moment with all the impact of unrestrained
collision. His eyes throbbed in their sockets. Pain racked his chest, ribs, and pelvis until they felt as though they were being pried open by hooks. Somewhere amid the dying branches he could hear laughter, the mindless, jabbering laughter of the Neti surrendering itself to madness.

Smoke, I smell smoke—

Trace fought to clear his mind.
Heat
. His skin blazed. Smoke assaulted his bronchial passageways, scorched the inner lining of his sinuses. The vision of what he’d seen in the temple pit was still glued to his consciousness, and he understood now that this was where the Sickness had first originated. Its source had been the library in whose labyrinthine depths Darth Scabrous had discovered a Sith Holocron, forgotten perhaps for more than a millennium, and unleashed something that even he was unable to control.

Trace felt the blood vessels in his head bulging with the sudden reversal of hydrostatic pressure. Wrenching agony took hold of his spine and hips. He looked down and saw that the Neti’s branches were squeezing him harder until his muscles howled for release. Behind the tree creature and below it, great ragged bursts of flame had started licking upward through the piles of fallen holobooks and sacred Sith texts, rising to engulf the library.

“Ought to have run away from here when you had the chance, Jedi.” The Neti’s branches, blazing now, swung across the shelves, knocking hundreds of holobooks into the fire. “Ought never to have sought my face. I told you I had entered my final days here. Now we’ll perish together … yes?”

“Wait—”

“There is nothing left for me here. Nor you. We will go now, both of us, and join your sister, yes?”

“No.”
But his limbs felt leaden, miserably weak, as if the smoke in his lungs had solidified, dropping massive hunks of ballast into his extremities. He had the awful suspicion that if he didn’t start moving them soon, he’d never be able to move them again.

Above him, the Neti-thing was having exactly the opposite reaction.
Impending death had transformed it into a frantic, slashing version of itself. It flung its branches violently from side to side, twisting and heaving as if caught in a fiery hurricane, ripping its roots up from the floor.

Somewhere in his own mind, Trace could feel the creature’s last grasp on reality coming totally unmoored, even as it ripped itself from the floorboards. On either side, shelves were shuddering and collapsing with frightening speed, dumping their contents like squadrons of fiery angels falling into the abyss. The holobooks crackled, hissing showers of sparks as their circuitry burst apart in the widening blaze. How long did he have until the fire brought the roof itself down on top of them? Five minutes? Less?

HELP ME PLEASE HELPMEHELPMEHELPME—

He recoiled as if slapped. It was Zo’s voice, screaming through his mind. The thought went rocketing through him, snapping him back to a state of total awareness.

Trace breathed, clearheaded again and grateful for it. The reprieve wouldn’t last forever, wouldn’t even last very long, he knew, but it might be enough to do what needed to be done.

Closing his eyes, he let his body fall motionless in the grip of the Neti’s branches, surrendering all resistance. He took one last deep breath and held it. That single lungful of air would have to last him … or else his last hope of helping Zo wouldn’t amount to more than suicide.

He created a small bubble, not much bigger than his own body, and sealed it shut, evacuating the air from inside it as he did so. The flames on his clothes, oxygen-starved, guttered and died.

Step one done. Now get busy
.

Jolting himself free from the Neti’s branches, he lurched forward inside the bubble as hard as he could, his momentum knocking it loose and letting it fall down into the landscape of the library’s floor.

The bubble spun and slammed into the heaps of burning holobooks, pitching him sideways inside it as it continued to spin. The library reeled around him.

Then, next to the Neti’s trunk, he saw his lightsaber.

It lay among the creature’s winding snake-like roots, in front of a large ragged knothole that had already started charring black. Steadying himself inside the bubble, Trace placed both hands along the inner curvature of its surface, spread out his fingers, and waited. A burning branch as big as his body swung down from high above, crashing off the top of the bubble, the Neti’s twig-fingers clutched rigidly as they twisted and burned in front of him. Trace almost breathed in and caught himself. His body ached for oxygen, for even an ounce of fresh air, but he knew that if he dissolved the barrier now and tried to inhale, the surrounding heat would flash-fry him in seconds, starting with the lining of his lungs.

He looked at the lightsaber, laboring to evacuate every other thought from his mind. At the Jedi Temple, they had taught that it was never a matter of manipulating the object, but of eliminating the space that separated you from it. Yet at this moment, the object in question had never felt so far away.

To me. To me
.

The lightsaber remained where it was.

Closing his eyes, he felt the bubble shift forward like a reluctant animal roused from hibernation, and begin rolling over the mountains of burning books, toward the Neti’s scorched trunk. When he opened his eyes, the lightsaber lay right in front of him, poised near the ragged knothole less than a meter away. Trace centered himself, drawing up his composure. The timing of what happened next was critical. Deactivating the bubble, he opened his hand, and the lightsaber flew into it. Its handle was almost too hot to hold, but the solidity of it had never felt better in his life.

It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for. His eyes followed the thing’s trunk back down to where it met the floor. It had yanked its roots almost entirely out of the structure’s foundation, and its balance now hung on by the slenderest of threads.

Trace waited until the creature was about to fling itself forward again. Then he swung the lightsaber’s blade in a single crosswise motion, slashing the remaining roots to the quick.

The Neti-thing pitched forward, no longer even remotely anchored to the library’s floor. It swung loose and kept falling, a captive of its momentum. It hit the floor hard enough to thrum the entire structure on its foundation, throwing up whole blinding swarms of sparks and ash in its wake.

Trace staggered forward, waving away the smoke in front of his eyes. From here, he saw a gaping hole that the tree had torn through the library’s outer wall, and through it, the frozen surface of Odacer-Faustin’s snow-covered landscape. He could already hear the hiss of steam as the flaming architecture met the subzero air outside.

Help me …

Trace felt his sister’s scream go burning throughout his entire body. This wasn’t just an impression, some random emotional flash—he actually
felt
her pain as it wrenched through his right arm, throbbing into his shoulder and chest, blasting up to the roots of his teeth. Tears boiled up in his eyes and the wind whipped them away. His legs went numb and he stumbled, almost falling over in the snow.

He shook it off. He couldn’t explain what he’d just experienced. It was as if everything he knew about his sister and the Force itself had suddenly been inverted, corrupted on some fundamental level. All that remained now was a sense of evil so intimate, so profoundly
personal
, that it made him want to crawl out of his own skin and leave it lying here like a heap of soiled clothes.

She was close … so close …

He took a step back toward the burning hall of the library. Snow was blowing in furiously now, swirling with smoke and ash, as he staggered through the ruined stones. If he had to go back into the fire for her, then so be it. If he had to give his life—

A bloodstained arm burst up from the rubble underneath him and seized him around the ankle, pulling him down. Then a second and a third. One of them hooked around his right wrist, the others around his waist. Two others punched upward, clamped down over either leg. Claw-like fingers plunged into one corner of his mouth and drew it
back into a hideous, involuntary half grin. The debris around him was roiling with activity now, of half-buried shapes clawing their way upward from below.

They were covered in vines.

Gravity took him, and he fell.

A
LTHOUGH HE’D NEVER CONSIDERED HIMSELF A LUCKY MAN UNDER THE BEST OF
circumstances, Pergus Frode had had the presence of mind over the past several hours to realize that he was very fortunate indeed.

The cargo hold of Dranok’s cruiser, where he was hiding, had obviously been built to smuggle contraband. All around him, in the half-light, empty swing-bins and hidden storage spaces stood open, exhaling the damp and fragrant residue of illegally transported spices that had been piled up here over the years.

Frode squirmed a little, lifting his head, stretching his legs and back, allowing himself to straighten up just enough to restore circulation to his extremities. There was tingling through his feet and toes, pins and needles as the leaden heaviness of numb muscle tissue began, reluctantly, to reawaken. He was going to need the full use of his feet, he knew, in case he had to run again.

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He’d run enough tonight already. Although it certainly did beat the alternative.

It had started hours ago. How many? He wasn’t even sure now. He’d just finished removing the flight computer from Dranok’s ship, and had hauled it back into the shop to run some basic diagnostics on it. All that time, his unconscious mind had been wrangling with the issue of how he was going to handle the incoming heat signature from the unknown vessel heading straight for Odacer-Faustin’s landing hangar.

To inform Darth Scabrous, or not to inform him—that had been the question he’d been pondering when a bloody palm had slapped and squeaked off the control booth’s glass.

Jarred out of his thoughts, Frode had sat up and spun around just in time to see something—it might once have been human—in the process of ripping the hatch off the booth. That face was like something out of a nightmare, a gray and grinning mask: whole chunks of viscera had begun to pucker and peel around its lips. Staring at it, Frode’s brain had flashed back to a corpse that he and another mechanic had once stumbled across inside the cockpit of a speeder they’d been salvaging.

Except
this
corpse’s eyes were wide open, and staring at him hungrily.

If he’d stopped and given it even an instant’s thought, Frode would already have been dead. Luckily for him, rumination was not his natural tendency—his first reaction was to run. He got one leg free and kicked out the front plate above the booth’s instrument panel. The plexi popped loose and he’d gone slithering out, hitting the hangar bay and running faster than he’d ever run in his life.