Star Wars: Red Harvest (25 page)

Tulkh speared the Sith student, ramming its body back into the snow lizard’s carcass and pinning it against the thing’s spinal column. He looked back at the droid. “They’re hiding inside the tauntauns,” he shouted. “They—”

The hard metal of the HK’s arm swung back and shoved him over, forcefully enough to knock him down in the snow, just as a slick bullet of bloody spit flew out of the infected tauntaun’s mouth. Another centimeter to the right and it would have hit Tulkh directly in his open eye; as it was, the gobbet of mucus stuck to the side of his head and clung there. Looking up, Tulkh saw the animal’s gore-soaked muzzle puckering, summoning up another mouthful.

“They’re notorious for their aim,” the droid said.

“Thanks.”

“I suggest another plan.”

“They’re faster than us.” Tulkh saw the other undead tauntauns behind the one he’d gutted, their hollowed-out chests and underbellies swelling and bulging with the Sith students hiding inside. Already he could imagine what it would be like, the snow lizards pounding up behind him at fifty kilometers per hour, only to eject their flesh-starved passengers on top of him. “Any ideas?”

“Only one,” the droid said.

It was already taking aim. An instant later the HK’s mortar round flew directly into the center of the herd. At close range, its twenty-meter blast radius was a sight to behold, even to Tulkh, who had seen the end result of such weapons many times before. He shielded his eyes as chunks and fragments of cold tauntaun fat, human flesh, and bone came raining down on top of them.

“Is there anything else we can kill?” the droid asked.

“Ourselves, if we don’t move.”

The HK turned to regard the landscape where they stood. Something inside its processor made a low, steady whirring noise, as if it was processing the recent developments, or experiencing a memory. When it spoke again, its voice was unhurried, almost introspective. “Have I told you how much I hate the Sith for enslaving me here for so long?”

“Only about twenty times.” Tulkh stepped around the still-twitching tauntaun hindquarters, idly admiring the knob of exposed hip joint. As trophies went, it would have made a fine addition to his collection, but it was going to have to stay here. He sighed. “Let’s go.”

They turned and started walking. The Whiphid’s fur was wet and dirty from the snow, and it clung to the side of his head in thickly plastered strands that made his flesh both clammy and numb. He was exhausted and distracted and more than ready to get out of here. Neither he nor the HK noticed the bloody, gelatinous glob of infected tauntaun sputum that the snow lizard had fired at him, but it was still there, still trickling steadily down the side of his brow, making its way toward the corner of his eye.

Arriving at the
Mirocaw
, Tulkh saw something that stopped him cold. There was a second ship—one that he didn’t recognize—crashed forty or so meters away from his own, its nosecone crumpled, half embedded in the snow.

The HK beeped. “That’s Dranok’s ship.”

“Who?”

“Another bounty hunter.”

“What’s it doing all the way out here?” Tulkh asked.

“According to my scanners, there are no life-forms on board,” the droid said. “But—”

“Let me guess.” The Whiphid raised his spear. “You’re picking up a positive reading in
my
ship.”

“How did you know?”

Tulkh pointed at the tracks leading across the snow in front of them, from one crashed ship to the other.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Looks like we’ve got at least one stowaway to scrag before we get out of here for good.”

S
CABROUS SWUNG THE
S
ITH SWORD DOWNWARD
. W
ITH THE FIRST CUT, THE BLADE
slashed through the dirty outerwear and animal skins that Zo had been wearing since her arrival here, exposing bare skin. She looked down and saw the shallow white trough that the sword had gouged through her flesh, a pale streak of pain, the cut turning red as it filled with blood.

Scabrous grinned at her, staring down at the wound, actually salivating now as he raised the sword a second time, extended high over his head, clutching its handle with both hands for maximum leverage, angling its tip directly toward her chest. His eyes rolled madly, utterly lost to the Sickness that had overtaken them. Zo went rigid, yanking at the straps, knowing even as she did it that there was no way she could get loose.

Not with your muscles, Hestizo. Reach out with the Force
.

It was the same voice that had called out to her just a moment before. She drew in a breath and fell absolutely still, closing her eyes, surrendering
her mind to the moment so that time itself seemed to fall motionless, settling down around her like silt. And when she raised her arms up again, in one smooth motion this time, the bindings fell loose beneath her—it was as if she’d passed
through
the leather straps without a whisper of resistance. Her wrists swung outward, her torso and legs suddenly, shockingly free.

Snapping upright, Zo swung her body off to one side of the slab.

“No!” Scabrous roared from the other side, the blade still held up high in the air above him. His voice was shrill, and as he shouted, Zo realized that she was hearing two voices, one forming the words in her ear while the other emitted the piercing, ululating scream in her mind. “You shall not! You
dare
not!”

She scrambled farther back. She was upright and on her feet for the first time, and the confines of the temple where she stood were only now beginning to register to her—an oblong room centered on the sacrificial altar, the stone floor beneath her cluttered with braziers, casting shallow pools of shifting firelight.

The Sith Lord charged at her, angling the sword downward, its blade whickering past her so closely that Zo heard the steel hissing crosswise through the air, shearing molecules from their bonds. It clanged off the wall and he spun around with sickening, eye-watering speed, slicing sideways for her.

Hestizo, it’s me—

The voice in her head again, the one that she still couldn’t identify, although its words continued to waft upward through her mind, resonating outward, ripples in a pond. Even as she lurched backward again, the corner of the temple pressing into her back so that there was literally nowhere left to turn, she heard it calling out.

Hestizo—

Where are you?
her brain cried back.
Who are you?
A remote possibility, wild but somehow impossible to ignore, burst into her mind fully formed.
Rojo? Is that you?

“Jedi trash.” Scabrous appeared in front of her, raising the sword between them, the sticky ruin of his face glinting off the engraved steel.
He moved forward to administer the death blow but in that same moment a crash erupted behind him, clanging deafeningly across the temple, followed by the rolling tinny clatter of an upset brazier.

The Sith Lord whirled, sword still raised, lips drawing backward, and glared at the man standing before him. The man wasn’t even looking at Scabrous. He was looking at Hestizo.

“Get behind me,” Trace told Zo.
“Now.”
Not waiting another instant for her reaction, he sprang upward, arcing around and landing on the floor in front of Zo so that he was face-to-face with Scabrous, locked directly into the Sith Lord’s stare. His lightsaber pulsed to life, its beam humming. “This is over.”

Scabrous’s answer came in the form of a scream. The Sith sword slashed downward in his right hand while his left swung upward, gripping his own lightsaber. He flung himself forward, both blades whirring in front of him, spinning outward, flashing steel and pure blood-red energy lashing out, the long, terrible scream still stretching from his jaws.

From the first thrust, there was no art to his attack, no evidence of grace or form. It was already too late for that, and both Trace and Scabrous seemed to know it. They went at each other viciously, head-on, like animals with no air between them, slashing and blocking, edging around the open place in the floor. Every time their blades crashed together Zo felt it in the hollow of her chest and the roots of her teeth.

She watched as Trace probed the Sith Lord’s weak places, or where he must have hoped they’d be, but Scabrous seemed to anticipate each move. The Sickness had made him incredibly fast, insurmountably strong. For every attack that her brother made, one of Scabrous’s two blades had an effortless reaction, as if he already held the outcome of the duel in the palm of his hand.

Yet for some reason he was still allowing Rojo to force him backward, across the temple, back toward the sacrificial altar, his movements almost ethereal behind the constant reckless smear of blue and red and steel blades all carving through the air.

Scabrous was poised in front of the altar now, standing before the slab where he’d laid Zo out for her sacrifice. He stepped lithely between the braziers, even the one that Rojo had knocked over when he’d landed, maneuvering without the slightest effort past the rising bank of flames where the fire had started to spread. It was climbing the black wall, orange peaks and tongues flickering upward, rising.

Zo watched her brother press forward again, keeping the duel tight and close, but the Sith Lord made no move to back away any farther now. Even as he continued to deflect Trace’s blade, his lips were moving. Zo couldn’t make out what he was saying, and when Rojo brought his lightsaber up for a final attack, she saw that Scabrous wasn’t just smiling; he was actually
laughing
.

Trace swung down again, one final blow, the coup de grâce that was intended to finish things between them permanently. Just then, Scabrous glanced up and gestured, a small, insignificant flick of the fingers in the direction of Trace’s lightsaber.

There was a slight airborne tremor in the space above his arm.

And Trace’s lightsaber went out.

“Did you really think,” Scabrous’s voice was saying, “that after all that, I would trust the outcome to a duel?”

Trace didn’t even bother looking at the deactivated lightsaber in his hand. He tossed it aside and pivoted backward as Scabrous’s blade slashed across the open space where he’d been standing a split second earlier. The red blade crashed into the floor, shaking it under Trace’s feet.

Everything had gone wrong. The Sith Lord had laid a trap, and he’d walked right into it.

Scabrous swept toward him, triumphant now. The remains of his eyes were huge and dead, bulging in their sockets. At first he looked as though he was going to scream again. But when he spoke, his voice was oddly mellifluous, almost a purr.

“Tell me a story, Jedi. Tell me about the Force and how it binds everything together. Tell me how it protects the good and sacred in life.” The Sith Lord’s lips drew back to show all his teeth.
“Tell me all your lies.”

Trace raised up one hand. He’d intended to levitate the stone altar behind Scabrous into the air—he could probably flip it around and drop it on top of Scabrous fast enough that he wouldn’t have time to react. But Scabrous sprang forward with the lightsaber, and when Trace moved to dodge it, he thrust himself directly onto the waiting edge of the Sith sword.

Trace looked down and saw the blade plunge through him. He felt a peculiar weightlessness pass over him, as if the gravity in the room had been suspended, as if—by lifting his feet off the floor—he might dematerialize completely.

When he looked down again, all he could see was blood.

Zo was staring at her brother when Scabrous’s blade sliced him apart. Trace staggered back, wobbling on his feet, and as he wheeled around toward her she saw that he’d been cut wide open from neck to belly.

“No.” It came out like a choke.
“No.”

Trace stumbled again, fighting to keep on his feet. The wound in his abdomen was even deeper than she’d first thought, pouring out whatever remained of his life. From where she stood, she could see pigtails of small intestine poking visibly from beneath his ribs. Trace’s cheeks had gone chalky white. Blood pattered on the floor between his feet, and he skidded in the puddle and fell, first to his knees, then to his back, where he lay motionless in front of her. He looked like a dancer for whom all music had permanently stopped.

He stretched out one hand. “Zo …”

And then nothing.

No. No. No
.

“That was easy,” Scabrous snarled, and turned to her. “You’re next.”

Zo shook her head. It wasn’t going to happen like this, she wanted to say, it didn’t get to end this way. He didn’t get to win.

But Scabrous was lumbering toward her, circling the pool of blood and the hole in the floor. The last dregs of his humanity had drained from his face, and now he was a shambling skeleton, a thing like those things that had dropped from the tower.

When he opened his mouth again to speak, all he could do was scream.

His transformation was complete.

Hestizo …?

She closed her eyes and heard that voice again, ringing out, growing steadier, like a sleeper awakening from a deep and disorienting coma.

Are you there?
she asked the orchid.
Are you alive?

Silence, and then:
 … felt the Sickness for so long … thought I was dead…

Never mind that now
, she thought.
Just grow
.

Hestizo, please—

Grow
.

Not sure I’m strong enough yet to—

GROW
, Zo cried out, shouting at the orchid, needing more than anything to be heard.
GROW. GROW! FOR THE SAKE OF MY BROTHER AND ALL THAT HE LOST, FOR MY SAKE, JUST—

The Scabrous-thing stopped in its tracks.

The rotting chamber of its skull cocked slightly to one side, as if it had just heard an unfamiliar sound, a voice shouting out from a far-off room. With one gnarled, spade-claw hand, it reached up and clutched at its left ear, working the finger around inside and wincing at the results.

Zo could see something inside the gray shell of his ear, just a glimpse.