Yoda, Dark Rendezvous Read online

  snuffling beside his student like some unfortunate garden gnome. The student's

  grin broadens, but he knows better than to offer to help.

  Yoda settles himself on the stone in a series of grunts and shifts, adjusting

  the skirts of his worn Jedi robes, and letting his feet hang just over the

  surface of the pond. The water-skeeters zip under his ancient green toes,

  oblivious to the slightly hairy greatness dangling over them. "Pensive, are you,

  Dooku?"

  The student doesn't attempt to deny it.

  "No fear about this mission have you, surely?"

  "No, Master." The student corrects himself. "Not about the mission, anyway."

  "Confident, you should be. Ready you are."

  "I know."

  Yoda seems to want the light he has left on the ground. He turns his cane

  around and tries to hook the glow light's handle with it. Grimacing, he fishes

  once, twice, but the light slips off. He grunts, exasperated.

  With the barest flick of his attention, the student picks up the lantern with

  the Force and sends it floating to his teacher. "Why not do it the easy way,

  Master?" he asks—and knows what's coming as soon as he shuts his mouth.

  "Because it is easy," Yoda grunts. In the young man's experience, students

  get a lot of answers like this from Yoda. He didn't send the light away, though,

  Dooku thinks.

  They sit together in the garden. Somewhere out of sight, a fish breaks the

  surface, then settles back into the water.

  Yoda gives the student a companionable prod with the end of his stick. "So

  ready to leave, yesterday you were!"

  "And last month, and last year, and the year before that." A rueful smile

  from Dooku lights and dies slowly away. "But now that it's really going to

  happen . . ." He looks around. "I can't remember a time I didn't want to

  leave—to go out, to travel the stars, to see the world. And yet I have loved it

  here. This place has been my home. You have been my home."

  "And will be still." Yoda gazes at the sweet-scented darkness of the gardens

  approvingly. "Always be here, we will. Home, yes ... they say on Alderaan, Home

  it is, where when you come to the door, they have to let you in!" He snuffs the

  evening air, laughing a little. "Hm. Always will there be a place for you here."

  "I suppose so. I hope so." The student looks down at the shell in his hand.

  "I found this on the bank. Abandoned by a freshwater hermit crab. They don't

  have homes of their own, you know. They keep outgrowing them. I was thinking

  about that, how the Jedi found me on Serenno. With my mother and father, I

  suppose. I can't remember them now. Do you ever stop to think how strange that

  is? Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without." Yoda

  stirs, but does not speak. "I wonder, sometimes, if that is what drives us, that

  first abandonment. We have a lot to prove."

  A glow-fly comes flickering out of the tangled vines to zip over the surface

  of the pond, like a spark shot from a fire. The student watches it make its

  dizzy pattern over the quiet water.

  Yoda has a question he likes to ask: What are we, think you, Dooku? Every

  time the student tries a different answer: We are a knot tied in the Force or We

  are the agency of Fate or We are each cells in the body of History . . . but

  tonight, watching the glow-fly hiss and flicker in the night, a truer answer

  comes to him. In the end, what we are is: alone.

  With a faint pop, like a bubble bursting, a fish rises from the dark water

  and snaps. The glow-fly's light goes out and is gone, leaving no trace but one

  weak ripple that spreads slowly across the surface of the pond.

  "I guess even then I was like that hermit crab," the student says. "Too big

  for my parents' house. So you brought me here, and it's been years, now, that

  even the Temple has seemed a tight fit for me. I guess . . ." The young man

  pauses, turning, so the light falling against the edge of his hooded robe throws

  a shadow across his face. "I worry that once I am out in the big world, I will

  never be able to fit inside here again."

  Yoda nods, speaking almost to himself. "Proud, are you. Not without reason."

  "I know."

  "Not without danger, either."

  "I know that, too."

  The student rubs again at the hermit crab shell, and then drops it into the

  pond. Startled water-skeeters skitter madly from the splash, trying to stay

  afloat.

  "Bigger than the Jedi, bigger than the Force, you cannot be," Yoda says.

  "But the Force is bigger than the Jedi, Master. The Force is not just these

  walls and teachings. It runs through all life, high and low, great and small,

  light—" Awkwardly the student stops.

  —and dark," Yoda says. "Oh, yes, young one. Think you I have never felt the

  touch of the dark? Know you what a soul so great as Yoda can make, in eight

  hundred years?"

  "Master?"

  "Many mistakes!" Wheezing with laughter, the old teacher reaches out with his

  cane and pokes his student in the ribs. "To bed with you, thinker of deep

  thoughts!" Poke, poke. "Your Master, Thame Cerulian, says the most gifted

  Padawan he ever saw, you are. Trust in yourself, you need not. I, Yoda, great

  and powerful Jedi Master, will trust for you! Is it enough?"

  The apprentice wants to laugh along, but cannot. "It is too much, Master. I

  am afraid . . ."

  "Good!" Yoda snorts. "Fear the dark side, you should. In the mighty is it

  mightiest. But not yet Thame's equal are you; not yet a Jedi Knight; not yet a

  member of the Council. Many shells have we left for you, Dooku—as long as you

  can fit inside this one," he says, rapping his student's skin. "Tomorrow, go you

  must, into the darkness between the stars. But home always will this place be.

  If ever lost you are, look back into this garden." Yoda hefts his glow light, so

  shadows like water-skeeters dart away from them. "A candle will I light, for you

  to find your way home."

  Sixty-three years later, Jai Maruk had been sent to the infirmary, and Ilena

  Xan had returned to her room, making preparations for the Jedi Apprentice

  Tournament. Mace Windu alone lingered with Yoda.

  "Dooku asks to come home," Yoda said. "A trap, could this be."

  "Probably," Mace agreed.

  Yoda sighed and studied the shell. "A question, he called it. Yes, such a

  question! But ignore it we must, do you agree?"

  Unexpectedly, Mace shook his head. "Dooku should be dead. I should have

  killed him on Geonosis. I could have stopped the whole war then. And still he is

  key. Could he come to parley in earnest? There is only a little chance. Could he

  come all the way back to us? Surely the chance is less than a little. But

  balance that chance, however small, against a million lives, and it's a chance

  we must take. So I think, Master."

  Yoda grunted. "Hard it would be, to dare to hope again for this lost

  student!"

  "Tough," Mace said. "Nobody said being a Jedi Master was easy—even for you."

  Yoda grunted, glaring around at the Temple . "Pfeh. All too wise, you have

  become. Better before it was, when only Yoda was wise!" He glanced over at Mace

  and snickered. Mace would have laughed, too,
if somewhere in the ring on

  Geonosis he hadn't lost the knack.

  On the other side of the galaxy, the Order's most gifted apprentice reached

  out to tap a lightsaber with the toe of his boot. Count Dooku grimaced. The

  lightsaber was still attached to a hand. The hand was soot black and rimed with

  frost; it ended in a gory stump of frozen blood just above the wrist. Dooku was

  in his study, a place for reflection, and the severed hand hardly struck the

  contemplative note. Besides which, as hard as it had frozen in the bitter vacuum

  of space, it would be thawing out in a hurry now. If he wasn't careful, it would

  leave a stain on the tiles. Not a good thing, even though one more bloodstain on

  the floor of Château Malreaux would hardly be noticed.

  On the other side of Dooku's desk, Asajj Ventress hefted a bag of foil

  insulation. "There wasn't much left of the ship, Master. The Force was strong,

  and I hit the reactor chamber with my first shot. It took me several hours to

  find that," she said, glancing at the frozen hand. "It occurred to me a magnetic

  scan might turn up the lightsaber. Funny to think he was reaching for his weapon

  when his ship blew up. Instinct, I suppose."

  "He?"

  "He, she." Asajj Ventress shrugged. "It."

  When her first Master died, Asajj Ventress, scourge of the Jedi and Count

  Dooku's most feared associate, had tattooed her hairless head and left her

  girlhood behind. Her skull was striped with twelve marks, one for each of the

  twelve warlords she had killed after swearing their deaths. She was a dagger of

  a woman, slender and deadly. Even in a galaxy cluttered with hate, such a

  combination of speed and fury comes only once in a generation; Dooku had known

  that from the first moment they met. She was the rose and the thorn together;

  the sound of a long knife driving home; the taste of blood on one's lips.

  Asajj shrugged. "I never found a head, but I did pick up a few assorted bits

  out of the wreckage if you want to take a look," she said, giving the foil bag a

  heft.

  Dooku regarded her. "What a little cannibal you have become."

  She said, "I become what you make me."

  No easy answer to that.

  With an expert Force tug, Dooku brought the severed hand, still clutching its

  weapon, to hang in the air before him, as easily as he had drawn up Yoda's glow

  light all those decades earlier. Before the starfighter explosion had ripped the

  hand so untidily from the rest of its body, Dooku rather thought it might have

  been olive-skinned. The charring made it hard to tell if it was even human. The

  dead flesh, unconnected to any spirit, was merely matter now—no more interesting

  than a table leg or a wax candle, and bearing no more imprint of its owner's

  soul and personality. Dooku always found this astonishing: how transitory the

  relationship was between one's body and oneself. The spirit is a puppeteer to

  make one's flesh limbs dance: but cut the spirit's strings, and nothing remains

  but meat and paint, cloth and bone.

  A Jedi's lightsaber, now: that was something different. Each weapon was

  unique, built and rebuilt by its owner, made to be a pure expression of Self.

  Dooku ran one finger along the handle of the dead Jedi's weapon. The force of

  the explosion had stripped off half the casing and fused its works so it would

  never burn again, but the essential pattern was obvious still. "Jang Li-Li," he

  murmured. To his surprise, he found he was sad.

  "I make that sixteen," Ventress said. "Seventeen, it should have been, if you

  had allowed me to kill that spy, Maruk."

  Dooku turned. Released from his attention, the gory hand and the handle it

  clutched dropped with a wet thump and clatter to the floor. The Count walked to

  the window of his study. When he was very young, Yoda had told him Vjun's tragic

  story, and for years he'd had it in mind as a good place to make a retreat. The

  planet was heavy with the dark side, which made the study of the Sith ways

  easier. And more practically, Vjun's catastrophe—a plague of sudden madness that

  carried off most of the planet's population in a year—had left a great many

  nicely appointed manors empty for the taking. An old crab likes a comfortable

  shell, after all, and Château Malreaux was very comfortable indeed. The previous

  owner's sanity had slipped from him in sudden and spectacular fashion; except

  for the bloodstains, one might think the château had been built new expressly

  for Dooku's occupation.

  Beyond the study window it was raining, of course—the same acid drizzle that

  had nearly eaten through the roof before Dooku had arrived to set things in

  better repair. In the distance, toward the seashore, a few twisted thorn-trees

  raised their claws at the dolorous sky, but the real ground cover was the

  notorious Vjun moss: soft, sticky, venomously green, and passively carnivorous.

  A two-hour nap on the stuff would leave exposed skin red, welted, and oozing.

  Dooku watched rain run like tear tracks down his windows. "The last time I

  saw Jang, she must have been . . . younger than you, even. A handsome young

  woman. The Council was sending her on her first diplomatic mission . . . to

  Sevarcos, I think it was. She came to ask my advice. She had striking eyes, very

  gray and steady. I remember thinking she would do well."

  Ventress picked up the bloody hand and tossed it into her foil bag. "Great

  are the powers of the Sith, but you're not much of a fortune-teller."

  "You think not?" Dooku turned to consider the dead Jedi's murderer. "Jang

  lived in service, however misguided, and acted by the star of her principles,

  however incomplete. By that judging, how many lives are better?"

  "Lots are longer, though." Ventress tied a knot in the foil bag and tossed it

  into the corner of the room. "If you ask me," she said, watching the bag hit

  with a wet thud, "that's not what winning looks like."

  She licked her lips.

  "You have a point," he said.

  Asajj shifted unconsciously into what Dooku recognized as the echo of a

  fighting stance, shoulders squared, chin up and aggressive, hands high. Here it

  comes, he thought.

  Ventress took a deep breath. "Make me your apprentice."

  "It's not the time—" Dooku began, but Ventress cut him off.

  "I'm not in it for the Trade Federation or the Republic," she said. "I don't

  care about flags or soldiers, sides or treaties, droids or clones. I'm not even

  in it for the killing, except for the Jedi, and that's not business, it's

  personal. When I work on my own, I do what I like. When I do your bidding, I

  don't need it to be right or reasoned or even sane: I do it because you ask it

  of me."

  "I know," Dooku said.

  Ventress strode to the window and stood before it, blocking Dooku's view.

  "Have I served well?"

  "Superbly," he admitted.

  "Then reward me! Make me your apprentice! Teach me the ways of the Sith!"

  "Have I not taught you many secrets, Asajj?"

  "Scraps. Little devices. Lesser arts. Not nearly what you would if I were

  your apprentice sworn in blood, I know. I am no fool," she said angrily. As if

  he didn't know that. As if she needed to convince him she wa
s deadly. "I have

  learned much about the Sith. Their lineage and their greatness."

  "But what of their natural history?" Dooku said. Ventress blinked. "What?"

  "The Sith, considered as a species. An insect, perhaps." Asajj's thin lips

  got thinner. "You mock me."

  "I have rarely been more serious." The Count paced over to a shelf of

  holocrons on the wall, plucked one out, and inserted it into the comm cube on

  his desk. "Behold: the sickle-back mantis of Dantooine." A glowing picture

  formed in the air over the desk, a glossy red-and-black mantis, all hooked

  forelimbs and wicked piety. "After mating, the female tears her partner's head

  off and lays her eggs in his body. When the broodlings hatch, they eat their way

  out and then attack one another."

  "I am not given to parables," Ventress said impatiently. "If you have a

  point, make it."

  "It is a tricky business, this making of apprentices," Dooku said. "The true

  Sith Lord must find a pupil in whom the Force runs strong."

  "Sixteen Jedi dead is some testament to that," Ventress said. "Should have

  been seventeen," she added.

  "But do I really want to make you so strong?" the Count said softly. "We are

  such pleasant company now, while you know your place. But if I were to make you

  my apprentice, if I were to take you by the hand and lead you down below the

  black water that is the dark side, then either you would drown, or you would

  grow far stronger, and neither option appeals to me. You burn so brightly now, I

  would hate to put you out."

  "Why should you? What harm is there in teaching me to help you better?"

  "You would betray me." He shrugged, cutting off her protests. "It is the

  unhappy hazard of embracing the dark side. I am old, and I have learned the

  limits of my ambition. You are young, and strong, and those two things have

  always led to one place in the history of the Sith."

  "You think I would intrigue against you?"

  "Not at first. But a day would come when you would disagree with my

  decisions. When you would start to dream of how much better things would be

  without my liver-spotted hand held over you."

  "I disagree with your decisions right now," she said. "About that Jedi who—"

  "Should have been number seventeen. I know." Dooku smiled. "I don't have your