Abyss (23 page)

“I thought as much,” Lady Rhea said. “That’s why Xal picked him.”

Vestara’s brow shot up. “I thought it was because Ahri is … well, Keshiri.”

“And Xal is … 
not
?” Lady Rhea smiled. “That’s part of the reason, I’m sure. It never hurts to draw the eye away from one’s weaknesses—as you well know.”

Lady Rhea ran a finger along the carefully applied eye swirls that Vestara painted on every morning to draw attention away from the small scar at the corner of her mouth.

“But the truth is, Master Xal was hoping that Ahri’s relationship with you might be of benefit.”

“
Me
?” Vestara gasped. “Because of Ship?”

“Because you are
my
apprentice,” Lady Rhea said. “I’m sure Xal was hoping that your friendship with Ahri might give him some
insight
into my thinking on occasion.”

Vestara’s heart rose into her throat. “Lady Rhea, I
never—”

“I know, Vestara,” she said. “And I’m sure that’s why Xal is so disappointed with your friend.”

Vestara’s heart sank. The last thing she wanted was to make Ahri’s life difficult, but she wasn’t going to betray her own Master to make him look good.

But that was exactly what Lady Rhea seemed to have in mind. “I don’t know how close you two are,” she said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to let Ahri make some progress.”

Vestara’s eyes went wide. “You mean …” She knew what Lady Rhea meant, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it aloud—not when it meant betraying her best friend. “You mean you want me to use Ahri?”

“I
mean
Xal will be coming for you,” Lady Rhea replied, growing exasperated. “It might be nice if you had a friend who would give you a little warning.”

“Oh.” Vestara paused, realizing that Lady Rhea was suggesting exactly what she had thought … and that her only real choice was to take the advice or die. “When you put it like that …”

Lady Rhea nodded. “Exactly.” She released Vestara’s shoulder and pointed up the slope. “Now let’s go get Ship.”

Expecting Xal’s parang to come flying out of the jungle at any moment, Vestara led the way up the cliff to where she sensed Ahri waiting. To her delight, when she found him, he was not lurking in ambush, nor was he standing out in the open acting as bait. He was crouching at the base of the outcropping, hiding between two boulders and watching the entrance of a volcanic cave that seemed barely large enough for Ship to enter.

Although Vestara and Lady Rhea were using the Force to approach in complete silence, his head swung toward them when they were still twenty paces away, and the look of relief on his gorgeous face was enough to eliminate all thoughts of ambush from Vestara’s mind. She
used the Force to spring across the last dozen meters to his side, then crouched beside the boulders where he was hiding.

“What is it?” she whispered.

Ahri shrugged. “Master Xal wanted to bring Ship out alone,” he said. “He told me to stay out here and let him know when I saw you.”

Vestara frowned. “
Did
you?”

Ahri shook his head. “I can’t even feel him,” he said. “
You
try.”

Vestara frowned, but reached out in the Force and was immediately overwhelmed by the same dark longing she had experienced as they approached the system. There was
something
inside the cave, hungry and lonely and powerful, but it wasn’t Xal. Nor was it Ship.

She turned to Ahri. “That’s … not good.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” Vestara looked down the hill, then reached out to Lady Rhea and poured confident feelings into the Force. “Follow orders?”

Ahri nodded. “When in doubt …”

A moment later, Lady Rhea came striding up the slope, looking far less concerned about the situation than Vestara suspected she truly was. She stopped in front of the cave mouth and peered into the darkness, then spoke without turning to look at Ahri or Vestara.

“I suppose Master Xal is in there?”

“As far as I know,” Ahri answered. “He went in about five minutes ago.”

“Ship?”

Ahri shrugged. “We heard something, but …”

“Never assume,” Lady Rhea finished. She extend a hand toward Ahri, using the Force to float the glow rod out of its loop on his equipment belt. “Don’t you know it’s bad form to lose your Master, Apprentice Raas?”

Ahri shot Vestara a nervous glance, then, when she gave him a reassuring smile, said, “I was only following his instructions, Lady Rhea.”

She gave him a sly smile. “I’m sure you were.”

Lady Rhea activated Ahri’s glow rod, then tossed it into the cave. Vestara caught a brief glimpse of something large and gray dangling
from the ceiling—or perhaps it was a lot of somethings, all of them long and writhing, with suction cups on the undersides and yellow barbed hooks at the ends.

The glow rod bounced across the floor and rolled in a slow circle, casting a disk of pale blue light across the porous walls. A writhing, man-sized mummy was briefly illuminated, wrapped in purple silk and hanging on the back wall, then the light slid past and came to rest on the dark gullet of a long black tunnel descending into the heart of the mountain.

Lady Rhea pointed a finger at the glow rod, calmly using the Force to roll it back across the floor until the disk of light came to rest on the purple cocoon hanging from the back wall. Vestara was not at all surprised to see the outline of Master Xal’s sharp-featured face in the silk, a small bubble over his mouth popping in and out as he struggled to breathe.

“Well,” Lady Rhea said, “I don’t think Ship did
that
.”

She motioned Vestara and Ahri toward the cave mouth.

Vestara swallowed hard, then turned to Ahri. “He’s
your
Master,” she said.

Ahri nodded. “Lucky me,” he replied. “If this doesn’t go well—”

“Yeah,” Vestara promised. “I’ll just kill you.”

Ahri slipped out of his hiding place, then ignited his lightsaber and dived into the cave. When the gray tentacle-things hanging from the roof did not immediately drop down to ensnare him, he came up slashing at Master Xal’s cocoon.

Vestara did not see what happened next, exactly, because she was diving into the cave after Ahri. She rolled across the lumpy floor, then came up on Xal’s other side, bringing her red, Lignan-powered blade down along his flank.

Freed from the wall if not his cocoon, Xal pitched forward and would have slammed into the floor had he not used the Force to break his fall. Paying him no more attention, Vestara pivoted around to face the gray tentacles she had seen earlier.

They were no longer dangling from the ceiling. In fact, they were nowhere to be seen at all, though there was a definite slurping sound coming from the direction of the dark tunnel the glow rod had revealed
earlier. Vestara quickly used the Force to swing the beam around toward the passage … and found herself looking at an attractive, svelte woman. Her eyes were gray, and her shoulder-length hair was the color of honey.

Vestara was still struggling to comprehend what she was seeing when Ahri sprang up in front of her, his lightsaber flashing at the woman’s shoulder. There came the distinctive sizzle of a superheated blade slashing through flesh and bone, then the acrid tang of scorched flesh.

Suddenly Ahri was slamming into the cavern wall behind Vestara, his lightsaber no longer burning. His head struck with a sickening thud. Vestara watched in horror as he dropped twitching to the floor, then ignited her own blade and leapt to the attack.

In the next instant she found herself hanging in the darkness, holding a deactivated lightsaber and staring into a pair of large gray eyes as cold and lifeless as pearls. Suddenly Vestara had another foolish notion as to the reason Ship might have led them here—one that frightened her far more than all the others. Perhaps Ship had brought them here not to destroy the Tribe, but to
free
the Destructors.

The woman lowered her hand, sending Vestara crashing to the floor of the cavern.

“My apologies,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you were real.”

If time had an existence beyond the body, Luke could not find it. Now that he was rising out of his physical being, he saw that moments and years were the same. A heartbeat lasted a week, a lifetime flashed by in an instant. But
Luke Skywalker
remained, a manifestation of Force energy that embodied his essence in both mind and form. And that essence was now more real and tangible than the flesh-and-blood husk he had left floating among the purple-tinged bodies in the makeshift meditation chamber.

“
Five
 … ” The skull-faced Givin’s raspy voice came to Luke from somewhere behind and below. “
There is no life, there is only the Force
.”

It was a perversion of the Jedi Code, but Luke dutifully repeated the phrase as he exhaled, allowing himself to accept it—even to believe it. He did not think that the “Mind Walkers,” which was how the station inhabitants referred to themselves, meant the phrase as a mockery or an insult. They were simply expressing the truth of the universe as they saw it, and he knew enough about meditation to realize that the
precise phrasing of a mantra was the code that unlocked the door to a particular realm of the mind.

Another year went by. Or maybe it was only a second. Luke inhaled slowly, picturing a big yellow
5
in his mind, focusing on nothing but that image.

“You are rising higher,” said the aged voice of Seek Ryontarr. The horn-headed Gotal was floating in front of Luke—or perhaps it was above him—speaking to him in the soft voice of a meditation coach, guiding him to a higher consciousness. “You are barely connected to your body. You feel contact only at your heels now, now your shoulders, now the back of your skull.”

And it was true. Luke only felt attached in those places. Everywhere else, he was floating free, at one with the Force.

“
Six
 …,” the Givin rasped.

Luke changed the image in his mind to a big yellow
6
. He began to let his breath out, feeling himself himself growing lighter and more … apart. Each time he exhaled, it seemed to take longer, and this time it felt as though a week passed while he was emptying his lungs.

“
There is no life,
” the Givin said. “
There is only the Force
.”

Luke repeated the phrase. He felt his shoulders lift free of his body, leaving him attached at only the heels and the head.

“You are almost free now,” Ryontarr told him. “When Feryl says
seven
, the last bonds will dissolve. You will no longer be attached to your body. You will rise from the shadows into the pure radiance of the Force.”

Ryontarr paused, as though waiting for Luke to change his mind. And perhaps he would have, had there been another way to learn what had happened to Jacen here—to look into his nephew’s heart, as the Mind Walkers had promised, and see why they believed Jacen could not have gone dark.

The skull-faced Givin, Feryl, rasped, “
Seven
.”

Luke felt his body fall away, and then he was floating in a cloud of violet radiance, staring up into the purple glow at the heart of the chamber and tingling with cool pleasure. He raised his real hand and saw that it looked the same as it always had, then raised the artificial
one and saw only a shadow in its place. He tried to touch it. His fingers vanished into the darkness, just as they would into any shadow.

“You cannot touch what is not real. Your cybernetic hand is just illusion, as much a shadow as flesh and bone.” Ryontarr reached out to tap Luke’s chest. “
That
is real.”

“What, exactly, is real?” Luke asked. “My spirit?”

“Your Force presence. It’s your true self, a swirl in the living Force that animates your physical body.” Ryontarr tapped Luke’s chest again. “
This
is what truly exists.” He pointed over Luke’s shoulder. “It gives form to
that
.”

“
That
being my body,” Luke clarified.

When Ryontarr dipped his tall horns in the affirmative, Luke slowly spun around and saw his body floating among a dozen others. Although it did not appear nearly as haggard and hollow-cheeked as some of those around it, the eyes were sunken, and his face looked dry and pale. To his surprise, his vac suit appeared to be mere shadow, as did all the clothes he saw. Even the walls of the meditation chamber—what little he could glimpse of them through the mass of floating Mind Walkers—appeared to be nothing but shadow.

“Our bodies appear more substantial than the inanimate material,” Luke observed. “Is that because our bodies are imbued with the living Force?”

Ryontarr shook his head. “We Mind Walkers come from a great many traditions: the Disciples of Ragnos, the Fallanassi, the
Jensaarai
, the Potentium Heretics, the Reborn, the Far Seekers, the Inner Seers, and ten dozen more. We have
all
brought our own understandings of the Force—that the Force is a rainbow, that it has a dark side and light side; that it has the three aspects or four, that it has two sides
and
two aspects …”