Abyss (28 page)

“Why’s she so flamed?” he whispered. “It’s not like we haven’t been
looking
.”

Vestara covered her distraction by patting the air to quiet him. “Shhh.”

Ahri frowned in confusion, then seemed to notice her gaze sliding away from Abeloth and rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. “
Focus,
” he hissed. “You’re about to get yourself put on point.”

Given her consistent failure to locate Ship in the Force, Vestara knew that was all too likely already. She nodded and returned her attention to the top of the boulder.

“… have failed,” Lady Rhea was saying. Although her angry gaze was hardly focused on Vestara alone, it did not exclude her, either. “Gather your things. We meet the shuttle in two hours.”

The news hit Vestara like a body blow. She was the one who had
guided the mission after Ship, and if they returned to Kesh without the wayward vessel, the failure would reflect as badly on her as Lady Rhea. But it was Abeloth’s voice, not Vestara’s, that cracked the stunned silence that followed.

“
Without Ship
?”

Lady Rhea’s tone softened—as did everyone’s when they spoke to Abeloth. “The
Crusader
is running low on fuel and stores. If we stay much longer, we won’t be leaving at all.”

The explanation only seemed to alarm Abeloth all the more. “But you
can’t
leave without Ship.” She turned to face the body of the search party, as though a handful of mere Sabers could overrule a Sith Lord. “Lord Vol will be disappointed in you.”

Lady Rhea seemed as surprised by the reaction as Vestara. Her eyes grew confused for a moment, then her expression hardened as she finally seemed to gather her thoughts. “Didn’t you tell us you had been marooned here for thirty years, Abeloth?”

Abeloth nodded. “That’s right.”

“Then I would think you’d be dying to get back to civilization.”

“And I
am
.” Abeloth continued to look at the rest of the search party. “But I’m only thinking of you, my friends. Your Circle of Lords will not look kindly on this failure.”

“I’ll handle them.” Lady Rhea glared down on Abeloth with a look of quiet appraisal, then asked, “You haven’t changed your mind about wanting to return to Kesh with us, have you?”

“Not at all,” Abeloth said. Lady Rhea’s expression grew noticeably softer as the castaway turned to face her again. “I’m as eager as you are to leave this place.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Lady Rhea’s smile managed to retain some of its predatory edge, and Vestara could almost read the thoughts flashing through her Master’s mind: Abeloth would make up for Ship’s loss.

Enthralled as they were, every Sith in the search party knew that Abeloth was no ordinary woman—if she was a woman at all. Sometimes it seemed to Vestara that Abeloth was no more than a swirling halo of Force energy that presented itself as a woman because its true form could not be comprehended by their mortal minds. But other
times, Abeloth seemed exactly what she claimed to be: a lonely castaway so desperate for companionship that she refused to be alone, a woman driven so near to madness by her long isolation that she had assumed she was hallucinating when Vestara and Ahri entered her cave to rescue Xal.

Of course, there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense about either possibility. First, Abeloth had never explained exactly
how
she had imprisoned Xal—a Sith Master—in a cocoon. She claimed to have no idea why Vestara had sensed Ship on the ridge near her home, yet accepted as perfectly logical the fact that it had been Ship that had led them to her in the first place. And when Vestara had inquired about the tentacle-thing she had glimpsed on the cave ceiling, Abeloth’s only reply had been that they had nothing to fear from any animal on this planet.

As Vestara was considering all this—and waiting for the strange contest of wills between Abeloth and Lady Rhea to be resolved—she felt the touch of a familiar presence.

You should never have come
, Ship said inside her mind.
Now you can never leave
.

Vestara swung her gaze down the river, then gasped aloud when she saw a familiar winged-ball silhouette hovering in the distance, just above the water.

“Vestara?” Ahri asked, turning toward her. “What is it?”

“It’s—” Vestara started to point, then saw Abeloth watching and realized that the castaway was eavesdropping. Besides, Lady Rhea would not appreciate being drawn into another futile Ship-chase when she had already given the order to leave. Vestara dropped her gaze. “Nothing.”

“What
was nothing?” Abeloth’s voice was a cold blade cutting through Vestara’s lie. “You saw something downriver?”

“I thought so.” Vestara sneaked a glance down the river and, much to her relief, saw that the tiny silhouette had already vanished. “But I was—”

Vestara was interrupted by the chime of Lady Rhea’s comlink. She turned and saw her Master pulling the wand from her belt, at the same time raising her free hand for silence. Lady Rhea had barely thumbed
the activation switch before Baad Walusari’s excited voice began to sound from the tiny speaker.

“A thousand meters at bearing one sixty from you,” the Keshiri said. “Ship just crossed the river and seems to be headed for the shuttle clearing.”

Lady Rhea’s eyes widened in shock. “Ship is letting you track it?”

“When it’s above the canopy, we have a heat signature,” Walusari explained. “When it’s in the jungle, we have a damage path. As long as Ship is moving, we can track it.”

“Good. Keep me updated.” Lady Rhea clicked off her comlink and turned to Vestara. “See if you can force it to return to us.”

Without awaiting Vestara’s acknowledgment, Lady Rhea drew her weapons and began to issue orders. By the time Vestara had located Ship in the Force again, the search party was deployed across a thousand-meter front and Force-running across the river. Abeloth fell in behind Lady Rhea, crossing the water as easily as the Sith Lord herself, and Vestara took advantage of her presence to concentrate on Ship instead of plants.

Vestara pressed down on Ship’s presence with all the willpower she could summon, commanding him to return to the river and await her order. Ship
wanted
to obey—she could feel that much, even with her attention divided between trying to track the wayward vessel and using the Force to keep her feet bouncing across the water.

But there was something defeated and lost in Ship’s spirit, like an uvak with severed wing tendons. He was … 
afraid
, crushed beneath a will strong beyond Vestara’s ability to imagine. To obey her was to defy
it
, a power that had reached across space and time to summon Ship for no other reason than it was
lonely
.

Vestara could see how hopeless it was to think she had the strength of will to break the grasp of such a being. Still, she continued to cling to Ship’s presence, if only because that would help her locate the meditation sphere if Walusari and the
Crusader
lost his trail. Once they caught up, Lady Rhea would be the one demanding Ship’s obedience.

And
that
thought was what nearly got Vestara killed.

She was almost across the river when a whirlpool opened ahead and swallowed Lady Rhea whole. With her attention focused on Ship instead
of the dangers of the situation, Vestara was taken completely by surprise, and she found herself stepping into the same swirling pit before Abeloth caught her arm.

“Siphon reed,” she said, pushing Vestara away from the whirlpool. “Keep going or it will get you, too.”

Most apprentices in Vestara’s situation would probably have done exactly as Abeloth instructed, reasoning that it was a lot easier to get a new Master than a new life. Ahri would certainly have been happy to leave
his
Master to be digested by almost any plant on the planet. But if Lady Rhea were gone, Xal would become the mission’s new commander, and
that
meant a death just as certain as being swallowed by the siphon reed—though probably far slower and more humiliating.

So Vestara jerked her arm from Abeloth’s grasp, then ignited her lightsaber and let herself sink beneath the river’s surface. The water was so full of crimson silt that she was blinded almost instantly. Filmy ribbons of wet cellulose wrapped themselves around her legs, squeezing her calves so tightly that her feet and ankles began to swell. She bent her knees and, unsure whether she was pulling the weeds up to her or herself down to them, drew her parang and began to slash at the plants.

At the same time, Vestara reached out in the Force and felt Lady Rhea to the right and a little bit below her. She lashed out with her lightsaber, water hissing and bubbling as the heat of her crimson blade turned it to steam. She felt the weapon slice through something the size of her own waist. She brought the blade back in the other direction and found another of the giant stalks, then quickly began to whirl, cutting away half a dozen more before the area seemed clear.

But there was no glow in the water beneath her, and Lady Rhea’s Force aura only seemed to be growing more frightened and confused as the siphon reed retracted, pulling her deeper into the river. Vestara could feel by the ache in her own chest—and by her growing compulsion to breathe—that her own air was running out, too.

It hardly mattered. Better to drown here than to suffer the degradations Xal would heap on her if
he
became the mission leader. Vestara grabbed her Master in the Force and pulled, hard.

Lady Rhea failed to come popping out of the severed stalk. All that
happened was that Vestara’s ears and sinuses began to ache as she pulled herself deeper, and the water began to darken as the sun’s light vanished into the suspended silt. Lady Rhea’s presence began to calm, though it was impossible to say whether this was because she felt Vestara coming, or because she was losing consciousness.

Then Vestara bumped into the stump of a severed stalk and knew that she had caught up to the retreating reed. She could feel Lady Rhea in the swirling darkness below, less than a meter away, but it was impossible to know whether they were at the bottom of the river or still descending.

Vestara didn’t care which. She reached out with her lightsaber, bringing it around as though to tap Lady Rhea along the flank. She caught a glimpse of brown as the blade split the stem open, then immediately thumbed the switch off.

An instant later, a human body slammed into her chest, and the last of her air left her lungs in a stream of ascending bubbles. Uncertain whether Lady Rhea would be conscious, she wrapped her arms around the body—then felt herself shooting upward as her Master used the Force to pull them to the surface.

As the water turned from black to crimson, Vestara had to fight the urge to exhale in relief. Lady Rhea had obviously survived and was still conscious—unless
Abeloth
was the one pulling them to the surface. Although the castaway had dodged most of the search party’s questions about her training, she was obviously both strong in the Force and capable of …

The blue disk of the sun began to ripple down through the crimson water, but Vestara was too preoccupied—too
frightened
—to notice even when they broke the surface.

Abeloth had been
with
them. The meaning of that finally sank in.

The siphon reed had attacked Lady Rhea, and Abeloth had done nothing to stop it. In fact, no plant had ever attacked someone while they were in Abeloth’s presence.

Vestara heard a loud, croaking gasp and felt a flood of bodily relief as her lungs filled with fresh air. Lady Rhea made a similar sound as she also began to breathe, then squirmed free of Vestara’s grasp and turned to kiss her.

“I owe … you … my life,” she coughed. “Whatever you desire, Vestara, it will be yours.”

“First, to leave this river alive,” Vestara said. Seeing that both of her Master’s hands were free of weapons, she shoved her parang into Lady Rhea’s grasp. “Abeloth is trying to—”

Vestara’s explanation was interrupted by a loud outcry from shore, then she felt herself and Lady Rhea rising out of the water.

“Don’t worry,” Lady Rhea said. “We’re safe.”

Vestara shook her head. “No. She betrayed—”

“Of course we’re safe,” Lady Rhea interrupted, not seeming to understand. She pointed upstream. “Your friend Ahri has us.”

Vestara turned in the direction Lady Rhea was pointing. Ahri was standing on the shore about fifty meters away, his weapons at his feet and both hands extended toward them. Most of the search party was rushing down the shore to protect Lady Rhea if she was attacked again. Master Xal remained at Ahri’s side, his jaw clenched and his dark eyes burning as though he were contemplating grabbing his apprentice’s parang and beheading him with it. Tonight, Vestara knew, Ahri would take a beating for saving her and Lady Rhea … if Abeloth let them live that long.

Behind Xal and Ahri stood … 
something
tall and vaguely human, with a long cascade of yellow hair that reached nearly to the ground. Her eyes were tiny and deep-sunken, like two stars shining out of a pair of black wells, and she had a large, full-lipped mouth so broad that it reached from ear to ear. Her stubby arms protruded no more than ten centimeters from her shoulders, but in place of fingers, her hands had writhing tentacles so long that they hung down past her knees. The body was as straight as a tree trunk, and as she started downstream to the place where Vestara and Lady Rhea would be coming ashore, her legs did not seem to swing forward so much as ripple.

Vestara went cold and queasy inside as Ahri lowered her and Lady Rhea to shore. She found herself kneeling in the shallows, retching black silty water into the river and shaking so hard that her body ached. Horrible as it was, the thing she had seen standing behind Ahri and Xal had been familiar to her. The long aquiline nose, high cheeks, the well-shaped chin, all were the face of Abeloth. Just this morning,
that face had seemed the most beautiful she had ever seen … until Lady Rhea had declared it was time to return home, and Abeloth had betrayed her true nature.