Either way
, she reasoned as the ship made the jump into hyperspace,
this will all be over soon
.
Night had passed on Ambria, giving way to the scorching heat of day. With the rising of the sun, Bane and Cognus had retreated inside the shelter of the hut. There the Dark Lord had sat cross-legged on the floor, meditating and gathering his strength in preparation for Zannah’s arrival.
“She’ll probably show up with an army at her heels,” the Iktotchi warned.
Bane shook his head.
“She knows she must face me alone.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Sith used to be as plentiful as the Jedi. Unlike the Jedi, however, those who served sought to tear their leaders down. Their ambition was natural; this is the way of the dark side. It is what drives us, gives us strength. Yet it can also destroy us if not properly controlled.
“Under the old ways, a powerful leader would be brought down by the combined strength of many lesser Sith working together. It was inevitable, a cycle that repeated over and over. And each time, the Order as a whole grew weaker.
“The strongest were killed, and the weak tore the Sith apart with their petty wars of succession. Meanwhile, the Jedi remained united, confident in the knowledge their enemies were too busy fighting one another to ever defeat them.”
“You discovered a way to break this cycle,” Cognus chimed in.
“Now everything we do is guided by the Rule of Two,” Bane explained. “One Master, one apprentice. This assures that the Master will only fall to a worthy successor.
“Zannah knows that if she is to rule in my place, she must prove she is more powerful by defeating me herself.”
Cognus nodded. “I understand, Master. I will not interfere when she arrives.”
As if on cue, the sound of a shuttle’s engines roared through the camp. The two of them rose to their feet and stepped out into the desert heat just as Zannah’s ship touched down.
She emerged a few seconds later. As Bane had predicted, she was alone.
He marched forward to meet her, Cognus hanging back near the entrance to the hut. He stopped in the center of the camp. Zannah took her stand halfway between the shuttles and where Bane now stood, eyeing the Iktotchi in the background suspiciously.
“She will not interfere,” Bane assured her.
“Who is she?”
“A new apprentice.”
“She has sworn allegiance to you?”
“She is loyal to the Sith,” Bane explained.
“I want to learn the ways of the dark side,” Cognus called out to Zannah. “I want to serve under a true Sith Master. If you defeat Bane, I will swear my loyalty to you.”
Zannah tilted her head to the side, studying the Iktotchi carefully before nodding her agreement to the offer.
“Who lies in the graves?” she asked, turning her attention back to Bane.
“Caleb’s daughter and her bodyguard,” he replied. “She was the one who imprisoned me. She fled here when the Stone Prison was destroyed.”
He felt no need to explain in any further detail. Zannah didn’t need to know who Lucia was, or her connection to Bane.
“I wondered why you chose this place to meet,” Zannah
muttered. “I thought it might have some symbolic meaning for you.”
Bane shook his head.
“The last time we were here you were too weak to even stand,” his apprentice reminded him. “You were helpless, and you thought I had betrayed you to the Jedi.
“You said you would rather die than be a prisoner for the rest of your life. You wanted me to take your life. But I refused.”
“You knew I still had things to teach you,” Bane recalled. “You swore you would not kill me until you had learned all my secrets.”
“That day is here,” Zannah informed him, igniting the twin blades of her lightsaber.
Bane drew out his own weapon in response, the shimmering blade rising up from the curved hilt with a low hum.
The two combatants dropped into fighting stances and began to circle slowly.
“I have surpassed you, Bane,” Zannah warned him. “Now I am the Master.”
“Then prove it.”
He lunged toward her, and the battle began.
26
Z
annah expected Bane to come at her aggressively, but even so she was caught off guard by the ferociousness of his attack.
He opened with a series of two-handed overhead chops, using his great height to bring his blade hacking down at her from above. She easily blocked each blow, but the momentum of the crushing impact caused her to stagger back, throwing her off balance.
She recovered quickly, however, spinning out of the way when he followed up with a low, looping swipe meant to hew her off at the knees. She retaliated with a quick jab with the tip of one of her blades toward Bane’s face, but he ducked his head to the side and came back with a wide-arcing, single-handed slash at chest level.
Zannah intercepted his blade with one of her own, angling her weapon so that the momentum of Bane’s attack was redirected downward, sending the tip of his lightsaber into the dirt. This should have exposed him to a counterthrust, but he was already reacting to her move, driving his entire body forward into Zannah’s before she could bring her weapon up.
His weight slammed into her, knocking her back as Bane snapped his neck forward. Zannah threw her head back just in time, and the head-butt that would have smashed her face glanced off her chin instead.
Scrambling to stay on her feet, Zannah raised her weapon back up, spinning the handle so that the twirling blades formed a defensive wall that repelled Bane’s next half a dozen blows.
During her years under Bane, they had sparred hundreds of times. During these sessions she had always known he was keeping something in reserve for the day they would inevitably fight for real. Only now did she realize just how much he had been holding back.
He was faster than she could ever have imagined, and he was using new sequences and unfamiliar moves he had never revealed during their practice sessions. But somehow she had survived the initial flurry, and now she knew what to expect.
The next exchange had a more familiar feel. Bane pressed the action with a devastating, complex combination of attacks, but Zannah was able to intercept, parry, or deflect each one. Her defensive style was simple, but performed correctly it was nearly impenetrable.
Recognizing this, Bane backed off and changed tactics. Instead of a savage, relentless pressure meant to overwhelm her, he settled into a pattern of feints and quick thrusts, probing and prodding her defenses in search of a weakness as the two of them settled in for a long battle of attrition.
Zannah had fought him once before, back when he was still encased in his orbalisk armor. She remembered it had been like battling a force of nature: the chitinous parasites covering his entire body had been impervious to lightsaber attacks, allowing him to attack with pure animal rage. She had survived that encounter only by convincing Bane she hadn’t betrayed him, and in the end he had let her live.
His style back then had been brutish and simple, though undeniably effective. Now, however, his technique was more advanced. Unable to simply bully his
way heedlessly forward, he had developed an unpredictable, seemingly random style. Each time she thought she could anticipate where the next attack was coming from, he changed tactics, disrupting the rhythm of the battle and causing her to give ground.
She was being driven back in a slow retreat, and she realized he was herding her toward the shuttles, hoping to pin her against the metal hull with no place to go. Zannah was content to play along, taking quick, careful steps backward over the soft, sandy terrain as she began to gather her power.
The key was subtlety. She couldn’t let Bane sense what she was doing or he would launch into another wild flurry of attacks, forcing her to focus all her energy on keeping him at bay. She had to give him the illusion he was controlling the action, when in fact she was only a few seconds away from unleashing a burst of dark side sorcery that would rip his mind apart.
Bane circled wide trying to come in on her left flank. Zannah simply altered the angle of her retreat, taking several more steps backward to keep him at a safe distance as she swatted away a few token slashes and strikes.
With her attention split between the enemy in front of her and the Sith spell she was preparing to cast Zannah didn’t notice how close she was to the freshly dug graves. Her heel caught on the uneven ground as she backed up, throwing her off balance as she fell awkwardly to the ground and landed on her back.
Bane was on her in an instant, his lightsaber slashing viciously, his heavy boots kicking and stomping at her prone body. Zannah thrashed and twisted on the ground, her lightsaber flailing desperately to parry Bane’s blade. She felt a sharp crack as the toe of his boot caught her in the ribs, but she rolled with the impact and managed to end up back on her feet.
Her vision was blurred with stars, pain shooting through her left side with each gasp as she tried to catch her breath. Bane didn’t let up, coming at her with a frenetic assault. The next few seconds were a blur as Zannah relied purely on instincts honed over twenty years to parry the wave of blows, miraculously keeping him from landing a lethal strike.
Zannah threw herself into a back handspring, flipping head over heels three times in quick succession just to put some space between her and Bane. Before the fourth one she suddenly stopped and went into a crouch, thrusting forward with her lightsaber like a spear to impale her opponent as he charged after her in pursuit … only Bane wasn’t there.
Anticipating her move, he had stopped several meters away.
Gritting her teeth against the pain from her broken rib, Zannah rose to her feet. Bane hadn’t killed her, but her survival had come with significant cost. She was tired now, the desperate scramble to escape after tripping on the grave had pushed her one step closer to physical exhaustion. She felt the broken rib with each ragged breath, and she sensed that the injury would make it harder for her to pivot and turn, limiting the effectiveness of her defensive maneuvers.
She couldn’t wait any longer. She’d wanted to surprise Bane, slowly gather her strength before unleashing it so he wouldn’t be able to properly defend against it. But she knew she wouldn’t survive another clash of lightsabers.
Opening herself up to the power of the dark side, Zannah reached out and touched the mind of her Master.
Bane sensed the attack, bracing himself.
He had encouraged Zannah’s training in Sith sorcery, knowing she might very well use it against him one day.
If it turned out he wasn’t strong enough to survive, then he wasn’t worthy of being the Dark Lord of the Sith.
That didn’t mean he was unprepared, however. Dark side sorcery was complex; it attacked the psyche in ways that were difficult to explain and even more difficult to defend against. Bane had no talent for it, yet he had done his best to study the techniques. What he learned was that the only real counter was the victim’s strength of will.
Zannah’s assault began as a sharp pain in his skull, like a hot knife stabbing directly into his brain before carving down to slice the two hemispheres in half. Then the knife exploded, sending a million burning shards in every direction. Each one burrowed into his subconscious, seeking out buried fears and nightmares only to rip them free and haul them to the surface.
Bane let out a scream and dropped to his knees. When he stood up the sky was thick with a swarm of flying horrors. Their wings were torn and ragged, leather flaps of skin hanging from exposed bone. Their bodies were small and malformed, their twisted legs ending in long, sharp talons. Their flesh was a sickly yellow: the same color as the faces of the miners who had died on Apatros after being trapped in a gas-filled chamber.
Their features were inhuman, but their burning eyes were unmistakable: each creature was staring at him with the hate-filled gaze of his abusive father. As one, they swooped down on him, their mouths screeching out a cry that sounded like his father’s name:
hurst, hurst, hurst!
Swinging his lightsaber wildly at the demon flock, Bane crouched low to the ground, his free hand coming up to cover his face and ward off the talons clawing at his eyes. As the swarm enveloped him, he caught a glimpse of Zannah standing a few meters away, her face frozen in a mask of intense concentration.
Bane knew it was a trick; the beasts weren’t real. They
were just figments of his imagination born from the repressed memories of his childhood, his greatest fears manifested in physical form. But he had conquered these fears long ago. He had turned his fear of his abusive father into anger and hate—the tools that had given him the strength to endure and eventually escape his life on Apatros.
He knew how to defeat these demons, and he struck back. Unleashing a primal scream, he channeled his terror into pure rage and lashed out with the dark side. It tore through the swarm in a burst of searing violet light, utterly obliterating them.
Zannah watched as Bane huddled against the ground, his lightsaber flailing wildly at invisible ghosts, but she didn’t let her concentration falter. Bane’s mind was strong; if she let up even for an instant he might break free of the spell.
For a second she thought she had won as Bane let out a shriek, but the burst of energy that followed sent her reeling backward.
Regaining her balance she saw that Bane was on his feet again, and she knew he had resisted the spell. But she still had one more surprise for her Master.
Again she opened herself up to the dark side. This time, however, she didn’t attack Bane directly. Instead, she let it flow through her, drawing it from the soil and stone of Ambria itself. She called to power buried for centuries, summoning it up to the surface in wispy tendrils of dark smoke snaking up from the sand.
The thin tendrils crawled along the ground, reaching for one another, twining themselves together into writhing tentacles each several meters long.
Then, in response to her unspoken command, the tentacles rose up and lashed out at her foe.