The words were barely out of his mouth when, without warning, an arrow flashed toward them from the right. It struck Thrawn in the side, barely missing the ysalamir tube wrapped around his shoulders and back, and bounced harmlessly off the body armor hidden beneath the white uniform. “Hold,” Thrawn ordered as Rukh leaped to his side, blaster at the ready. “You have the location?”
“Yes,” the Noghri grated, his blaster pointed at a squat two-story structure a quarter of the way around the square from the palace.
“Good.” Thrawn raised the megaphone again. “One of your people just shot at us. Observe the consequences.” Lowering the disk again, he nodded to Rukh. “Now.”
And with a tight grin of his needle teeth, Rukh proceeded-quickly, carefully, and scientifically-to demolish the building.
He took out the windows and doors first, putting perhaps a dozen shots through them to discourage any further attack. Then he switched to the lower-floor walls. By the twentieth shot, the building was visibly trembling on its foundations. A handful of shots into the upper-floor walls, a few more into the lower-
And with a thunderous crash, the building collapsed in on itself.
Thrawn waited until the sound of crunching masonry had died away before raising the megaphone again. “Those are the consequences of defying me,” he called. “I ask once more: who will take me to the Guardian of the mountain?”
“I will,” a voice said from their left.
Pellaeon spun around. The man standing in front of the palace building was tall and thin, with unkempt gray hair and a beard that reached almost to the middle of his chest. He was dressed in shin-laced sandals and an old brown robe, with a glittering medallion of some sort half hidden behind the beard. His face was dark and lined and regal to the point of arrogance as he studied them, his eyes holding a mixture of curiosity and disdain. “You are strangers,” he said, the same mixture in his voice. “Strangers-” he glanced up at the shuttle towering over them “-from offworld.”
“Yes, we are,” Thrawn acknowledged. “And you?”
The old man’s eyes flicked to the smoking rubble Rukh had just created. “You destroyed one of my buildings,” he said. “There was no need for that.”
“We were attacked,” Thrawn told him coolly. “Were you its landlord?”
The stranger’s eyes might have flashed; at the distance, Pellaeon couldn’t say for certain. “I rule,” he said, his voice quiet hut with menace beneath it. “All that is here is mine.”
For a handful of heartbeats he and Thrawn locked eyes. Thrawn broke the silence first. “I am Grand Admiral Thrawn, Warlord of the Empire, servant of the Emperor. I seek the Guardian of the mountain.”
The old man bowed his head slightly. “I will take you to him.”
Turning, he started back toward the palace. “Stay close together,” Thrawn murmured to the others as he moved to follow. “Be alert for a trap.”
No more arrows came as they crossed the square and walked under the carved keystone archway framing the palace’s double doors. “I would have thought the Guardian would be living in the mountain,” Thrawn said as their guide pulled open the doors. They came easily; the old man, Pellaeon decided, must be stronger than he looked.
“He did, once,” the other said over his shoulder. “When I began my rule, the people of Wayland built this for him.” He crossed to the center of the ornate foyer room, halfway to another set of double doors, and stopped. “Leave us,” he called.
For a split second Pellaeon thought the old man was talking to him. He was just opening his mouth to refuse when two flanking sections of wall swung open and a pair of scrawny men stepped out of hidden guard niches. Glowering silently at the Imperials, they shouldered their crossbows and left the building. The old man waited until they were gone, then continued on to the second set of double doors. “Come,” he said, gesturing to the doors, an odd glitter in his eyes. “The Emperor’s Guardian awaits you.”
Silently, the doors swung open, revealing the light of what looked to be several hundred candles filling a huge room. Pellaeon glanced once at the old man standing beside the doors, a sudden premonition of dread sending a shiver up his back. Taking a deep breath, he followed Thrawn and Rukh inside.
Into a crypt.
There was no doubt as to what it was. Aside from the flickering candles, there was nothing else in the room but a large rectangular block of dark stone in the center.
“I see,” Thrawn said quietly. “So he is dead.”
“He is dead,” the old man confirmed from behind them. “Do you see all the candles, Grand Admiral Thrawn?”
“I see them,” Thrawn nodded. “The people must have honored him greatly.”
“Honored him?” The old man snorted gently. “Hardly. Those candles mark the graves of offworlders who have come here since his death.”
Pellaeon twisted to face him, instinctively drawing his blaster as he did so. Thrawn waited another few heartbeats before slowly turning around himself. “How did they die?” he asked.
The old man smiled faintly. “I killed them, of course. Just as I killed the Guardian.” He raised his empty hands in front of him, palms upward. “Just as I now kill you.”
Without warning, blue lightning bolts flashed from his fingertips-
And vanished without a trace a meter away from each of them.
It all happened so fast that Pellaeon had no chance to even flinch, let alone fire. Now, belatedly, he raised his blaster, the scalding hot air from the bolts washing over his hand-
“Hold,” Thrawn said calmly into the silence. “However, as you can see, Guardian, we are not ordinary offworlders.”
“The Guardian is dead!” the old man snapped, the last word almost swallowed up by the crackle of more lightning. Again, the bolts vanished into nothingness before even coming close.
“Yes, the old Guardian is dead,” Thrawn agreed, shouting to be heard over the crackling thunder. “You are the Guardian now. It is you who protects the Emperor’s mountain.”
“I serve no Emperor!” the old man retorted, unleashing a third useless salvo. “My power is for myself alone.”
As suddenly as it had started, the attack ceased. The old man stared at Thrawn, his hands still raised, a puzzled and oddly petulant expression on his face. “You are not Jedi. How do you do this?”
“Join us and learn,” Thrawn suggested.
The other drew himself up to his full height. “I am a Jedi Master,” he ground out. “I join no one.”
“I see,” Thrawn nodded. “In that case, permit us to join you.” His glowing red eyes bored into the old man’s face. “And permit us to show you how you can have more power than you’ve ever imagined. All the power even a Jedi Master could desire.”
For a long moment the old man continued to stare at Thrawn, a dozen strange expressions flicking in quick succession across his face. “Very well,” he said at last. “Come. We will talk.”
“Thank you,” Thrawn said, inclining his head slightly. “May I ask who we have the honor of addressing?”
“Of course.” The old man’s face was abruptly regal again, and when he spoke his voice rang out in the silence of the crypt. “I am the Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth.”
Pellaeon inhaled sharply, a cold shiver running up his back. “Jorus C’baoth?” he breathed. “But-”
He broke off. C’baoth looked at him, much as Pellaeon himself might look at a junior officer who has spoken out of turn. “Come,” he repeated, turning back to Thrawn. “We will talk.”
He led the way out of the crypt and back into the sunshine. Several small knots of people had gathered in the square in their absence, huddling well back from both the crypt and the shuttle as they whispered nervously together.
With one exception. Standing directly in their path a few meters away was one of the two guards C’baoth had ordered out of the crypt. On his face was an expression of barely controlled fury; in his hands, cocked and ready, was his crossbow. “You destroyed his home,” C’baoth said, almost conversationally. “Doubtless he would like to exact vengeance.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when the guard suddenly snapped the crossbow up and fired. Instinctively, Pellaeon ducked, raising his blaster-
And three meters from the Imperials the bolt came to an abrupt halt in midair.
Pellaeon stared at the hovering piece of wood and metal, his brain only slowly catching up with what had just happened. “They are our guests,” C’baoth told the guard in a voice clearly intended to reach everyone in the square. “They will be treated accordingly.”
With a crackle of splintering wood, the crossbow bolt shattered, the pieces dropping to the ground. Slowly, reluctantly, the guard lowered his crossbow, his eyes still burning with a now impotent rage. Thrawn let him stand there another second like that, then gestured to Rukh. The Noghri raised his blaster and fired-
And in a blur of motion almost too fast to see, a flat stone detached itself from the ground and hurled itself directly into the path of the shot, shattering spectacularly as the blast hit it.
Thrawn spun to face C’baoth, his face a mirror of surprise and anger. “C’baoth-!”
“These are my people, Grand Admiral Thrawn,” the other cut him off, his voice forged from quiet steel. “Not yours; mine. If there is punishment to be dealt out, I will do it.”
For a long moment the two men again locked eyes. Then, with an obvious effort, Thrawn regained his composure. “Of course, Master C’baoth,” he said. “Forgive me.”
C’baoth nodded. “Better. Much better.” He looked past Thrawn, dismissed the guard with a nod. “Come,” he said, looking back at the Grand Admiral. “We will talk.”
“You will now tell me,” C’baoth said, gesturing them to low cushions, “how it was you defeated my attack.”
“Let me first explain our offer,” Thrawn said, throwing a casual glance around the room before easing carefully down on one of the cushions. Probably, Pellaeon thought, the Grand Admiral was examining the bits of artwork scattered around. “I believe you’ll find it-”
“You will now tell me how it was you defeated my attack,” C’baoth repeated.
A slight grimace, quickly suppressed, touched Thrawn’s lips. “It’s quite simple, actually.” He looked up at the ysalamir wrapped around his shoulders, reaching a finger over to gently stroke its long neck. “These creatures you see on our backs are called ysalamiri. They’re sessile tree-dwelling creatures from a distant, third-rate planet, and they have an interesting and possibly unique ability-they push back the Force.”
C’baoth frowned. “What do you mean, push it back?”
“They push its presence out away from themselves,” Thrawn explained. “Much the same way a bubble is created by air pushing outward against water. A single ysalamir can occasionally create a bubble as large as ten meters across; a whole group of them reinforcing one another can create much larger ones.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” C’baoth said, staring at Thrawn’s ysalamir with an almost childlike intensity. “How could such a creature have come about?”
“I really don’t know,” Thrawn conceded. “I assume the talent has some survival value, but what that would be I can’t imagine.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Not that it matters. For the moment, the ability itself is sufficient for my purpose.”
C’baoth’s face darkened. “That purpose being to defeat my power?”
Thrawn shrugged. “We were expecting to find the Emperor’s Guardian here. I needed to make certain he would allow us to identify ourselves and explain our mission.” He reached up again to stroke the ysalamir’s neck. “Though as it happens, protecting us from the Guardian was really only an extra bonus. I have something far more interesting in mind for our little pets.”
“That being . . . ?”
Thrawn smiled. “All in good time, Master C’baoth. And only after we’ve had a chance to examine the Emperor’s storehouse in Mount Tantiss.”
C’baoth’s lip twisted. “So the mountain is all you really want.”
“I need the mountain, certainly,” Thrawn acknowledged. “Or rather, what I hope to find within it.”
“And that is . . . ?”
Thrawn studied him for a moment. “There were rumors, just before the Battle of Endor, that the Emperor’s researchers had finally developed a genuinely practical cloaking shield. I want it. Also,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “another small-almost trivial-bit of technology.”
“And you think to find one of these cloaking shields in the mountain?”
“I expect to find either a working model or at least a complete set of schematics,” Thrawn said. “One of the Emperor’s purposes in setting up this storehouse was to make sure that interesting and potentially useful technology didn’t get lost.”
“That, and collecting endless mementos of his glorious conquests.” C’baoth snorted. “There are rooms and rooms of that sort of cackling self-congratulation.”
Pellaeon sat up a bit straighter. “You’ve been inside the mountain?” he asked. Somehow, he’d expected the storehouse to be sealed with all sorts of locks and barriers.
C’baoth sent him a scornfully patient look. “Of course I’ve been inside. I killed the Guardian, remember?” He looked back at Thrawn. “So. You want the Emperor’s little toys; and now you know you can just walk into the mountain, with or without my help. Why are you still sitting here?”
“Because the mountain is only part of what I need,” Thrawn told him. “I also require the partnership of a Jedi Master like yourself.”
C’baoth settled back into his cushion, a cynical smile showing through his beard. “Ah, we finally get down to it. This, I take it, is where you offer me all the power even a Jedi Master could desire?”
Thrawn smiled back. “It is indeed. Tell me, Master C’baoth: are you familiar with the Imperial Fleet’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Endor five years ago?”
“I’ve heard rumors. One of the offworlders who came here spoke about it.” C’baoth’s gaze drifted to the window, to the palace/crypt visible across the square. “Though only briefly.”
Pellaeon swallowed. Thrawn himself didn’t seem to notice the implication. “Then you must have wondered how a few dozen Rebel ships could possibly rout an Imperial force that outgunned it by at least ten to one.”
“I didn’t spend much time with such wonderings,” C’baoth said dryly. “I assumed that the Rebels were simply better warriors.”