Yoda (28 page)

“You're making this up,” Whie said hoarsely. “You think you can kill my droid, hurt my friend, and then talk me over to your side?”

“That's exactly what I think.” Again, with just the back of her fingers, she touched the line of his cheek. “I killed your droid and I could kill the girl. Life isn't a storybook, boy. The good guys don't always win. Sometimes the bad guys don't even know they're on the wrong side. You
do
know you're on the wrong side now, don't you?” Her voice still soft and lazy. “In this world the only rule is power: who has it, and who is willing to use what they have.”

“I'm not like you,” Whie said, but his voice broke as if he were on the point of tears.

“Don't think so? You told me you were going to die under a Jedi blade,” Ventress said. “Sounds to me like you're due to change sides.”

The fire hissed.

“You're fighting me with everything you've got,” Ventress murmured. “As if I'm trying to hurt you: when all I want is to set you free.” She was standing so close he could feel the heat from her body. Her voice a whisper, light as a spider crawling into his ear. “What you want, you can
have,
boy. What you desire, you can
take.
This is all yours,” she said, gesturing around the room. “The room is yours, the manor house is yours. The Jedi took it from you, but it's yours and you can have it back. The fire belongs to you, too. This is all for you, and with it, anything else you care to take. She can be yours, too,” she added, glancing at Scout. “You can have her if you want.”

The bitter smell of damp wood burning.

“Tell him it's all right,” Ventress whispered to Scout. And to her horror, Scout felt Asajj use the Force to pull her lips into a smile.

Drip, drop.

“Kiss her, Whie.” Blood trickling down Scout's face. Her collar wet with it. “Kiss her.” And he wanted to.

Asajj smiled. “Welcome home,” she said. “Now choose.”

“Your hand is shaking,” Yoda said.

“Yes.” Dooku frowned down at it. “Age.”

Yoda smiled. “Fear.”

“I don't think—”

Yoda came out of the shadows. The vision of him in his Sith avatar faded. It was only Yoda, the same as always, taking Dooku's hand and studying it intently, as if he were mad Whirry, trying to read the future in the pattern of liver spots. “Feel the trembling, even you must.”

Behind him, broadcast on the holomonitors, the attack on Omwat played out. “I tricked you into coming here,” Dooku said. “This is a trap.”

Yoda said, “A trap? Oh, yes it is.”

His old touch was warm and firm.
If you fall, catch you I will.

No. Not
if
but
when.
Yoda had said,
When you fall, catch you I will.
Had he known even then, seventy years ago, that this day would come? Surely even Yoda could not guess that his star pupil would fall so very, very far.

“To the dark side I do not think I shall go,” Yoda said conversationally. “Not today. Feel the pull, do I? Of course! But a secret let me tell you, apprentice.”

“I'm not your apprentice,” Dooku said. Yoda ignored him.

“Yoda a darkness carries with him,” the Master said, “…and Dooku bears a light. After all these years! Across all these oceans of space! All these bodies you have tried to heap between us: and yet call to me still, this little Dooku does! Flies toward the true Force, like iron pulled to a magnet.” Yoda cackled. “Even the blind seed grows to the light: should mighty Dooku be unable to achieve what even the rose can do?”

The Count said, “I have gone too far down the dark path ever to return.”

“Pfeh.” Yoda snapped his fingers. “The empty universe, where is it now? Alone are you, Count, and no one your master. Each instant the universe annihilates itself, and starts again.” He poked Dooku in the chest with his stick, hard. “Choose, and start again!”

Far below, Whie was standing centimeters from Scout's bloody face.

And then Scout smiled for real, because she knew, she
knew
what he would do, and the Force welled up in her and she broke Asajj's grip around her throat. “It's all right!” she gasped. “You're going to make the right choice!”

“I am?”

“Yes!”

Relief spread across the boy's face like daylight flooding into a dark place.

“What are you doing?” Asajj said angrily.

Whie laughed and snapped his fingers. “Waking up!” he said. “Scout, Scout, you're right! I'm not going to give in! I'm not a bad guy!”

“You're going to be a
dead
guy,” Ventress said. Her two red lightsabers flashed to life.

Whie laughed again. “Honestly, that scares me less than the idea I was going to…to turn into
you,
” he said. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Asajj drawled. “Droids, kill th—”

A hail of lightning came through the door, reducing it to smoking splinters. On the other side of the room, where six assassin droids had been standing with their blasters leveled, there were suddenly two badly damaged assassin droids, one on either side of a heap of molten slag.

“What was that?” Ventress asked.

“Rika/Moab mini rail cannon,” Solis said, walking through the space where the door used to be.

“That's not in the Footman specs.”

He shrugged. “Upgrades.”

Then he liquidated the remaining droids.

“I didn't know there were two of you,” Ventress said, eyeing him warily. “I thought this was the one who called to give me Yoda's location.” She tapped Fidelis's corpse with one foot.

“No—that would have been me.”

“Why would you rescue us?” Scout said, bewildered.

“You're not rescued yet,” Asajj said tartly.

“She backed out of a bargain. One can't let that happen too often,” Solis said. “It's bad for business. I saved you because the odds of taking her down are better if all three of us are alive and fighting.”

Scout looked at him narrowly. “I don't think that's it at all. I think you just didn't like the thought of us dying.”

Solis sighed. “I didn't want you to die,” the droid said. “I never got very attached to the boy.”

Scout drew her lightsaber, a pale blue wand of flame. “I like the better-odds thing, too.”

Asajj leapt high over the sudden death spitting from the cannon attachment at the end of Solis's arm. A cabinet exploded in a shower of debris. Ventress was swinging for the girl, but the Force was strong in Scout, too, in this place and hour, and her parry was there before the killing blow could fall.

Whie swept out his lightsaber. The room was bedlam and fire, the smell of smoke and hot metal.

Another prickle of premonition shivered up Scout's spine and she gasped, seeing Ventress use the subtlest of Force grabs to lift the forgotten neural eraser from Fidelis's metal hand. “Solis!” Scout screamed, as the trigger punched down. “Behind you!”

Too late.

Lines of blue flame streaked along Solis's spine. “Run!” the droid shouted. He fired at Ventress with mechanized speed and accuracy, sending a stream of superaccelerated metal through her left leg. The neural-net eraser took hold and he was shooting behind her; and then he was shooting at nothing at all as his limbs jerked and spasmed. Whie, white-faced, watched him start to die.

“Come on!” Scout shouted, grabbing him by the collar. “We've got to get out of here and find Master Yoda!”

She dragged him through the far door, and the two of them raced up into the unfamiliar house. Sirens were going off and bells were ringing. They turned down a corridor at random and Scout sprinted toward an archway that seemed to lead into a large entry hall. She stopped dead as a burst of blasterfire came spitting through the arch. “All right—next choice,” she gasped, and they picked a different door.

Behind them, Asajj Ventress tore a length of cloth from her own shirt and wrapped it around her bleeding leg, growling. The wound wasn't critical, but it hurt, and she meant to make the Padawans pay for it. She pulled the makeshift bandage tight and sprinted after them, growling deep in her throat. She darted down the same passageway, following the sound of blasterfire, and leapt through the doorway into the great entry hall of Château Malreaux. “
Now
I've got you!” she snarled…

…And found herself face to face with Obi-Wan and Anakin. “True as you tell it,” Obi-Wan said, ever urbane. “But what are you going to do with us?”

Behind him, Anakin's lightsaber hissed into sizzling life.

Ventress turned and ran.

“Blowing up, your house is,” Yoda remarked, peering at the various holomonitor displays with interest. A light blinked on the comm console. A special, red light. Dooku stared at it, then tore his eyes away.

“Message,” Yoda said helpfully. “Answer it, should you?”

Sweat was running freely down the Count's face.

“Or maybe someone it is you do not want me to see. Your new Master calls. Dooku, ask yourself: which of us loves you better?”

“I serve only Darth Sidious,” Dooku said.

“Not my question, apprentice.”

The red light blinked. There was another explosion from downstairs. A siren went off, and several of the holomonitors began to flash.

“Come,” Yoda said urgently. He put his hand once more on Dooku's arm. “Catch you, I said I would. Believe you must: more forgiveness will you find from your old Master than from the new one.”

A rush of panicked footsteps, and the housekeeper burst into the room. “Master, which there are Jedi in the ballroom. They're
coming to take my Baby
!” she shrieked.

Dooku flicked through the security monitors until he found the ballroom. “Ah,” he said. Something in his face seemed to freeze, and die. “I see you brought your protégé.”

“Understand you, I do not,” Yoda said.

“You didn't mention bringing young Skywalker,” Dooku said, pointing to the holomonitor. “And Obi-Wan, too. That changes the odds considerably. There's your Wonder Boy now, fighting the assassin droids I have standing sentry duty at the front door.” His hand was wonderfully steady now. “Your new favorite son.”

“Bring him, I did not!”

“And yet, there he stands, with Obi-Wan. A miracle and a prodigy to be sure. I suppose you left him under cover. Perhaps you missed a rendezvous. So easy to lose track of time, chatting with old friends,” the Count said.

In the entryway, Whirry was shifting from foot to foot in extremes of agitation. “Please, Master! Don't let the Jedi steal my Baby again! Do something for me, for all my hard work, Master?”

Dooku glanced up. “Do something for you?” His eyes flicked to Yoda and the lightsaber at the Jedi Master's belt. “Of course I'll do something for you.”

With a flick of his hand, he picked up the heavyset woman with the Force and hurled her through the window casement. Yoda's eyes went wide with shock. “You might want to help her,” Dooku said.

With a bound, Yoda was at the casement. Whirry was windmilling down through the black air, screaming and tumbling toward the flagstones. Narrowing his eyes, Yoda reached out through the Force and caught her not three meters from the ground.

Instantly he was in the air himself, spinning away from Dooku's vicious attack before he was even consciously aware it was coming. The blinding scarlet blur of Dooku's lightsaber split the air, slashing a burning line along Yoda's side before chopping his desk in half.

Yoda whipped out his blade while trying to set Whirry gently down on the cobblestones below. “Wish to hurt you, I do not!”

“That's odd,” Dooku remarked. “I intend to enjoy killing you.”

As Yoda released Whirry from his mind's hold, and let her spill gently onto the flagstones far below, the tip of Dooku's lightsaber scored a burning line across his shoulder. The Count's blade was quick as a viper striking. Among the other Jedi, perhaps only Mace Windu would have been his equal on neutral ground: but here on Vjun, steeped in the dark side, his bladework was malice made visible—wickedness cut in red light. “I've hurt you!” Dooku cried.

“Many times,” Yoda said. He considered his pain: let it drop. Now he had nothing but Dooku to focus on, and his lightsaber gleamed with the same fierce green light that flickered from under his heavy-lidded eyes. “But killed me you did not, when you had the chance. A mistake, that was. More than eight hundred years has Yoda survived, through dangers you could not dream.”

“I know how to kill,” Dooku hissed.

Yoda's eyes opened wide, like balls of green fire. “Yes—but Yoda knows how to live!”

Then their blades clashed together in a lace of fire, green and red: but the green burned hotter. Slowly, slowly, Dooku gave way: and in the dark, drunken Vjun air, Yoda was terrible to behold.

“Yes,” Dooku whispered. “Feel me. Feel the treason. All those years of teaching me, raising me. Trusting me. And here am I, the favored son, butchering your precious Jedi, one by one. Hate me Yoda. You know you want to.”

Count Dooku lashed out with his lightsaber. Yoda took a quick step back and felt the heat of the red blade as it sliced the air centimeters from his tunic. He jumped, spun, and struck at Dooku's back before he landed. Dooku turned aside at the last moment, whipping his blade across the space where Yoda was seconds earlier. Facing each other again, their blades met, clashed, froze.

“Cunning, are you,” Yoda said, breathing hard.

“I've had excellent teachers,” Dooku said.

Yoda dropped and rolled to the side, his lightsaber blazing, reaching for Dooku's ankles. Dooku leapt up and flipped backwards landing lightly to face Yoda squarely. On his feet again, Yoda whirled and struck at Dooku, his green blade meeting Dooku's and pushing him back. Dooku attacked with reckless abandon fueled with hatred. Their blades hummed together, hissing and sparking.