Darth Plagueis - James Luceno [46]
Saleucami’s primary was low in the sky by the time Plagueis reached the stone slab and stood facing the Iktotchi. Her broad hands took hold of his, and she tightened her thick fingers around his narrow palms.
“A Muun of wealth and taste—the first who has come in search of me,” she said.
“You were selected,” Plagueis told her.
She held his gaze, and a sudden look of uncertainty came into her eyes, as if Plagueis had locked horns with her. “What?”
“You were selected—though without your knowledge. And so I needed to meet you in person.”
She continued to stare at him. “That’s not why you are here.”
“Oh, but it is,” Plagueis said.
She tried to withdraw her hands, but Plagueis now had firm hold of them. “That’s not why you are here,” she said, altering the emphasis. “You wear the darkness of the future. It is I who have sought you; I who should be your handmaiden.”
“Unfortunately not,” Plagueis whispered. “Your message is premature and dangerous to my cause.”
“Then let me undo it! Let me do your bidding.”
“You are about to.”
A fire ignited in her eyes and her body went rigid as Plagueis began to trickle lightning into her. Her limbs trembled and her blood began to boil. Her hands grew hot and were close to being set aflame when he finally felt the light go out of her and she crumpled in his grasp. Askance, he saw one of the Iktotchi’s Twi’lek disciples racing toward him, and he abruptly let go of her hands and stepped away from her spasming body.
“What happened?” the Twi’lek demanded as other disciples were rushing to the Iktotchi’s aid. “What did you do to her?”
Plagueis made a calming gesture. “I did nothing,” he said in a deep monotone. “She fainted.”
The Twi’lek blinked and turned to his comrades. “He did nothing. She fainted.”
“She’s not breathing!” one of them said.
“Help her,” Plagueis said in the same monotone.
“Help her,” the Twi’lek said. “Help her!”
Plagueis stepped from the slab and began to walk against a sudden tide of frenzied beings toward one of the waiting speeder buses. Night was falling quickly. Behind him, shouts of disbelief rang out, echoing in the amphitheater. Panic was building. Beings were wringing their hands, jiggling their antennae and other appendages, walking in circles, mumbling to themselves.
He was the only one to board the speeder bus. Those he had arrived with and the Selected who had built shelters above the lakes were running into the dark, as if determined to lose themselves in the wastes.
In a starship similar in design to the one that had delivered Tenebrous and Plagueis to Bal’demnic—a Rugess Nome craft—Plagueis and 11-4D traveled to the Mid Rim world of Bedlam, near the argent pulsar of the same name. A leak point in realspace and a playground for purported transdimensional beings, the luminous cosmic phenomenon struck Plagueis as the perfect setting for the sanatorium to which the last of Venamis’s potential apprentices—a Nautolan—had been confined for the past five years.
Uniformed Gamorrean guards met them at the towering front doors of the Bedlam Institution for the Criminally Demented and showed them to the office of the superintendent, where they were welcomed by an Ithorian, who listened closely but in obvious dismay to the purpose of Plagueis’s surprise visit.
“Naat Lare has been named as a beneficiary in a will?”
Plagueis nodded. “A small inheritance. As chief executor I have been searching for him for