Star Wars_ Darth Bane 01_ Path of Destruction - Drew Karpyshyn [92]
An eerie blue light filled the tunnel, sending a small swarm of deadly pelko bugs scurrying for refuge beyond the dim circle of illumination. They had been stalking him, closing in from all sides. He could still sense them there, lurking in the shadows all around him, but he wasn’t afraid. After all, it wasn’t the light keeping them at bay.
Pelko bugs, like many of the creatures indigenous to Korriban, were attuned to the Force. They would have sensed Bane’s arrival even before he entered the tomb; his power would inevitably draw them in. Yet it also kept them and their paralyzing spines at a safe distance. Instinctively, the pelko bugs could sense the sheer scope of his power; they were wary of him. They wouldn’t come close enough to actually attack him, making them nothing more than a nuisance. Larger predators, like the tu’kata, might pose a real threat. But he’d deal with them if and when the time came.
Right now he was more concerned with the potential dangers the builders of the tomb might have left behind. Sith mausoleums were notorious for their fiendishly lethal traps. Bane reached out with the Force, carefully probing the walls, ground, and ceiling in front of him for anything out of the ordinary. He was relieved—and slightly disappointed—to discover nothing. Part of him had hoped he would stumble across an undiscovered chamber, something the Jedi had missed.
He continued down the tunnel, winding his way past various chambers where the wealth and treasures would have been buried with the deceased Dark Lord—along with his still-living lesser servants. The rooms held no interest for him; he wasn’t a grave robber. Instead he continued deeper and deeper until he reached the burial chamber itself.
The pelko bugs matched his progress, endlessly circling just beyond the blue illumination cast by his glow rod. He could hear the high-pitched clicking—skreek skreek skreek—of the frustrated swarm: powerless to assail their prey, yet irresistibly caught up in the wake of his passing.
The burial chamber was easily identifiable by the enormous stone sarcophagus in the center of the room, resting atop a small stone pedestal. It was little more than a blocky shadow on the fringes of the glow rod’s light, but it filled him with a sense of both fear and awe.
Still using the Force to scan for traps, he cautiously approached the tomb, his trepidation growing as the blue light washed over it to reveal more and more details. The stone was carved with symbols similar to those on the crypt’s entrance, but these hadn’t suffered untold centuries of erosion. They stood out starkly, brutal and sharp. He couldn’t read the unfamiliar language or identify the Dark Lord from the crest, yet he knew this was the resting place of an ancient and mighty being.
He reached the platform; it stood a little higher than his knee. He put one foot on it, then reached out to grip a protruding edge of one of the carved symbols on the side of the sarcophagus itself. He half expected to receive a sharp jolt or shock, but all he felt was cold stone beneath his palm.
Using his hold to maintain his balance, he hauled himself up so that he was standing with both feet on the platform, looking down at the top of the tomb. To his horror, he could now see that the stone slab sealing the sarcophagus had been virtually destroyed. Whatever had been inside was gone, replaced by rubble, dust, and a few bits of broken bone that might once have been the fingers or toes of the Dark Lord’s skeletal remains.
He stepped down from the platform, frustrated but still not willing to give up. Slowly, he turned in a great circle, as if he expected to find the stolen remains lying in a corner of the burial chamber. There was nothing: the tomb had been robbed and defiled.
Bane hadn’t been sure what he expected to find, but it wasn’t this. The spirits of the ancient