Star Wars_ Darth Bane 02_ Rule of Two - Drew Karpyshyn [127]
The face—ten years older, but unmistakable—jogged the Dark Lord’s memory. He had lain on this very floor over a decade earlier on the border between life and death, even as he lay now.
Caleb, he tried to say, but the only sound that came out was a soft groan. Like the rest of his body, his lips, tongue, and jaw refused to move. Bane tried to call upon the power of the dark side to grant him strength, but his will was as weak and helpless as the rest of him.
“He’s awake,” Caleb called out loudly, never taking his eyes off his patient.
From outside Bane heard the sound of approaching footsteps. He tried to speak again, pouring all his strength into a single word.
“Caleb.”
His voice was a faint whisper, but this time the word was clear. The healer didn’t bother to respond. Instead he stood up, leaving Bane staring at his boots once more. Bane heard the dull thud of running footsteps on the sand outside change to the sharp clack of boot heels on the shack’s wooden floor.
“Let me see him!”
He recognized the voice of his apprentice, and his mind slowly began to reassemble the pieces of what had happened. He remembered the battle with the Jedi on Tython; he remembered unleashing a storm of Force lightning at the last of his foes. He remembered the kriffing shield the Ithorian Master had thrown up around him. After that, all his memories were of unbearable pain.
Somehow the Jedi’s barrier had trapped Bane inside the center of the dark side storm. The electricity had enveloped him, millions of volts arcing through his body, cooking his flesh from the inside and throwing his muscles into an endless series of violent seizures that threatened to rip his body apart.
The energy had coursed through the orbalisks embedded in his skin, too. The creatures absorbed the power, hungrily devouring it until they became so engorged that the soft, pliant flesh of their underbellies had begun to swell. Squeezed ever tighter against the unyielding chitin of their own exterior shells, they’d begun to burrow deeper into Bane. He remembered screaming as thousands of tiny teeth started sawing away at subcutaneous tissue, chewing through muscles, tendons, and even bone.
But burrowing deeper hadn’t stopped the creatures from feasting on the electricity coursing through Bane’s frying innards. They’d continued to expand until they had begun to pop, rupturing like overfilled balloons pinched beneath the hard shells.
Bane had stayed conscious through the torture of the electricity cooking him alive and the agony of the teeth burrowing into his flesh. But the indescribable pain from the chemicals released by the exploding orbalisks dissolving his body on a cellular level finally caused him to black out … only to wake up here.
A pair of boots stepped in beside Caleb’s: the smaller feet of a woman, most likely Zannah.
“He’s trying to speak,” Caleb said from up above Bane’s line of sight.
He tried to tilt his head again, this time managing to look up toward the pair standing over him. Zannah noticed and crouched down to raise his head and shoulders. She slid a makeshift pillow formed by her balled-up cloak underneath his neck to support him. He felt her long, thin fingers on his back as she did so.
The contact brought a realization crashing down on Bane—the orbalisks were gone! That was why he had felt the coarse blankets against his bare skin. That was why he could feel Zannah’s fingers pressing against his flesh.
“Orbalisks?” he managed to gasp.
“We had to remove them,” his apprentice informed him. “They were killing you.”
Bane felt the world going dim again, his body exhausted by the two words he had spoken. As he lost consciousness, he felt a pang of regret for what he had lost.
To Zannah’s untrained eye, her Master looked much stronger when he opened his eyes again two days later. This time he was able to turn his head slowly from side to side, taking in the surroundings of Caleb’s home and the nearby presence of his apprentice.