Star Wars_ Darth Bane 02_ Rule of Two - Drew Karpyshyn [17]
Crawling forward through the gloom, he felt around with his hands until his fingers closed around the hilt of the lightsaber. He thrust it triumphantly up in the air as it ignited, allowing him to see once more.
He had no way of knowing how far away the owner of the voice was. The acoustics of the tunnel were strange and unfamiliar. Sounds and echoes were unnaturally distorted as they bounced across the irregular stone walls of the underground maze. But he was certain the voice had come from somewhere up ahead, in the direction he had been going.
With the glowing blade to guide him, he moved with an eager confidence. Every minute or so he would catch another snatch of conversation coming to him from somewhere up ahead. He could tell there were two speakers now, each with a distinct voice: one a deep bass, the other a much higher pitch. Each time he heard the voices, they were slightly louder, and he knew he was headed in the right direction.
He noticed that the darkness of the tunnel was fading; he no longer needed his lightsaber to see his surroundings. But it wasn’t the yellow light of the sun streaming in as he neared the surface; it was a cold silver glow. With a start he realized he had somehow circled back and was once more approaching the chamber of the thought bomb. Whoever the voices belonged to—friend or foe—he’d find them there.
The chamber was close, so close he could make out the words the next time the voices spoke.
“The Sith are only two now—one Master and one apprentice,” the deeper one said. “There will be no others.”
“What happens if I fail?” the other replied.
Sounds like a woman, Darovit thought, too focused on following the voices to pay much attention to the actual words. No, not a woman, he corrected himself a second later. A girl.
“Will you destroy me, too?” the girl asked.
With a shock, Darovit realized that he knew the voice! He didn’t know how it was possible, but there was no doubt in his mind who this was.
“Rain!” he shouted, breaking into a run to meet the cousin he had thought was dead. “Rain, you’re alive!”
The trip to the cave was quick and uneventful. Bane had noticed a few shell-shocked survivors of the final battle of Ruusan staring at him and Zannah as they roared past on their swoop, but he paid them little heed. He doubted any of them would recognize him for what he truly was. And even if they did, their tales of a surviving Sith Lord racing past them with a young girl in tow would seem as ludicrous and unreliable as the accounts of the mercenaries he had let escape back at Kaan’s camp.
He brought the swoop to a stop outside the dark and forbidding tunnel that would lead them down to the chamber of the thought bomb. Small pebbles crunched loudly beneath the hard soles of his heavy black boots as he dismounted. Zannah was too small to simply step off the vehicle, but she leapt down from her seat without any sign of fear or hesitation, landing nimbly on the ground beside him.
Neither of them spoke as they made the descent, their way lit by one of the glow rods Bane had found in the supplies back at the Sith camp. The air grew colder and Zannah shivered beside him, but she didn’t complain. They moved quickly down the rough-hewn passage; even so it took nearly twenty minutes for them to reach their destination due to the length of the tunnel. And for the first time Darth Bane actually saw what his manipulations of Kaan and his followers had wrought.
The pale, glowing orb floating in the center of the chamber was nearly four meters tall. It pulsed with raw power; it made the flesh on Bane’s neck crawl and the hair on his arms stand on end. Dark veins of shadow swirled