Star Wars_ Darth Bane 02_ Rule of Two - Drew Karpyshyn [26]
Zannah didn’t say anything. From her expression Bane saw she was still struggling to comprehend why her Master would train her knowing that she would ultimately betray him. But she didn’t need to understand. Not yet. Right now she needed only to obey him.
“Make your way to Onderon,” Bane instructed her. “I will meet you there in ten standard days.” After I find Nadd’s tomb on Dxun.
“How am I supposed to get there?” she protested.
“You are the chosen one, the anointed heir to the legacy of our order. You will find a way.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you will have proven yourself unworthy of being my successor, and I will seek out another apprentice.”
There was nothing more to say. Bane turned his back on her and headed for his ship. Zannah merely watched him go, not speaking. As he walked away, he could feel her anger building, becoming a raging inferno of hate as he climbed into the cockpit. The heat of her fury brought a grim smile to Bane’s lips as he fired up the engines.
The Valcyn took to the air, leaving Zannah behind—a tiny figure on the planet’s surface staring after the ship, standing motionless as if she had been carved from cold, hard stone.
6
This is all just a misunderstanding,” the man insisted from inside his cell.
“You’re making a mistake,” the woman with him agreed.
Johun took a deep breath, then let it out in a long, weary sigh. He’d arrived back on the Fairwind with his two prisoners over an hour earlier. His request for an immediate audience with Farfalla had been denied, as the acting general had been otherwise preoccupied with the cleanup efforts on Ruusan. So Johun had taken his prisoners down to the flagship’s lower deck and placed them in a holding cell to wait. With nothing better to do, he’d decided to take a seat in a nearby chair and wait with them.
The young Jedi was now strongly regretting that decision.
“We were never part of Kaan’s army,” the woman called out to him from behind the bars of their cell. “We’re just farmers.”
“Farmers don’t wear battle armor and carry weapons,” Johun said, pointing to the corner of the room where the clothing and equipment confiscated from the mercenaries had been piled atop a small table.
“That stuff’s not ours,” the man explained. “We … we just found it. We were out for a walk this morning and … we came across this deserted camp. We saw all this equipment lying around and, uh, we thought it would be fun to dress up like soldiers.”
The Republic guard standing watch over the prisoners with Johun barked out a laugh at the pathetic lie. Johun just closed his eyes and reached up to rub his temples. Back on Ruusan the prisoners had been all too eager to confess to their crimes. Fresh from their encounter with the unnamed Sith Lord, they had been temporarily scared straight. Now that they were safely away from the planet’s surface, however, the sobering reality of a five-to-ten-year sentence on a Republic prison world was making them recant their earlier testimony.
“What about the others?” Johun asked, hoping to catch them in their own web of lies. “Your friends who died in the attack. Were they farmers, too?”
“Yes,” the man replied, even as the woman said, “We didn’t really know them.”
“Well,” the young Jedi asked coolly, “which is it?”
The two mercenaries gave each other a long, sour look, but it was the woman who finally answered. “We just met them this morning. At the Sith camp. They said they were farmers like us, but they might have been lying.”
“Lying? Really?” Johun asked sarcastically. “Hard to imagine why anyone would do that.”
The guard gave another short laugh. “You two should take this act on tour,” he said. “You know … if you survive prison.”
The man in the cell seemed about to say something biting in reply, but he held his tongue when his companion gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs. At that moment one of Farfalla’s envoys poked her head into the room.
“The general can see you now,” she said to Johun.
Johun leapt from his chair to follow her.
“Hey, tell him to let