Star Wars_ Darth Bane 03_ Dynasty of Evil - Drew Karpyshyn [28]
“Those who are trained in the ways of the Jedi are taught to live by the rules and tenets of our Order,” Obba said at last. “We believe in self-sacrifice, and we believe that the power of the Force must only be used when it serves the greater good. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, there are those who fall away from our teachings. They give in to weakness. They succumb to ambition and greed. They use the Force to satisfy their own base wants and desires. They reject our philosophy and fall to the dark side.”
“You’re talking about the Sith,” Serra whispered. Lucia thought she heard fear in the princess’s voice, but she couldn’t tell if it was real or simply part of the game she was playing with their host.
“Not the Sith,” he corrected. “I am speaking of the Dark Jedi.”
“What’s the difference between a Sith and a Dark Jedi?” Lucia asked.
The Ithorian stopped pacing and turned to face them, instinctively addressing his audience like a teacher giving a lesson.
“The Sith were the sworn enemies of the Jedi and the Republic. They sought to wipe us from existence; they sought to rule the galaxy. They united their strength in the Brotherhood of Darkness, drawing countless followers to their cause with false promises. They amassed an army of individuals foolish and desperate enough to believe their lies, and they plunged the galaxy into a war that threatened to destroy us all.”
Lucia remained silent as Obba spoke, though she tensed involuntarily at his description of her and her fellow soldiers.
“A Dark Jedi, on the other hand, has much smaller ambitions. He—or she—thinks only of himself. He acts alone. The ultimate goal is not galactic conquest, but personal wealth and importance. Like a common thug or criminal, he revels in cruelty and selfishness. He preys upon the weak and vulnerable, spreading misery and suffering wherever he goes.”
“And you think such a one might be involved here,” Serra noted. “You have someone in particular in mind.”
Obba bowed his head in shame. “Set Harth. As a Padawan he lost his Master to the thought bomb on Ruusan. I took him under my wing, and eventually I recommended him to the other members on the Council of First Knowledge. Like Medd, he became one of our agents, scouring the galaxy for dark side artifacts and lore.
“But the temptation of the dark side proved too strong for Set. He rejected the Jedi teachings to pursue wealth and personal gain at the expense of others. Too late we learned that he had kept many of the artifacts he uncovered for himself. By the time I realized what he had become, he was gone, vanished into the galactic underbelly of lawless mercenaries, bounty hunters, and slavers.”
“So you fear that Set Harth, this Dark Jedi, may have killed Medd Tandar on Doan?”
“If the killer was not an assassin hired by someone on Doan, then this seems to me to be the most likely possibility. If Set somehow learned about the artifact cache on Doan, he would have sought to claim it … and he would have killed anyone who got in his way.”
“He sounds like a dangerous man,” Serra noted.
“Now that the Sith are extinct,” Obba proclaimed, “Set Harth may be the most dangerous individual in the galaxy.”
Serra stared at him. She thought of the black-armored man who had haunted her dreams for the past twenty years, and remembered the words of her father:
The Jedi and the Sith will always be at war. They are each wholly uncompromising; their rigid philosophies make no room for mutual existence. But what they fail to realize is that they are merely two sides of the same coin: light and dark. You cannot have one without the other.
“How can you be so sure the Sith are gone?” she demanded. “Weren’t there rumors that some of the Sith Lords survived the thought bomb that destroyed the Brotherhood of Darkness?”
“That is true. One did survive,” Obba explained. “But now he, too, has fallen … though his defeat came at a terrible cost.”
“I don’t understand.”
The Ithorian