Star Wars_ Darth Bane 03_ Dynasty of Evil - Drew Karpyshyn [38]
It was time for Zannah to do the same. She would not allow herself to be like these pathetic wretches: weak, afraid, and enslaved.
Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken.
There was still the problem of finding her own apprentice, of course. But for now, she needed to focus on why she was here. Her investigations had revealed that she wasn’t the only one interested in the dead Jedi. A man with long, silver hair—some called him a mercenary, others a bounty hunter—had been here not two days earlier, asking the same questions she was. Since then, she had been following his tracks: talking to the people he spoke to, and charming, bribing, or threatening them into giving her the same information they had given him.
She now suspected she knew why Medd Tandar had come here in the first place. It was common knowledge among the miners that a small cache of jewelry had been uncovered during a dig, and that the Jedi had come to Doan in the hope of acquiring the find. Zannah could only think of one reason why a Jedi would be interested in a few trinkets discovered in a long-forgotten tomb on an insignificant Outer Rim world—her Master wasn’t alone in his obsessive efforts to locate ancient Sith artifacts scattered across the galaxy.
At first she had assumed the man who had been asking about Medd before her had been another Jedi sent to complete the original mission. However, it quickly became clear from the reports of his use of terror and torture to extract information that he was not a Jedi or even someone working for the Jedi Order. The trail of these reports had ended at a dilapidated cantina in one of the seemingly infinite mining camps. But she found the establishment closed, and Quano, the Rodian proprietor, nowhere to be found. With no more eyewitnesses, Zannah decided to have a look around herself, hoping for further clues.
Night had fallen, casting everything in near blackness. She tried the door and discovered that someone had smashed the lock. Not surprising, given the poverty she had seen. Pushing her way in, she picked up the faint odor of decaying flesh. She cracked a glow stick from her belt, filling the room with its pale green light. She was just able to make out two bodies on the floor.
Crouching by the first one, she made a quick examination. Doan’s dry, dusty heat—combined with the general lack of airflow through the cantina—had partially mummified the corpse, slowing the decomposition process. The cause of death was obvious: a blaster bolt to the chest. His own blaster was still clutched in his hand.
It was obvious he wasn’t Quano; the body was plainly human. And he didn’t fit the descriptions she had been given of the man she was following. Based on his clothes and large muscles, he was probably one of the miners. She found the second body the same: a dead miner, shot in the chest.
Continuing her examination of the scene, she noticed that the shelf behind the bar was empty—but clear circles in the dust showed that until very recently, dozens of bottles had stood there. Whoever had broken in must have stolen all the alcohol … and left the two bodies where they lay on the floor.
A thorough search of the room turned up no trace of either the Rodian or the silver-haired man.
At the sound of someone fumbling at the door, Zannah covered her glow stick with her cloak and crouched low to the ground, a perfect statue hidden—she hoped—by the darkness.
The door creaked open and a shadowy figure slowly picked its way through the tables toward the bar in the back. Zannah waited to make sure the intruder was alone, then stood up and cast her cloak aside, bathing the room in the light of her glow stick.
A Rodian stood frozen,