Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 06_ Vortex - Denning Troy [162]
Finally, Khai simply turned his back on the corpse and, screaming, began to totter away. Had his daughter not flicked a hand in his direction and buckled his knees with a Force blast, he might have kept going until he had left the village—and perhaps even the island. As it was, he simply covered his head and lay on the ground wailing—an embarrassment that caused his daughter to render him unconscious with a second Force blast.
Taalon flicked a finger toward Akanah, drawing her back down to eye level. “I will turn the whole Fallanassi order into ghosts, if you like.”
“I assure you,” Akanah said, “that won’t be necessary.”
Before Taalon could reply, Sith all over the village began to scream and hack at the air. Sometimes they hit Fallanassi, sometimes they hit a tree fern or a fungus-covered hut, occasionally they even hit one another—but most of the time they struck nothing at all. Still, they universally began to cringe and wince as though taking blows, and within seconds they began to retreat into defensive squares that did nothing at all to diminish their panic.
Luke glanced over at Ben and was relieved to see that Akanah had spared his son—and Vestara—from her illusion. He signaled them to come and stand with him and Taalon, who also seemed to be free of the deception. Then he withdrew his presence from the White Current, just far enough to see the illusion to which the Sith were reacting.
It appeared the Sith were being swarmed by translucent green figures. These phantasms had ghastly, distorted faces and thin tentacles lashing from their fingertips, and every couple of seconds one of them would belch a cloud of brown vapor into the face of a warrior. The victim would age a dozen years in a heartbeat, the face wrinkling and the posture growing more stooped.
But it was the tentacles that were the most gruesome. They would shoot out from the ghost’s fingertips to lodge themselves in the eyeballs or nostrils or ears of an intruder. What looked like thumb-sized drops of dark Force energy would pulse down the tentacles, and with each globule, the phantasm seemed to grow a bit more solid and real looking.
As the ghosts grew more opaque, they stopped belching brown fumes and started to spew flame. Before long, there appeared to be wildfires springing up everywhere, driving the Sith toward the edges of the village, screaming and stumbling just as Gavar Khai had done. Within seconds, the fastest Sith had reached a low stone wall that separated part of the village from a thousand-meter plunge to the sea.
When Luke saw the first warrior vault over the wall and drop screaming out of sight, all doubt about the woman before him vanished. No Adept of the White Current would have used her art to kill any being so casually.
Luke immersed himself within the Current again. The scene before him changed from horror to simple madness, with the Fallanassi standing pressed against their huts while the Sith flailed at empty air and rolled in the moss, trying to smother flames that did not exist. Whether the Adepts were contributing to the illusion or just standing aside while Abeloth alone tormented the intruders, Luke could not say. But it seemed clear to him that the Fallanassi were under Abeloth’s influence, or they never would have permitted the White Current to be defiled in this way.
After a few moments watching the madness, Taalon seemed to gather his courage. He snapped his lightsaber off his belt and pointed it at the woman floating before him. “You will end this, now.”
Abeloth merely smiled. “I could.” She drifted out of his reach and turned toward the large gathering hall where she had first appeared. “Or I could explain what’s happening to you.”
Taalon’s expression changed from exhaustion to rapture. He glanced in the direction of his maddened followers, but Luke knew the choice