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“Actually, I’m not all that angry.” Ben turned back to the door, then ignited his lightsaber and began to cut his way out. “She didn’t even try to kill me.”

THE PYRE SMOKE HUNG LOW AND BLACK OVER THE COURTYARD, MAKING it difficult for Luke Skywalker to concentrate on the figures carved into the stone arcade … and perhaps that was the point. His Sith companions did not like him wandering the ruins alone, trying to understand Abeloth and the Font of Power without them, and they were certainly capable of using smoke to express their feelings. Unfortunately, he had discovered nothing to warrant their displeasure—only more of the eerie reliefs they had uncovered everywhere as they stripped away the temple’s veil of carnivorous plants.

Dominated by sinuous shapes that seemed to change from vines to serpents to tentacles with each blink of the eye, the reliefs resembled a style called “ophidian grotesques” back on Coruscant. But Luke recognized these as something far more ancient and sinister. He had seen similar sculptures in half a dozen places around the galaxy, on worlds like Shatuun and Caulus Tertius—worlds that had died in cataclysms as old and mysterious as the Maw itself. Nobody seemed to know who had created the sculptures, and they were only found on planets that had been rendered uninhabitable eons before the dawn of recorded time.

A faint shiver of danger sense alerted Luke, and he turned to see Sarasu Taalon approaching through the greasy pall of smoke. Like all native Keshiri whom Luke had met, Taalon was slender and good looking, with lavender skin and violet eyes. His long face had been etched by age lines, though just deep enough to give him a dignified appearance grimly at odds with the hostility and narcissism that permeated his Force aura.

The smoke began to billow away as Taalon drew near, and Luke realized that the Sith was using the Force to clear the air around him. This simple task would have taxed his own abilities no more than it did those of the High Lord, but the Force was a sacred thing to Luke, not some tool to be utilized for one’s personal comfort and convenience. That was the fundamental difference between Sith and Jedi, he thought: Sith believed the Force existed to serve them, and Jedi regarded themselves as servants of the Force.

Taalon stopped at Luke’s side, his nose wrinkling at the smell of charred flesh that still lingered in the air. “You have a fondness for the odor of burning Sith, Master Skywalker?”

“If you mean, do I like it better than the smell of Sith left rotting in the jungle, then yes,” Luke answered, not turning away from the column he had been studying. “Especially when they have been left in the heat for two days already.”

Taalon waved a slender hand in indifference. “Time matters little to the dead, Master Skywalker, and we had work to do,” he said. “But I apologize if the odor offended you. Given that it was only Sith you were smelling, I had thought you would find it satisfying.”

“I don’t relish anyone’s death,” Luke replied. “And I was sorry for your loss.”

This last part drew a snort of disbelief. “You can’t lie to a Sith, Master Skywalker.”

Luke turned to Taalon with a smile as confident as it was serene. “If that were true, you’d know that I’m not lying. I took no joy in the deaths of Lady Rhea and her team aboard Sinkhole Station. And I’ll take no joy in killing you and Gavar Khai—after you’ve forced me to it, of course.”

Taalon’s smirk narrowed to a thin-lipped frown. “You see, that’s where we are different, Master Skywalker. When our work together is done, I’m very much looking forward to killing you.”

Luke shrugged. “We all need a dream, Lord Taalon.” He returned his attention to the battle-scorched arcade and traced a finger down a ropy carving. It might have been a serpent climbing the column, or a vine twined around it; like all of the carvings in the temple, it was abstract and mysterious. “Until then … these reliefs obviously had some deep significance