Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [95]
A raging windstorm howled through the Grand Audience Chamber and battered me as I burst through the stairwell doorway. As I entered the room, I saw Leia leap for her brother’s legs and get carried upward toward the ceiling by the cyclone. At the heart of the storm, Streen danced around in a circle, his arms spread wide, his eyes open but unseeing. He clearly meant for the storm to blow Luke and Leia out through the skylights and hurl them into the jungle, where the fall would kill them.
And without any telekinesis, I was powerless to halt the storm. Something urged me to despair over the fact, but I brushed it aside. I’ll just have to make Streen stop it himself.
As the turbolift door opened and Kirana Ti boiled into the storm armoring Streen, I set myself and concentrated. Summoning the Force, I projected into Streen’s brain a vision of the room that did not include me or Kirana or the other apprentices coming out of the lift. I also showed him that the room was empty save for himself. Those he wished to blow out of here were gone, sent off on the fate he had intended for them. I shoved into him a sense of his mission having been accomplished fully and totally and I felt an alien wave of satisfaction roll back out from him.
Then Kirana Ti battered her way past his defenses and tackled him. The wind died, allowing Luke and Leia to plunge toward the ground. Kam Solusar and Tionne rushed forward and used their telekinetic abilities to catch the siblings and lower them to the ground slowly.
Master Skywalker appeared to be unhurt. Streen slowly recovered himself and explained that in his nightmare, he thought he was fighting the dark man. He had tried to destroy him, thought he had, and then awoke to find he had actually been trying to kill Master Skywalker.
Standing up, Streen put an edge into his voice. “We must destroy the dark man before he kills all of us!”
I retreated back down the stairs, mulling over Streen’s words. I’d always known it would come down to that. While I used sociopathic murderers as mental models for Exar Kun, I hadn’t located the logical flaw in my thinking. When hunting a sociopathic killer on Corellia, we could still have our blasters set on stun. We could capture him, have him treated for mental illness, have him incarcerated so he would do no more harm or even exile him to Kessel or some other hideous penal colony. We could also kill him, but only after court proceedings and judicial reviews. If we had to, if we were given no choice, we could employ deadly force against him, but few serial murderers fought to the bitter end.
Capture and rehabilitation were not options with Exar Kun. Master Skywalker might have been able to redeem his father, but I held out no such hope for the dark man. Luke had a stake in redeeming his father, and his father had a connection to him that invited redemption. Exar Kun had just spent four millennia trapped on this rock—virtually forever to think on what he had done—and if he hadn’t decided to mend his ways in that time, it wasn’t going to happen when one of us asked nicely.
But how does one kill a creature of the dark side? I had no clue as to the answer to that question. We would just have to find a way and then do it.
It really came as no surprise when, as I lay down in my bunk, an oily, glistening black stain seeped into the ceiling above me. It resolved itself into the shadowy image of a tall, slender, sharp-featured man. He wore archaic clothes and long hair. He knitted his long fingers together at his waist.
“Your mind-trick was quite good, Keiran Halcyon.”
“High praise from a Dark Lord of the Sith.” I watched him through half-lidded eyes. “Did it really fool you, Exar Kun, or were you just too trusting in using Streen’s senses?”
The Dark Lord threw his head back in a silent laugh. “Fire and spirit, good. I had misjudged you because Gantoris and Kyp