Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [162]
Above, the eyes began to descend, staying at their respective distance from the gleam of his lightsaber, but definitely following.
The railcar slowed to a halt, curving around in a circle. Brisha and Jacen were in a well-lit chamber, large enough to house a good-sized transport, but the only thing present was the end of the rail line. The track here curved around in a teardrop shape and rejoined itself on the way up, allowing the railcar to head back up the track it had just descended.
Jacen didn’t bother with the scenery. He stared at Brisha. “Why did you do that?” he asked.
She gave him an innocent stare. “Do what?”
“Shove Ben and Nelani out of the car. Did you think I couldn’t feel your pulse of Force energy?”
“I suspected you could.” She stood and stepped out of the car. She floated for a moment beside it, then slowly drifted down to the stony surface of the floor. “I separated them from us for their own good. What they’ll face will be dangerous, but not as dangerous as what we’re going to encounter—if they accompanied us here, they’d probably die.”
“Your Sith.” Jacen pushed off from his seat and drifted upward a dozen meters. From this altitude he could see all corners of this chamber, with its natural stone walls and glow rods all over them. There were no menaces, no strange beings to confront them. “What can you tell me about him?”
“His knowledge is of the lineage of Palpatine, but is broader than the Emperor’s. He’s young. He was not yet born when the Emperor died.”
“How was the Sith knowledge transmitted to him?” Jacen began to float back down toward the railcar. “Through a Sith Holocron? Through loyal retainers?”
“Through disloyal retainers. Through Sith trainees who could never achieve Mastery themselves…and who rejected Palpatine and his teachings as too selfish, too controlling, too destructive.”
Jacen gave her a curious look. “You make them sound benign. If they’re benign, isn’t he?”
She shrugged. She kept one hand on the railcar so that casual motions would not propel her across the chamber. “All the same, he must be found and mastered. Ah.” She turned toward a shadowy corner of the chamber, a place where a huge, rounded outcropping came within meters of the curved section of rail.
From around that outcropping walked a man. He was tall, slender, garbed in a traveler’s robe of black and dark gold; it was styled like a Jedi’s but made of expensive silks. A lightsaber, its hilt also in black and gold, swung at his belt. His hands were gloved, and his face was in the deep shadow cast by the hood of his cloak, though his eyes—a liquid, luminous orange-gold—glowed from within that darkness.
He came to a stop just at the edge of that outcropping, several meters from Jacen and Brisha.
“So you’re the Sith,” Jacen said.
The dark figure bowed.
Jacen gave him a scornful look. “How am I supposed to take you seriously? You’re not even here.”
The hooded man’s voice came back as a whisper. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you walked. As if we were in Coruscant-standard gravity instead of a tiny fraction of it. You’re an illusion.”
“Yes, I’m an illusion. But I’m also here. Right here.”
“Care to explain that?”
“No.”
“Ah.” Jacen thumbed his lightsaber into life. “Well, I suppose I should be cutting you in half now.”
“I am a Master. You are a Jedi Knight. Do you know what that means?”
“That I can’t win?” Jacen punctuated his question with a mocking laugh.
“No. That you must go through my subordinates to get to me. Allowing me to test you, to evaluate you. That’s tradition, you know.”
“If you say so.”
The reflection of the Sith’s gold-orange eyes disappeared—and then the Sith himself vanished, ghost-like.
But there was a sound from beyond where he had stood, a slight scrape, and another figure moved forward into view. This one walked, as the Sith had, in a fashion appropriate for a standard-gravity environment, and stepped out to stand where the Sith