Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [156]
Could he be all these things—could he be any of them—and still have done what he has done?
He was already discovering the answer at the same time that he finally realized that he needed to ask the question.
The deck bucked as the cruiser absorbed a new barrage of torpedoes and turbolaser fire. Dooku’s severed staring head bounced along the deck and rolled away, and Anakin woke up.
“What—?”
He’d been having a dream. He’d been flying, and fighting, and fighting again, and somehow, in the dream, he could do whatever he wanted. In the dream, whatever he did was the right thing to do simply because he wanted to do it. In the dream there were no rules, there was only power.
And the power was his.
Now he stood over a headless corpse that he couldn’t bear to see but he couldn’t make himself look away, and he knew it hadn’t been a dream at all, that he’d really done this, the blades were still in his hands and the ocean of wrong he’d dived into had closed over his head.
And he was drowning.
The dead man’s lightsaber tumbled from his loosening fingers. “I—I couldn’t stop myself …”
And before the words left his lips he heard how hollow and obvious was the lie.
“You did well, Anakin.” Palpatine’s voice was warm as an arm around Anakin’s shoulders. “You did not only well, but right. He was too dangerous to leave alive.”
From the Chancellor this sounded true, but when Anakin repeated it inside his head he knew that Palpatine’s truth would be one he could never make himself believe. A tremor that began between his shoulder blades threatened to expand into a full case of the shakes. “He was an unarmed prisoner …”
That, now—that simple unbearable fact—that was truth. Though it burned him like his own lightsaber, truth was something he could hang on to. And somehow it made him feel a little better. A little stronger. He tried another truth: not that he couldn’t have stopped himself, but—
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, and now his voice came out solid, and simple, and final. Now he could look down at the corpse at his feet. He could look at the severed head.
He could see them for what they were.
A crime.
He’d become a war criminal.
Guilt hit him like a fist. He felt it—a punch to his heart that smacked breath from his lungs and buckled his knees. It hung on his shoulders like a yoke of collapsium: an invisible weight beyond his mortal strength, crushing his life.
There were no words in him for this. All he could say was, “It was wrong.”
And that was the sum of it, right there.
It was wrong.
“Nonsense. Disarming him was nothing; he had powers beyond your imagination.”
Anakin shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. It’s not the Jedi way.”
The ship shuddered again, and the lights went out.
“Have you never noticed that the Jedi way,” Palpatine said, invisible now within the stark shadow of the General’s Chair, “is not always the right way?”
Anakin looked toward the shadow. “You don’t understand. You’re not a Jedi. You can’t understand.”
“Anakin, listen to me. How many lives have you just saved with this stroke of a lightsaber? Can you count them?”
“But—”
“It wasn’t wrong, Anakin. It may be not the Jedi way, but it was right. Perfectly natural—he took your hand; you wanted revenge. And your revenge was justice.”
“Revenge is never just. It can’t be—”
“Don’t be childish, Anakin. Revenge is the foundation of justice. Justice began with revenge, and revenge is still the only justice some beings can ever hope for. After all, this is hardly your first time, is it? Did Dooku deserve mercy more than did the Sand People who tortured your mother to death?”
“That was different.”
In the Tusken camp he had lost his mind; he had become a force of nature, indiscriminate, killing with no more thought or intention than a sand gale. The Tuskens had been killed, slaughtered, massacred—but that had been beyond his control, and now it seemed to him as if it had been done by someone else: like a story he had heard that had little to do with him at all.
But Dooku—
Dooku had been murdered.