Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [197]
“My time will come … when I am older. And, I suppose, wiser.” He didn’t want to get into this with Palpatine; talking with the Chancellor like this—seriously, man-to-man—made him feel good, feel strong, despite Obi-Wan’s warning. He certainly didn’t want to start whining about being passed over for Mastery like some preadolescent Padawan who hadn’t been chosen for a scramball team.
“Nonsense. Age is no measure of wisdom. They keep you off the Council because it is the last hold they have on you, Anakin; it is how they control you. Once you’re a Master, as you deserve, how will they make you do their bidding?”
“Well …” Anakin gave him a half-sheepish smile. “They can’t exactly make me, even now.”
“I know, my boy. I know. That is precisely the point. You are not like them. You are younger. Stronger. Better. If they cannot control you now, what will happen once you are a Master in your own right? How will they keep your toes on their political line? You may become more powerful than all of them together. That is why they keep you down. They fear your power. They fear you.”
Anakin looked down. This had struck a little close to the bone. “I have sensed … something like that.”
“I have asked you here today, Anakin, because I have fears of my own.” He turned, waiting, until Anakin met his eye, and on Palpatine’s face was something approaching bleak despair. “I am coming to fear the Jedi themselves.”
“Oh, Chancellor—” Anakin broke into a smile of disbelief. “There is no one more loyal than the Jedi, sir—surely, after all this time—”
But Palpatine had already turned away. He lowered himself into the chair behind his desk and kept his head down as though he was ashamed to say this directly to Anakin’s face. “The Council keeps pushing for more control. More autonomy. They have lost all respect for the rule of law. They have become more concerned with avoiding the oversight of the Senate than with winning the war.”
“With respect, sir, many on the Council would say the same of you.” He thought of Obi-Wan, and he had to stop himself from wincing. Had he betrayed a confidence just now?
Or had Obi-Wan been doing the Council’s bidding after all? … Be wary of Palpatine, he’d said, and be careful of your feelings …
Were these honest warnings, out of concern for him? Or had they been calculated: seeds of doubt planted to hedge Anakin away from the one man who really understood him?
The one man he could really trust …
“Oh, I have no doubt of it,” Palpatine was saying. “Many of the Jedi on your Council would prefer I was out of office altogether—because they know I’m on to them, now. They’re shrouded in secrecy, obsessed with covert action against mysteriously faceless enemies—”
“Well, the Sith are hardly faceless, are they? I mean, Dooku himself—”
“Was he truly a Lord of the Sith? Or was he just another in your string of fallen Jedi, posturing with a red lightsaber to intimidate you?”
“I …” Anakin frowned. How could he be sure? “But Sidious …”
“Ah, yes, the mysterious Lord Sidious. ‘The Sith infiltrator in the highest levels of government.’ Doesn’t that sound a little overly familiar to you, Anakin? A little overly convenient? How do you know this Sidious even exists? How do you know he is not a fiction, a fiction created by the Jedi Council, to give them an excuse to harass their political enemies?”
“The Jedi are not political—”
“In a democracy, everything is political, Anakin. And everyone. This imaginary Sith Lord of theirs—even if he does exist, is he anyone to be feared? To be hunted down and exterminated without trial?”
“The Sith are the definition of evil—”
“Or so you have been trained to believe. I have been reading about the history of the Sith for some years now, Anakin. Ever since the Council saw fit to finally reveal to me their … assertion … that these millennium-dead sorcerers had supposedly sprung back to life. Not every tale about them is