Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [245]
Anakin collapsed forward, face into his hands.
Mace reached into the Force, opening the eye of his special gift of perception—
What he found there froze his blood.
The tangled web of fault lines in the Force he had seen connecting Anakin to Obi-Wan and to Palpatine was no more; in their place was a single spider-knot that sang with power enough to crack the planet. Anakin Skywalker no longer had shatterpoints. He was a shatterpoint.
The shatterpoint.
Everything depended on him.
Everything.
Mace said slowly, with the same sort of deliberate care he would use in examining an unknown type of bomb that might have the power to destroy the universe itself, “Anakin, look at me.”
Skywalker raised his head.
“Are you hurt? Do you need—”
Mace frowned. Anakin’s eyes were raw, and red, and his face looked swollen. For a long time he didn’t know if Anakin would answer, if he could answer, if he could even speak at all; the young Jedi seemed to be struggling with something inside himself, as though he fought desperately against the birth of a monster hatching within his chest.
But in the Force, there was no as though; there was no seemed to be. In the Force, Mace could feel the monster inside Anakin Skywalker, a real monster, too real, one that was eating him alive from the inside out.
Fear.
This was the wound Anakin had taken. This was the hurt that had him shaking and stammering and too weak to stand. Some black fear had hatched like fever wasps inside the young Knight’s brain, and it was killing him.
Finally, after what seemed forever, Anakin opened his blood-raw eyes.
“Master Windu …” He spoke slowly, painfully, as though each word ripped away a raw hunk of his own flesh. “I have … bad news.”
Mace stared at him.
“Bad news?” he repeated blankly.
What news could be bad enough to make a Jedi like Anakin Skywalker collapse? What news could make Anakin Skywalker look like the stars had gone out?
Then, in nine simple words, Anakin told him.
This is the moment that defines Mace Windu.
Not his countless victories in battle, nor the numberless battles his diplomacy has avoided. Not his penetrating intellect, or his talents with the Force, or his unmatched skills with the lightsaber. Not his dedication to the Jedi Order, or his devotion to the Republic that he serves.
But this.
Right here.
Right now.
Because Mace, too, has an attachment. Mace has a secret love.
Mace Windu loves the Republic.
Many of his students quote him to students of their own: “Jedi do not fight for peace. That’s only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace.”
For Mace Windu, for all his life, for all the lives of a thousand years of Jedi before him, true civilization has had only one true name: the Republic.
He has given his life in the service of his love. He has taken lives in its service, and lost the lives of innocents. He has seen beings that he cares for maimed, and killed, and sometimes worse: sometimes so broken by the horror of the struggle that their only answer was to commit horrors greater still.
And because of that love now, here, in this instant, Anakin Skywalker has nine words for him that shred his heart, burn its pieces, and feed him its smoking ashes.
Palpatine is Sidious. The Chancellor is the Sith Lord.
He doesn’t even hear the words, not really; their true meaning is too large for his mind to gather in all at once.
They mean that all he’s done, and all that has been done to him—
That all the Order has accomplished, all it has suffered—
All the Galaxy itself has gone through, all the years of suffering and slaughter, the death of entire planets—
Has all been for nothing.
Because it was all done to save the Republic.
Which was already gone.
Which had already fallen.
The corpse of which had been defended only by a Jedi Order that was now under the command of a Dark Lord of the Sith.
Mace Windu’s entire existence has become crystal so shot-through with flaws that the hammer of those nine words has