Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [268]
The blue-white blade cut into and out from her skull, and her corpse swayed. A negligent flip of the wrist slashed through her column of neck rings. Her brain-burned head tumbled to the floor.
The only sound, then, was a panicky stutter of footfalls as Wat Tambor and the two Neimoidians scampered along a hallway toward a nearby conference room.
The Sith Lord was in no hurry to pursue. All the exits from the control center were blast-shielded, and they were sealed, and he had destroyed the controls.
The conference room was, as the expression goes, a dead end.
Thousands of clone troops swarmed the Jedi Temple.
Multiple battalions on each level were not just an occupying force, but engaged in the long, painstaking process of preparing dead bodies for positive identification. The Jedi dead were to be tallied against the rolls maintained in the Temple archives; the clone dead would be cross-checked with regimental rosters. All the dead had to be accounted for.
This was turning out to be somewhat more complicated than the clone officers had expected. Though the fighting had ended hours ago, troopers kept turning up missing. Usually small patrolling squads—five troopers or less—that still made random sweeps through the Temple hallways, checking every door and window, every desk and every closet.
Sometimes when those closets were opened, what was found inside was five dead clones.
And there were disturbing reports as well; officers coordinating the sweeps recorded a string of sightings of movement—usually a flash of robe disappearing around a corner, caught in a trooper’s peripheral vision—that on investigation seemed to have been only imagination, or hallucination. There were also multiple reports of inexplicable sounds coming from out-of-the-way areas that turned out to be deserted.
Though clone troopers were schooled from even before awakening in their Kaminoan crèche-schools to be ruthlessly pragmatic, materialistic, and completely impervious to superstition, some of them began to suspect that the Temple might be haunted.
In the vast misty gloom of the Room of a Thousand Fountains, one of the clones on the cleanup squad caught a glimpse of someone moving beyond a stand of Hylaian marsh bamboo. “Halt!” he shouted. “You there! Don’t move!”
The shadowy figure darted off into the gloom, and the clone turned to his squad brothers. “Come on! Whatever that was, we can’t let it get away!”
Clones pelted off into the mist. Behind them, at the spill of bodies they’d been working on, fog and gloom gave birth to a pair of Jedi Masters.
Obi-Wan stepped over white-armored bodies to kneel beside blaster-burned corpses of children. Tears flowed freely down tracks that hadn’t had a chance to dry since he’d first entered the Temple. “Not even the younglings survived. It looks like they made a stand here.”
Yoda’s face creased with ancient sadness. “Or trying to flee they were, with some turning back to slow the pursuit.”
Obi-Wan turned to another body, an older one, a Jedi fully mature and beyond. Grief punched a gasp from his chest. “Master Yoda—it’s the Troll …”
Yoda looked over and nodded bleakly. “Abandon his young students, Cin Drallig would not.”
Obi-Wan sank to his knees beside the fallen Jedi. “He was my lightsaber instructor …”
“And his, was I,” Yoda said. “Cripple us, grief will, if let it we do.”
“I know. But … it’s one thing to know a friend is dead, Master Yoda. It’s another to find his body …”
“Yes.” Yoda moved closer. With his gimer stick, he pointed at a bloodless gash in Drallig’s shoulder that had cloven deep into his chest. “Yes, it is. See this, do you? This wound, no blaster could make.”
An icy void opened in Obi-Wan’s heart. It swallowed his pain and his grief, leaving behind a precariously empty calm.
He whispered, “A lightsaber?”
“Business with the recall beacon, have we still.” Yoda pointed with his stick at figures winding toward them among the trees and pools. “Returning, the clones are.”
Obi-Wan rose. “I will learn who did this.”
“Learn?”
Yoda shook his head