Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [40]
Soft laughter began, familiar yet strange; the pitch and timbre were wrong, but the cadence was as known to him as his father’s speech. A woman’s laughter, throaty and sardonic. It made the hair on his neck prickle up.
He turned and saw her.
Her hair was gold, the gold of a vein in a sunset on Coruscant or of the sudden spark from an inferno. One of her eyes was jade and the other obsidian. Her lips were fringed by a hundred incisions, and a white scar ran from the top of her forehead to her chin. Armor of a black-and-gray-banded chitinous substance fit close to her body, a very adult, very human body, though the armor was plated and jointed like an insect’s. Knobs and spurs stuck out from her shoulders and elbows.
She smiled at him through those split lips and held up something baton-shaped, which flexed in her grip like a sluggish pupa. Sudden light blazed from one end of it and resolved into a blazing blue blade. Dark-side energy crackled around her, calling to him, and he felt a sudden terrible attraction to her, every part of him yearning for her in a way he had never even begun to feel before.
She grinned more widely and laughed again, and with sudden understanding Anakin realized that she wasn’t looking at him at all, but at someone else in the vision, someone Anakin couldn’t see.
“The last of your kind,” the woman said, her voice made whispery by what had been done to her mouth. “The last of my kind.” And she raised the blade, and Anakin recognized her.
“Tahiri!” he shrieked. She paused, as if she might have heard something very far away. Then she came forward, sweeping the weapon down, and Anakin choked on the look in her eye, the mixture of glee and despair, joy and sickness.
He awoke still choking. A strong hand was clamped over his mouth. He squirmed, but the grip on him was sure and strong. He tried to get his feet under him and failed.
Calm. No fear, he thought. Get it together, Anakin. You’re supposed to be on watch. They won’t even hear this, in the cave, if you die.
He used the Force to twist the hand away from his mouth and shove his attacker sprawling, and in the next instant got his feet under him and his lightsaber in hand. In its sudden light he made out a bearded face, a blaster. He leapt foward.
“Wait! Jedi! I’m—I’m a friend.”
“Yeah? Why did you attack me?”
“Didn’t know—didn’t—” He wheezed off, his voice sounding strange, weak, as if he rarely used it. “Name’s Qorl. I have been a friend to Jedi. I didn’t know who you were.”
“Qorl? My brother and sister knew a Qorl. He made them fix his ship at blasterpoint.”
“Jacen. Jaina,” the old man said. “Qorl also saved them from the Shadow Academy.”
“You were a TIE fighter pilot, stranded here when the Death Star was destroyed. You went off—”
“And came back. I left as an enemy to your brother and sister. I came back their friend. You’re really their brother?” He squinted. “Can’t see so well anymore.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Saw some ships fly over, fighting. Thought I saw one go down, so I followed to see.” He shrugged. “Seven days later, here I am.”
“So you are.” Anakin struggled to remember what he knew about this grizzled old man. Jacen and Jaina had found his wrecked TIE fighter and set about fixing it, not realizing its pilot was still around, hiding in the jungle, unaware that the war was over. Qorl had forced them to finish the repairs and left them to die, but had later helped them escape the Shadow Academy. Anakin remembered that Qorl had ended up back on Yavin 4, but none of the details. He did know that Jacen and Jaina counted him a friend, and Uncle Luke had been content to leave the old man alone.
Qorl gestured at the lightsaber. “Could you put that away, please?”
“Oh. Sure.”
“Who were you fighting?”
“Peace Brigade.”
“Who?”
“Er—how long since you’ve had news from the outside, Qorl?”
“I don’t know. Old Peckhum dropped off some supplies for me, maybe two or three years ago. I told him