Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [59]
“The dark side?” Jacen lifted his head. His hands shook, so he clasped them together and pinned them between his knees. “I, ah—Vergere, I’m sorry—”
“For what?”
“I wanted to kill you. I almost did.”
“But you didn’t.”
Waves of trembling rippled through him. He ventured a shaky laugh. “You should have left me behind. I probably have less to fear from the Yuuzhan Vong than I do from the dark side.”
“Oh?”
“All the Yuuzhan Vong can do is kill me. But the dark side …”
“Why is it so to be feared?”
He turned his face away. “My grandfather was a Lord of the Sith.”
“What? Of the Sith?”
He turned back to find Vergere staring at him in blank astonishment. She tilted her head one way, then another, as though she suspected he might change appearance when viewed from a different angle. “I had thought,” she said carefully, “that you were of Skywalker blood.”
“I am.” He hugged himself against the shaking. Why couldn’t he breathe? “My grandfather was Anakin Skywalker. He became Darth Vader, the last Sith Lord—”
“Anakin?” She settled back into herself, openly stunned—and clearly, astonishingly, saddened. “Little Anakin? A Lord of the Sith? Oh … oh, could it not have been otherwise? What a tragedy … What a waste.”
Jacen stared at her in turn, his mouth hanging open. “You say that like you knew him …”
She shook her head. “Knew of him, more. Such promise … Do you know, I met him once, not five hundred meters above where we now sit? He couldn’t have been more than twelve, perhaps thirteen standard years old. He was—so alive. He burned …”
“What—what would Darth Va—I mean, my grandfather—what was he doing on Coruscant? What were you doing on Coruscant? Five hundred meters above us? What was this place?”
“Do you not know? Has this been lost, as well?” She rose, and extended a hand to help him to his feet. She touched the wall nearby, her fingers skittering through a complex pattern on a sweating rectangular slab, which slowly swung wide, opening a doorway into a gloom-filled chamber beyond.
“This way.” The chamber threw back a dark resonance, as though she spoke beside a drum. Her gaze was steady once more, and expressionless as the stone of the walls. Lost in wonder, Jacen stepped past her into the darkness.
“This was our tower of guard: our fortress watch upon the dark,” she said. The doorway narrowed into a dim yellow stripe of globe-glow, then vanished. “This was the Jedi Temple.”
“This—?” Awe squeezed his chest, and he floundered in the dark; he had to gasp harshly in order to speak. “You—you are a Jedi!”
“No, I am not. Nor am I Sith.”
“What are you, then?”
“I am Vergere. What are you?”
In the darkness her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. He turned, seeking her blindly. “No more games, Vergere.”
“This has never been a game, Jacen Solo.”
“Tell me the truth—”
“I tell you nothing but truth.”
She sounded so close by that Jacen reached for her in the dark. “I thought everything you tell me is a lie—”
“Yes. And the truth.”
“What kind of truth is that?”
“Is there more than one? Why even ask? You will find no truth in me.”
This time her voice came from behind him; he whirled, extending his hands, but found nothing he could grasp. “No games,” he insisted.
“There is nothing that is not a game. A serious game, to be sure: a permanent game. A lethal game. A game so grave that it can be well played only with joyous abandon.”
“But you said—”
“Yes. It has never been a game. And it always has. Either way, or both: you had better play to win.”
“How can I play if you won’t even tell me the rules—?”
“There are no rules.”
A scamper of footsteps to his right; Jacen moved toward them silently.
“But the game does have a name,” she said from the opposite side of the room. “We are playing the same game we have been playing ever since Myrkr: we are playing ‘Who is Jacen Solo?’ ”
He thought with longing of the glow rod, lost with his sliced-open knapsack in the crater above. Thinking of the glow rod, of bright golden light springing from his fist, made him suddenly ache for