Path of Deceit, page 21
Marda’s mouth went dry. Her lips parted.
“After I…speak to the Herald, and the Mother”—she spat the word—“I am leaving. This place is awful, and it’s going to get worse. Come with me.”
Marda said, “Yes.”
Her cousin reared back in surprise. “You will?”
“I will.” Righteousness flooded Marda. “I will. You’re wrong about the Force and the Mother, but I’ll go with you. With open hands.”
“We’ll see,” Yana muttered. She picked up another cracker and stuffed it in her mouth. “I don’t know how we’ll get off planet, though,” she said through her food.
“The Jedi will take us.”
Yana laughed. “You’re crazy, Marda. The Jedi are here to get back what the Mother stole, what I stole. They won’t help me.”
“They’ll help me,” Marda said. She smiled, and it was warm. She was right about this. Doing the right thing. “I trust Kevmo.”
The dark amusement fell off Yana’s expression. She contemplated Marda, who did her best to keep her face lifted, not to squirm. Yana said, “We can’t trust anybody. If you retain nothing else, let it be that. We can’t trust anybody.”
Marda reached for Yana’s hands and turned them over, palms up. “We can trust the Force.”
Yana fled Marda’s cell as soon as her cousin would let her. Marda was too soft, too kind. She didn’t have the stomach to do what needed to be done.
But Yana did.
Yana strode through the compound, ignoring the greetings called out by the other members of the Path. She had no attention for them. Her rage might not be as hot as it had been when they landed, but her grief still sat heavy in her middle. Kor deserved a better death, an end that was far in the future, surrounded by people who loved her. Instead she had bled out on the ice of a planet far from her mother and father. It was a tragic end.
Yana would make sure that the Mother’s death was equally terrible.
When Yana arrived at the Mother’s cottage, there was no one guarding the way. That was strange, and while Yana made note of it, she didn’t slow her gait in the least. She continued on her route, each step a call to arms, her hands clenched into fists. The Mother was soft and human, and Yana was Evereni. There was nothing for Yana to fear.
But as she made her way through the tunnels, Yana could tell that there was something amiss. She couldn’t quite say what it was; it was more a feeling than anything else. Outside of the Mother’s listening room, Yana heard low voices, and when she entered the room, it was to find Jedi.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” Yana said, the first words that leapt to mind. Marda’s Padawan rounded on her with wide eyes, but his master was not so surprised to see her.
“How many artifacts have you purloined beyond the Rod of Seasons?” she said, holding up the glowing purple rod that Yana, Kor, and Treze had taken from the Hynestian Royal Treasury. Just the sight of the artifact made tears prickle Yana’s eyes. It seemed like a lifetime before that they had so boldly walked into the treasury under the guise of teaching the way of the Path and pocketed the rod. It seemed amazing that it had taken everyone so long to figure out they had been the ones to steal the artifact. She crossed her arms and snorted to hide her anguish.
“Kick rocks, Jedi,” Yana said, her voice a near snarl. “You’re out of your depth. You have no reason to be here, and last time I checked, trespassing is illegal even if you have the ability to manipulate the Force.”
“Yana is correct,” came a soft voice behind Yana. She turned. The Mother stood behind her in the entryway, a hand settled on the strange gem that now rested in a nest of silk on a plinth. The Herald, Jukkyuk, and Qwerb stood on either side. Sunshine slouched a little bit behind them, most likely the reason they’d been absent when she’d come through the entrance. Sunshine had beat her to the caverns, but only because she’d been waylaid by Marda. Not that it mattered. He was a dead man walking.
Either way, Yana stepped to the side. She might not like the Mother and might even want her dead, but she was savvy enough to realize the Jedi were the bigger threat.
“We liberated these artifacts from those who would utilize the Force for their own gains,” the Mother said, her voice calm. “And I would thank you to place that back where you found it and take your leave.”
“You must be the Mother,” said Marda’s Padawan. Kevmo, Marda had just said.
“I am,” the Mother said with one of her calming smiles. Yana was delighted to see that the Jedi seemed completely unaffected. “And I suggest you take your leave before you regret your abuse of the Force. I will even be so magnanimous as to let you have the Rod of Seasons, since you seem to think it stolen rather than liberated. We have no desire to quarrel with you, Jedi, even though your abuses of the Force will one day cause a reckoning.”
The Soikan smiled humorlessly. “Oh, we are taking all the artifacts hidden down here. And you, as well.”
The Mother tilted her head, her expression fearless. She stroked the jewel on its plinth and hefted it up in both hands. She sighed. “No.”
What came next seemed to happen all at once. The Jedi powered up their lightsabers as the Herald and his retainers produced blasters from under their robes. The first few shots ricocheted off the Jedi’s lightsabers, the bolts flying wildly around the cavern. Yana threw herself to the ground beside one of the shelves, trying to keep from being a casualty in a fight she did not want to be part of.
The Jedi were completely unfazed by the blasters, their lightsabers more than an adequate defense. They looked almost bored, and Yana marveled that the Jedi could be so calm when they were being shot at. But then the Soikan Jedi lowered her saber and held out her hand, using the Force to pull the blaster from the Herald and crumple the device into nothing more than metal and diodes. She reached for the second blaster and the third while her Padawan deflected every single blaster bolt sent in her direction.
It would’ve been awe-inspiring if it wasn’t for the scream that ripped out of the Mother, an animalistic sound of pain that caused everyone to hesitate.
In the Mother’s hands, her jewel pulsed, the purple glow dimming and brightening in a rhythm like a heartbeat. Her hands became spotted with an odd gray scale, and she dropped the jewel. It hit the ground with a loud crack and burst open, revealing a bright blue squirming creature, wet and covered in fluid.
The elder Jedi frowned. “What in the name of—” She didn’t get a chance to finish. The creature—it was little more than a blob of iridescent blue flesh, really—flung itself at her. There were meters separating the Mother and the Jedi, and yet the creature closed the distance in the blink of an eye. The thing clung to the Soikan’s arm, and the Jedi drew back in revulsion.
“What is that?” Marda’s Padawan asked, but his master said nothing. She only let out a high keening sound of pain and terror, and Yana watched as the strange gray scale extended over her body. It spread slowly at first before increasing its pace. Yana thought of the time she and Kor had watched a flutterbug spin its cocoon, how long it took the creature to change. This took less than a fraction of the time. The woman’s pale silvery skin was replaced with something akin to the stone that made up the walls of the caverns, and the sounds of fear, revulsion, and pain that came from her cut through Yana like a vibroblade.
What was that thing? Had the Mother known she was incubating such a creature?
“Zallah!” Kevmo cried as his master fell to her knees, a choked sobbing the only sound coming from her. He started to reach out but stopped, eyes huge. His lightsaber shook, and the blade vanished. Everyone had frozen in a mixture of awe and horror as the Jedi was changed by the creature. Yana had never seen something so horrifying, and she had just watched her girlfriend die a handful of hours before. The Jedi’s suffering made Kor’s end seem peaceful.
Yana hissed as the Jedi calcified, clicking her teeth in distress. After a few heartbeats the Jedi was gone, a crumbling stone statue in her place. The creature had changed her entirely, leaving behind a disintegrating pile of despair where a woman had stood only moments before.
“The Force has spoken,” the Mother said, her voice whispery and strange. The Wookiee Jukkyuk came to help her stand while Sunshine hovered nearby, sweating profusely.
“What did you do?” Marda’s Padawan screamed. But then the creature was slithering toward him, and he was holding his hands out in terror as the glowing blue glob—larger already—reached a single tendril toward him. “No, no! Please,” the boy sobbed. He thrust out both hands as if pushing, using the Force. It did not even slow the creature down.
The creature wrapped the tendril around an ankle in what looked like a caress, and the Padawan kicked it away, his eyes wild. For a moment Yana thought the fight would resume, but the Padawan was consumed by fear, jerky and irrational.
“No. No. I can’t be here,” he said before running out of the chamber, pushing past Sunshine as he headed deeper into the caves.
The Herald’s retainers made to follow him, but the Mother waved them off. Her cowl slipped back a little, revealing gray streaks in her dark hair. Had those been there before? Yana wasn’t sure.
Yana blinked and stood, walking over to claim the Rod of Seasons. Her mind was all over the place trying to make sense of what she had just seen. The Mother’s jewel hadn’t been a jewel at all, but an egg of some kind. And now the creature was changing from a blobby glowing blue shape to something that vaguely resembled a tooka cat: four legs, a stubby kind of tail, and wide dark eyes that seemed too large in an iridescent blue face. The creature glowed in the dimness of the cavern, and when it beheld Yana, she had a curious feeling, like the creature was seeing through her to the most fundamental parts of her being.
She didn’t like it.
Jukkyuk and Qwerb were seeing to the Mother, who was putting on quite the show of being exhausted. “I knew the Force would protect us,” she said over and over again. “We are the stewards of the Force, and the Force will be free!” Her calming smile was once more securely in place, even if the edges of her mouth were bracketed with lines of pain and exhaustion. Yana could only curse herself for her hesitation. She had missed her chance to kill the woman. Her grief curdled her stomach, and she watched as the woman bent over to scoop up the strange Jedi-killing creature.
“Take the Mother to her meditation chamber,” the Herald said. His retainers helped her walk, her gait uneven, the blue creature cradled in her arms. Would the strange creature protect the Mother from any threat? Yana’s eyes fell on the stone edifice that had once been the Jedi. Yana had the feeling that it would, especially when the Mother began to coo at it like it was a beloved child.
“The Force has given us a powerful gift indeed,” the Herald said, a smile playing around his lips as he watched the Mother go. “This is a new day for the Path of the Open Hand.”
“Kor is dead,” Yana said, waiting for her words to land. “Treze, as well.”
The Herald rounded on her, his joy melting into horror. “I…What happened? Did you secure the artifact?”
Yana clenched her fist around the Rod of Seasons. “No. And we need to talk.”
Kevmo fled the cavern in a daze, agony stripping his senses and making him feral. Everything hurt, and his heart pounded with panic as he kept glancing over his shoulder, fearful the creature would follow. Ringing, scathing fear was the only sensation pouring through him.
Stumbling through the cave system, he tried to recall the markers and what they meant. But terror clouded his mind, and he ran down the tunnels heedlessly.
The more he ran, the worse he felt. There was some part of him that thought the creature’s effects should be fading. But they weren’t. For a moment Kevmo remembered his first day at the Temple on Coruscant as a youngling. He’d been little more than three or four, nearly a baby, and he’d been so afraid. And then a human Jedi had smiled and reached out to him with the Force, smoothing away the fear and showing him how to reach for the Force, as well, how to let that all-encompassing energy steady him and guide him.
Kevmo reached for the Force now and found…nothing. The well of calm and focus that was usually just a thought away was gone, lost. He tried again—still nothing! That warm, ever-loving bright Force he’d always known was just gone.
That was when Kevmo fell.
He stumbled over nothing and hit the ground hard. For a moment he lay there on the damp stone, and he idly wondered what his master would think of this weakness. It was unbecoming of a Jedi.
That was when he remembered.
Zallah! The memory of her keening fear, of the panic writ large across her features, broke through a little of Kevmo’s dread and despair. He had to tell someone about the creature, about the Mother and her monster.
He got up. And he began to walk. There, the orange marking meant the sun. An exit. Light.
The farther he went, the stiffer he felt. His jaw locked first, teeth gritted tight, and he moaned. Something was happening to him. Something bad. He couldn’t feel the Force, and his body felt brittle and old, the joints creaky and unfamiliar. But still he pulled himself along, farther down the passageway.
He had to tell someone. The Order had to know about the threat that awaited them on Dalna. Any creature that could so easily dispatch a Jedi was a threat to the galaxy as a whole.
So Kevmo kept walking, pulling himself along the wall. Someone would help him.
There had to be someone.
And they would warn the Jedi that terror lived on Dalna.
Marda packed quickly and efficiently. She had little and needed less. A change of underclothes, a thicker outer robe, a handful of pebbles some of her Littles had given her from an afternoon along the river the previous summer. Her crystal file for her nails and teeth. The small pot of brikal-shell blue. Everything else in her cell was either communal or nothing she truly needed. The flower petals would fade too fast to survive even the shortest galactic journey.
Though loath to admit it, Marda was excited.
The timing was poor, the reasons awful, but she was leaving Dalna for the stars.
Not the Path. She would never leave the Path. But the Path was not Dalna; it was a community of people with shared understanding of the Force, and none of that required Marda to be on the planet.
Marda clicked her teeth in slight chagrin. She knew she was convincing herself. But that didn’t make any of it less true. This was what the Force needed from her, because this was what her cousin needed. Yana was in pain, and Marda could do something about it. So she must. It would be a service to the Mother, to take Yana away before she could do something irreversible.
And Marda had felt this way already, before the past two weeks when so much had changed. She’d longed to travel for the Path, with the Path. That had always been behind her desperation to join the Children. Maybe the Mother consistently denied her that because the Force wanted to protect Marda from the disaster that had befallen Kor and the others. Wanted to keep her on Dalna for the Jedi, for the Kessarine, for the Littles, until she was ready for her real purpose, to go to Jedha with Yana.
For the final time—she knew in her gut she’d never be in this cell again—Marda opened the small jar of brikal-shell blue and dipped in her three fingers. She painted fresh lines of the Force across her forehead in smooth, cool waves. She looked into her own big black eyes, tinged brassy by the copper of the old mirror. This was it.
Marda folded a small blanket into a sling with her scant belongings inside, put it over her shoulder, and slipped her feet into her boots. Then she left the cell in which she’d lived for most of her life.
The suns had just set, leaving only a rim of vivid violet edging the western volcanoes. Stars glittered overhead, and around her glowed a few of the flutterbugs that had emerged in the nights since the flood.
The main commune hummed with repaired lights, and Marda decided not to make her way toward the community garden or the barn. There were too many to say goodbye to them all. Besides, she’d see them when the Gaze Electric was finished and all the Path joined her in the stars.
But Marda had to see Ferize and her family.
Nobody noticed Marda as she keyed in her code for entrance to the caverns. The people she passed moved sedately as usual, without any urgency of tragedy. Whatever Yana had done when they parted had not involved making wild public accusations, and the news of what befell the Children on Thelj had clearly not spread. Marda hoped Yana remained with the Herald and his wife and the three could share these initial hours of grief before Yana confronted the Mother.
Regardless, without gossip turning the peaceful night into an emergency, Marda had time to visit the Kessarine.
The nesting chamber had been fully repaired, though the corner where Er Dal and the hatchling had nearly drowned was cracked in two places and the sun opal deposits that used to glow there had fallen dark from changed underground strata. Because of that, Fel Ix had erected a string of lights near that corner. They had fresh blankets and a thick nest of pillows.
Marda smiled to see all five of the babies squirming in the blankets for tummy time, with all three of their parents crouched near. Ferize dangled a string of beads that blinked in musical patterns in front of the largest of the babies, and Er Dal had one long finger in the furled tail of another as the baby gurgled happily. Fel Ix was knitting something fuzzy and keeping a tender eye on his whole family.
“Marda,” Fel Ix greeted in his gravelly voice. His cheek frills flicked happily.
“Hello,” she said. The word trembled with Marda’s effort to rein in her emotions. She took a deep breath, then let her sling slide off her shoulder.
“Marda?” Ferize repeated, her cheek frills drooping. “What is wrong?”
Marda walked to the blanket nest and knelt. She opened her mouth, stopped, and then lowered her eyes. She reached for the nearest baby and picked him up, bringing his squirming little body to her chest. Bowing her face over the baby, she breathed in the soothing smell of soft scales and damp frills and spit-up.
