Jabitha backed away, speechless with terror.
"I tried to control it," Anakin said, and emerged into the twilight. The pinwheel's purple glory illuminated them with the fading of the dusk. The Blood Carver lurched forward step by step toward the edge of the field, away from the Sekotan ship.
"Stop him," Anakin said. "Please help me stop him."
Jabitha walked beside the boy toward the pitiful figure of their enemy.
"Is he dying?" she asked.
"I hope not," Anakin said as if ashamed. "By the Force, I hope not."
"He was going to kill you," she said.
"That doesn't matter," Anakin said. "I should never have let it loose like that. I did it all wrong."
"Let what loose?"
He shook his head, trying to erase a nightmare, and grabbed the Blood Carver's arm. Ke Daiv swung about as if on a turntable and fell to his knees. Blood dripped from his mouth.
Jabitha stood before the two, the young boy with the short, light brown hair and the tall, gold-colored Blood Carver who might be dying. She shook her head in desperate confusion. "You saved us, Anakin," she said.
"Not like this," he said. "He was being brave in the only way he knew, the only way they taught him. He's like me, but he never had the Jedi to help." To Ke Daiv, he said, "Please be strong. Don't die."
Jabitha could stand this no longer. "I have to find my father," she said. She turned and ran toward the ruins.
Anakin gripped Ke Daiv's arm and glanced up at the sky. The awful glyphs written by the mines were fading, contrails pointing east now, drifting and diffusing in the winds over the clouds.
Ke Daiv spoke in his native language. Each sound cost him an agony. By the cadence, he was repeating something familiar, a poem or a chant. He fell to one hand, then lowered himself to the ground.
Anakin stayed beside him, holding his arm, until he died. Then the boy rose, turned around once, and screamed, heard only by the mountain, the skies, the broken and charred stones, the crumbling ruins of the Magister's palace.
Chapter 55
Anakin Skywalker understood the nature of the Force-the many natures of the Force-better than a century of teaching in the Temple could have taught him. And he understood now that his trial was far from over. He had to remove Jabitha from the mountain and get back to Obi-Wan, and he had to wrestle with what he had discovered about himself.
But the wrestling would have to wait. A Jedi with responsibilities had to put away the personal and get on with his duty, no matter what it might cost him.
The entrance to the ruin was dark. Dust sifted from a shattered stone lintel. He wiped the dust from his eyes arid crawled into the darkness, until the rubble cleared and he faced a long, black corridor.
His senses had become marvelously acute, sharper and more intuitive than ever before. Despite the darkness, the corridor offered no mysteries. It was simply a hallway in what was left of the palace. He saw himself at the end of the hallway, turning right.
And when he reached the end of the hallway and turned right, he saw ahead to another corridor, larger, its thick roof supporting much of the mass of talus and rubble that covered the ruins. That corridor led to the chamber where Obi-Wan and Anakin had first met the Magister.
Jabitha was in the chamber already, so it was not far away. He walked there, his footsteps sure but his thoughts a painful riot.
The ceiling shuddered with a sound like a dying bantha. Other groans and shrieks of rock grinding against rock echoed down branching hallways, and somewhere, very close, rock tumbled into a corridor and sealed it off, then crushed it completely. A blast of air and dust blew out over him like the penultimate breath from the dying palace.
He stepped over tendrils that crept along the cracked floor, new tendrils. Sekot still lived here, still felt its way through the broken shafts and voids. There was still life here, and something like the voice of their ship, soft in his thoughts, almost drowned out by the tumult of Ke Daiv's death.
Anakin thought for a moment that he saw Vergere gleaming softly ahead, and wondered if she had died on Zonama and left behind a spirit to guide him. But the image was not there when he reached that point, and Anakin shook his head. He was dreaming, hallucinating. Perhaps he was going insane.
His mother had many waking dreams, disturbing and strange, she had once told him. That had scared him a little.
He came to the circular chamber with its high, thickly vaulted roof, the skylight now collapsed, and a thick pillar of rubble fanning out. Jabitha stood by one side of the rubble, on her knees, her head bowed.
Anakin approached her. She looked up and held a powered torch beam on his face. She had found the light somewhere in the rubble, perhaps in her rooms in the palace.
Sticking out between two large carved stones was an arm, most of the flesh gone now. On one finger gleamed a thick steel ring set with a pentangle of small red stones. Anakin recognized one of the old signet rings once handed out to Jedi apprentices.
"He's dead," Jabitha said. "Only the Magister could wear this ring. It meant he was linked with the Potentium."
"We have to go," Anakin told her softly. The corridors echoed with more groans, more shrieks and rumbles. The floor beneath them trembled.
"He must have died during the battle with the Far Outsiders," Jabitha said. She shone the torch beam around the chamber, looking for any others. The chamber was deserted. "But who was sending his messages?"
"I don't know," Anakin said. Then once again, from the corner of his eye, he caught a gleam of light in the darkness, away from Jabitha's torch. He turned and saw the feathered Jedi Knight standing on her reverse-articulated legs, feet splayed as if prepared to leap, staring at him with no apparent emotion.
Jabitha could not see her. Nor did the girl see the figure become the Magister, her father. The transformed figure stepped forward.
Anakin felt no fear. He felt instead in the presence of another young person very like himself, a friend. This made him consider once again the real possibility that he was going insane.
"I sent the messages," the figure told Anakin.
The girl remained crouched over her dead father. Anakin bent and touched her head, and she was comfortable, then stood and faced the image.
"Who are you?" he asked, his voice cracking.
"A friend of Vergere," it said."I think my name, to some, is Sekot."
Chapter 56
To prepare the way for a retrieval ship to land on the mountain, Tarkin ordered a swarm of droid starfighters to take any other ships in the area.He watched with satisfaction from his lofty orbit, Sienar at his side, as the starfighters harried the outmoded YT-1105 and another Sekotan ship.
"We'll sacrifice one to gain another," Tarkin said.
"Take care with the larger Sekotan vessel," Sienar said, though he was not at all sure that Tarkin was willing to hear reason."It may be exceptional."