Fate of the Jedi: Backlash (33 page)

Drola nodded. “How convenient that we are deprived of our greatest weapon against the rancors.”

“We could not have known that they would send rancors against us!” Firen’s hand curled into a fist. Little flickers of what looked like lightning crackled around it, making popping and snapping noises.

“Stop it.” Kaminne forced herself between Firen and Drola. “If you have nothing to suggest that will improve our situation, then you have nothing to say.” She looked between them, stared each down in turn.

“Nightsister!” That was not one cry but many from those at the southwest crest. Pushing through the crowd in that direction, Ben saw several Dathomiri raising blasters.

When he got to the edge, he could see their target. A single human-sized silhouette had emerged from the forest verge and was walking toward the hill. She held a gleaming pole taller than she was.

“Hold your fire.” That was Tasander, so calm as to seem almost disinterested. “She carries the white spear.”

Ben shot him a curious look. “Some sort of truce thing?”

Tasander nodded. “Not even Nightsisters attack a bearer of the white spear—that anyone knows of, anyway—because they would never again be safe when they carried one.”

The Nightsister marched to the bottom of the hill slope, stopping where soil mostly gave way to stone. She plunged the point of the spear into the ground, then turned and, at a rate so slow as to seem insulting, walked back into the forest.

Ben saw movement on the slope—the white garments of his father made him dimly visible. Luke descended toward the spear.

Ben started down the slope, carefully picking his way among boulders and rock faces in the dark. By the time he reached the midway
point, Luke had climbed to that altitude again, the spear in his hands. “How are you doing, Dad?”

“Just another ordinary day at the Temple.” Luke seemed neither hurt nor winded. In fact, he wasn’t even dirty. He held the butt end of the spear toward Ben. “There’s a note attached.”

Ben unwrapped it from the spear butt. It was a piece not of flimsi, but of tanned animal hide, the words painted onto it—recently, to judge by the tacky wetness of the paint—in crude block letters in Aurebesh.

It read,

Ben showed it to his father. “Not too bad. No misspellings. I think they used a ruler to keep the lines straight, like a first-timer in school.”

Luke cast an eye up the hill. “How are they doing?”

“Lots of injuries, lots of deaths. I think we’re losing the morale war.”

“Do what you can to keep that from happening. As much as your fighting skills, that’s what they need you for.”

“I guess.” Ben rolled the hide around the spear butt, tied it fast with the leather thong that had held it originally, and gave his father a quick hug before ascending the slope again.

At its summit, he offered the note to Kaminne and Tasander. They and some of the subchiefs gathered around could read, and news of the note’s contents spread throughout the camp.

Kaminne pondered. “What’s an elegant way to say
No, and we hope you die in misery
?
”

Tasander shrugged. “My father used to say,
May the stinging insects of a thousand worlds seek out your moist places.”

Kaminne laughed. So did several of the subchiefs, both Raining Leaves and Broken Columns. “Yes, say that.”

Tasander lay the note facedown on the rock and, with Dyon’s paints, wrote that response in a beautiful, flowing calligraphic hand. Once the paint had dried to the point it would not smear, he tied the note to the spear and handed it to Drola.

The others opened up a lane for the warrior. He started well back along the hilltop, ran forward, and hurled the spear with an athlete’s skill. The gleaming shaft sailed out far past the hill, burying its head in the soft soil partway back to the tree line. A few moments later a silhouette emerged from the trees, retrieved the spear, and returned to the shadows.

A little while later, Ben felt the familiar twinge in the Force net above him. He didn’t have to warn the others. Olianne was the first to raise a voice. “They’re coming!”

Ben was surprised to see the same number of rancors as before emerge from the tree line and race for the hill. All eleven seemed fresh, unhurt.

“Fire at will.” That was Tasander, and blasterfire joined arrows to hurtle against the rancors.

The beasts reached the hill’s base and, as before, clambered up with terrifying swiftness. This time, though, the central rancor of the five on the southwest slope stopped when it reached Luke, not ignoring him as the others had, and began grabbing at him as the other four swept up around him on both sides.

The spearmen braced themselves. But as the four rancors came almost close enough to receive their thrusts, they halted. Instead of surging up to the crest, they began digging and prying at the boulders toward the top of the slope.

Ben didn’t understand their tactic until it was too late. Tons of boulders, ranging from the size of a human head to the size of an air-speeder, dislodged by their efforts, clattered and rolled as a broad, deadly curtain toward Luke Skywalker.

“Dad!”

Luke, caught up in combat with a curiously defensive rancor, did not hear. Perhaps he felt a touch of Ben’s alarm, but he did not recognize it as applying to himself. He did not look up, and Ben saw the
curtain of stone sweep across him and the rancor, carrying both down the hillside with it.

Then, and only then, did the four other rancors clamber up to the top of the hill.

Below, Ben could see Luke’s lightsaber, gleaming but now still, at the base of the hill. And four figures, women glowing with blue energy, raced out from the tree line toward his father.

Ben crouched to jump—not at any of the four rancors now clambering to their feet to his right, but down the slope, toward his father.

A hand fell on his shoulder, restraining him. He looked up to see Dyon shaking his head.

It played out like a conversation but with no words being spoken, the entire exchange one of understanding, transpiring in a fraction of a second—

My father is in danger
.

If you abandon the hilltop, the Dathomiri may lose heart
.

My father—

Your attachment, or your duty?

Dyon was right, and that truth wrenched a groan from Ben. He stood up and pivoted, the better to leap into the midst of the rancors.

A slim hand plucked the unlit lightsaber from his grip. Ben caught a fleeting glimpse of Vestara in motion, flashing past him, before she dropped over the lip of the hill, his weapon in her hand.

Luke never lost consciousness, despite the head-sized rock that grazed his skull and toppled him down the hillside. He rolled and slid, his acrobatic skills keeping him from some of the pounding he might have experienced, and he stayed ahead of the majority of the rockfall. But dazed as he was, he could not avoid all harm. A rock slammed into his chest and he felt a pop in his sternum. Another slab of stone gave way under his weight as he came down upon it and slammed back-first onto a moving stone surface, the world spinning around him.

He leapt free but traveled only three or four meters before he hit another surface. The blow knocked the wind out of him. Stones continued to slide and clatter down toward him, but most of them stopped short of his position. Dimly, he could see the rancor he had
been fighting; it was now between him and the base of the hill, lying still, tons of stone atop it.

And he could feel danger above and beyond the natural peril posed by the rockslide. Dark side Force energy was headed his way. He rolled forward, putting another two meters between him and the oncoming rockslide, pressing sharp stony points into his back and neck and legs, and sat up to see four Dathomiri women limned in blue energy running toward him. As they saw him struggling to rise, two slowed their forward pace and lifted their arms, beginning a series of intricate weaving motions.

Luke raised his lightsaber and tried to stand.

Lightning, Force lightning, erupted from the two spell-weavers. It crackled toward him, lethal amounts of energy.

He caught both bolts on his lightsaber blade. At such times, the weapon of the Jedi was more than a concentrated and constrained shaft of energy; it was an extension of himself through the Force, and the blade held the Force lightning at bay. Residual energy reaching him caused his hair to stand on end and the sheer force of the attack drove him back, forcing him down again.

The two nearest Witches were only meters away, and now Luke could see two more rancors break free of the tree line and charge toward him.

This was not good.

T
HE NEARER
W
ITCHES CAME WITHIN TWO METERS OF HIM, THEIR ARMS
raised and weaving spells in new patterns. Luke struggled to rise, could not do so against the press of the lightning and his own dazed condition.

Then there was a
thump
to his left as Vestara landed atop a flat stone the size of a tabletop. She was within reach of the nearer Witch on the left. She swung the lightsaber in her hand—blue, not the red one she’d wielded in the Maw—at that Witch.

The Witch, a redheaded woman of middle years with purpling blotches on her face, shifted the aim of her spell-weaving. Air superheated in a channel from her to Vestara. The Witches doubtless would have called it fire, but it was plasma.

Vestara took it on her lightsaber blade. She twisted, bracing herself on her right foot, and pivoted into a side kick. The blow took the Witch in the midsection, and Luke could hear ribs break. The Witch staggered back, her plasma attack sliding off sideways to play harmlessly against boulders and loose soil.

Vestara’s attack was more than a successful assault against one Witch. It distracted the others as well. The attention of the two lightning casters wavered. Luke felt the pressure against him falter just a bit—just enough.

He rolled rightward, carrying the lightning assault with him but deflecting more of its energy, and came to his feet—and more, leaping up and toward the nearest Witch to his right. His kick caught her in the chin. He felt bone break under his attack. The Witch fell back, her spell-weaving immediately at an end. She collapsed gracelessly and lay unmoving.

The ground shook as the onrushing rancors came near. They passed the two Witches in the rear. One headed for Luke, one for Vestara.

Luke traversed toward the right. The Witches’ lightning stayed with him. Too late, the Witches recognized his tactic. The crackling streams of lightning crossed over Luke’s rancor.

The lightning jittered over the beast’s body, illuminating it. The beast stumbled in its run, falling forward. Its inadvertent dive brought it below the lightning bolts, which returned to harry Luke. But he caught them on his blade again, and the damage had been done: the rancor lay still, smoke rising from its back. Luke grinned at the Witches, a smile not of humor but of warning.

To his left, Luke saw the second rancor tripping over something, falling toward Vestara—

The
something
was the Witch closest to Vestara. Somehow the girl had redirected the Witch, perhaps with another kick or an exertion through the Force, and had put her beneath the rancor’s feet. Now the Witch was down, trodden upon, and the rancor was in the middle of an awkward collapse.

Vestara showed it no mercy. With grace and speed worthy of a Jedi Knight, she sidestepped and brought up her blade in a blindingly fast slash. The blow intercepted the rancor’s throat. The beast’s shoulder came to ground centimeters from her feet.

One of the two rearmost Witches diverted her lightning to Vestara. The Sith girl caught it on her blade and was forced backward, taking slow steps and skidding slightly as the energy compelled her into unwilling retreat.

But that left only one on Luke. Pushing, summoning his willpower and technique in the Force, he walked toward his Witch at the same rate Vestara retreated before hers.

He felt the new attack in the Force before he detected its direct effects. There was a pulse of energy from all along the tree line. Then wind howled out of the forest and rushed against him, battering him, adding its strength to that of the lightning.

He couldn’t advance against it, so he rooted himself in place. The wind tore at his clothes and his hair, caused him to squint and shield his face with his free hand. But he could not be put down, could not be pushed back.

He saw winds hammer at the two downed Witches. In a moment the currents caught them up. They rose to an altitude of a couple of meters, the skins they wore rippling and tattering in the wind, and then they hurtled toward the forest. The two Witches pouring Force lightning against him and Vestara also retreated, but they kept their feet and backed away until they reached the tree line and disappeared within it.