Aftermath - PRT Katherine Cantor Flyer
Kate Flyer was back in the
chamber. Seemingly every night since the
vision that had sent her from Obelisk to Krath, Kate had visited a mysterious
room piled high with books. The chamber
was dimmed, the distance from floor to ceiling stretching for what seemed like
miles. Here and there, crumbling pillars
held the domed ceiling aloft. And then
there were the books. Some of them
glowed, others were in such poor condition that they disintegrated at the
slightest touch. Still others screamed
and bled as Kate passed.
But Kate was looking for one book in
particular. Her feet seemed to guide her
to the spot where she knew the book must lay.
Every night, she grew more hopeful that she might finally find the book
and end the dreams. But it was never
there. Instead, as she neared the spot
where the book should be, she would hear the inevitable snap-hiss that heralded
the activation of a lightsaber.
It was that very sound that she
heard now.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Before Kate could react, the crimson
saber sped through the darkness and clove her from her shoulder down to her
waist. As she fell, her organs slid
smoothly from abdomen and decorated the floor.
Kate thought she heard laughter.
Then she woke up.
“Sithspit,” Kate breathed, just
staring at the ceiling as she lay there in bed.
Her back was drenched in sweat, and her hair felt similarly
disgusting. As she stared at the
rough-hewn ceiling, a droplet of water hung down, suspended by a thread before
it fell and struck her forehead.
That was her cue to get up. Kate shivered a bit as her feet hit the cool,
stone floor and she pulled on a robe. To
her left and right, other Dark Jedi apprentices moaned and turned over in their
sleep. Kate padded over to one of the
public showers and turned on the water, happy to be washing away her
nightmares.
Since returning to Clan Arcona’s Tower of Shadows a few days ago to resume
her Dark Jedi training, Kate had been plagued by that same nightmare. The book always seemed just out of reach as
she moved through that dark hall, and no matter what she did, her opponent was
always there to rend her in half with his lightsaber.
The shower water went off, and Kate
went off to get dressed. In a few
minutes, she would be due for her own lightsaber training with Kerridwen
Jorddyn. With luck, the training would
move her just a bit further down the path to being a Dark Jedi, and maybe help
her forget about bad dreams.
* * *
By the time Kate arrived in the
training chamber, located in the basement of the Obelisk tower, the lightsaber
training had already begun. She hurried
to take a place next to Azurin Luna, a young Shadow-Walker who served as
Jorddyn’s other apprentice, and activated her own blade.
“Didn’t want to wait until after your workout to take a shower?” Azurin whispered as she tried, and failed, to
emulate one of Ric Taldrya’s intricate combinations.
“I needed to wash away some bad
dreams,” Kate whispered back.
“Oh, I hope you feel better soon,
Katey,” Azurin smiled sympathetically and returned her attention to her
lightsaber strokes, nearly cleaving Daar Skeloria in two as she did. The Acolyte threw the pair a dirty look that
suggested a desire to keep all of his limbs intact.
Azurin murmured a hurried apology,
and Kate focused on keeping up with Ric, Delak and Jorddyn. While the rest of the class used training
lightsabers, Kate stuck with her own laser edge, a curious blade that was
“coated” in an energy field designed to repel lightsabers. She had acquired it during her recent encounter
with the vicious Akumvah, the ancient enemy of the Jedi.
It was during that battle that Kate
had started to discover her true potential as a Force-user. A burst of rage had allowed her to delve into
a previously untapped well of power, giving her the strength to overwhelm a
host of the aliens.
It was a pity that her newfound
strength had deserted her ever since, leaving the young Protector to struggle
with the Force in a seemingly vain effort to become a Jedi.
That effort could frequently be a
painful one, as Kate discovered during the sparring section of her lightsaber
training. Her dueling partner, a tall,
fair looking Guardian named Solaris Darthinian, knocked away her laser edge
with a heavy kick and pinned her to the floor as she sucked on her hand.
Kate was smashed up against the cold
stone like a bug, her vision fading fast as she croaked, “Okay, okay, let me
up.”
“You dropped your guard,” Solaris smiled
apologetically.
“Yeah, I did,” Kate rose and brushed
herself off and went back to sucking on her knuckle, her eyes straying to the
front of the training room to see if Jorddyn or Ric had noticed her
embarrassment. To her relief, they had
their back to her as they conferred in hushed tones with a grizzled, cloaked
man that Kate recognized immediately as Grand Master Rapier. She lingered there for a moment, her natural
curiosity getting the better of her. But
then Rapier melted back into the shadows, and Ric hurried out of the room,
leaving Jorddyn and Delak to formally end the class.
“I’ll see you later, Kate,” Azurin
waved and headed out of the center, leaving Kate to approach Jorddyn by
herself.
“Oh, hello Kate,” Jorddyn appraised
her apprentice. “Nice job on the
sparring today. You might want to keep
your guard up though.”
“I was just a little distracted,”
Kate admitted, simultaneously wondering if Jorddyn ever missed anything as she
did. “I noticed that you and Ric were having
a chat with Rapier.”
“Oh yes,” Jorddyn said. “I’m afraid that I can’t really say what it’s
all about though.”
“Not even a hint?” Kate asked hopefully.
“Nope.”
“I guess I should have expected as
much from the former Supreme Director of Intelligence.”
“Hey, you’re starting to catch on,”
Jorddyn said playfully. “Look, don’t
worry about it. It’s nothing
particularly important, I don’t think.”
“Okay,” Kate said reluctantly. She was a naturally curious person, and her
desire to know what had been said between the three burned quietly within
her. But she swallowed that curiosity as
she walked with Jorddyn, the pair of them chatting about her lessons.
“I want you meet me back down here
tonight,” Jorddyn said. “Now that you’re
a Protector, it’s time that we work a little on getting you to speed with a few
new powers. We’ll start with you Force
pulls and pushes, then maybe move on to the jumps and the energy absorption if
you’re ready.”
“Sithspit, all that?” Kate sighed.
“I can barely go into a hibernation state, never mind everything else
I’m supposed to know. I make a lousy
Dark Jedi.”
“There’s no need to be so down on
yourself, Kate,” Jorddyn cast a sympathetic look at her apprentice. “You proved that you have a lot of potential
when we were down there with the Akumvah.
Domi, Ric and I have been watching you closely since you first arrived,
and we’ve liked what we’ve seen. I think
that you’ve convinced yourself that you’re having trouble because you’ve put
too many expectations on yourself and aren’t fulfilling them. You just need to relax, okay?”
Kate didn’t think that she had high
expectations for herself – She had been down on herself since she had joined
the Dark Brotherhood. But she nodded to
Jorddyn anyway, and a few minutes later, the pair parted ways.
A few minutes later, Kate was back
in her dormitory, which was now empty.
She tugged off her ammo belt, dropping her laser edge, blaster and
fletchet daggers under the bed, and laid down.
She felt tired after her long lesson and her bad dreams, and she just
wanted to roll off to sleep. But she
found that she couldn’t – Her mind kept returning to the conversation she had
witnessed in the training center.
She mulled the possibilities of
their discussion for a while. It was
possible that the new Rogue Dark Brotherhood SSD, the Chi Long, had been spotted.
Kate hoped that wasn’t the case.
Owing to its nearly impregnable shield, the Chi Long would be invincible when the Rogue Dark Brotherhood
finally launched their invasion.
Anyway, Jorddyn had pronounced the
conversation as being fairly unimportant, so Kate had a feeling that it wasn’t
about world-ravaging Super Star Destroyers.
As she continued to think of it, Kate found herself drifting off to
sleep, her breathing slowing as she consciousness fell away.
She was back in the chamber, the
cathedral of blue light rising for what seemed like a hundred miles around her,
a hundred books strewn throughout its cobwebbed shelves. Kate hurried through the chamber, certain
that, this time, she knew precisely where to find what she sought.
If she could just hurry, maybe she
could beat out..
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
The lightsaber hummed as it sliced
through Kate’s torso once again, her death marked by a series of loud incessant
beeps. Kate started awake and looked
around. The beeps were issuing from the
communicator that was sitting on her bedside table. She grabbed it with a tired snort and thumbed
the activation key, a quarter-sized holographic image appearing as she
did.
“Fink? Is that you?”
Kate squinted at the image with blurry eyes. Even quarter-sized, the Kadith’s canid
complexion and ever-present scowl were unmistakable. He appeared to be holding his communicator
with one hand and a cigarra with the other, his tail swishing this way and that
as he spoke.
“About time you answered,” Fink
mumbled. “This is the third time that
I’ve tried to get in contact with you.”
“Why? What’s going on? Is the squadron okay?” Kate felt a momentary thrill of panic sitting
there on the bed. She had recently
appointed Alex Shrike as her new XO for Cyclone Squadron and left him alone
while she went to train on Nesh. Since
Fink was also a pilot in Cyclone, he would know if anything had gone
wrong.
“No, the kid is doing fine,” Fink
said around the cigarra. “I was calling
about the family.”
Kate crossed her legs. So that was it.
“Have you found anything about
Keirdagh?” Keirdagh Cantor was Fink’s
brother and Kate’s first cousin twice removed.
A mess of crossbreeding and other drama, Kate frequently found that she
couldn’t make heads or tails of the family tree. But she did know that Keirdagh had been a
prominent member of the Dark Brotherhood before defecting, and that Fink had
sworn to find him and confront him.
“Well yeah, but not what you would
think,” Fink tossed away his cigarra.
“The Dark Brotherhood just recently dealt with some race called the
Akumvah on Pirath, yeah? Well, my
sources are telling me that there base on Lien wasn’t the only one in this area
of space.”
“There are more?” Kate asked breathlessly. Was this what Ric, Jorddyn and Rapier had
been urgently discussing in the training room?
“Heh, well, not anymore,” Fink
smirked. “The rogues got to them.”
“Where was this?”
“Hyperion I, I think. It’s a small system not far from Pirath. There’s a lot of orbital debris, and only a
small Emperors Hammer facility to contend with.
It would make a pretty nice rear base for the Akumvah, I would
think.”
“Why would the rogues venture into
our space specifically to wipe out a threat to us? I didn’t know they
cared.”
“Well, that’s the real question,
isn’t it?” Fink shrugged. “But I’ve also heard rumors that the Akumvah
had another reason to go to Hyperion. My
contact thinks that they found something.”
“How does your contact know this
stuff?”
“He works for my old organization,
of course,” Fink was patting around his uniform jacket for another
cigarra. “He spends a lot of time in
rogue space. When you do that, you hear
things.”
“What do you think the Akumvah
found?”
“Judging by how fast my dear brother
got out to Hyperion,” Fink always referred to Keirdagh as ‘dear brother,’ “I
think that one of the old family treasures is on Hyperion.”
Kate thought of the book from her
dream, then shook it away.
“What would it be doing there? There’s nothing on Hyperion.”
“Well, if it’s Aktrian’s Book, it
will be a powerful artifact of the Force,” Fink pointed out. “And there are rumors of an old Jedi
repository of some kind that is hidden at the edge of Emperor’s Hammer
space. I know that Ronin has sent out
expeditions to look for it, but they haven’t had any luck.”
Kate bit her lip. The Ancient Book was one of the artifacts
that Varian Cantor had commanded her to find in the vision that had sent Kate
from the Obelisk Order to the Krath. She
sat uncomfortably on the bed, her stomach churning uncomfortably as she
considered what Fink had to say. In the
back of her mind, she was getting cleaved in two by her assailant’s lightsaber
again.
“You know, I think the DB might have
found it too.”
Kate told Fink about the
conversation she had witnessed in the training chamber. The Kadith listened carefully, then finally
said, “They’ll never get there in time.
You need to leave as soon as possible to try and head off the rogues
before they get away with whatever they’re looking for.”
“What?” Kate couldn’t believe what she had
heard. “And how exactly would I put a
stop to them? With my great knowledge of
the Force? Maybe with my skill with the
lightsaber? I’m barely a
Protector.”
“Are you a Cantor, or not?” Fink snorted.
“Because a Cantor would never turn down an opportunity to get hold of a
family treasure.”
Kate started to open her mouth, but
closed it again. Fink had gotten to know
her too well – He knew that she would never turn down a challenge like that. Nevertheless, she shot back, “And what about
you? Why can’t you do it?”
“You’re technically on leave. I’m not,” Fink pointed out. “And I’ll never make it to Hyperion on
time. The Challenge is out on mission right now.”
“Some excuse.”
“Didn’t your dream say that it was
up to you to start restoring some of the old family honor?” Fink cocked his head. “Well kid, this is your big chance.”
“Alright, alright.. I’ll talk to Jorddyn about it. Maybe she’ll be able to help me.”
“Don’t take too long. The rogues have already defeated the Akumvah
and gotten hold of the book.”
“Yeah, I know,” Kate said, her mouth
like ash as she wondered for the hundredth time why she had involved herself
with ‘family’ matters when she was only a distant relative at best. She often felt as if Fink’s personal goals
and vendettas came into play more than her own.
Kate spoke to Fink for another few
minutes over the communicator, then she said her goodbyes and pulled on her
ammo belt. As she walked down to speak
with Jorddyn, she couldn’t help wondering what she would do now.
* * *
Jorddyn was waiting for Kate when
she wandered down to the training chamber.
The Krath Priestess was holding an shimmering onyx quarterstaff in one
hand and several remotes in the other.
She smiled at Kate, “I was wondering
when you would get here.”
Kate stopped short. Had her conversation with Fink been that
long? There had been the nap too, but
she hadn’t thought it was time for the lesson already. Kate started to ask Jorddyn about Hyperion,
but the Priestess hushed her and held out the quarterstaff.
“We’ll begin our lesson now,”
Jorddyn was still smiling. “I want you
to take this quarterstaff from me.”
“But I need to talk to you ab—“
“It can wait a moment,” Jorddyn proffered
the quarterstaff. “Take it.”
Kate sighed and started forward to
take the quarterstaff, but she stopped short as Jorddyn abruptly withdrew it.
“Use the Force.”
Still itching to ask about Hyperion,
Kate sighed again, this time more impatiently, and stretched out her hand. She recalled what she had read in a few of
the provided texts from the Shadow Academy, and tried to imagine the Force
coiling around the quarterstaff and bringing it to her.
To her surprise, she could feel the
staff’s cool onyx in what seemed to be an outstretched, but invisible,
hand. She gave the quarterstaff a tug,
but Jorddyn held on tight.
“Very good!” She said, apparently surprised.
Kate tugged harder this time, but
Jorddyn continued to hold on tight to the wayward staff. Finally, frustrated by the wait to speak
about Hyperion and her inability to retrieve the staff, Kate gave a good hard
yank. The quarterstaff started to fall
to the ground, but Jorddyn quickly recalled it to her palm.
Sensing an opening, Kate finally
spoke up, “Kerri, I know what you were talking about Ric and Rapier.”
Jorddyn froze, “Oh?” She put aside the remotes but held tightly to
the quarterstaff. The Krath Priestess’
look was such that Kate wondered for a moment if she was about to lunge at her.
“Yeah I.. I checked my sources.”
“What did they say?”
“They said that in the aftermath of
the battle at Lien, the Akumvah retreated to a rear base at Hyperion.” Kate said quietly. “And that they found something very valuable
to my family. Something of interest to
the rogues too.”
Jorddyn sighed, “I should have known
you would go looking around for information after I decided not to tell you
what was going on.”
“Well, to be fair, I didn’t look at
all,” Kate said. “Fink heard about it
from his sources, and he passed it along to me.
I guess I made some creative deductions.
She paused, “I have to go there,
Kerri. I have to get that artifact. But I need help. I can’t do it alone.”
Jorddyn was already shaking her head,
“No Kate. We’ve already prepared an
expedition to go to Hyperion.”
“But I can help..”
“You’re not ready to face down
rogues, even with help from full-fledged Dark Jedi.”
“But I was ready to face down the
Akumvah on Pirath?”
“That was different. We needed everybody we could muster to fight
the Akumvah. This is just a handful of
rogues. Yeah, they’re dangerous rogues,
but they won’t be threatening Aurora Prime anytime soon.”
“You say that now..” Kate mumbled as she imagined the Chi Long casting it’s long shadow over
the Emperor’s Hammer capitol world.
“Look, this isn’t about the threat they pose. I’m one of the last of the Cantors still
loyal to the Emperor’s Hammer. This is
personal, Jorddyn.”
“Can’t Fink do it?”
“He wouldn’t make it in time. He’s stuck on the Challenge.”
Jorddyn sighed, “I see. Well, I’m sorry Kate, but I can’t let you do
this. You have a lot of potential, but
you haven’t reached it yet.”
“Kerri!”
“I said no!” She snapped. “The warriors we have going there will be
able to handle the rogues on their own.
If it’s there, they’ll find it.
Now come on, we have some more training to do.”
* * *
They trained together for another
several hours, with Kate quickly improving.
She was soon able to snatch the quarterstaff out of Jorddyn’s hand,
juggle remotes in the air, and push the staff back and forth in midair in a
bizarre tug of war. Kate said hardly a
word throughout the training, her friendly conversations with Jorddyn pushed
aside in favor of grim training.
She found that the more she dwelled
on her anger over being denied an opportunity to travel to Hyperion, the better
her Force powers seemed to become. At
one point, her anger reached a flash point, and one of the remotes actually
exploded in midair. It was at that point
that Jorddyn decided to end the training, sending Kate back to her room with
instructions to meet her again the next morning for another round of practice.
Kate walked slowly back to her
dormitory, surprised at the power her anger had given her and craving
more.
.. She doesn’t understand my obligations ..
.. What right does she have to hold me back?
..
They’ll be gone before our force gets there.
Then Keirdagh will get the book..
Kate felt a chill as she
walked into the dormitory and sat heavily on her bed, her keen desire to get
hold of the dream book fresh in her mind.
Her hand strayed almost unconsciously toward her ammo belt.
“Hi Katey,” Azurin said cheerfully
as she strode in and sat down on adjacent bed.
Kate started cautiously pulling on her ammo belt now as she returned the
greeting, the laser edge and the blaster weighing heavily on her left hip.
Azurin was talking about a
particularly weapons training session with Delak when she noticed Kate standing
to leave, “Are you going somewhere?”
“Yeah, I’m uh.. Just going to take the air.”
“With your ammo belt?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“On a moon like Nesh?”
“I find lightning invigorating.”
“Kate.. Where are you going?”
Kate hesitated one more time. She didn’t want to anger Jorddyn by leaving,
and she definitely didn’t want to die at the hands of some rogue. But even as she started to burn back, she
heard Fink’s words ringing in her ears.
“Are
you a Cantor or not?”
That did it.
“I’m just going to take care of some
family business off-planet,” Kate said as casually as she could. “I’ll be back in a day or two.”
“Oh.
Does Jorddyn know that you’re leaving?”
“Yeah, she knows,” Kate lied.
“Anything you want to talk
about?”
“No, not particularly,” she
sighed. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Okay, bye.”
Kate strode numbly out, wondering
briefly about her future in the Dark Brotherhood when Jorddyn found out that
she had flatly ignored her order to stay away from Hyperion. Kate supposed that there was a reasonable
chance that she would be expelled, but she felt ready for that. As far away as the Cantors were, she felt a
peculiar obligation to them that went beyond the Emperor’s Hammer.
She couldn’t help but wonder if it
was because she missed her parents. It
had been so long since she had last seen them..
Kate’s X-wing was sitting in one of
the Tower of Shadows lower hangars, her R5 unit diligently assisting with its
maintenance nearby. It hooted as Kate
walked in and rolled over amid a stream of electronic babble.
One of the technicians noticed Kate
standing there and walked over as well, “Planning on heading out?”
“Just for a couple days,” Kate said
as confidently as she could.
“Well, your X-wing is ready. Your R5 unit here was a big help.”
Kate gazed distractedly out at the
lightning-streaked of Nesh, biting her tongue as she did. This was her last chance to turn back. But instead, she turned to the tech. “Get my X-wing ready please. I have business to take care of.”
* * *
The journey to Hyperion was not a
long one – Barely 36 hours from Nesh.
The system was strewn with rock and debris, a living reminder of the
system’s violent past. Kate calmly slipped
her X-wing around the asteroids, some of them habitable, but most of them dead
obstacles.
“Hold on back there, R5,” she warned
as they passed through a shower of micro-meteorites. Kate was grateful to see the deflector
shields holding – She had only recently replaced them, and hadn’t had time to properly
test them.
Finally, after a bumpy ride through
the system, she spotted Hyperion I, a barren planet that lay not far from the
system’s star. The planet was obscured
by its poisonous atmosphere, masking the barren, pockmarked surface below.
“Run a few scans,” Kate instructed
her R5. “Tell me if there are any other
ships near here.”
There was a hoot, and several lines
of information popped up on Kate’s console.
It looked as though they were alone.
“Anything on the surface?”
R5 beeped an affirmative, and more
information scrolled across the CMD.
“Well, take us there then.”
The secondary Akumvah base was built
into a small volcano far to the planetary north (The Akumvah and their volcanoes, Kate smirked to herself), hidden
away in the cooler nightside of the planetary terminator. She roared through the heavy atmosphere, the
gravity and turbulence jolting the X-wing unmercifully. Kate had to fight to keep her X-wing from
spiraling into the ground most of the way in, finally regaining a measure of
control when she cleared the clouds.
A short while later, she located the
Akumvah hangar and maneuvered her ship toward it, gently sliding through the
pressure doors and setting down on the cool floor. Kate had her blaster out even before her
canopy snapped out, but she needn’t have bothered – The Akumvah were all
dead.
A loud hoot told Kate that her R5
was trying to rock itself out of the X-wing’s control socket, but she waved it
back in, “No, stay with the ship, R5.
I’ll be back before too long.”
She started away from the X-wing,
horrified by the sights in front of her.
The Akumvah bodies were strewn about the bay, some in grotesque positions,
others missing limbs. Kate edged past
them and out of the bay, her stomach lurching dangerously.
“Sithspit,” she muttered to
herself. “The rogues were here
alright.”
The situation was the same all
through the base. Kate began to wish
that she had heeded Jorddyn’s command – It seemed as if the rogues had already
done their work and departed. Kate had
come to a graveyard.
Nevertheless, she continued to make
her way through the complex, her senses guiding her deeper and deeper into the
bowels of the volcano. Finally, she came
to a halt in front of an obsidian door that glowed an angry violent amid a
hundred crimson ruins.
Feeling as if she was back in her
dream, Kate reached out to the touch it, and it slid away to reveal a lift
leading downward into the deepest section of the volcano. Kate pushed an Akumvah corpse out of the way
as she entered and the lift began its long descent.
Kate squeezed her eyes shut, her
hand closed tightly about her blaster and her laser edge as the lift hurled
downward at a dizzying rate. As she
neared her destination, she could feel the aura from the book growing strong
and stronger. She knew now that she
hadn’t been wrong to come to Hyperion – The rogues had somehow missed the
precious artifact.
The lift ground to a halt, and the
door slid open. Kate stepped out, and
felt her breath freeze.
The great chamber lay before her,
exactly as it had been in her dream.
Blue torches lit walls that spiraled hundreds of feet into the air, with
hardly any end in sight. The pillars
were there too, as were the books, though they presented the only anomaly as
they lay neatly ordered on a hundred shelves instead of torn and strewn about
the floor.
She walked toward the aura of the
book in the distance, her legs leaden with anticipation. Just a bit further, and the end dreams would
finally end.
10 feet..
Then five feet..
Then..
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Kate spun, but too slowly. She heard the snap-hiss of a lightsaber
igniting and she caught a glimpse of a billowing cloak gliding down from the
ceiling, and craned her neck up to follow its descent, transfixed.
Her assailant, a sharp looking man
who couldn’t have been much older than Kate clad in the billowing cloak of a
Dark Jedi, only barely avoided cleaving Kate in two with his first stroke as he
lit on the ground and attacked. Kate
stumbled, trying to bring up her blaster to fire on the Jedi, only to have the
barrel cleaved off. A heavy kick to the
chest send her to the ground with a grunt, her laser edge spinning away before
she could ignite it.
Kate wheezed from the blow to her
chest as she scrambled backward from the questing lightsaber point and tried to
recover from the shock of the attack.
The Dark Jedi tsked as he followed and ran a hand through spiky, red
hair, “Master Cantor said I would find you here. Said I would have a chance to fight you. It’s just a pity that you didn’t put up more
of a – hrrkk!”
The Dark Jedi turned a delicate
shade of green as Kate delivered a hefty kick to his groin, causing him to
briefly double over from the pain. Kate
scrambled for her laser edge as he recovered, snatching it up from the ground
and fumbling to ignite it. She turned to
strike, but found herself face-to-face with his lightsaber.
The two weapons struck one-another
with a crackle-hiss, and the pair briefly stared each other down through a halo
of white and crimson.
“I know all about you, Kate Flyer,”
the Dark Jedi growled, suddenly angry now.
“You are no match for me.”
The pair broke apart, their weapons
flashing as they struck once, twice, three-times. The uniform blue of the chamber was disrupted
by crimson and ivory lights as they slashed and parried, dancing up and around
the books as they did. The Dark Jedi was
by far the more aggressive of the two, bullying Kate back with his lightsaber
and using his superior strength to keep her in a defensive posture. Worse for Kate, he struck infinitely faster
than she did, forcing her to use every bit of skill she had ever accrued in
Jabba’s palace to fend him off.
In the end though, he proved too
much. After a short duel, the Dark Jedi disarmed
her with ease and Force-pushed her into one of the shelves, bringing a hail of
ancient books down upon her head. A few
of the books actually began jabbering away at her, trying to keep her from
standing back up as the Dark Jedi strode forward confidently to deliver the
killing blow.
Stretching out her hand, Kate felt
the rough, plasteel texture that comprised her laser edge’s handle through the
Force and yanked back toward her, surprising the Dark Jedi and giving her a
momentary edge. He parried furiously,
anger marring his boyish features.
Finish
her Corwin. Finish her now.
“Yes Master, I’m
trying.”
Now it was Corwin’s turn to reach
out with the Force, sending a cascade of books hurling toward Kate as she
fought to maintain her advantage over the Dark Jedi. One of them struck her over the back of the
head, and she winced with pain, momentarily dropping her guard.
That was all the opening Corwin
needed. Kate screamed as he caught her
first in the arm, then the shoulder, the leg and the knee with his
lightsaber. She went down in a heap, her
clothes smoldering from the crimson blade as she cried out from the pain.
She lay there for a moment, then
tried to fight off the pain and rise again, but a weight like an invisible
stone crushed her back to the floor.
Corwin curled his lip, then struck again and again with lightsaber, a
smile slowly blossoming as he tormented her with the edge of the blade.
A shadow appeared over Corwin’s
shoulder, a billowing cloak hiding the chalk-white face of the newcomer. He stood watching her for a time as Corwin
continued to knick her with the lightsaber blade, then finally raised his hand
to bring him to a stop.
“Do you know who I am?”
Kate didn’t say anything for a
moment, then wheezed, “Keirdagh.”
“Very good,” Keirdagh rumbled. “My apprentice has beaten you. You never really stood a chance against
either of us. If we wanted, either of
could take your feeble life. But we will
not.”
“But master..”
“We
will not,” Keirdagh growled. “I know
that my brother put her up to this ridiculous quest of hers. Because she is family, we will only punish
her and leave her to think about the error of her ways.”
“Yes, my master.”
“We have what we came for,” Keirdagh
tucked a large, glowing tome into his cloak.
“Come, my apprentice. It is time
for us to go.”
He started to sweep away, and then
hesitated, “I will give you your life today.
Next time though, I will destroy you.
Tell my dear brother Fink that
if he wants so badly to destroy me, then he must face me himself.”
A swish of the cloak, and Keirdagh
and his apprentice was gone, leaving Kate to lay alone in the middle of the
cathedral, amid the hundreds of shredded books, and consider her failure.
* * *
When the Arconan expedition found
Kate among the ruins two days later and returned her to Nesh, she didn’t stay
long. With a brief apology to Jorddyn,
she packed her things and left for the Challenge.
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