Yoda (3 page)

Dooku watched rain run like tear tracks down his windows. “The last time I saw Jang, she must have been…younger than you, even. A handsome young woman. The Council was sending her on her first diplomatic mission…to Sevarcos, I think it was. She came to ask my advice. She had striking eyes, very gray and steady. I remember thinking she would do well.”

Ventress picked up the bloody hand and tossed it into her foil bag. “Great are the powers of the Sith, but you're not much of a fortune-teller.”

“You think not?” Dooku turned to consider the dead Jedi's murderer. “Jang lived in service, however misguided, and acted by the star of her principles, however incomplete. By that judging, how many lives are better?”

“Lots are longer, though.” Ventress tied a knot in the foil bag and tossed it into the corner of the room. “If you ask me,” she said, watching the bag hit with a wet
thud,
“that's not what winning looks like.”

She licked her lips.

“You have a point,” he said.

Asajj shifted unconsciously into what Dooku recognized as the echo of a fighting stance, shoulders squared, chin up and aggressive, hands high.
Here it comes,
he thought.

Ventress took a deep breath. “Make me your apprentice.”

“It's not the time—” Dooku began, but Ventress cut him off.

“I'm not in it for the Trade Federation or the Republic,” she said. “I don't care about flags or soldiers, sides or treaties, droids or clones. I'm not even in it for the killing, except for the Jedi, and that's not business, it's personal. When I work on my own, I do what I like. When I do your bidding, I don't need it to be right or reasoned or even sane: I do it because you ask it of me.”

“I know,” Dooku said.

Ventress strode to the window and stood before it, blocking Dooku's view. “Have I served well?”

“Superbly,” he admitted.

“Then reward me! Make me your apprentice! Teach me the ways of the Sith!”

“Have I not taught you many secrets, Asajj?”

“Scraps. Little devices. Lesser arts. Not nearly what you would if I were your apprentice sworn in blood, I know. I am no fool,” she said angrily. As if he didn't know that. As if she needed to convince him she was deadly. “I have learned much about the Sith. Their lineage and their greatness.”

“But what of their natural history?” Dooku said.

Ventress blinked. “What?”

“The Sith, considered as a species. An insect, perhaps.”

Asajj's thin lips got thinner. “You mock me.”

“I have rarely been more serious.” The Count paced over to a shelf of holocrons on the wall, plucked one out, and inserted it into the comm cube on his desk. “Behold: the sickle-back mantis of Dantooine.” A glowing picture formed in the air over the desk, a glossy red-and-black mantis, all hooked forelimbs and wicked piety. “After mating, the female tears her partner's head off and lays her eggs in his body. When the broodlings hatch, they eat their way out and then attack one another.”

“I am not given to parables,” Ventress said impatiently. “If you have a point, make it.”

“It is a tricky business, this making of apprentices,” Dooku said. “The true Sith Lord must find a pupil in whom the Force runs strong.”

“Sixteen Jedi dead is some testament to that,” Ventress said. “Should have been seventeen,” she added.

“But do I really want to make you so strong?” the Count said softly. “We are such pleasant company now, while you know your place. But if I were to make you my apprentice, if I were to take you by the hand and lead you down below the black water that is the dark side, then either you would drown, or you would grow far stronger, and neither option appeals to me. You burn so brightly now, I would hate to put you out.”

“Why should you? What harm is there in teaching me to help you better?”

“You would betray me.” He shrugged, cutting off her protests. “It is the unhappy hazard of embracing the dark side. I am old, and I have learned the limits of my ambition. You are young, and strong, and those two things have always led to one place in the history of the Sith.”

“You think I would intrigue against you?”

“Not at first. But a day would come when you would disagree with my decisions. When you would start to dream of how much better things would be without my liver-spotted hand held over you.”

“I disagree with your decisions right now,” she said. “About that Jedi who—”

“Should have been number seventeen. I know.” Dooku smiled. “I don't have your appetites. I can wait on my kills, and use them better. And for now, you might disagree, but you dare not disobey.” And here, with a small smile, he lifted just one finger.

She blanched. “True,” she said.

Dooku let his finger drop.

In the hologram on the desk, baby mantises were squirming from their father's body. They groped blindly about them with their spindly hooked limbs until one, a little larger than the others, chanced to find that the sickles on his hind legs fit like a collar around a sibling's neck. Driven by primitive instinct, he jerked and tore off his brother's head.

“In a perfect world,” Dooku said, “one could feed an apprentice just enough to keep him growing—just enough to keep him wanting more. The Master could promise him fame, glamour. That's a good one to deliver on,” he said. “He could do the Master's bidding, be his public face. Then if any of the Master's plans went wrong, why, he could take the fall.” Dooku looked up, his eyes suddenly sharp and very much in the present. “Does that sound good to you, Asajj? Would you truly like to be my apprentice? I could make you the most feared woman in the galaxy. All the Jedi would come looking for you, while I sat safe and sound in Coruscant, biding my time.”

Asajj licked her lips again. “Let them come,” she said.

“Ah, to be young and full of hate!” Dooku chuckled. “You would be a star—great to everyone but me. But I'd have to keep you humble, you realize. I'd have to goad and needle and hurt you, to keep you in your place. Every secret the apprentice learns, he pays for dearly. Oh yes, he pays…” The Count paused, his eyes closing for a moment as if to shut out some terrible memory.

Asajj regarded him narrowly. “You don't think I'm worthy.”

“You're not listening, are you?”

“You're not saying anything to the point,” Ventress said angrily. “Was it that Jedi, Jai Maruk? Should I have killed him? I was following your orders, but perhaps that was the test.” Her eyes narrowed. “I should have showed more initiative. That's what you're waiting for. You don't need a…minion. Those you have in plenty. You need something more.”

The Count watched her, bemused. “How strange it is, to know your every thought before you think it.”

“Not even the dark side can give you that power,” Ventress said, unnerved.

The Count smiled. “I have a power greater than the dark side, my pet. I am
old.
Your fresh furies are my ancient mistakes.”

Mantises squirmed and hunted in the vision over his desk. He snapped off the holocron and consulted a monitor. “Ah. Our latest batch of guests is arriving. Loyal beings and true, for the Trade Federation cause and a ten percent profit. Go meet them at the door. You always make such an impression on visitors.”

“Don't patronize me,” Asajj said coldly.

Dooku looked around. “Or
what
?”

Her face went pale.

Dooku lifted that one finger, and this time he tapped it in the air, as if pushing a needle into a pincushion. Ventress crumpled to her knees. Her voice came out clotted with pain. “Please,” she said. “Don't.”

“It doesn't feel very good, does it? Like sharp stones in your throat and chest.” Dooku made another little patting motion, and Ventress slammed to the tile floor. “It's the blood vessels I hate,” Dooku said. “The way they
stretch
inside, like balloons about to pop.”

“P-p-p-please…”

“But worse than anything is the memories,” he said, more softly still. “They crowd around, like flies on meat. Every despicable thing, every petty vice, every little act of spite.” A cruel, strange quiet stretched out as Ventress panted on the stone floor. Rain ticked against the window glass, and the Count's soft voice went dark and far away. “All the things you should have stopped, but
didn't,
and nothing will ever be right again. And the things you've done,” he whispered. “By the pitiless stars,
the things you've done…
”

The comm on Dooku's desk beeped. He shook his head, like a man waking from a dream. “The Troxan delegation is at the door.”

Ventress crawled to her feet. Her face was bruised and her cheeks were wet with tears. Both pretended not to notice. “Tell them I'll be right down,” Count Dooku said.

Physically, the Count's age was rarely a handicap. Deft as he had become with the Force—unimaginably more subtle than the boy who had watched water-skeeters in the Jedi gardens all those years ago—he wore his eighty-three standard years better than most humans half his age. He was still in superb physical shape, senses keen, health undiminished by even the memory of a cold.

Only in this situation, stooped before the image of his Master, did he feel his years. Even via hologram, the flickering figure of Darth Sidious, hideous in blue and shadows, seemed to strip his false youth away, leaving his bones brittle, his joints worn thin and knotted with tension.

“These are the envoys from Troxar,” his Master said. How could he know? Dooku didn't ask. Darth Sidious knew. He always knew.

“They are considering surrender,” Dooku said. “They claim they have a resistance planned, ready to rise in insurrection when the clone troops withdraw.”

“No!” the flickering figure said sharply. “The war has already damaged the planet too much to make it worth saving. Its only value now is to chew up more troops and resources. Tell them they have to fight on. Promise them reinforcements—tell them you will be deploying a new fleet of advanced droids to retake the whole system within a month, if only they can hold on. Explain that such weapons will not be put in the hands of those who surrender.”

“And when the month passes, and no reinforcements arrive?”

“Help will come within another month at most. Promise them that, and make them believe it. I've shown you how.”

“I understand,” Dooku said.
How casually we betray our creatures.

The hooded figure cocked its head. “Having an attack of
conscience,
my apprentice?”

“No, Master.” He met the hooded figure's hideous eye. “It was their own greed that brought them to you,” he said. “In their heart of hearts, they always knew what they were getting into.”

The Château Malreaux was alive with eyes.

The spectacular security system installed by the seventeenth (and last) Viscount Malreaux in the final months of his descent into madness was one of the reasons Dooku had chosen the château for his current base of operations. Optic recorder studs littered the mansion, disguised as upholstery rivets in the parlor, screw heads in the kitchen cabinets, painkiller pills in the apothecary's pantry, and the black eyes of birds woven into the tapestries of the Crying Room. Top-of-the-line infrared swatches, originally developed as prosthetics for tongue-damaged Sluissi, were grafted into the cream-and-crimson Malreaux livery of the table linen and carpets and drapes. The faux walls that had been built at enormous expense to riddle the château with secret passageways were pocked with spyholes. Microphones nested like spiders in dozens of drawers and linen closets, under every bed, taped to the roof by each of the eleven chimneys, and even glued on the base of a priceless bottle of Crème D'Infame in the wine cellar.

The seventeenth (and final) Viscount Malreaux, convinced he was being poisoned, had murdered his kitchen staff and then fled into his secret tunnels, coming out only at night. The last anyone saw of him was a murky glimpse shot from a security cam hidden in a fake onion in a hanging basket in the kitchen: a thirty-second recording of a skeletal figure creeping from a hidden grate into the kitchen to drink two hurried gulps of tap water and gnaw a handful of raw flour.

If it hadn't been for the smell, the corpse of the seventeenth (and terminal) Lord Malreaux would never have been found.

Someone hidden in the secret passage that ran over the study, for example, would have been able to watch the whole of the conversation between Dooku and Asajj Ventress through a peephole gimlet in the ceiling. If that person had been patient, and waited until Ventress was well away, he or she would have seen the conference between Dooku and the hologrammic apparition of Darth Sidious.

And if the watcher had waited a good while after Dooku left the room, he or she might have seen a section of shelving swing out unexpectedly, admitting a small, quick, evil creature, a Vjun fox, its coat a brindled red and cream, with clever prehensile hands instead of paws.

After pausing a moment to sniff, it advanced warily into the room, speculatively at first, but almost immediately coming to the spot where Dooku had dropped Jang Li-Li's thawing severed hand. The floor was tiled in the Malreaux check, half fusty crimson, half dirty cream, like dried blood and curdled milk. The hand, landing with a wet
thud
on one of the dirty-cream tiles, had left a splotch. The fox sniffed, and its thin pink tongue showed between its lips.

“Not yet, my sweet.” A wheezing older woman limped through the secret door. She was dressed in dirty tatters of what had once been fine clothing—a pink ball gown gone black at its raveled hems, torn stockings, and the remains of what had once been a pair of gold lamé slippers. Around her neck she wore a fur stole made from foxtails tied together. “Wait a bits. Which Momma wants to take a look-see.” She lowered her bulk to the floor with a grunt and bent forward to peer at the stain.