C’baoth didn’t move; but suddenly Mara could feel a surge of tension in the air around her. “No one points a weapon at me with impunity,” the Jedi Master said with quiet menace. “You will pay dearly for this one day.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Mara said, retreating a step to put her back against the X-wing’s starboard S-foils. Above and to her left she could hear the R2 droid chirping thoughtfully to itself. “You want to stand aside and let me pass? Or do we do this the hard way?”
C’baoth seemed to study her. “I could destroy you, you know,” he said. The menace had vanished from his voice now, leaving something almost conversational in its place. “Right there where you stand, before you even knew the attack was coming. But I won’t. Not now. I’ve felt your presence over the years, Mara Jade; the rising and falling of your power after the Emperor’s death took most of your strength away. And now I’ve seen you in my meditations. Someday you will come to me, of your own free will.”
“I’ll take my chances on that one, too,” Mara said.
“You don’t believe me,” C’baoth said with another of his ghostly smiles. “But you shall. The future is fixed, my young would-be Jedi, as is your destiny. Someday you will kneel before me. I have foreseen it.”
“I wouldn’t trust Jedi foreseeing all that much if I were you,” Mara retorted, risking a glance past him at the darkened building and wondering what C’baoth would do if she tried shouting Skywalker’s name. “The Emperor did a lot of that, too. It didn’t help him much in the end.”
“Perhaps I am wiser than the Emperor was,” C’baoth said. His head turned slightly. “I told you to go to your chambers,” he said in a louder voice.
“Yes, you did,” a familiar voice acknowledged; and from the shadows at the front of the house a new figure moved across the courtyard.
Skywalker.
“Then why are you here?” C’baoth asked.
“I felt a disturbance in the Force,” the younger man said as he passed through the gate and came more fully into the dim starlight. Above his black tunic his face was expressionless, his eyes fixed on Mara. “As if a battle were taking place nearby. Hello, Mara.”
“Skywalker,” she managed between dry lips. With all that had happened to her since her arrival in the Jomark system, it was only now just dawning on her the enormity of the task she’d set for herself. She, who’d openly told Skywalker that she would someday kill him, was now going to have to convince him that she was more trustworthy than a Jedi Master. “Look—Skywalker—”
“Aren’t you aiming that at the wrong person?” he asked mildly. “I thought I was the one you were gunning for.”
Mara had almost forgotten the blaster she had pointed at C’baoth. “I didn’t come here to kill you,” she said. Even to her own ears the words sounded thin and deceitful. “Karrde’s in trouble with the Empire. I need your help to get him out.”
“I see.” Skywalker looked at C’baoth. “What happened here, Master C’baoth?”
“What does it matter?” the other countered. “Despite her words just now, she did indeed come here to destroy you. Would you rather I had not stopped her?”
“Skywalker—” Mara began.
He stopped her with an upraised hand, his eyes still on C’baoth. “Did she attack you?” he asked. “Or threaten you in any way?”
Mara looked at C’baoth … and felt the breath freeze in her lungs. The earlier confidence had vanished from the Jedi Master’s face. In its place was something cold and deadly. Directed not at her, but at Skywalker.
And suddenly Mara understood. Skywalker wouldn’t need convincing of C’baoth’s treachery after all. Somehow, he already knew.
“What does it matter what her precise actions were?” C’baoth demanded, his voice colder even than his face. “What matters is that she is a living example of the danger I have been warning you of since your arrival. The danger all Jedi face from a galaxy that hates and fears us.”
“No, Master C’baoth,” Skywalker said, his voice almost gentle. “Surely you must understand that the means are no less important than the ends. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.”
C’baoth snorted. “A platitude for the simpleminded. Or for those with insufficient wisdom to make their own decisions. I am beyond such things, Jedi Skywalker. As you will be someday. If you choose to remain.”
Skywalker shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t.” He turned away and walked toward Mara—
“Then you turn your back on the galaxy,” C’baoth said, his voice now earnest and sincere. “Only with our guidance and strength can they ever hope to achieve real maturity. You know that as well as I do.”
Skywalker stopped. “But you just said they hate us,” he pointed out. “How can we teach people who don’t want our guidance?”
“We can heal the galaxy, Luke,” C’baoth said quietly. “Together, you and I can do it. Without us, there is no hope. None at all.”
“Maybe he can do it without you,” Mara put in loudly, trying to break up the verbal spell C’baoth was weaving. She’d seen the same sort of thing work for the Emperor, and Skywalker’s eyelids were heavy enough as it was.
Too heavy, in fact. Like hers had been on the approach to Jomark …
Stepping away from the X-wing, she walked over to Skywalker. C’baoth made a small movement, as if he were going to stop her; she hefted her blaster, and he seemed to abandon the idea.
Even without looking at him, she could tell when the Force-empty zone around her ysalamir touched Skywalker. He inhaled sharply, shoulders straightening from a slump he probably hadn’t even noticed they had, and nodded as if he finally understood a hitherto unexplained piece of a puzzle. “Is this how you would heal the galaxy, Master C’baoth?” he asked. “By coercion and deceit?”
Abruptly, C’baoth threw back his head and laughed. It was about the last reaction Mara would have expected from him, and the sheer surprise of it momentarily froze her muscles.
And in that split second, the Jedi Master struck.
It was only a small rock, as rocks went, but it came in out of nowhere to strike her gun hand with paralyzing force. The blaster went spinning off into the darkness as her hand flared with pain and then went numb. “Watch out!” she snapped to Skywalker, dropping down into a crouch and scrabbling around for her weapon as a second stone whistled past her ear.
There was a snap-hiss from beside her, and suddenly the terrain was bathed in the green-white glow of Skywalker’s lightsaber. “Get behind the ship,” he ordered her. “I’ll hold him off.”
The memory of Myrkr flashed through Mara’s mind; but even as she opened her mouth to remind him of how useless he was without the Force, he took a long step forward to put himself outside the ysalamir’s influence. The lightsaber flashed sideways, and she heard the double crunch as its brilliant blade intercepted two more incoming rocks.
Still laughing, C’baoth raised his hand and sent a flash of blue lightning toward them.
Skywalker caught the bolt on his lightsaber, and for an instant the green of the blade was surrounded by a blue-white coronal discharge. A second bolt shot past him to vanish at the edge of the empty zone around Mara; a third again wrapped itself around the lightsaber blade.
Mara’s fumbling hand brushed something metallic: her blaster. Scooping it up, she swung it toward C’baoth—
And with a brilliant flash of laser fire, the whole scene seemed to blow up in front of her.
She had forgotten about the droid sitting up there in the X-wing. Apparently, C’baoth had forgotten about it, too.
“Skywalker?” she called, blinking at the purple haze floating in front of her eyes and wrinkling her nose at the tingling smell of ozone. “Where are you?”
“Over here by C’baoth,” Skywalker’s voice said. “He’s still alive.”
“We can fix that,” Mara growled. Carefully picking her way across the steaming ruts the X-wing’s laser cannon had gouged in the ground, she headed over.
C’baoth was lying on his back, unconscious but breathing evenly, with Skywalker kneeling over him. “Not even singed,” she murmured. “Impressive.”
“Artoo wasn’t shooting to kill,” Skywalker said, his fingertips moving gently across the old man’s face. “It was probably the sonic shock that got him.”
“That, or getting knocked off his feet by the shock wave,” Mara agreed, lining her blaster up on the still figure. “Get out of the way. I’ll finish it.”
Skywalker looked up at her. “We’re not going to kill him,” he said. “Not like this.”
“Would you rather wait until he’s conscious again and can fight back?” she retorted.
“There’s no need to kill him at all,” Skywalker insisted. “We can be off Jomark long before he wakes up.”
“You don’t leave an enemy at your back,” she told him stiffly. “Not if you like living.”