Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

“The dark side?” Jacen lifted his head. His hands shook, so he clasped them together and pinned them between his knees. “I, ah—Vergere, I’m sorry—”

“For what?”

“I wanted to kill you. I almost did.”

“But you didn’t.”

Waves of trembling rippled through him. He ventured a shaky laugh. “You should have left me behind. I probably have less to fear from the Yuuzhan Vong than I do from the dark side.”

“Oh?”

“All the Yuuzhan Vong can do is kill me. But the dark side …”

“Why is it so to be feared?”

He turned his face away. “My grandfather was a Lord of the Sith.”

“What? Of the Sith?”

He turned back to find Vergere staring at him in blank astonishment. She tilted her head one way, then another, as though she suspected he might change appearance when viewed from a different angle. “I had thought,” she said carefully, “that you were of Skywalker blood.”

“I am.” He hugged himself against the shaking. Why couldn’t he breathe? “My grandfather was Anakin Skywalker. He became Darth Vader, the last Sith Lord—”

“Anakin?” She settled back into herself, openly stunned—and clearly, astonishingly, saddened. “Little Anakin? A Lord of the Sith? Oh … oh, could it not have been otherwise? What a tragedy … What a waste.”

Jacen stared at her in turn, his mouth hanging open. “You say that like you knew him …”

She shook her head. “Knew of him, more. Such promise … Do you know, I met him once, not five hundred meters above where we now sit? He couldn’t have been more than twelve, perhaps thirteen standard years old. He was—so alive. He burned …”

“What—what would Darth Va—I mean, my grandfather—what was he doing on Coruscant? What were you doing on Coruscant? Five hundred meters above us? What was this place?”

“Do you not know? Has this been lost, as well?” She rose, and extended a hand to help him to his feet. She touched the wall nearby, her fingers skittering through a complex pattern on a sweating rectangular slab, which slowly swung wide, opening a doorway into a gloom-filled chamber beyond.

“This way.” The chamber threw back a dark resonance, as though she spoke beside a drum. Her gaze was steady once more, and expressionless as the stone of the walls. Lost in wonder, Jacen stepped past her into the darkness.

“This was our tower of guard: our fortress watch upon the dark,” she said. The doorway narrowed into a dim yellow stripe of globe-glow, then vanished. “This was the Jedi Temple.”

“This—?” Awe squeezed his chest, and he floundered in the dark; he had to gasp harshly in order to speak. “You—you are a Jedi!”

“No, I am not. Nor am I Sith.”

“What are you, then?”

“I am Vergere. What are you?”

In the darkness her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. He turned, seeking her blindly. “No more games, Vergere.”

“This has never been a game, Jacen Solo.”

“Tell me the truth—”

“I tell you nothing but truth.”

She sounded so close by that Jacen reached for her in the dark. “I thought everything you tell me is a lie—”

“Yes. And the truth.”

“What kind of truth is that?”

“Is there more than one? Why even ask? You will find no truth in me.”

This time her voice came from behind him; he whirled, extending his hands, but found nothing he could grasp. “No games,” he insisted.

“There is nothing that is not a game. A serious game, to be sure: a permanent game. A lethal game. A game so grave that it can be well played only with joyous abandon.”

“But you said—”

“Yes. It has never been a game. And it always has. Either way, or both: you had better play to win.”

“How can I play if you won’t even tell me the rules—?”

“There are no rules.”

A scamper of footsteps to his right; Jacen moved toward them silently.

“But the game does have a name,” she said from the opposite side of the room. “We are playing the same game we have been playing ever since Myrkr: we are playing ‘Who is Jacen Solo?’ ”

He thought with longing of the glow rod, lost with his sliced-open knapsack in the crater above. Thinking of the glow rod, of bright golden light springing from his fist, made him suddenly ache for his lightsaber: he thought of that clean green glow filling the room, cutting through all shadows, making everything clear again. His hands burned to hold it one more time. In building that lightsaber, he had built himself an identity. He had built himself a destiny.

He had built himself.

“If that’s the game,” he said, “I can end it right now. I know who I am, Vergere. No matter what you do to me. No matter what new torture you put me through. If I never touch the Force again. It doesn’t matter. I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he said solidly into the darkness. “I’m a Jedi.”

A long, long silence, in which he seemed to hear the entire room drawing a slow, slow breath.

“Indeed?” She sounded sad. Disappointed. Resigned to a melancholy fate. “Then the game is over.”

“Really?” he said warily. “It is?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “And you lose.”

The room burst to light; after so long in the dark, Jacen felt like he was being jabbed in the eye with a piece of the sun. He flinched, shading his eyes with an upraised arm. Slowly his eyes cleared; the room was larger than he had thought—a ten-meter ceiling, walls decorated with the same floral mosaics, lit by blazing glow globes the size of the Falcon’s cockpit, hanging suspended by tripled chains of verdigris-caked bronze that swung gently above its tiled floor—

And it was full of Yuuzhan Vong.

He turned to Vergere. Beyond a ring of warriors, she stood companionably beside a medium-sized male who wore a long, loose-fitting robeskin of black.

They spoke, but Jacen could not hear them. His ears roared like a forest fire. The Yuuzhan Vong male spoke again, more sharply, but Jacen did not understand. Could not understand. Had no need to understand.

Jacen had seen this male before.

He had seen this male on Duro, with Leia’s lightsaber behind his belt. He had