III

I spent many days, when I was young enough to stand like a son at my Master's side, idling on the streets or rooftops of Coruscant and looking across the chasms at the Jedi Temple. He would speak softly, just loud enough for the words to travel from one cowl to another. He would say that I was destined to kill them, the Jedi, the collective mind-crowd, soon, soon enough, I would cut through their Masters as easily as a ship slides through hyperspace, not soon enough—!

And that is why the visits stopped; I would have escaped from his leash, from his hand at my neck, even from his thoughts ripping through mine, if he had not one day removed me from the temptation. No revelation yet, for the Jedi. No more vigils.

Until now.

I pay for a dock at the Senate spaceport and release the Dark Eyes. Each droid records crisp audio and visual and does not appear on scans for surveillance devices. They are agile, and hidden in ovoid, antennaed casings which could belong to any messenger or security or cam droid. I control them manually, allowing them to sometimes chose their own ways, and float them toward the spires.

I spend a handful of quiet hours sitting at my ship's control panel and following the droids' live holocam feeds, watching long walls slide by. The droids bat against the walls and then plunge, their own guidance maps telling them to search for supply routes into the Temple that will not allow them through its front doors. I see lit fuel stations, bulging tanks, depots, bay doors. Finally, the holodisplay shows me long halls, salmon-colored lights, ceilings with struts taller than those on some capital ships.

A lesser being would have stilled his breathing, thinking superstitiously that perhaps through the droids his enemy could hear. I almost understand that.

My Dark Eyes touch the fringes of the halls where the Jedi walk, and then I retract them. There are no cameras allowed in these mystic halls, and there is little sign of droids with higher functions than forever polishing the floor. I call my machines back.

And move in myself.

It is a process, cloaking oneself with the Force. As I walk I pull strings, as sure as each footstep, covering my emotions with pure energy, covering my self with the universe. I pass through crowds like a trickle of water through rocks. All the while dampening, slowing my anger as I could slow my heartsbeat, covering, cloaking, casting a pall. It is like meditation, like parlor tricks; one covers oneself with the cloth of the living Force, then removes the cloth, and there is nothing beneath. This trick must be excellent, because there are Masters, Sidious said, almost as great as mine. I have been planning for this, perfecting.

I know that there would be no hope for this venture unless Sidious had been working tirelessly for many years, constructing the machinery of obscuration, a miasma of the dark side which fogs my enemies' eyes. In it he and I are cloaked, and the Jedi almost lose that advantage which any Force user has over his lesser cousins, perception of presences.

I hope that, like many beings among whom I have spied, they will see no more than they expect to see.

Quickly I descend toward the workingbeings' entrance. Below the temple's first level and great door, the light of Coruscant is dim. I scale girders when I can, ruing sidewalks. Too quickly, in fact; I realize that I am arriving sooner than expected, because I am so eager.

I can feel my lightsaber in my hand, although it is not there, like a desired meal tempts the taste buds with its phantom flavor. It takes discipline like pain to dampen the fightlust that curdles behind my eyes. I am here to watch. Only to watch, or they will all be upon me in their halls, and I am not ready. Sadly, obviously, never yet ready for them all. Only one, and alive, if he and I are lucky. But here, the goal so close, my purpose in front of me, silence and machinery-smells, the Force flowing like low fog—

Footsteps. A being at a service station, walking around the curve of a pole. A moment's silhouette allows me to see the four shoulders and broad back; he is Pho Ph'eahian or Morseerian--I take to the shadows of another thick fuel store before I can think of anything but the release his death will bring. Suddenly trajectory is the world, the clicks of my boots running now are the world, this alien is the end point of everything--

I hit him from behind, sink my fingers into fur—Pho Ph'eahian—go to ground with him. His neck breaks as I whip his body over mine and crouch, knees against his caught-in-heaving-breath sides in case I am wrong and his species can survive that snap—!

He is still and the Force cries out.

Not too loud, not louder here than anywhere else—it is simply the life fleeing, and I turn my back on it. I pace on, up into the light, smiling a smile that does not feel natural but satisfies. For a moment, that serviceman was every Jedi I have ever imagined, every one that I have ever met.

After skirting students who will feel nothing more than a passing tremor of fear in my wake, I ignite one lightsaber blade. The Padawan in the room below the flowstone cornice I perch on brings his weapon to life. My timing was flawless; the sounds converge.

Precombat tensions hum in the room nearby, and the beacon…cloaked as I am, my own senses are not as acute as I would like them to be, and I have been here a span of days without whiff of the Padawan from Naboo. But there is the beacon, the Tatooine-born Anakin Skywalker who saved the Naboo fleet, who shines in the Force like suns, like an electrical socket broken and spitting its power out into the world. He was with the Padawan on Tatooine, and so, my movements have, more often than not, followed him. He is going to duel another boy, in this room I stand next to.

When the other Padawan's weapon ignites, I shear the cover away from the ventilation grate that runs from the hallway to the training salle.

I duck my head and crawl.

It is shameful, yes, moving and sleeping in ducts and vents and long-empty rooms. There are passages here, though, that the Jedi themselves do not know, which run behind the walls and have proved extremely fortunate for me. But the close, metal walls of ventilation shafts, cool and dead, ease the unerring, teeth-grinding urge to break things, to break out, to kill and storm and—wait. I have to wait. And so, in this vent, I watch the Jedi.

I crawl until the light of the training hall flows orange through the bars. I am looking down from very near the ceiling. The hall is five meters each way; in the center is a square of mats, light orange, and around the edges other young Jedi practice while the two whose lightsabers are ignited circle one another slowly, waiting to strike. One blue blade, one green.

And on the edge of the circle, adding to the hums, moving slowly through kata, is the Padawan I have come here to steal.

But he is shorn of braid, and does that not mean…but he is a Padawan, in age and thought and movement! But he is a Knight.

And the younglings are dancing now. Tentatively, the blades flash out. These children are clumsier than I expected, swiping, refusing to listen to the voice of the Force and their bodies. They clash and move apart; no one has touched flesh.

Another few steps; the bright boy's feet are drifting out of stance, pointing toward the other. That one is nervous; he sets his teeth and twitches his wrists as if imagining strikes. They are going to clash again—it does not take the Force to intuit that! The clumsy clash comes. Both younglings swing at one another and –are they trying to hit the sabers?—Anakin Skywalker's stance goes from drifted to dangerous, his legs too far apart, his maneuverability compromised.

My target turns to look at the bout and shouts out clearly: "Watch your feet, Anakin."

Skywalker actually looks down, quickly yes, but he resumes his stance. He says, "I'm trying to think about my hands!"

I expect the Knight to reprimand the youngling, to flick the Force and send him sprawling, but instead my target resumes his sequence with a decent pivot into a high kick. This is not like my training! Skywalker and the other lurch into strikes again, and the Force pulses as the other slams his saber down toward Skywalker's shoulder. It is a well-timed blow; Skywalker's hands are low.

But I am surprised; the Jedi allow their children to maim one another? The swing is not showing signs of halting.

Then the lightsaber bounces off the place between Skywalker's tunic-covered shoulder and his neck, bounces off the side of his face, and jerks backward as the other boy backpedals quickly. Skywalker reels for a second, blinking, darts forward. He dodges the lightsaber—the other boy seems to be thinking that he should stop now that he failed to defeat Anakin—and slams a fist into the side of his opponent's jaw.

Lightsabers tamed enough to burn but not cut? The Order must dial down the plasma loops' power to keep their Padawans safe, regulating it not to keep it from fluxing out of control, but to minimize the lethality… The touches hurt—Skywalker is rubbing his face. As is the other boy, after that punch. A gnarled imp of a Jedi Master is waddling toward them from where he was watching at the edge of the fighting floor, and my target too is stopping his movements, turning, paining in the Force as he realizes Anakin's…his charge's…wounds.

They made my target the beacon's mentor?

I almost laugh. At these weak weapons—where is the incentive? Where is the drive, if they are not trying to kill each other? They do not truly fight for their titles, do not leave failures behind?

No matter. I will ask my target later about his organization's poor teaching techniques.

Now, he is checking and consoling his charge, and speaking. They are going to healers. I cannot emerge there.

But I have been scanning the Temple. I know where the healers live in their quiet pools of useless Force. My target will go there, and leave his charge alone while bacta is applied to his reddening face.

Afterward, I can confront him.

The target moves back into the dark halls after looking after the beacon, into the underlevels where none of his kind walk; it is an amusing show of deference. He is accompanied by a compatriot of my alien victim, by chance or discovery—if the latter, no matter. I will be gone from this place soon. For a brief, exciting moment I imagine turning and killing this worker too. But there would be no point. And my target is right there, walking down the hallway in the opposite direction from the Twi'lek servant.

I emerge from a duct, shake dust from the shoulders of my cloak, walk crouched along a ledge beside a wall rougher than those in the Temple proper. I realize that I am hungry; I have subsisted on nutrition capsules for the past three days.

My target walks below me, his short hair not hidden by the brown Jedi cloak. The drop from the hall to the floor is about eight feet. I fall fast.

I allow my landing to make a sound, a suggestion of footfall. The Jedi turns.

I wish I could see them all like this. Every Jedi in the towers, looking at me with an expression of denial and shock and fear. Admittedly, he doesn't fear much. He'll be their champion, this one. Yes, I respect my enemy.

He almost killed me once.

His hand is nervously at his lightsaber, but he knows the power that backs him here on their ground. It's harder than I thought it would be, not to kill him now. I want to move, to unleash, to channel all my pent of wrath at this human—but then I would have come here for naught.

I say, "Are you surprised to see me?"

"'Surprised' is not quite the word I'd use." He says, eyes narrowing.

I know exactly how this dialogue will go. I know what will surprise him more, and I await it eagerly. "I've been looking for you. Do you know why, Jedi?"

"You want revenge." Revenge on me, he is thinking. His nervousness trickles through the Force, but there is readiness atop it. I expect anger; the ties that bound him to his Master hurt when they were sliced apart. But, true to the Jedi, he has practiced serenity so much that there are barely any emotions left for him to use.

I answer, "No."

Ah, the surprise. The stilling of breath. "No?"

I pace. "No. I hunt a man who calls himself Darth Tyranus. I need whatever information you have in order to find him. And you need me to kill him." He opens his mouth to speak, then, intimidated, silences himself. "You get the prize, the glory if you find any. I only want the favor of my Master. Do you understand, Jedi?"

We look at one another for a moment.

He says, "I understand, but this must remain strictly between the two of us."

"Of course." He expected something else? "The galaxy thinks I am dead. Who would believe you anyway?"

I offer him a handshake. He seals his fate.

His grip is middling strong, and I escape it quickly. My next words judge him; will he obey orders? "Move. We are not invisible enough here."

I thumb a control at my right gauntlet, awakening my ship, the distant Scimitar. It will meet us at my location. He starts to speak, does not, walks down the corridor and turns onto a catwalk, always looking back, his Force sense piqued and frightened. I pass him by. The air changes slightly, the small differences in flow telling me that we have gone from inside the Temple to as outside as one gets at this depth of Coruscant. Below the corrugated catwalk is a small lot for delivery craft and workers' speeders.

"Are you prepared to depart, Jedi?"

The human's pale face showed confusion. "We're going to leave now?"

"You would rather I give you time to report my presence to your Council." Fool. He thinks I will let him run. "You have your supplies. What else do you require?"

"My Padawan."

I almost laugh; so my target was made a master. These soft Jedi. "Do you want Tyranus to kill the whelp?" The beacon on my ship! Sidious would know our presence immediately. It is ridiculous.

The Jedi says, "I should at least tell him I am leaving."

"He is Force sensitive. He will know."

The two grappling lines fall out of the ship, hissing, and I catch one in my hand and look up at the distant gray against more grayness that is my ship next to a monolith. I glance at the Jedi. Here will be the first controlled test of his training! "Climb, Jedi." I relish speaking the word, for I am ridding myself of it, and am sure that derision curdles it so that my target knows precisely what I think of his kind.

If he hesitates, I suppose I will have to threaten him. Pity that he could not climb, nor fight for a time, without a hand.

I begin to pull myself up the thick line, past stories of windows, into the gales of Coruscant streets that whip my cloak about my body and threaten my eyes with pain.

The Jedi, half a meter behind me on the end of his line and pock-marking the Force like a black hole in spacetime, says, "Kenobi." I wonder if he is cursing, or calling the name of an ally. His Master, perhaps? But there is no danger sense. He says, "My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi."

Query beats in the Force; he wants my appellation. Obi-Wan Kenobi means less to me than target. "I am Darth Maul."

Silence. The Jedi ascends faster than I do. I would rue this were I not hesitant to move too quickly, with such strain on my arms and the skin of my chest pulling at the old wound.

But then the Force warns. Seconds-that-feel-like-minutes before the snap-hiss of the green lightsaber above me, I pull my own weapon from my belt and raise it up, one blade jumping to life, my right hand still clutching the line. I bat the strike away and flick my gaze down, up, enough to see the canyon-street falling away beneath us.

Sudden rage—all the talk was a distraction! Kenobi will not leave the Temple this easily. I aim a strike at his face and the green saber neatly tips and blocks, but Kenobi blinks in the brightness. My line swings with the movement, my grip grown stiff and paining—curse you, Kenobi, for a torturer, leaving me unable to train after Naboo! But Kenobi is useless for a moment.

I holster my saber and move on up the line as he recovers, using the Force to boost my speed, feeling wind scour at my skin and smelling the tinge of exhaust fumes in the air as it whips past. I reach the thick floor of the ship's ramp and pull myself up, set my feet under me. I could cut his line now. I could tear him from it with the Force, could push his own lightsaber back into his face—but he is necessary. I did not come here to kill him, I came here to wait, to find the Jedi, and I have been waiting so long in that cursed Temple and now even this far from it I can breathe after drowning and why should I let him live?

And Dooku's wrinkle-scoured, impassive face meets my mind's eye.

With easy, easy rage I stretch out a hand and with the Force snag the weighted end of the line Kenobi is climbing. It raises to the level of the ship, bowing the line, hoisting the Jedi to hang below and at the edge of the decking. He remains stoic, controlled, despite the vertiginous movement of the lines and the streams of lighted traffic far, far below.

I snarl, "I wasn't planning on killing you yet." (Oh how I want to.)

Stoicism. To let Kenobi up I release my hold on the line and let it swing, and step back into the shadow of the ship's hall. A moment later Kenobi drags himself up onto the deck.

He says no more. The ship's hatch stands open in the wind and speeder-sound. When I reach it, I climb up and retract the line into its cabinet. Kenobi follows me into the ship, silent, questioning, tasting the dark side on the air. Soon, I will hide no longer…

I ask, "Will you cooperate?"

"Yes."

On the main deck, I tell him to sit. He hesitantly backs into one of the chairs in the half-circle, the ones which I have never before seen used.

When I take the ship's controls and fly it out of the atmosphere, Kenobi—target no longer, ally now, dangerous droid from whom I will pull information—speaks. With enough apathy in his voice that I know he is in shock—his fear slides under the surface of his thoughts, pressuring to express itself—he says, "What is your destination?"

"Into space." I do not know the course after; I will head for a major spacelane and cruise, and then we will discuss Kenobi's knowledge of Tyranus.

As the ship breaks into hyperspace, I figuratively breathe easier, letting down my control which I feel like I have been holding for so long, releasing the impediments upon my Force powers which concealed me from the Jedi. Again, I feel strong instead of crafty, and I am comfortable. Kenobi blazes dimmer than his protégé, but still he is a candle, its light eating away at and being dimmed by the darkness which, as natural to me as water to a Gungan, permeates the ship. Will I turn him? If it is useful.

I want to kill something. The self-healing training droids I have here are almost good enough, almost sufficient, programmed so that I cannot predict their attacks by their movement alone.

Tiresome.

But I must be sure that rooms and systems are locked, must secure my ship against this intruder-guest-contrivance that is the Jedi. I turn and walk toward him. He looks up at me and I can feel the sadness and shock in his eyes, as he grows used to the darkness, as he senses his kin so distant. Pitiful, how much control over his facilities he has lost by a simple change of scene. No matter. I consider knocking him out for a while, so that he will be out of the way and his brain can recover.

He is weary.

I say, "Follow me," and lead him to an unused room within which is a half-unfolded cot—a second sleeping cell which was never used except sometimes for storage. He presses on the cot's struts and sits down. I leave him, and the door hisses shut behind me.

I lock it from the outside, and leave it that way until I have password-locked the Bloodfin and most of the rooms in the ship. I realize that I am weary myself, from the return of the Force as well as deprivation of it. I unlock Kenobi's door and retire to my own cell, twitchiness smoothed by my body's demand for recovery.

I sleep, as it is said, with one eye open, but this is no different from any other resting period, any other place. Memories of Sidious, of my young self scarred by saber or shiv the moment before the Force screams me into consciousness, will not let me feel safe.