Lineage IX
Chapter 21
"So, Jedi boy, not so haughty without your sabers, hmm?"
Obi-Wan stalked behind the foremost Sister, noting the labyrinthine networking of passages through which he was led. "Try me," he smirked, not liking the tenor of his would-be captor's mocking attempt at conversation.
The girl swiveled, crimson topknot swishing over one bare shoulder, hands going to her hips. "What's that supposed to mean?"
His brows crept upward. "I thought you were told to be gracious?"
"You're alive. Be grateful." Painted lips curled over small teeth. "That's as hospitable as I feel like being to an intruder."
They descended a steep stairwell to another subterranean level of the sprawling complex. "Your Mother invited us here, you know."
"You are males. You don't belong here." They reached a pressure sealed door, which slid open at their approach. Two of the young women took up sentry posts to either side. "You can stay here. One foot past the door and we'll kill you."
He flashed a grin. "I've heard that before."
The Sister struck out savagely at his face, but he ducked beneath the blow, burying a shoulder in her armored chestplate. She staggered back, and a Force-push sent her nearest companion skidding down the hall in disarray. The remaining two jumped their captive, seizing both arms in painful grips and brandishing vibroshivs.
"You arrogant, reeking heap of offal." The second slap landed squarely across his cheekbone, provoking little more than a grunt and a half-smile of challenge in response to the heated pejorative. "Typical."
He was shoved unceremoniously into a small cell-like room, and the door locked behind him. So much for Dathomiri ambassadorial etiquette, Obi-Wan thought. Gracious certainly bore a wide plethora of meanings in different Galactic cultures, but this was possibly an all-time low by his exacting standards.
Since there was little else to do besides of course force an escape strategy – something not included in Dooku's implied mandate to learn from his inhospitable hostesses – so he went to his knees in meditation posture, rolling his shoulders a bit to loosen the knots put there by the cramping position of the binders about his wrists. If he achieved a deep balance in the Force, he would be spared the tedium of waiting for his master's business to conclude itself.
Some time later – difficult to gauge precisely how much later – his quiet communion with the universal was rudely interrupted by a newcomer. The door hissed open to admit none other than Rue, the wounded Sister who had been brought hostage back to Dathomir aboard the Republic shuttle. She stepped across the threshold, and planted herself arms akimbo above him, clearly relishing the position of superiority.
Obi-Wan did not open his eyes immediately. Power and advantage, as he had learned well at Dooku's feet, had little to do with relative positions in space, or even the presence of binders upon one's person.
"Go away," the young witch ordered, and her compatriots grumblingly obeyed, a concession to some kind of internally recognized rank. The door slid closed again.
"I am glad that you are healed," Obi-Wan greeted her, finally emerging completely form his meditative state and having a good look at his unlikely visitor. She had hastily donned new make-up, a mere mask of stark white with a few harshly delineated lines beneath eyes and along the slope of her high forehead.
Rue's mouth twisted. "I am only here because Mother sent me. She says I may learn something from you, Jedi."
He nodded warily as she sat before him, cross-legged like one of the initiates in Master Yoda's youngest classes… intently watching his every motion, eyes raking over the length of padawan braid dangling over his shoulder.
"Is that the sign of your bondage?"
He snorted. "Obedience. To a master of the Order. To the Code and precepts. To the Force. There is no coercion or bondage in that which is undertaken willingly."
Her eyes slitted. "It is still slavery, and a weakling's creed, if it prevents you from slaying an enemy. You think in your heart that women are soft and subject to pity, but you are the one who is too feeble to act."
The words bore a hidden barb; he was careful not to flinch. "Restraint is not a weakness," he offered. "Compassion, we are taught, is a greater strength than subjugation."
A derisive exclamation, like a strangled shout. "Is that why you tried to heal me aboard your ship? Save your pity and compassion, Jedi. I don't need them."
Siri would never openly tolerate his pity, either; this fact emboldened him. "Perhaps it was not pity so much as respect," he offered, diplomatically. "You can feel the Force, as I can. There are … other ways to tread this path. You need not languish in such a hateful rut."
Hissing audibly, she drew back upon her haunches. "Oh, I see. You hope to sway me to embrace your own doctrines. You call that respect? If you respect me – us, our way – you would not be so eager to convert us into copies of yourself. I call that imperialism, not compassion. Mother warned us that you Jedi are all fanatics and sophists. You don't fool me."
"I'm not trying to make you like me; I'm inviting you to step outside the narrow confines of this conclave. The Force is more than this –this shadow- you live in."
Impatient, the Sister rose again and paced about him in a wide and discontented circle. "What am I supposed to learn from a brutish pillock like you?" she exclaimed, disgusted and unsettled at once. "This is ridiculous."
The first step to successful diplomacy was that of understanding the other's viewpoint. Obi-Wan tilted his head, conveying genuine curiosity. "Why do you hold men in such contempt?" he inquired.
She waved a dismissive hand at him. "You are the inferior gender, is that not obvious? In nearly every species, your kind are larger and more suited to manual and simpletons' work. Your grosser physicality marks you as lower beings. Nor do you have any power to produce and nurture life – you are merely seed-bearers. And you are all very ugly - especially you," she added, with a toss of her head. "We have little use for such base filth."
"Is that why your Mother is so desperate to strike a bargain with Master Dooku? Or why you needed Syfo-Dyas' help to locate your precious artifacts? Or why it takes eight of you to attempt a simple highway robbery?"
Rue's hands went to her knives, nestled in matching sheaths of tooled leather. "I can think of at least one way to render you more docile," she sneered, "- presuming your masters have not already spared me the trouble."
Such uncivilized threats were beneath any decent being's notice, much less a Jedi's. He closed his eyes and pointedly ignored her resentful presence, having nothing more to say upon the wearisome subject.
After a disgruntled few minutes, the young Sister seemed to get the hint, and stormed out again, leaving the Force sullen and turgid in her wake.
Winds buffeted his back, pressing him against the unyielding stone, or else seeking to pry him loose, icy fingers grasping at his limbs and garments, clawing at his handholds, numbing fingers already torn by endless climbing.
If he risked a downward glance, there was nothing but mist; upward likewise there was only the grey unknown. Much like himself, barricaded within the narrow limits of his quest, lost memory and the uncertain future occulting both past and future, leaving him stranded in a moment where there was no rest and no serenity, only a striving that admitted no failure. Muscles shaking with the effort – a sign of increasing age he chose to obstinately ignore – Qui-Gon crawled onward, every painful centimeter a test of his mettle, a trial so fundamental and unforgiving that it sent a shudder down his spine. Here, there was indeed no try: he would either make the summit or tire before he reached that lofty goal, and plummet to his certain death. Do or do not.
Passing time dissipated into the surrounding fog, and he was soon mantled in freezing droplets, a chill dampness seeping to his skin from without while his every joint and tendon screamed with inner fire. And yet upward, upward, he crept, luminous spirit gradually, ever so slowly, winning the battle over gross matter, the buoyancy of purpose lifting him beyond the demands of gravity and mortal flesh.
When blood pooled in the hollows between his trembling fingers, ran in slow rills over bruised knuckles, he pushed on. When the condensation turned to driving rain, razoring pellets of cold, he froze against the cliff until the bitter assault ended. When the eroded surface of the column crumbled to sand beneath his grasping fingers and he fell, abruptly jerked to a standstill by his anchorline, he breathed out the sheer animal terror and found a new starting place, not mourning the meters lost by his precipitous slide downward. When the wind seemed to mock him in a reedy whisper, he recited the lotus-of-incomparable-tranquility mantra in grunting breaths and pushed upward, indefatigable.
And when, without warning, his searching fingers found a rim more solid and wide than any he had discovered before, he raised a face stained by tears and sweat and dried to salty grit by the scouring wind, and beheld… the very pinnacle.
A plateau crowned by the crumbling ruins, the desiccated skeleton of an ancient Temple.
The Force sang in triumph as he hauled his battered body over the last ridge and collapsed face-first, gratefully surrendering to oblivion.
The negotiations were not short.
When even sustained meditation failed to carry him through the endless vigil, and in the predictable absence of any food or drink, or even the meager comfort of a proper palette, Obi-Wan ran through three or four weaponless kata as a means of dissipating physical tension, and then settled for propping his back against the hard corner of his interim prison, slipping into a half-aware state on the border between sleep and a light trance.
In his private quasi-dreaming, he walked the halls of the unifying Force, a colonnaded expanse without walls or buttresses, vast columns of stone rising into mist above, like the ceiling of the Temple's arboretum. His footfalls were hushed by the susurration of wind and rain, a gentle buffeting that left him neither chilled nor wet. Light shafted down upon him as he strolled between stripes of purple and gold, shadow and luminance, beneath the watchful eyes of impossible sculpted towers. As he strode up the limitless arcade, his awareness soared upward until he was rising toward distant heaven alongside the rock spires, rushing through cloud and then sky until the pure stars shone cold above, and the pillars flattened into a desolate plain, a ruined city lying stark beneath pitiless consellations. A limpid moon hung, like an empty bowl, low on this second ethereal horizon, a wan observer.
And somewhere, near the outskirts of this strange place, he stumbled upon a soft bundle of cloth, the richest white silk imaginable. He knelt, and ran it between his fingers, feeling the tight-woven texture, the rasping sound as it slid over his skin and fell in shimmering folds, as lovely as a phlogista moth's wings. The garment bore a familiar signature, the ephemeral trace of one long missed –
He jolted back to full alertness, responsive to the approach of another quite different but still familiar presence. A quiet pressure at the back of his mind impressed upon him the need for stealth, forbade any motion or exclamation that would raise an undue alarm. Slowly, he stood and waited.
There were two Night-sisters outside the door, and surely many others in the vicinity. And yet Dooku's surreptitious approach went apparently unmarked, the Jedi Shadow slipping between the guards like ink running through darkness, mantled in a net of illusion so precise and impenetrable that he disappeared in the Force.
The door opened, and a black-cloaked figure flowed elegantly over the threshold, lowering his cowl to reveal aristocratic features crowned in close-cropped silver.
Obi-Wan bowed. "Master. I take it we're leaving?"
The Sentinel's lips curled upward, sardonic. "Yes. That might be prudent, under the circumstances." He silently released the bindrs' lockeing mechnaism, returned his apprentice's weapons.
"You were not able to reach an agreement with Mother Talzin?"
Dooku raised one brow. "Our objective here has been accomplished." He withdrew a small velvetar pouch from an interior pocket. "Carry this. In extremis, it would be best that the two artifacts not be discovered together."
The young Jedi gasped softly when the small bag hit touched his extended palm, the moment of contact sending an electric jolt up his arm and down his spine. "The B'Tmothi holocron!" he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper. "But, Master – "
"Not now, Padawan."
Biting back the flood of questions and bad feelings provoked by the revelation of his mentor's treachery, Obi-Wan stuffed the precious object inside his own belt pouch and pulled his hood far over his face.
"Shield heavily and follow me closely. If it comes to violence," Dooku instructed, "Do not allow yourself to be seduced into complacency. The Sisterhood can be ruthless foes when provoked."
Which statement invited at least a dozen obvious retorts about the wisdom of provoking such a reaction. Obi-Wan heroically refrained from voicing any of them, earning him a knowing half-smile from the master Sentinel. He barricaded his mind as deeply as possible in the Light, merging into Dooku's own powerful Force manipulation, flattening his own signature into a mere passivity, the shadow of a shadow.
And they walked, cautiously, back into the adjoining passage. The two Sisters watching the door looked straight through them, minds pliant to the suggestion of nothingness, of absence, the Jedi's passing no more than a ripple of warmth in a placid pool. Down the corridor, pacing in single file, boots barely rasping against the flagstones, up into a wide hall domed in polished metal, an ominous hub in the stronghold's center.
There were more of the witches here, and yet none seemed to notice them as they threaded their way across the echoing chamber, footfalls hushed and tentative.
"Where is Mother?" a voice whispered.
Another: "She has been closeted with that Jedi too long."
"It is not our place to interrupt."
They attained the safety of the far door and slipped into an adjacent passage, one connected to a broad stairwell. Master and apprentice tripped lightly up the spiraling steps, reached the main hall above, pressed themselves into deep shadows between support buttresses as a foursome of armed Sisters passed by, and then made for the main portals, wide slabs of stone inscribed with twisting sigils, a torturous calligraphy wrought upon their wide surface.
Together, they gathered the Force and pried the massive panels apart –
To the din of shrieking alarms. A wailing banshee's cry went up from the violated doors, a stabbing incantation that shattered Obi-Wan's concentration and dispelled their projected disguise.
"Quickly," Dooku barked, shoving his padawan through the narrow aperture, out into the desolate courtyard beyond, blood red beneath Dathomir's brooding skies.
A ring of foes awaited them, decked in battle array, displeasure etched upon their haggard visages. Mother Talzin stood at their head, chuckling quietly to herself.
"Were you going somewhere, Master Dooku?"