Chapter 3
Wooden sticks the length and weight of lightsabers clattered in a blur of swings and parries, until the shorter of the two combatants broke from the exchange and signalled for a stop. "No more," Sabeeth said, mopping her brow. "It's too hot for this."
"Hot?" Anakin echoed, lowering his stick. "You call this hot?"
"Your world was baked by two suns, desert-boy. Mine had none."
"Tatooine would fry you to a cinder."
"It very nearly did."
Obi-Wan smiled at their banter, watching from a spot in the shade of the tower. A cool breeze riffled his robe and sent a swarm of crisp reddish leaves skirling across the raked earth of the practice yard.
Sabeeth tipped her face into the breeze, closing her eyes in pleasure as the cool air blew loose strands of night-black hair back from her damp brow.
She had been back for seven days, and already it was as if she'd never left them. The time she'd been gone seemed unimportant, a dreary dream from which he'd finally awakened.
"You were on Tatooine?" Anakin perked up in interest.
"Once, briefly. And never again," she stated, dunking a dipper into a barrel of water and dumping it over her head.
"What were you doing there?" The boy asked. He hadn't even broken a sweat under Sylvar's yellow and mild sun.
Sabeeth wrung a stream from the hem of her tunic. "I owed your teacher some money."
"No, you didn't," Obi-Wan objected.
"You fed me, clothed me, paid my way around three systems," she said.
"Like you you're not making it worth his while," Anakin snickered, then subsided as they both shot him sharp looks.
"I don't need the money, Sabeeth," Obi-Wan said. "And I'm a little afraid to ask where it came from."
"I knew there was a reason I came here," she said, choosing a piece of fruit from the bowl beside Obi-Wan. "As it's not the cooking, it must be the high esteem in which you both seem to hold me."
"What, were you a dancing girl?" Anakin guessed. "There were a lot of those on Tatooine. The Hutts --"
"Was I a what?" Sabeeth flung the fruit at him.
Before it hit, he snatched it from mid-air with the power of the Force. Bringing it to his hand, he took a bite, grinning at her with juice running down his chin.
"I take it that's a no," Obi-Wan said. "Something of a relief."
"You're as bad as him. No, I was not a dancing girl. I worked for Pran Kessel."
"The smuggler?" Anakin asked eagerly. "Really?"
"Smuggling, bounty hunting, some piracy here and there," Sabeeth said. "And gambling; that's what took us to your sand-pit. Mos Eisley, what a place!"
"Scum and villainy," Obi-Wan said absently.
"That's putting it kindly."
"Well, I'm going back someday," Anakin said. "To free the slaves. I promised my mother."
"You'll go back," Obi-Wan said. "Once you've completed your training."
"I'm close, though, aren't I? I finished my lightsaber!"
"Let's see how well you can use it." He tossed the recently-completed weapon to Anakin and drew his own.
"I'll sit this one out," Sabeeth announced, making herself comfortable in the shade.
"While you rest," Obi-Wan suggested, glancing at her, "you could work on lifting objects."
Sabeeth grimaced.
"You should develop your gifts," he said.
"Remember what happened last time I tried that?"
"I do!" Anakin said, slapping his thigh merrily. "You cracked the stone in half instead of floating it!"
"Exactly, and this is supposedly a peaceable technique you Jedi use to hold off your enemies. Can you imagine what would happen if I directed that at a living person?"
"Better to practice and be prepared, so that you're not surprised into using it unintentionally," Obi-Wan said reasonably.
"Yes, Master." She said, emphasizing the word, giving it all kinds of interesting meanings.
Obi-Wan gave her a stern look, but she just look right back at him, so seductively he had to avert his eyes and will his face not to redden.
Sabeeth smiled triumphantly, almost feline and fixed her emerald eyes on the bowl. It was heaped with yellow-orange globes, with thin skin and crisp, juicy innards, plucked only that morning from the trees surrounding their tower home. One hand reached out as if to grab, stopping several inches away.
Obi-Wan felt the Force thicken around her, saw a violet flicker in her eyes. Beside him, Anakin winced in anticipation.
"You're concentrating too hard," he mumbled.
The bowl quivered, rattling on the table. One piece of fruit began to rise jerkily from the pile.
"Relax your mind," Obi-Wan said.
It imploded as if suddenly squeezed in an iron fist. Pureed bits spattered on the ground.
"Better," he admitted.
Sabeeth voiced her opinion with a few words she'd probably picked up from smugglers on Kessel's Run.
Anakin giggled.
"Repeat any of that in the presence of the Council, the Senate, or the queen," Obi-Wan warned him, "and you'll have to answer to me."
"See?" Sabeeth chose another piece by more conventional means. "Bad example. I haven't even been here a week yet, and you've got me swearing in front of the kid."
"I've heard worse," Anakin said. "There was this one time --"
"Can we continue the lesson?" Obi-Wan tapped the haft of his lightsaber meaningfully against his palm.
"Carry on," Sabeeth said, taking a bite.
They faced off. Blue-white and pale green came alight in unison.
Anakin's first swing was coming right at him. He parried, then began launching a series of testing strikes of his own.
"Don't watch my hands," he cautioned. "Watch my eyes ... that's where you'll see the attack coming."
"If we can see things before they happen," Anakin said, circling, "and that's what makes our reflexes so sharp, how can one Jedi win against another? They'd both know what the other guy was going to do before he even did it."
"We're not infallible, for one. For another, our mental barriers can help shield our intent. You'll also learn the knack of changing tactics at the last possible instant, without projecting. Even Jedi can be taken by surprise."
He demonstrated, starting off with a high-over arc but switching to a low sweep. Anakin, already raising his lightsaber to protect his head, yelped and leaped backward as Obi-Wan's bright blade seared a line at his feet.
"And sometimes," he said, "even knowing what your opponent is going to do can't help you defend against it. Sometimes we're simply outmatched. Or lucky."
Anakin nodded and lunged, swinging at Obi-Wan's left arm. Their blades clashed inches from his right leg instead.
"Not bad," he said. "You'll learn to do it as second nature."
"What I really want," Anakin said, "is for you to show me how you do that double-jump-kick thing. You know, where you go yah! with both feet at the same time --" He tried to demonstrate and nearly ended up on his backside.
"Let's focus on one lesson at a time."
A chill prickled his flesh. He looked up, thinking at first that a cloud had passed over the sun, but the sky was clear.
No, it had come from within ...
He turned inward to pursue it while holding his defensive stance. It seemed he could almost hear a voice, faint and far ... not calling to him but crying out in pain and dread ...
Sensation ... a spreading, creeping coldness and the feeling of something being taken ... helplessness, immobility ... draining ...
Uri-Tan!
He recognized the touch of that mind, the desperate flight of thought between childhood friends close as brothers.
Losing contact ... no, worse than that! Slipping away, clinging to a tenuous thread, weaker and weaker ...
Obi-Wan dimly realized that Anakin was trying again, coming at him with one intended manoeuvre, diverting ... even as he brought himself back to enough awareness to counter that plainly obvious move, Anakin was leaping- somersaulting, --that-- was the real attack, landing behind him and ready to strike –
"No!"
A wooden bowl intercepted the green lightsaber. Charred splinters exploded in a halo.
Obi-Wan staggered, bringing a hand to his forehead. He dropped his weapon.
Sabeeth was there, shouldering past the stunned and stricken Anakin to support Obi-Wan as he chased the vanishing trace of Uri-Tan's mind into a frigid and empty darkness. His legs refused to hold him upright, and if not for Sabeeth he would have gone sprawling.
"Did I hurt him? Please say he's okay!" Anakin cried. "I thought he'd ... I didn't think it would..."
"Easy, Ani," Sabeeth said. "You didn't hit him."
"But I would have!" he said, agonized.
"You didn't, Anakin!" she said sternly. "Now gather your wits; I need your help!"
All of this came to Obi-Wan as if he was listening to a conversation in a separate room. He quested outward, found only an echo of the initial sensation ... helpless ... draining ... so cold!
Then even that was gone, and he blinked and was back in his proper surroundings. Sitting with his back leaned against the tower wall. Sabeeth kneeling over him, Anakin hovering at her elbow with anxiousness contorting his face.
"Uri-Tan," he gasped.
Sabeeth frowned, perhaps thinking him delirious, but Anakin understood.
"Another Jedi," Anakin said. "His friend. They grew up together on Coruscant after being taken away from their families."
"Dead?" Sabeeth asked Obi-Wan.
"I don't know ... I felt his pain, his fear, his suffering ... but not his death. There was something else ... something was happening to him, being done to him ... something terrible." He convulsed in a shudder. "It was no premonition. It was happening at that moment. And now, I cannot reach him at all."
XXX
"He's gone," Mace Windu said.
Zadrek Kellnu sighed heavily, massaging her temples and absently pushing back a strand of auburn hair that had come loose from her elaborate coiled bun. "Gone ... but not dead. We would have felt that."
The rest of the Jedi Council sat in silence. In that instant, each of their faces, markedly different from one another as they were, all bore identical expressions of concern and dismay.
"That makes five," Imlen V'drin said, the membranous gills at his throat fluttering in agitation. His voice was at once high as a reed instrument and underscored with a deep hum. "And no answers, no explanations!"
"Accidents, these are not." Yoda thumped his walking-stick against the arm of his chair. "Action against us is being taken. The Sith it is!"
"We never knew whether Obi-Wan Kenobi slew the master or the apprentice six years ago," Mace Windu said. "But there are always two, so one survived ... and has had time to gather strength."
"But what are they doing?" Kellnu demanded, her dusky skin still ashen at the memory of the last despairing cry of Uri-Tan's mind. "If they mean to attack us, why not kill them? Why this ... this ... we don't even know what is happening to them!"
"In danger are we all," Yoda said. "Worse things than death might there be. If dead they were, contact us they might. But lost are they. Lost even to us. The work of the Dark Side this is, hatred and evil."
"What do we do?" V'drin trilled furiously.
"Summon the Jedi we must," Yoda declared. "All of them."
"What of their missions?" Gol Xadir countered, clicking his hoof-like knuckles together. "Can we endanger --"
"Can we endanger more of our own?" Mace Windu cut in. "Until we know what this new threat is, we must proceed carefully."
To Be Continued