It was almost a waste, how easy it would be for Sidious to leave Vader crumpled in a corner. The possibility was so close that it seemed like reality.
Sidious sighed. If he had done his work right, this was how Maul and Vader felt most of the time. Unfortunately for him, Sidious could not have the luxury of getting close to those urges.
Instead, he tried to look at the more socially palatable side of his greatest creation as Vader strode into the amaranthine office that had belonged to Sidious for many years.
There had been a lot of pomp and circumstance as Vader had approached the senate rotunda, but after that the press had been kept away by cordons and guards, and the rest of the affair would be about none of the things that politicos and pundits had speculated over the last few days.
Vader had not come in to Sidious' office since before he had been fused with his suit. Sidious wondered what Vader associated with the place.
"Good day, master." Vader bowed his head and let the dusty edges of his black cloak pool on the carpet.
"You seem to have divided the people."
Vader turned his head as if he could see the senate's entrance hall from the doorway of the office. Sidious' words had made him wince. Anakin could take criticism. Vader was, in many, many ways, more fragile. It was a pity that Sidious had had to ruin his Chosen One in order to tame him.
Vader was all metal and stone, just as Anakin Skywalker had been desert bones and packed sand. Maul, for all his simplicity and single-mindedness, reacted better to stimuli that he could only half see. That was part of why he and Sidious had worked so well together, with some exceptions. Maul took Sidious' slightest suggestions like they were prods. Prods bounced right off him.
Vader, on the other hand, needed lots and lots of prodding.
"I have work for you. My apprentice, Darth Maul..." Sidious let the words trail off so that he could judge Vader's reaction to them. There were none. There would have been if he had mentioned Kenobi in the same sentence, but Maul was just a blip in Anakin Skywalker's history. The Chosen One would only see the perpetual Sith apprentice as an occasional annoyance. "...continues to be inconvenient."
Vader tipped his head like a bird. "There is much work that still needs to be done here," he said, hesitating as much as his forced breathing would allow: Vader was still becoming used to the automation of his own body. He would adjust to the rhythms eventually, succumbing to the cadence of his metal-shrouded lungs.
"You have all but exterminated the Jedi on Coruscant, have you not?"
"On this region of Coruscant. There are others, still many unmapped."
Sidious was not under the illusion that Vader could police the entire galaxy by himself: of course he would need Force-strong lieutenants as time went on. For now, Sidious was curious to see how Vader would handle an excess of gristly work.
"Then make a quick diversion from your task, Lord Vader. You remember Maul."
The black mask inclined downward in a tiny, sepulchral nod.
"Get rid of him. He will be visiting his ancestors on Dathomir soon. Wipe him out."
"How do you know that he will be there, Master?"
The question set off a red flag in Sidious' brain. Vader had taken some of Anakin's good tendencies - tenaciousness, hotbloodedness - and made them not grander but just more inconvenient. Luckily the grandness outweighed those traits.
"Are you jealous, Vader? Do you fear that I may still have an eye on my former apprentice?"
A lack of answer was all the reply he needed.
Sidious let some of his anger show in his voice. He did not have time to deal with his apprentice's petty ... dramas. If Vader did not have conflict with the people around him, he would invent it. Another side effect of Anakin's hot-running emotions that made him so strong in both the light side and the dark side of the Force.
"My question..." Vader rumbled.
Sidious felt piqued, but Vader was not a dog, who would keep crawling back if his master beat him. Vader needed to respect Sidious for any of this to work. The Empire, Sidious knew, would be a lot more difficult to run without Vader.
"I have planted a vision in Maul's mind. He will be pushed inevitably toward Dathomir. Go. Use whatever means necessary."
Solve both of our problems, Sidious thought. Kill him in whatever way you wish. Maybe violence will make you feel better. It will for him. It does for me, when I can get the chance.
Sidious wanted the chance to get one more barb in, though. Maybe he would be able to teach Vader a lesson. "And have you had any word of your own wayward apprentice?" Sidious asked.
Vader paused for a moment. So, he would have Sidious believe that he had forgotten.
"The girl," Sidious prodded.
Ahsoka. The name sent shockwaves through Vader's consciousness without Sidious even having to say it. To his credit, Vader did not react outwardly. "There has been no sign of her, Master."
"Fine," Sidious said. One more Jedi out on the loose in the dark, he thought. One of many. but she had three advantages: she was smart, she was fierce, and she knew Anakin. If she did not already know that he was Darth Vader now, she might be able to when she sensed his Force presence. Sidious did not imagine that Ahsoka would have gone far, if she had gone off Coruscant at all, since she had been kicked out of the Jedi Temple so reluctantly, and then invited back in, and since the Jedi lifestyle matched her altruistic, warriorlike attitude to a t.
"So be it," Sidious said.
"Is that all, Master?" Vader asked. He put the emphasis on 'all' in a way that sounded condescending to Sidious, like Vader knew that Sidious was trying to goad him by mentioning Ahsoka. Maybe he did. Sidious would be sure to use her name judiciously in the future.
"That is all, Lord Vader."
Vader turned on his heel and walked out into the bright-lit halls in the deep night, his cape swishing. Soon Sidious would follow him. He had a lot of work to do as Palpatine. The residents of the Empire were starting to feel that he was a controlling fist instead of a protective hand, and Sidious would not let them labor under false assumptions very long. Fear would work, fear would strengthen the dark side, and fear would not change whether or not the Empire could be stopped.
Yujan invited Maul aboard her ship without a fuss. He could bring his own along with her, someone else told him only after she had waved him aboard, but it would need to be slaved to the mother ship, and only Yujan knew where the fleet were going.
Of course, Maul knew - they were going to Dathomir to evangelize to the downtrodden Zabrak and Zabrak-hybrid men. The other crew members and passengers, more like relief workers than soldiers, knew too. But the exact coordinates were, per Yujan's orders, to be held by her along.
When Maul was told this, the Nautolan that told him made it clear that it was second-hand information. Someone had told him to slave his ship and so he had done it, without apparently much reticence on his part. This Nautolan wore a shirt with fringes and had a large tattoo of a snake on his forearm. It was drawn, rather badly but with an attempt at realism, in thick, black ink. He looked like someone who would slave his ship to another ship without thinking much about it.
Maul, however, had to stop and think about what to to with his own craft. It was his own, by now - he almost never thought of Kasen any more. The statue of the goddess still stared, but the couch and the table had been moved to clear the space so that Maul could practice teras kasi there, on the largest patch of open floor on the vessel. The bridge was annoyingly tiny even for one person.
Yujan had literally just waved him in. All around her, Nautolans, Devaronians, and others were bringing boxes of supplies onto the ship. The Dug was sitting on a box, giving orders, answering question after question that crewmembers asked her. She was patient and composed, and no longer wearing a hat. She still had on the red jacket that she had worn previously.
In the end, Maul decided that he would leave Kasen's ship where it was. He could afford to pay the rent, and he did not feel trapped among Yujan's people: he could fight his way out of them if necessary. The ship, while large, was still not so large that a single person could not pilot as long as they were a skilled computer programmer and could make most of the co-pilot's tasks into automated functions. Maul knew how to do that.
Draz found him just as he was wandering another hall, not sure where he was going, half-interestedly taking note of where the strongest points of the ship were and which corners would be good for an ambush. The ship was a large cruiser, but not luxurious: most of the space was taken up by storage and bunks. There were two bedrooms with eight bunk beds each. A few of the beds were not the shape Maul was used to, but a round, hammocklike nest, one over the other, that Maul assumed was more comfortable for Dugs. The beds did not take away the impression that the Dugs were like small, fearsome dog-snakes, but Maul knew that that was not their intent.
"So you decided to join us!" Draz said happily when she encountered Maul in the hallway. As soon as he nodded her affect became more grim, either because she was mirroring his flat expression or because the severity of their situation was upon her. He nodded.
"I hope it helps you find the Surins," she said. "I'm sorry if it was weird that I mentioned that before."
Maul shook his head.
"Okay," Draz said.
They left it at that.
When the ship took off, Maul found that the bunks had not been assigned but simply claimed. He was left with one of the round Dug-beds, which was far too small for him. Instead of playing cards or napping, he walked the halls. No one seemed to mind where he went. There did not seem to be one human on the ship.
He found a storage room and, wondering whether the group had packed any weapons or whether they had not gotten to that stage in their cause yet, poked in. There was a cardboard box with crinkled edges sitting near the door, and he nudged it with his foot just enough to push one of the flaps away from another.
There was a pile of red discs inside the box. Curious, he reached down and opened the box further.
He pulled out of the box a small, sewn patch. On it was a red design like a stylized anchor or a bird with swept wings. Maul had seen that symbol before. The Empire tried not to publicize it, but it was there, every once in a while, in the background of a shot or in the news media that hadn't yet caved to the emperor's demands. Maul held the patch for a moment, just feeling the weave of it, wondering who had brought the pile of them and to what they were supposed to be affixed.
The thing that Yujan had implied that Draz knew about was the fact that the protesters were affiliated with, or soon to be affiliated with, the Rebellion.
Maul nodded. So they had reached that stage. Not yet military, but carefully dipping a toe into the idea of affiliating themselves with a militant group. They had not affixed the patches yet. Maybe Yujan was one of the few people who even knew about them.
Maul knew the stages of rebellion because he had studied it, had sat in front of holograms that showed many, many wars developing from tiny groups of friends like this. First it would be people who knew each other from a club or a workplace, and then it would spread out through HoloNet and word of mouth, gathering mass and coldness like a snowball rolling down hill. Then someone would find a bit of philosophy that justified violence, usually another bit of violence real or perceived, or an unreconcilable difference, and then - people would start bringing home patches, and then they would have a banner to march under. As soon as it became visual the separation of 'us' and 'them' became more and more severe, rolling and cold, an avalanche.
The Empire, which quickly declared that it hated and did not want to liberate its enemies, as so many less sincere regimes termed their conquest, quickly found itself the target of many avalanches.
But the Empire had built many, many high walls.
And Maul, who had discovered himself to be just one stone in that wall, had no lingering sense of coherency left. He was here to find his family. If the Rebellion rolled over the Empire, so be it.
But, on the other hand, he knew that it would not. As he stood in the door to the supply closet he could hear Rebels who did not know they were Rebels playing cards and bickering in various languages, from careful words that sounded almost like Basic to snorts and growls, layered references to cultures Maul could not begin to understand. They were disorganized - and besides, Sidious would have planned for them. He would have planned for the millions of organisms that would come together into this larger organism called the Rebellion. His Chosen One, after all had always been intended as a monster to slay that hero. The patches were clearly hand-made. The Rebellion would just poke at Sidious.
The thought of Sidious actually being threatened just made Maul tired. Perhaps that was because part of him wanted to do the threatening but knew that he could not. He had resigned himself that to return to Sidious meant death. Of course, Maul could fight - the fight-lust rose in him now as it hadn't in a long time. It had been tempered by shark-blood and fish-blood, by the way he had gotten to know the slow, cunning animal intelligences in the Glee Anselm sea. Fighting a person was different now, and Sidious was a predator who operated in an element even more unfamiliar than the open ocean.
He returned to the room filled with bunk beds, where people were sitting around, dangling their legs or claiming places on the floor to talk among themselves. "What about the Senate?" one rebel was saying to another.
"We could petition them, but it would take such a long time. Once we have more people, with more influence, I'm sure we'll send someone to run that angle. But right now, because of the bureaucracy, it just seems like common sense to do the good we can do at the time."
"You might be able to do greater good for a greater amount of people, even if it takes more time, if you go to the senate," said the petite Devaronian woman. She spoke slowly, as if she was working the words out.
Maul found them dull, so he ignored them and passed through to the next room, which was closer to the bridge. There were people sitting everywhere, and it did not seem like all of them knew each other. They had a common cause, but there was some initial awkwardness in their interactions which made him believe that their alliance so far had been brief. No one paid attention to one man wandering the halls - many other people were doing the same, with various degrees of grumpy or sinister aspect too.
It seemed to call into question Maul's idea of his own cosmic importance, but the Force told him otherwise. The Force always reassured.
In the end, he slept through much of the trip , despite Draz's occasional attempts at friendship. She seemed stymied when he told her that he did not actually know where his family was, and that he hoped to maybe find them on Dathomir. He told her that he had been employed for some time as a fisherman, a topic which bored both of them, and he refused to tell her anything about his life beyond the fact that he was an itinerant. Eventually she stopped trying, although it was less that she gave him the cold shoulder and more that she was distracted by more interesting, more open people who also wished to make friends on the long trip to Dathomir.
The flight took nearly three weeks, since Dathomir was all the way on the other side of the galaxy, literally. Multiple times, the ship needed to stop for fuel. Maul overheard Yujan saying once that the space lanes were actually more empty of pirates than they had been before the Emperor had declared his law to extend all throughout the former sway of the Republic. Even crime syndicates like the Hutts, who had whole star sectors of their own, seemed to be hushed while they waited to see what stance the Empire would take toward them and what it would do once they continued their operations.
Maul exercised, mostly, during the flight. He had lost some of his skill at martial arts while he was a fisherman, and he got the chance to spar with live people on the ship. He had not stopped practicing on Glee Anselm, but practicing by himself was almost useless after a while. Even if he shadowboxed, it was never the same as fighting a live person who could be unpredictable. He found sparring partners among the rebels and quietly, and without the Force, bested them repeatedly. It helped him learn, and he became known as the muscle of the group.
That was why Yujan called him to talk to her one day.
It wasn't a secret discussion. There was hardly enough room on the ship for a secret discussion to take place. Maybe there would have been if there were fewer people on the ship, but for now, Yujan called him to her in the common room. She was wearing a plainer outfit now, navy blue with a vest, but she still had claws that looked impractically long and catlike.
"I hear that you're gaining a reputation as a good fighter," she said.
He bowed his head, looked back up. He had brought new clothes at one of the stop overs for fuel and now wore new black pants and a black tunic (it was easy to get the more obvious bloodstains out of black clothing) and a heavy brown jacket with a rounded collar that crinkled around his neck when he moved. He didn't like the collar at all, but it made him sure that he could blend in with smugglers or spacers anywhere.
"That's good," Yujan said. "And don't worry that I'm going to assign you to anything." She bit at the words angrily, occasionally sending a fine spray of spit into his face that made him shift backward. Her tone, however, was not angry. "I just like to know what's going on. And I wanted to offer you a deal. We're going to set a group down in the Nightbrothers camp. It'll all be Zabrak men like yourselves, so the Nightsisters won't see it as any type of invasion - or at least, so we hope. Another group of us will go to the Nightsisters council in that region and actually talk to them. Would you be willing to be part of that advanced group?"
"Why would you need fighters there, instead of in the place where you are more likely to face resistance?"
"I won't lie to you - it will be more about how you look than your skill. If you have to hide, you'll blend in better than, say, I would."
"Why would we have to hide? I want to know more about your plan first."
Yujan sighed, looked away. "It wouldn't be right if I didn't tell you. The Empire got to Dathomir first. They haven't approached this particular clan, but the clans know there are outsiders about, and they don't like it."
"No they're not," Maul said.
Yujan tipped her head.
Maul had to back up to realize what he had said. Yujan's words - the Empire is on Dathomir - had sparked something in him, an absolute certainty that she was wrong. He would have sensed if the Empire was on Dathomir, he thought. He would have sensed Sidious' hands in all of this. He had never sensed something from so far away before, though, and that got him wondering whether he was wrong.
"Or maybe they are..." he mused, regretting already that he had said any of it out loud. He had been among gregarious people for too long.
"Are you okay?" Yujan asked.
"You're lying to me." As soon as those words came out, Maul knew that he was certain about that part.
"What?"
"You're lying. I..." Can sense it, he wanted to say. But then she would leap to the conclusion that he was a Jedi, and - she would like that, would't she? The idea of having a mystical warrior on their side would certainly help the proto-rebellion. But it would be messy. People would begin to feel like they were trapped on the ship with him. "I can tell."
"Hmm," Yujan said calmly. "Listen, it's not that I'm lying. I didn't have the plan halfway formed before we started out, because something might have changed on the way. But I have more planned for when we get there than I've told all of you - nothing different, just something more." She looked around, sighed again. She hadn't planned on talking about this but didn't mind if people heard. A few, the ones who had been around her before she had called Maul over, and others, looked between the two of them. "I want to recruit the Nightsisters to the Rebellion."
"The Rebellion," a Devaronian breathed.
"Yes." Yujan raised her voice, looking over and around Maul at more and more people who were paying attention, getting into the rhythm of her speech now and proclaiming confidently the thoughts that she had probably been turning over and over in her head over the last fourteen days and nights. "First of all, I want you all to know that I've been in talks with the leaders of the Rebellion. I won't give you names, but they're gathering people and forming a network. If any of you have any ideological differences with the Rebellion, you're welcome to voice them."
People were gathering behind Maul now, forming a half-moon around Yujan. She continued speaking. "I know a lot of the people working in the Rebellion are humans. Its leaders...well, I know they're sympathetic to our cause."
She waited for people to raise their hands, to protest. There were mutters behind Maul, and he didn't like the fact that, if she wanted, Yujan could blame him for this in some way: he was literally in the middle of it even though he hadn't started it. Yujan had used him to nip rumors in the bud and so she had drawn him into this.
He kept quiet.
In the end, the proto-Rebels decided to go along with her plan. She had to explain it first, and so the gathering became something more formal, more hushed and tensed. People gathered in the common room around her still held sabacc cards or digital readers in their hands, fussing at flimsiplast and thick plastic alike, rubbing away the dirt.
Yujan explained. One group would ingratiate themselves with the Zabrak men, talking about freedom. The other would speak to the women, try to reason with them and get them to join the Rebellion. Maul nodded along. This worked for him, if he wanted to find his family. Names probably passed along the matriarchal line in Dathomiri-Zabrak society, but the men would be more likely to remember the goings-on in their small community.
Savage had explained to him that not all Nightsisters lived the same way his tribe did, and most tribes did not even communicate with each other very often. The Nightsisters made sure that neither sub-society became inbred through keeping elaborate records (or so Maul assumed. Savage had never looked into that aspect of things.)
Apparently another rebel knew something similar. "Which clan are we visiting?" a female voice said.
"The Nightbrothers," Yujan said, and that seemed to explain it to the other woman.
"Why them?" Another group asked. "There are friendlier clans."
"That's part of the reason," Yujan said without hesitation. "We need people who will fight. The Nightsisters are fierce."
This prompted more muttering, but Yujan pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes and flattened her ribbed bat-ears to her head, and no one challenged her.
(Rule by fear, Maul learned later, can happen anywhere. It is not always orchestrated, it is not always organized.)
After that, the group went back to playing cards and talking. Some resentment simmered. Some people, Yujan announced without either sullenness or sadness, got off at the next fuel stop, not willing to take the plunge into the Rebellion, or perhaps not willing to ally themselves with a group lead, supposedly and if the rumors were true, by humans.
And the next stop was Dathomir.
Maul knew that the only person who really knew him on this planet was Mother Talzin, and since she was one of the only surviving members of the Nightsisters clan, Yujan was going to have to be careful that she didn't walk into a whole mess of inter-clan warfare when she arrived on Dathomir. That was also the first time Maul thought about how weak the clan would be. There would be a lot of men, who knew how to fight in theory, but had never really gone to war. Their fighting was more a sort of display, and Savage had not given his clan a very good name compared to the power of the Sith. The Nightsisters did not develop their Force sensitivity, seeing it simply as a side effect of magic that used hallucinogenic herbs as much as it did anything with actual transformative properties, so even Force-strong ones would be weaker than Maul. Yujan might just find a ghost town. The Nightsister buildings that Maul remembered were barely distinguishable from natural forms by the untrained eye anyway.
He did not tell Yujan any of this. Helping her miniature rebellion to succeed was not why he was here, and he needed to get to his clan to try to find his parents - or at least his father.
When the time for the mission came, Maul was chosen to go with the group to the Nightbrothers. The other two members of the group seemed to have done evangelism of this type before. Maul had, he supposed, been chosen simply because he looked the part.