Vader fought him, caught him for a moment in what was almost an embrace. Maul strained against metal arms as both of them fell, the rocks tumbling around them. Metal legs clanked against metal legs. For a moment a Force presence seemed to whip past them along with the rest of the scenery - his mother Zanja was out there somewhere, watching. Rocks clattered around the sound of Vader's lightsaber. Maul tucked his head against Vader's chest and held on until the two of them rolled apart at the bottom. If he was going to be stabbed with the lightsaber Vader had been too stupid or bloodthirsty to put out, he would take Vader with him.
At the bottom, Vader lay as if crucified. Maul rolled to a crouch. His burnt leg felt shaky, so he pushed up with his left instead and reached out to pull the blaster to him. It had snagged in a rock fall on the wall of the crater. The avalanche had not quite filled the depression in the earth: he and Vader lay at the bottom of the shallow depression, the ground littered with vines and boulders waiting to trap an ankle.
Before Maul could pull the blaster from the rocks, Vader stood up.
It was as if he stole the Force from Maul's hands. Maul felt himself lifted, his entire body constrained. The pain in his shoulders was emphasized now, while his legs felt invisible and useless, like they belonged to someone else. Maybe to Vader, even more of a machine than Maul had ever been.
Skywalker, though, had been something else.
If Maul couldn't kill Vader, surely he could kill Skywalker- the Jedi boy, the one who had always been hounding Obi-Wan's feet as Obi-Wan hounded Maul's, the one who now hurt because he had lost the privilege of being a student.
Vader, Palpatine's pet, the Jedi who had never earned the right to his title the way Maul had. Who was he to walk proudly? He had no right to hate.
Even as Vader lifted him into the air by the throat. Maul dug around in the Skywalker-persona he remembered and the fragments of the one Vader projected. "I have seen your hatred, the Jedi losses to which you cling."
Vader burned and tightened his grip.
"And so many lost..." Maul eked out.
Vader's momentary shock was almost enough to get him to let go. Maul almost smirked. There was another presence swirling around in Vader's thoughts too, and old wound almost healed but connected to newer ones by still-bleeding runnels. Fear is my ally, and the Force shall set me free.
Anakin was afraid of thinking about his apprentice. Maul knew very little about the last of Qui-Gon's lineage, but identity didn't matter. All that mattered was that Vader's fear and hatred vortexed around the idea of an apprentice but were not fed from it.
(Not so afraid as he was of thinking about his Master, but Maul was not sure what his own emotions would do if he thought too much about Obi-Wan here, within Anakin's umbra. It would blind him, and his task right now was to try to keep Vader the blind one.)
Vader squeezed tighter on Maul's throat, making his vision swim and flash. Maul struggled, digging his heels into the dirt. "Find the Padawan next -"
The boulders rose up behind them and blasted forward, brown and gray and shadowed, as heavy as starships. One caught Vader in the back and pitched him forward. Maul tried to whip his legs up to kick Vader back, but succeeded only in hitting his mask with his knees. It was enough to put some distance between them when they hit the ground. Maul crawled backwards while Vader levered himself up on his elbows. The rocks were still falling without Maul's push, though, tumbling over one another on the hill. A boulder struck his shoulder and immediately numbed it. He didn't understand why the pain was flaring on his other side until he saw that he'd hit the ground, next to a patch of grass. The cacophony of the stones still rang out as more fell toward him. Metal creaked - Vader trying to get up? Dark spots started getting bigger in front of Maul's eyes. His metal legs should still work, but the pain in his upper body was cutting them off from him, blurring his thoughts.
Why did Anakin Skywalker have to win this way? (Or lose this way, but, Maul thought really, win.) Why did Maul's brother have to die before he remembered who he was? Cruel world, cruel words, cruel Glee Anselm sea. So be it. Maul closed his eyes.
As soon as he opened them again he was struggling.
He pushed to his feet, immediately landing square on the pebble-strewn ground, looking around fully alert. Zanja crouched next to him with a burning crock filled with what looked like pieces of sticks and leaves in her left hand.
"This is the third time a witch has saved your life," Zanja said. "What are you going to do now?"
Maul shook his head, trying to dislodge his fuzzy thoughts. "Go back into the galaxy. Not now. When I'm ready."
"Good. You can't stay here. I don't imagine that you want to be a Nightbrother. It would be a challenge for you to become a warrior."
"You didn't save me. I landed on my feet."
"And then hit your head."
They stared levelly at one another. He sat up fast, felt cold air on his wounded shoulder and saw that she had torn his sleeves off and put some of the herb poultice on bruises and scrapes. "Why did you help me?"
She shrugged. "Residual kindness. I tend to birds too. I cannot do anything for your leg."
He sat up and dug his toes into the rocky ground, then stood up. The wounded leg felt disjointed, as if its parts weren't working as efficiently as they should, but it took his weight. He would have to look at the knee and make repairs or reinforcements there, later. For a moment he missed his common room couch on Kasen's ship.
"Where's Vader?"
"The Imperial ship picked him up and left."
"He didn't kill me."
"You put up a good fight," she said. The words smacked of flattery, and the Force soured. He snarled and pushed a thought into her mind, urging her to continue on that train of thought.
"Come back with me," she said, as if she had not noticed his influence. At the same time, he considered what he thought were unlikely reasons for Vader to leave him behind: that the other Sith had thought he was dead, that Sidious had ordered that Maul should live. They bothered him like a sneeze, tickling the back of his throat.
"Why?"
"You will help me in my work. There is much to discover of the dark side here. Are you curious about the things that lurk in the dark forests?"
He shook his head. "Your people are not my people."
"You are a Nightbrother."
"Was I? And what else am I, mother?"
"You are a child like those in our legends."
"I do not remember any legends." He sniffed the air, catching dust and the herbs she used. Where was his blaster? He stood up and started searching, stepping carefully between the stones.
"You would not be kept with the other men."
He hadn't thought of the Nightbrothers' enslavement. Suddenly Zanja's words were more ominous. I promise not to enslave you? It was not a hard bargain. "I'm looking for my gun."
"It must have been lost when the rocks fell."
Aah. There it was. He turned a mossy stone over with his boot and found only a dark green vine. He raised his head, kept his back to Zanja. "So that is what it feels like when you're lying."
She had been lying for a long time.
As he turned she was narrowing her eyes, but giving nothing else away on her face.
He could see the blaster laying behind one of the larger rocks, wedged in a crack. The metal top looked like a ribbon between the many-colored rock faces. "Ah," Maul said. "There it is."
Zanja disappeared. She did not use the thick green smoke that Talzin favored, but instead the air simply folded around her, glimpses of blue and white and silver before she magicked herself away and left the smell of the poultice behind.
When he reached the blaster he found that it had been crushed beyond recognition, the barrel completely gone somewhere under the rockfall. It might be good as a grenade, now, but certainly not as a gun.
Maul turned his back to her and walked back toward the forest.
Had she really been his mother? The Force had been telling him otherwise, quietly, and when it had become loud enough he listened to it. That was how it had always been, since Coruscant. Not since Dathomir. Maul had become accustomed to being no one's.
Where now? He cast his senses out, feeling over the trees and creeping things to find the Empire in its metal ships. Vader would be a powerful, poisonous presence up there in the sky. Maul felt only traces, like the ions left behind from their drives. He could follow it if he quieted, if he was still for a very long time and took the sort of short steps he had taken already. If he hitched a ride with a smuggler or a Nightbrother-slave.
Maul was tired of short steps.
He scaled the first tree with low-lying branches, but found that it was difficult to progress that way for very long. The branches were black and narrow, and they were too weak to take his weight, especially with his metal legs. He dropped down, pushed his way between fallen trees and through poisonous-looking clumps of stiff grasses.
As soon as he arrived at the hut, he knew that it was empty. Zanja's presence had long departed, leaving only Maul's memory of the workshop to guide him in a slow circle around the house. He found an empty garage and kicked-up leaves: she had taken a speeder bike.
Maul looked into the forest, heard the hooting there and sensed hard, fast lives.
Wondered where he had gone wrong. He had lost something of himself and had been going wrong for a long time, even since he had decided not to go to Coruscant and encounter Sidious and the man he now knew to be Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker. Back then, though, he had not been used to doubting himself, and it had felt as if the Force had hinted that his choice to stay his course was right. Had even then it been setting something in him, some geas to take him out of the world, to make him a more serene, more solitary person?
No. There was not that much meaning in the world. Fear was his compass. What did he fear now? He could still smell the herbs the witch kept in her hut. He would be the last of the Sith after all, as he had always been destined to be. He would see the last of the Jedi, even if he was far away from that goal now. The last would be the last for him because he would command that moment. He would control its singularity, its purpose. Fear was modulated, but not removed, by control.
He wouldn't want to erase the fear.
He tried to catch up with the speeder bike. By ground or by tree it was too far away, leaving him bent over and panting, beginning to feel lost in the forest. Maybe he could loop around toward the Nightbrother complex, but someone there would probably try to stop him at least to find out what had happened when the Empire had landed. He could almost hear the bike ahead of hm. Zanja was right there, afraid but not in the same way that he was. Her fear was more panic, less tool, and he marveled that he had ever thought she was his mother, or bothered to work the relationship into his equations. Perhaps she was going to Mother Talzin, the one who had already shown her willingness to turn Maul and those like him into strong weapons in someone else's war.
He reached out along the path she had taken, sighting along his hands like a sniper. Beyond his reach, Zanja hunched over the steering veins of the speeder bike, nervous.
He felt his arms shaking, rolled his shoulders to dislodge the creeping tension. Vader had fought so well. He had fought like a Force user, and it had been far too long since Maul had experienced that -
Someone had to be killed today.
Rook Kast shoved the lever down and watched Dathomir resolve out of the starfield in front of her. Beside her, Gar Saxon turned his black and red helmet toward her for one dismissive moment before focusing back on the view. No one hailed them from Dathomir, even though they were within range of most conventional forms of transmission. Kast had expected this. All sources said that Dathomir was a primitive, isolationist planet, and that its inhabitants didn't care who got lost on the surface. A planet was a big place. Tourists were likely to be eaten by rancors, or just get lost.
Kast started to scan for places to set down the Kom'rk fighter.
"The Empire's already here," Saxon said matter-of-factly. He pointed out the window with one stubby finger while craning his neck toward her console to look at the displays. He was right - a Star Destroyer lurked off to port, barely visible. Kast imagined it as a silver needle.
"They don't care we're here," she said, adjusting the controls she needed to complete the shift over from hyperdrive coasting to sublight.
"They might care that he's here."
"If he even is," she said.
Saxon sat back in his jumpseat and folded his arms, still watching the controls. She had been working with him long enough that she could almost track his line of sight through two helmets and in her peripheral vision. Both of them had thought that Maul had been a beacon of hope for what remained of the Mandalorians (the true Mandalorians, lethal, organized, and dropping in number through both death and disinterest.)
"You heard the man," Saxon said. "We pay an information specialist that much to track one tiny ship here, and we ought to get our credits worth. Lord Maul might not have been part of that refugee group after all, but you backed me up on it."
The refugees from Glee Anselm had indeed come to Dathomir, if the informant was correct. Kast nodded as she plotted a course that would skirt the Imperial destroyer in a semi-circle. "I'm just playing Sith's advocate."
"All of these ships aren't here because of the Nautolan councilman."
"No. Maybe something else. If we're lucky, they don't even care we're here."
She flew the half-circle and descended without incident, always looking at the radar as if glancing over her shoulder. The Imperial ship just sat there in the distance, almost too small to see. Kast shook her head. "We're a little in over our heads, Saxon."
He didn't reply. In all the times they had fought together, silence had meant assent.
For a few minutes she wasn't sure where to set down, so went into a low geosynchronous orbit. Now it was Saxon's turn to look at the radar every few seconds. Soon, though, both of them saw the clouds drift into spirals and the radar flare as as another ship lifted out of the atmosphere. "We'll follow that ship," Kast muttered, and kept orbiting.
It wasn't subtle, but the Imperials didn't seem to care about a small transport looking for a place in the inhospitable forest to land. Another ship, with the distinct three-winged silhouette of an Imperial shuttle, lifted off from the same location not long after them, and Kast switched tactics, diving down into the atmosphere.
She could tell immediately that the Imperial ship had come from one of the few villages in the area. The Nightbrother compound barely had enough space for the small ship to land, but something had been going on there recently. There was smoke rising from the forest nearby, and people gathering on the ramparts.
"From this distance they all look like him." Saxon had his eyes fixed on the primitive perimeter wall.
"Wait." The smoke was moving through the forest. Kast banked to follow a vehicle making the trail through the trees, feeling the atmosphere jostle against the hull. Saxon projected skepticism, but didn't say anything to dissuade her; the impression remained in the tilt of his shoulders.
Kast was right. She saw a dark figure at the edge of a road in the forest, saw the smoke rising from wreckage. "You'll have to go down there. I'll hold it as steady as I can."
Saxon grunted and got out of his seat.
Again Kast looked back and forth between the screens as she opened the rear ramp, holding the ship steady as it hovered just above the treetops. Saxon could easily fly down there, although returning with a person in tow might be more difficult. If she needed to talk to him helmet-to-helmet, the channel was open. Until then, she waited and kept the engines stable, and after far too long a wait she heard two knocks on the back hatch and a click in her mic.
She brought the ship up slowly, and couldn't help squinting toward the ground, dialing her filters up so that she could see how the ground had been torn up in furrows. It was as if the speeder had bounced or been dragged along the natural avenue before turning into wreckage.
Saxon plodded back into the bridge, with Maul edging around the bulkhead behind him.
Kast glanced over her shoulder. "Welcome back, Lord Maul."
Saxon fell into the navigator's chair. Maul, impersonally ungrateful, just nodded.
Maul looked out the viewport in the narrow gap between his Mandalorian lieutenants as the ship lifted above the atmosphere. He licked dry lips and wondered whether he was satisfied - by Vader's disappearance, by Kast and Saxon's return, by the memory of Sanja's corpse, her shoulder broken first when the Force grabbed her off of the speeder bike. Maul had stood up from beside the body just as Saxon jetted down. Hunting Jedi had given him a similar feeling of pleasant challenge. If only he had felt a Padawan braid in his fingers, not the Nightsister's stiff black hair.
Almost. It had almost been enough, to have his revenge upon at least one person.
And now? Vader was out there, but he was more the pillar man than Anakin. Maul shook his head, saw the Mandalorians respond to the movement with minute, semi-conscious shiftings of their gloved hands on the controls. He could go after the Empire. He could indulge that itch, give in to that pathway of vengeance as easy as falling asleep. Why not?
But why? To taunt Anakin? (Yes. To pique the apprentice of his Master, to bring the Chosen One to his knees. Yes.)
To fight Sidious? To show himself to the Master who had never come for him? Sidious had abandoned him to pirates as if he was a commoner, easily assassinated. What would it mean, to go back to his teacher? Maul's mind flinched away from it.
And the rebels? They also fought Vader, but were too secular to have drawn Sidious' Force-strong attention yet. They had accepted him as one of their own simply because of his species, which had made trust laughably easy.
The Death Watch was fragmented, but Kast and Saxon clearly still had some kind of structure, some kind of loyalty, left after the still-so-recent end of the Clone Wars.
He could see the fuzzy, blue edge of the atmosphere as Kast accelerated over the north pole of the planet. In the empty space between the Mandalorians' heads, the stars stared in their thousands. Maul said, "What do you know about alien dissidents?"
You have fallen so far, my apprentice.
This refusal to die is not admirable. You aren't a threat any longer, not if what Vader says is true. You had to be dragged away by the Nightsisters, that decimated coven of Force-pretenders. Maybe you will go back to being the barbarian you once were, that you always were. Savage wore his barbarism on his sleeve. That was part of why I did not concern myself with him until he meddled in something bigger.
There is still healthy competition for Vader, in the Outer Rim colonies and among the crews of his own starships and hired killers, if not here on Imperial Center. He doesn't need an old dog nipping at his heels. Eventually, you will die. Vader will die too, but not before he has served his purpose. He can fight the Rebellion in ways you cannot. You were a good assassin for a short time, but always a terrible spy.
I have no more plans for you.
Author's Note: As always, it's been fun to get inside Maul's head. This is the end of the story. I have ideas about where a sequel might go, but am not sure if that sequel will ever be written. Thank you to those people who have left reviews, as well as the Star Wars fandom in general. Here's to Dec. 18.