Chapter Five: The Path to Power
"Walking the path" was meant quite literally. Dzoun pointed out a trail Krell was meant to follow, one that wound through the jungle.
"You will meet some of our members," Dzoun promised. "Speak to our brothers and sisters, learn from them. Keep walking, and the path will eventually return you to us for your next trial."
And in the meantime, Krell guessed, the Revanites would send their impressions of him back to camp. With a bad impression presumably leaving him returning to an armed ambush.
"I'll be tested?" he asked aloud.
Dzoun smiled humorlessly. "Every day brings us tests, young Sith. Even the smallest tests add up over time. It is best not to fail."
Dromund Kaas was not a safe planet, and Krell's walk was not without incident. Several times, predators gathered, sizing him up for their next meal. They scattered when he activated the ancient black lightsaber he had taken from the Tomb of Tulak Hord... but it was never long before they began gathering again.
The path continued winding, but now he was heading uphill. The jungle dropped away, and he found himself working his way through a narrow mountain pass. A pack of gundark blocked his way. Krell activated his blade. The monsters did not scatter.
He stopped in place, warily evaluating the creatures even as they did the same to him. He could not risk letting them get close. He trusted his blade technique - but it would take no more than a single lucky swipe with a giant claw for him to end up dead on the rocks.
He took a single backward step, judging the distance between the approaching creatures. He probed, pushing very gently with the Force, visualizing an arc: a curved line connecting him to the first gundark, to the second and the third and the fourth, then all the way back to him.
He cocked his elbow and threw the lightsaber, which danced and spun exactly as he'd envisioned, in an oval of perfect blackness that left nothing alive in its path. Most of the gundarks didn't so much as grunt as they fell; the blade allowed them no time to respond, no time to even feel their lives' end.
He lifted his hand, catching the blade as it returned to him. He deactivated it, studying the results of its work with genuine satisfaction.
"Not bad."
Krell started as the man's voice, haughty and amused, sounded from a ledge above. Krell had sensed nothing.
A figure in Sith's robes floated down to the path in front of him. He threw back the hood of his robe with a single toss of his head, revealing him to be a Chagrian, blue skinned, his face flanked by tall black horns. His lips were drawn back in a thin, cold smile.
"Yes," the Chagrian confirmed. "I am an alien. By Sith dogma, inferior in every way. And yet here I am: I am Sith, and I am Revanite. What do you say to that?"
Krell could see that this alien Sith enjoyed rubbing his status in the faces of those who had once considered themselves his betters. He couldn't blame him: In his place, Krell would have done the same.
He shrugged. "Congratulations?"
The Chagrian seemed startled. Then he laughed, a cold and grating sound. "I like you," he declared. "I am Morrun Dokaas, Lord of Beasts."
Lord of Beasts? Krell frowned. "You set those creatures on me."
"A small test, to gauge your combat prowess."
"And if one of the beasts had gored me?"
Now it was Morrun's turn to shrug. "Then you would have failed the test. Walk with me, initiate."
He turned, walking along the mountain path, not waiting for Krell nor even looking at him.
Krell trotted to catch up. "How did you shield yourself from my senses?"
"A simple technique," Morrun said. "I emulated the presence of a beast. You likely detected me but dismissed me as an irrelevance – a mere creature, and not one interested in attack."
"How did you learn this trick?" Krell's eagerness was genuine. "Can you teach me?"
"The Master could, though it would take time. It took 12 years for me to have command of it."
"The Master?"
"The Master found me when I was a larva. He saw that I was strong in The Force. This was before Coruscant, when the Sith were still in hiding. When Sith teachings were forbidden to aliens. Nevertheless, the Master trained me, and my own abilities won me my place in the Empire. This is the way of Revan: To teach all species the path to power."
"Your Master was not punished?"
Krell forced himself to remain calm. This "Master" was doubtless a high ranking Revanite, someone whose identity would be a prize for Baras. Morrun was wary, though, not even revealing this Sith's gender. Questions would only stop the man from telling more.
Morrun smiled thinly. "There are many paths to power. The Master is strong in the Force - and also in connections and influence. Both types of power can act as shields as well as weapons."
"I see."
"Now you will answer a question, initiate." A harsher tone now, the amusement gone from his voice. "Why do you think Revan trained aliens in the ways of the Sith? Why offer power to all seekers?"
They turned a corner, revealing a view of the dark jungle below. Krell saw shapes moving in the vegetation. Sleen, vine cats, Jurgoran, other beasts. Left to their own devices, they would prey on each other. But as hunting parties from Kaas City had learned to their sorrow, the monsters would band together to destroy a common threat.
He thought of Vette, the Twi'lek slave, saving him from the initiate who ambushed him on Korriban. Had she been too weak to act, he might have died.
"Simple," Krell declared. "Servants are most useful when they are strong."
Morrun's smile returned.
Two gundark ran up the path. Krell reached for his lightsaber, but Morrun gave a dismissive wave.
"They will not attack," he said.
One gundark lowered itself before Morrun. The strange Sith climbed atop it.
"You answered well," Morrun said. "You answered like a Revanite. You may proceed on your pilgrimage."
He loped away, with the other gundark following behind. As a guard? Krell had no idea.
"Lord of the Beasts," he mused.
He hoped he would not have to fight Morrun. Not only did he like the odd alien – He also had the sense that he would be a formidable opponent.
He turned and continued on the path, walking toward his next encounter.
Black Sun Territory was effectively a miniature fiefdom within Coruscant. During the Imperial Occupation, the Sun had gained a hold on sectors too poor and isolated for the Empire to bother occupying in force. By the time the Imperials left, the gang's numbers had swelled with the desperate and the angry. It would have taken a full-scale military engagement to dislodge them, something the Republic had no appetite for.
And so an unspoken pact was forged: Security would not come down here, and the Sun would not provoke them by doing anything that affected the upper levels or general trade and tourism. Leaving the Sun full reign within their borders.
It was a place to go if you were looking to buy or sell spice, or if you needed someone put out of your way, or if you had some particularly illegal appetite to sate. Otherwise, it was a place best avoided.
Ashara Zavros could feel the stares as she and Qyzen walked through this forbidden kingdom. She had little doubt that Qyzen's size and fierce presence was keeping the predators at bay. Had she come alone, she would already have been targeted.
Their contact, Dr. Maer, had set up his clinic in a previously abandoned warehouse. Makeshift patient rooms had been created by arranging empty shelves and hanging sheets into partitions. Most of the "rooms" were occupied, some with people suffering from illness and malnutrition, others with clear knife or blaster injuries.
A pretty young human woman greeted them, asking what their ailments were. She focused her gaze on Ashara, doing her best to avoid looking directly at Qyzen.
Ashara gave her friendliest smile. "We're actually here to help Dr. Maer," she said. "Let him know that Darmas Pollaran sent us."
The woman's eyes widened slightly. She rushed back, disappearing among the improvised partitions. A moment later, she returned with a middle-aged human male.
"Darmas sent you?" Dr. Maer asked.
"An associate of his," Ashara replied. There was no advantage to telling him that Darmas had been uninterested. "She thought that your problem and ours might be connected."
Maer grunted. "Let's talk in my office."
He escorted them through the crowded warehouse to a back room. It had originally been a place for business: accounting, reconciliation of physical inventory with invoices, verification of shipping authorizations. Ashara could see places where computer equipment had been ripped from the walls and desks, likely scalped for whatever credits they could fetch.
Now there were only two pieces of equipment, both portable, both supplied by Maer himself: a simple computer, likely for tracking patient files and doing research, and a small communications unit.
"So you're here on you own business," Maer noted. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised. No one cares what happens to the people down here."
"You do," Ashara observed. "Otherwise, you wouldn't have sent that message. You wouldn't be here in the first place."
Maer nodded, sighed. "These people have been completely abandoned," he said. "They're trapped here. Even if the Black Sun let them leave, there's no place for most of them to go. They're dependent on the Sun for protection and for their next meal, leaving them no choice but to do whatever they're told."
"What have they been told to do?" Ashara asked. "Something involving Jedi artifacts?"
Maer studied her, then Qyzen. "What's your interest? Neither of you looks like a Jedi."
Only because I got kicked out. But saying that wouldn't lower the doctor's defenses. Ashara might not be allowed to pass herself off as a Jedi – but there was no rule against letting others draw their own conclusions.
She reached out a hand, raising it slowly upward. The table holding Maer's portable equipment rose into the air. She took care to keep it level.
Maer gaped. "You…"
Ashara smiled, lowered the table back into place.
"An important Jedi artifact was recently stolen from the Temple," she said. "We need to recover it. So why did you ask Darmas Pollaran for help, and how is that connected to Jedi artifacts?"
Maer stared at the table. Ashara had to say his name to draw his attention back to their conversation.
"The Black Sun," he said. "Usually, they just use standard couriers to get their stolen goods out onto the market. But lately, they've started dealing in a new type of contraband – something they don't trust to standard channels. They've been smuggling these items inside people's bodies, surgically removing them at drop sites. One man came to me in extreme pain, the object still in his abdomen. I performed surgery, and extracted this."
Maer walked to a stack of boxes. He reached into the top box and retrieved what was unmistakably a Jedi holocron.
"Whatever runs this old Jedi junk is poison to organic bodies," Maer said. "By now, the Black Sun know this, but they won't stop."
He held the holocron out to Ashara. She took it, turning it over in her hand. Such a small, light object. "What happened to the man?" she asked.
"The flesh where it had been sewn in was already necrotic when I operated. I did what I could – cut away the dead flesh, removed his kidney, infused him with as much bacta as I could spare. But the contamination had already spread, and it resisted all treatment. In the end, all I could do was stop his pain."
Ashara looked at Qyzen. Though the Trandoshan's features were hard to read, she could see his disgust.
"Jedi artifacts killing people," she said. She might no longer be with the Order, but she felt outrage just the same.
"This holocron was fitted with a magnetic tag," Maer told her. "The Black Sun must use that to identify their smugglers." And, Ashara guessed, to locate any victims who died before delivery.
Dr. Maer reached into the box a second time. This time, he removed a scanner.
"Use this to find someone who's carrying these items," he said. "Get that person here. If we get it out fast, maybe we can save a life. And if your artifact was only just stolen, maybe it will be inside one of those people."
"You know the Sun will trace this back to you," she said. "We've had eyes on us since we got off the speeder."
He sighed. "I know. I'll have to leave here after tonight. But I can't stand by and do nothing."
Ashara considered. She doubted the Noetikon was one of the artifacts being smuggled. The holocron Dr. Maer had shown them was unremarkable, a simple informational interface. These items had probably been smuggled out over a period of months, if not years.
Still, even if this did not help Master Yuon, she agreed with Maer: She could not stand by and do nothing.
"We'll do what we can," she promised. "Show us how the scanner works."