Moments of Truth/Part 19

As Jirdo croaked, clasping Narasi's wrists, she snarled, "Think maybe you might've left out one or two details?"

Some part of Tirien appreciated it. Lying on the bunk, sleep was a terrible temptation; his whole body ached from repeated impacts, to say nothing of Bras's Force lightning, and the idea of drifting off for a few hours—or days—sounded as pleasant as a vacation to Alderaan. No enemy had tested him like this since Vandak. But in his heart he knew they could not delay, and his Padawan's temper gave him the motivation to sit back up. "Narasi…"

"I got this, Master."

"Put him down, Narasi."

"I don't interrupt you when you're negotiating!"

Zaella laughed, and Tirien allowed a chuckle, though it made his chest hurt. But Jirdo's face was turning purple, so Tirien put more durasteel in his tone and commanded, "Put him down."

Narasi snarled again, but she whirled and threw Jirdo to the deck; he bounced and rolled twice before coming to a halt. Groaning, he tried to press himself up. "I'm sorry…"

Zaella kicked him down. "Damn right you're sorry! Now start talking!"

Jirdo clutched his side and moaned, and Tirien forced himself to his feet. Narasi and Zaella would feed off each other if he let this carry on; their friendship had been good for both of them in many ways, but Tirien also feared it could draw out and exacerbate their worst qualities. Staggering around to put himself between them and Jirdo, he said, "Enough. Jirdo, whatever you've been holding back, now is the time.  Innocent people died today, and I'm holding you to account for their lives."

That, more than any physical torment, seemed to reach him; he had gotten up to a sitting position only to put his face in his shaking hands. Zaella said, "Spit it out! Where the kriffing hell did all that come from?"

"I swear I don't know," Jirdo said. "I-I suspected…I think M-Maia suspected it…but we never knew for sure!"

"What didn't you know?" Tirien asked.

"The Whispers…it's not the will of the Force. And it's not just the dark side, either.  There's…will behind it.  A consciousness."

He shuddered, and Tirien narrowed his eyes. "Go on."

"At first—and I mean for years—it was subtle. I thought it was the will of the Force; it was just this sense that we were doing the right thing roping in all the Guudrians, putting together the kingdom.  That it was the best way to keep them safe.  And when I had the idea about the Jedi religion…"

Jirdo trailed off, his eyes distant and disturbed. "I…I think it was my idea. Now I can't be sure.  Was it all manipulation…?"

"Focus."

"Yeah. I…yeah.  Anyway, I had the idea for the religion, but then the Whispers—we called it that because that's what it felt like—they told me about the shrines.  And not just the concept, but the design, the way to shape each corae.  That's when I first started to suspect the Whispers weren't the will of the Force, but the will of…someone."

"Wait," Tirien said, frowning. "What about the coraie?"

Before he could answer, Zaella said, "I thought I recognized something in there! The design in the skylight, right?"

Jirdo blinked. "How did you—?"

Ignoring him, she looked at Tirien. "I've seen that shape before, on Ryloth."

Tirien felt a chill. "Where?"

"Lady Hadan's throne room."

They stared at each other, and Tirien thought they were drifting toward the same horrible notion. Then, as one, they turned back to Jirdo, and Tirien said, "The Whispers told you how to design the coraie?"

"Yeah, and each one's a little different. I don't know what the designs mean, we didn't know what they were for…"

Tirien gritted his teeth. "What else?"

"I…I told you the Guudrians called Kharkûskyat 'the Cold Lands'. But they also said that in the past, heroes had gone on quests there, fought monsters, endured horrible trials.  When I first heard the stories I thought it was just legends—maybe the terrain was dangerous.  Even when we found it, Maia figured maybe the Force nexus had changed some of the local animals—made them more intense or something.  But now…"  Jirdo swallowed. "I think the Whispers…whispered to them, too."

"Wait," Narasi said; Tirien saw her eyes had widened. "Wait. The Cold Lands—that's where the Snow Woman went, right?"

"The Snow…oh, yeah, I remember that legend. Yeah, I think so."

"They said she was looking for someone called Tu'um. The Guudrians thought it was…I think some sort of dark god, maybe?  But that was before you got here, right?"

"Assuming it actually happened? Yeah."

"So they didn't speak Basic back then—they wouldn't have recognized Basic words." She looked at Tirien. "Like, for instance, if they heard a word like—"

"—'tomb'," Tirien finished. Sith symbols, a poisoned land full of monsters where even brave beings dared not go, whispers from the darkness… "A Sith tomb.  Bras didn't master the dark side overnight—he's possessed."

Saying it aloud brought the true horror of it home to Tirien. He had felt the awful power of the dark side even before he and the Thing inside Bras had come to blows, heard the horrible whispers of doom and torment for everyone he cared for taunting him, trying to sap his strength. He had never faced such Force powers, even from Vandak, and the Thing had been limited by Bras's strength; its own soul was clearly too much for Bras's body to handle. But set free…?

Narasi's ears stood straight up, Zaella's eyes widened, and Jirdo hunched down—all the evil he had done seemed to be catching up to him at once. "All the shrines…we built them because the Whispers said it would help…it would allow the taint in the land to leave…"

"That Thing can't be allowed to escape," Tirien said. "Narasi, fire up the engines."

She started. "Wait, what? Now?"

"Of course now."

"But the fight…Master, we're all exhausted—"

"Jirdo, the ship you, Maia, and Bras brought to Guudria—is it still functional?"

Jirdo nodded. "We've kept it grounded since the first couple years, but yeah, it should work."

Tirien looked at his Padawan. "We absolutely can not allow this Thing to get offworld. Fire up the ship."

The hair on Narasi's right ear stood up and she bared her fangs in stress, but she nodded. "Yes, Master."

As she ran to the cockpit, Tirien turned to Zaella. "I know I've conscripted you to defend Marekka because you were here, but I won't ask you to go with us if you're not willing."

"I…" She was warring with herself, Tirien could see it in her eyes. He did not know the margin of victory, but eventually loyalty won and she shook her head. "No. No, I'll…I'll go."

Tirien clasped her uninjured shoulder; she looked surprised, but she did not flinch from his touch. "Thank you."

"What about me?" Jirdo asked.

"Oh, you're going," Tirien said, and Jirdo cringed at his icy tone. "You brought this calamity on Guudria, you can help us fix it."

They landed the Second Chance outside the shrine; Narasi kept it running while Tirien and Zaella took Jirdo inside. Tirien led the way into the corae and said, "Where?"

"That," Zaella said, pointing with her good hand. "I've seen that before."

"Yeah, that's what the Whispers told us to build here," Jirdo said. "Every corae has a different symbol. I don't know what they—"

The snap-hiss of Tirien's lightsaber cut him off. He threw the weapon, gouging the offending symbol out of the wood before bringing the hilt back to his hand. Jirdo caught the chunk of wood; he stared at it for a moment, then grimaced and took it outside, throwing it away. Zaella followed, but as he brought up the rear, Tirien drew his blade again and cut off the dark side door to the corae at the hinges, letting it fall to the floor.

On the ride toward Kharkûskyat, Jirdo looked at Tirien and said, "Bras…you destroyed his lightsaber. But today he had a green one."

"You noticed?" Zaella asked. "I figured you were cowering in a corner somewhere while better people were fighting."

Jirdo winced. "I…I watched you dueling."

"And did nothing to help," Narasi said.

Standing behind her in the cockpit, Jirdo put his face in his hands. "How many times can I say I'm sorry? I was never cut out for any of this."

"What about the lightsaber?" Tirien asked before Narasi and Zaella could double-team him.

Raising his haggard face, Jirdo said, "I think…I think it was Maia's. I don't know what he…"

He trailed off, apparently lost in the horrible possibilities. Tirien had little sympathy for him, but he sighed and said, "We'll know soon enough. If there's any Jedi left in you, then remember where you come from.  There is no emotion, there is peace.  Now more than ever you can't leave your mind or your spirit vulnerable."

The Second Chance slowed; Tirien feared the Whisperer had some defense against their approach until he saw Narasi pulling back on the throttle. "Master…"

"What is it?"

"What if he—it—tries to possess us?"

Tirien had not considered that possibility, and his eyes widened. "I…don't know."

He felt his Padawan's disappointment and saw Zaella's unease, and it came home to him again how very out of his depth he was. Fighting Jedi con artists was one thing, but tangling with the spirit of a dead Sith Lord was something altogether different. Tirien wanted to reassure them, to suggest mental self-discipline, but he stopped himself. This was not a time for pride.

Digging in his belt, Tirien unearthed Master Fane's holocron and activated it. When the blue ghost of the gatekeeper appeared, Tirien said, "Forgive my curtness, Master, but time's a factor. We think everything on Guudria has been caused by the spirit of a Sith Lord entombed here; it's already possessed one of the Dark Jedi, and I barely survived fighting him.  How do we defend ourselves?"

Master Fane looked stunned; Tirien was not sure he had ever produced that response in a holocron's gatekeeper before. "What you're speaking of is Sith magic of the foulest kind, Tirien. Even in my time such abominations were mercifully rare.  We knew the legends I'm sure you know, of the Valley of the Dark Lords on Korriban and its host of Sith spirits, but neither I nor any of my brethren ever confronted such a thing that I'm aware of.  Can you seek help?"

That's what I was trying to do with you, Tirien thought, but his actual words were, "There's no time. If we don't defeat it now, it could escape into the galaxy."

Master Fane shook his head. "That can not be. All I can advise you, then, is to anchor yourselves firmly in the light—light is always the answer to the dark.  Be true Jedi, and the light side will shield your spirits.  May the Force be with you."

Tirien powered down the holocron and looked through the cockpit. Zaella shifted her weight from foot to foot. "Okay, you and Narasi are Jedi, but I'm a Sith and Jirdo's a con artist."

"Hey!" Jirdo objected.

Zaella gave him a look. "You're conspiring with a dead Sith Lord to subjugate a whole planet with dark side sorcery; you're already the bad guy here."

Jirdo turned scarlet, but Tirien shook his head. "Now might be the time to reconsider your allegiances."

Before Zaella could respond, Narasi said, "We're coming up on it. I've got the tech on the scanner."

Taking the co-pilot's seat, Tirien looked down on Kharkûskyat. Built from wood and stone, the castle was little more than a keep surrounded by a curtain wall. "Where's the tomb, Jirdo?"

He leaned down between them, though he gave Narasi an edgy look and shifted closer to Tirien as he pointed. "See those hills? That one in the center—that's where we've heard the Whispers.  There are some ruins there."

Tirien had Narasi set the ship down outside the range of hills, a kilometer away from Kharkûskyat. Jirdo objected—the way was straighter from the castle, which was why it had been built there—but Tirien was taking no chances on Bras seeing them coming, or Jirdo having another change of heart. It was not raining in the hills—indeed, the dead grass that crunched under their boots made Tirien wonder whether it had rained there in living memory—but the clouds overhead billowed and rumbled, twisting like the precursors to a funnel cloud. The center of the writhing clouds hovered over the hills.

Tirien and Narasi donned their robes and pulled up their hoods; Zaella forewent hers, not wanting to bother with it given her sling, and no one offered one to Jirdo. The wind howled through the hills, bringing that same reek of decay that had preceded Bras into Marekka. Tirien stretched out with his senses, alert for everything from telepathic attacks to tuk'ata, but the dark side pressed against his mind, diminishing his ability to predict what was coming. The aches of the day—had it been this same rotation that he had fought Maia?—dragged him down, and his legs burned as they hiked one hill after another.

Surmounting yet another hill, Jirdo pointed. "There? You see it?"

Tirien followed the gesture. The thick cloud cover blocked moonlight and stars alike, and no light shone in Kharkûskyat, but his eyes could just make out shapes atop a hill. As he stretched out his mind in that direction, pressing against the resistance, he shivered. "Let's go."

Even before they reached the base of the hill, Tirien had started shivering in earnest. That alone unnerved him—he could not remember the last time he had been really cold. Zaella and Narasi were shivering too, and Jirdo clutched his arms, his teeth chattering. "I-I-It's always c-c-cold here, but it's n-n-never been like th-this before."

"He's getting stronger," Tirien realized, speaking slowly so he would not stutter too; he feared Narasi would panic if she realized the cold had gotten to him. "And now he has Bras's body."

Zaella stopped. "W-W-Why 'he'?"

Tirien blinked. "…that's a good point. Jirdo?"

The Human had tucked his hands into his armpits for warmth, but he shrugged a little. "No id-d-dea."

"Then let's go stop it," Tirien suggested.

"Girls can be horrible, undead sorcerers too," Zaella muttered, and Narasi laughed. The sound felt alien in that place, where darkness was almost a physical presence, and unseen eyes watched their approach…and hated.

Tirien leaned on the Force to make it to the top of the hill; more than physical exhaustion was dragging at him. When he did, though, he stopped so abruptly that Narasi walked into him. Guudrian corpses littered the hilltop, withered and brittle mummies all. Tirien thought they must have been there for years, even decades, until he saw the poleaxes and understood.

"It's M-M-Maia's guard!" Jirdo said, eyes wide. He darted forth, looking through the bodies, running around the opposite side of the hill. He was on his way back when he cried out and dropped to his knees.

Jogging over, alert for threats and traps, Tirien saw Maia Kyss facedown in the grass. Her robes had been crudely ripped aside, and her face showed bruises from being struck along with the lightsaber wound Narasi had dealt her. A cauterized lightsaber burn pierced her bare back through the center of her torso. Tirien pulled Maia's robe back to cover her body, hoping Narasi and Zaella would not realize the scope of what had happened. Narasi had the rearguard, watching the hilltop, but Zaella looked down, and Tirien thought she had put the pieces together, because her face lit up with rage.

"Bras," Jirdo said. Tirien sensed a spike of fury, the first sign of real power he had felt from the Human. "He d-did this."

"Focus," Tirien commanded. "What are these pillars?"

Four curved pillars crowned the hilltop, like talons reaching out of the earth. Carved from black stone, they were marked with sigils and glyphs Tirien half-recognized. Looking at Zaella, he asked, "Is this Sith writing?"

She wrenched her eyes away from Maia's corpse to study the nearest pillar. "Yes. I can't r-r-read it all, but y-y-yeah."

"We heard the W-W-Whispers here," Jirdo said, stepping over dead Guudrians. "They—he—it told us these w-w-were ruins of some ancient ci-ci-civilization."

"That may be true, but not in the way you interpreted it," Tirien said.

Narasi half-extended a hand toward a pillar, then stopped herself. "What do we do, M-Master? I can feel the dark side's p-power here."

"Probably a disturbance left from whatever ritual Bras—or this Sith—executed here." Tirien looked at the withered Guudrians that had been hale and hearty soldiers only days before, and the probable course of events assembled itself in his mind. "The Whisperer must have absorbed their life energy to possess Bras."

Narasi's lip curled in disgust. "That's what we s-sensed before?"

"Probably."

Zaella crossed her arms. "I still don't get why I didn't f-f-feel anything."

"Wait," Jirdo asked. "You…you f-f-felt this happen?"

"You didn't either?" Zaella asked.

The answer was obvious on Jirdo's face, but Tirien waved them down. It bothered him too, especially since Jirdo had been close to Bras and the guards, but… "We don't have time! We'll sort that out later."

Narasi gestured to the pillars. "This isn't the tomb, is it?"

Tirien opened his mouth, but Zaella snapped, "Oh, kriff this."

Before Tirien could stop her, she drew her lightsaber and cut the nearest pillar in half. Tirien half-expected her lightsaber to bounce off, or for some terrible dark side energy to be released. Instead, nothing happened at all—the air grew neither colder nor warmer, the pressure of the dark side did not intensify or slacken, and the wind howled on. After a few seconds, Tirien ignited his own blade and threw it, guiding the saber around the hill to halve the other pillars. By the time the hilt returned to his hand, he was convinced. "It's a decoy."

Jirdo, who had cringed at the first pillar's fall, straightened up and stared. "But…but the Whispers. W-W-We always heard them h-here!"

"This is the spot," Narasi said. "I can feel it."

Tirien looked down. "It's not a hill—it's a burial mound."

They spread out, shifting aside the dead, toeing the half-buried flagstones and cracked pieces of stone. Tirien had taken to prodding different flagstones with the butt of a poleaxe when Narasi said, "Hey! Over here!"

They clustered around one of the split pillars. Narasi held her hand over the stone and shuddered. "I feel a b-b-breeze. Like…colder air."

Tirien copied her and realized she was right; the pillar was not hollow, but it had just enough of a hole running down the center for air to escape. Narasi put her shoulder into the pillar, tugging it this way and that, using the Force to boost her strength. After some experimentation, she got it to rotate counterclockwise, and Tirien added a Force push to her efforts, turning the pillar until it clicked. The earth groaned and rumbled before a whole section of flagstones dropped away into a tunnel down.

They all stared for a moment, Zaella holding up her lightsaber for illumination. The crimson light seemed all too appropriate for the setting, but it did not reach far into the shadows. Tirien remembered Bras—or rather, the Whisperer using Bras—weaving together a spear from the dark side itself. Like that weapon, the tomb drank the light.

Light is always the answer to the dark, Master Fane had said, but Tirien wondered if he had ever gazed on darkness like this.

Zaella pointed her blade at Jirdo. "You first."

"What? I don't know anything ab-b-bout any of this!"

"Your mess, your problem."

"But—"

"Me first," Tirien decided. The idea of entering that hole at all, let alone leading the way, sent claws down his spine, but he was the only Jedi Knight, and they needed him to have courage. "Then Jirdo, then Narasi, then Zaella. If he doesn't come willingly, make him."

And leaving his Padawan and his ward with that, Tirien swallowed his fear and jumped.