Scarcely listening, Sidious moved with utmost care, his hands and knees seeking firm purchase on the stones. For weeks Darth Plagueis had deprived him of sleep, food, and water. Now if only he could reach the Muun, his thirst would be slaked, his hunger sated, his contusions healed. Countless times the broad expanse of rock debris had slipped and he’d had to ride the slide almost to the shore of the lake, tumbling, surfing on his front and back, abrading his ruddy skin, bruising nearly every part of himself. Only to have to pick his way back to the top.
Seething in silence, he managed to scale a meter more of the slope, calling on the Force to ensure his balance, to render him weightless.
“Fool,” Plagueis derided him. “Success doesn’t come from summoning help from the Force, but from taking control of it and generating the power from within yourself.” He sighed theatrically. “Still, I’m somewhat encouraged by the progress you’ve made. Mere centimeters from me now, almost within arm’s reach. Soon I’ll be able to feel your breath on my neck and perceive the heat of your rage — your desire to kill me, as if by doing so, you could lay claim to the authority I embody.” He paused but didn’t move, much less glance over his shoulder. “You want to strangle me, like you did your poor, misunderstood mother; tear me limb from limb as you did the bodyguards. Fair enough. But to do so you will have to make a greater effort, Apprentice.”
Like a feline, Sidious leapt from the scree, his curled fingers aimed for Plagueis. But instead of vising themselves around the Muun’s slender neck, his hands went through thin air and met each other, leaving him to collapse face-first atop the outcropping. Off to one side he heard his Master laugh in scorn. Either Plagueis had moved faster than Sidious could discern or, worse yet, he had never been there to begin with.
“So easily tricked,” Plagueis said, confirming the latter. “You waste my time. More of this and the dark side will never take an interest in you.”
Sidious whirled, flinging himself at Plagueis, only to meet an irresistible force and be hurled backward to the frozen ground.
The Muun’s shadow fell over him. Arms folded across his chest, Plagueis loomed.
“If you’re to succeed in inhabiting both realms, Sidious — the profane world and that of the Force — you need to learn how to use guile to your advantage, and to recognize when others are employing it.” Without extending a hand, Plagueis tugged him to his feet. “If you can survive a few more days without sustenance or rest, I may be inclined to teach you.”
Clawing his way across the tundra, his body rashed with lightsaber burns, Sidious looked up at Plagueis, imploringly.
“How much longer, Master?”
Plagueis deactivated his weapon’s crimson blade and scowled. “Perhaps a moment, perhaps an eternity. Stop thinking of the future, and anchor yourself in the present. A Sith apprentice is the antithesis of a Jedi youngling nurtured in the Temple, battling a floating remote with a training lightsaber. A Sith acquaints himself with pain from the start, and inflicts it, as well. A Sith goes for the throat, just as you did on your family’s starship.”
Sidious continued to gaze at him. “I meant, how much longer will it take me to learn?”
The Muun sized him up with a look. “Hard to tell. Humans are their own worst enemies. Your body isn’t meant to withstand real punishment. It is easily injured and slow to heal. Your olfactory and tactile senses are relatively acute, but your auditory and visual senses are extremely limited.”
“Have I no strengths, Master?”
Plagueis dropped to one knee in front of him. “You have the Force, apprentice, and the talent to lead. More, you have the bloodlust of a serial killer, though we need to hold that in reserve unless violence serves some extraordinary purpose. We are not butchers, Sidious, like some past Sith Lords. We are architects of the future.”
Sidious swallowed and found his voice. “How long?”
Plagueis stood, reigniting the lightsaber as he did so. “Not a standard day sooner than a decade.”
PART TWO: Apprenticed To Power. 54–52 BBY
13: RIDERS ON THE STORM
In mad pursuit of their prey and all but taking flight, the two Sith, Master and apprentice for eleven years now, bounded across the grassy terrain, their short capes snapping behind them, vibroblades clenched in their hands and bare forearms flecked with gore; blood caked in the human’s long hair and dried on the Muun’s hairless brow. Twisting and swirling around them was a herd of agile, long-necked quadrupeds with brown-and-black-striped fur; identical and moving as if possessed of a single mind, leaping at the same instant, reversing direction, cycloning gregariously over the short-napped savanna.
“This is not a chase,” Plagueis said as he ran, “this is a summoning. You need to get behind the eyes of your target and become the object of its desire. The same holds true when you summon the Force: you must make yourself desirable, fascinating, addictive, and whatever power you need will be at your command.”
Blended into the herd, the animal Sidious had fixed his sight on would have been indistinguishable to normal beings. But Sidious had the animal in his mind and was now looking through its eyes, one with it. Alongside him suddenly, the creature seemed to intuit its end and tipped its head to one side to expose its muscular neck. The moment the vibroblade stuck, the creature’s eyes rolled back and grew opaque; hot blood spurted but quickly ceased to flow — the Force departing, and Sidious drawing its power deep into himself.
“Now another one,” Plagueis said in a congratulatory tone. “And another one after that.”
Sidious felt himself shoved into motion, as if by a gale-force wind.
“Feel the power of the dark side flow through you,” Plagueis added from behind him. “We serve nature’s purpose by culling the herd, and our own by sharpening our skills. We are the predatory swarm!”
The low-gravity planet was known then as Buoyant, its bewildering jumble of flora and fauna the result of an experiment by a long-forgotten species that had tweaked the atmosphere, set the world spinning faster than nature had intended, and encouraged the growth of lush forests and expansive grasslands. The still-functioning machines of the ancients dotted the landscape, and millennia later the animals they had imported were thriving. Nothing moved slowly or ponderously on rapidly spinning Buoyant, even day and night, or the storms that scrubbed the atmosphere with violent regularity.
Elsewhere on the planet — in dense forests, in arid wastes, beneath the waves of inland seas — the two Sith had already taken the lives of countless creatures: culling, sharpening, marinating themselves in a miasma of dark side energy.
Kilometers from where the quadruped hunt had commenced, Plagueis and Sidious sat under the enormous canopy of a tree whose trunk was wide enough to engulf a landspeeder, and whose thick branches were burdened with flowering parasitic plants. Breathing hard and drenched in sweat, they rested in silence as clouds of eager insects gathered around them. The pulse-beats of the Muun’s trio of hearts were visible beneath his translucent skin, and his clear eyes tracked the slaloming movements of the escaping herd.
“Few of my people are aware of just how wealthy I am,” he said at last, “since most of my riches derive from activities that have nothing to do with the ordinary business of finance. For many years my peers wondered why I chose to remain unwed, and ultimately reached the conclusion that I was in essence married to my work, without realizing how right they were. Except that my real bride is the dark side of the Force. What the ancients called Bogan, as separate from Ashla.
“Even the Jedi understand that there is no profit in partnering with a being who lacks the ability to understand what it means to be in the grip of the Force, and so the Order restricts marriage by dogma, in service, so the Jedi say, to the purity of Ashla.