Outlined against the green.
The wall of jungle was green only on the outside: between the leaves and trunks, among the fronds and flowers and vines, was shadow so thick that from out here under the brilliant sun, it looked entirely black.
Mace thought, It's not too late to change my mind.
He could leave Nick here. Could turn his back on Chalk and Besh and Lesh. Hike along the road, catch a ride into Pelek Baw, hop a shuttle for the next liner on the Gevarno Loop.
He knew, somehow, that this was his last chance to walk away. That once he crossed the green wall, the only way out would be through.
He couldn't guess what he might find on the way- Except, possibly, Depa.
you should never have sent me here. And I should never have come.
It was too late to change his mind after all.
He was in the jungle already.
He'd walked into it from the shuttle in the Pelek Baw spaceport. Maybe from the balcony on Geonosis. Or maybe he'd been just standing still, and the jungle had grown around him before he'd noticed.
Welcome to Haruun Kal.
His boots crunched through the husks of bracken as he toiled up the slope. Chalk nodded to him and vanished through the wall. Nick gave him a smile as if he knew what Mace had been thinking.
"Better keep up, Master Windu. Another minute, we woulda left you standing there. You want to be alone out here? I don't think so." He was right about that. "If we should happen to get separated, is there a landmark I should make for?" "Don't worry about it. Just keep up." "But if we do, how will I find you?" "You won't." Nick shook his head, smiling into the jungle. "If we get separated, you won't live long enough to worry about finding us. You get it? Keep up." He walked into the trees and was swallowed by the green twilight.
Mace nodded to himself, and followed Nick into the shadows without looking back.
THE SUMMERTIME WAR S
ingle file through the jungle: Chalk picked their path, parting gleamfronds, tipping gripleaf trailers aside with the muzzle of the Thunderbolt. Mace followed perhaps ten meters back, with Nick close behind his shoulder. Besh and Lesh brought up the rear together, switching positions from time to time, covering each other.
Mace had to look sharp to keep track of Chalk. Once they were well into the jungle, he could no longer easily feel any of the Korunnai in the Force. His gaze had a tendency to slip aside from them, to pass over them without seeing unless he firmly directed his wilclass="underline" a useful talent in a place where humans were just another prey animal.
Occasionally a Force-pulse as unmistakable as an upraised hand came from one or another of the Korunnai, and they would all stop in their tracks. Then seconds or minutes of stillness: listening to wind-rustle and animal cries, eyes searching among green shadow and greener light, reaching into the Force through a riot of lives for-what? Vine cat? Militia patrol? Stobor? Then a wave of relaxation clear as a sigh: some threat Mace could not see or feel had passed, and they walked on.
It was even hotter under the trees than in full sunlight. Any relief due to shade was canceled by the damp smothering stillness of the air. Though Mace heard a constant ruffle of leaves and branches high above, the breeze never seemed to reach down through the canopy.
They broke out into a gap, and Nick called a halt. The jungle canopy layered a roof above them, but the folds of ground here were clear for dozens of meters around, smooth gray-gold trunks of jungle trees becoming cathedral buttresses supporting walls of leaf and vine. Upslope, a spring-fed pond brimmed over into a steamy sulfur-scented stream.
Chalk moved into the middle of the gap, lowered her head, and went entirely still. A Force wave passed out from her and broke across Mace and thirty-five years fell away: for a delicious instant he was once more a boy returned to the company of ghosh Windu after a lifetime in the Jedi Temple, feeling for the first time the silken warmth of a Korun's Force-call to an akk.
Then it passed, and Mace was again a grown man, again a Jedi Master, tired and worried: frightened for his friend, his Order, and his Republic.
Within minutes a crashing outside the gap heralded the arrival of large beasts, and soon the jungle wall parted to admit a grasser. It lumbered into the gap on its hind legs, its four anterior limbs occupied with ripping down greenery and stuffing it into a mouth large enough to swallow Mace whole. It chewed placidly, bovine contentment in all three of its eyes. It turned these eyes toward the humans one at a time: first the right, then the left, then the crown, assuring itself that none of its three eyes spied a threat.
Three more grassers tore their way into the gap. All four were harnessed for riding, the wide saddles cinched above and below their foreshoulders, exactly as Mace remembered. One wore a dual-saddle setup, the secondary saddle slung reversed at the beast's mid-shoulder.
All four grassers were thin, smaller than Mace remembered-the largest of them might not have topped six meters at full stretch-and their gray coats were dull and coarse: a far cry from the sleek, glossy behemoths he'd ridden all those years ago. This was as troubling as anything he'd yet seen. Had these Korunnai abandoned the Fourth Pillar?
Nick reached up to take the knotted mounting rope of the dual-saddled grasser. "Come on, Master Windu. You're riding with me." "Where are your akks?" "Around. Can't you feel them?" And now Mace could: a ring of predatory wariness outside the green walls: savagery and hunger and devotion tangled into a semi-sentient knot of Let's-Find-Something-to-Kill.
Nick rope-walked up the flank of the grasser and slid into the upper saddle. "You'll see them if you need to see them. Let's hope you don't." "Is it no longer customary to introduce a guest to the akks of the ghosh?" "You're not a guest, you're a package." Nick slid a brassvine goad out of its holster beside the saddle. "Mount up. Let's get out of here." Without even understanding why he did it, Mace moved away into the middle of the gap.
One breath composed his mind. The next expressed his nature into the Force around him: Jedi serenity balancing buried temper, devotion to peace tipping the scales against a guilty pleasure in fighting. Nothing was hidden, here. Light and dark, pure and corrupt, hope, fear, pride, and humility: he offered up everything that made him who he was, with a friendly smile, lowered eyes, and hands open at his sides. Then he sent rippling through the Force the call he'd been taught thirty-five years before.
And he got an answer.
Slipping through the walls of the gap: measured tread blending seamlessly with wind-rustle and flybuzz: horned reptoid heads questing, lidless oval eyes of gleaming black- "Windu!" A hiss from Nick. "Don't move!" Triangular fangs scissored along each other as jaws that could crush durasteel worked and chewed. Steaming drool trailed down mouth folds of scaled hide thick enough to stop a lightsaber. Splay-toed feet with shovel-sized claws churned kilos of dirt with every step.
Muscular armored tails as long as their landspeeder-sized bodies whipped sinuously back and forth.
The akk dogs of Haruun Kal.
Three of them.
Nick hissed again. "Back up. Just back up. Straight toward me. Very slowly. Don't show them your back. They're good dogs, but if you trigger their hunt-kill instincts." The beasts circled, switching tails that could break Mace in half. Their eyes, hard-shelled and lidless, glittered without expression. Their breaths all stank of old meat, and their hides gave off a leathery musk, and for an instant Mace was on the sand in the Circus Horrificus in the bowels of Nar Shaddaa, surrounded by thousands of screaming spectators, at the mercy of Gargonn the Hutt- He understood now why he had done this. Why he'd had to.