Mace put out a hand to stop Vaster as the lor pelek swept by him. "What will you do with the captives?" Vaster rumbled wordlessly in his throat, and now again his meaning unfurled in Mace's mind.
They come with us.
"You can take care of prisoners?" We don't take care of them. We give them to the jungle.
"The tan pel'trokal," Mace murmured. "Jungle justice." Somehow, this made perfect sense.
Though he could not approve, he could not help but understand.
Vastor nodded as he turned to move on.,'/ is our way.
"Is that different from murder?" Though Mace was looking at Vastor, he sounded like he was asking himself. "Can any of them survive? Cast out alone, without supplies, without weapons-" The lor pelek gave Mace a predator's grin over his shoulder, showing his needle-sharp teeth. I did, he growled, and walked away.
"And the children?" But Mace was talking to the lorpeleKs departing back; Vastor was already snapping at three or four ragged young Korunnai. What he might be ordering them to do, Mace couldn't say; Vastor's meaning had departed with his attention.
Mace drifted in the direction the last captive he'd spoken to had indicated. He stopped at the edge of a smoldering puddle of flame-projector fuel. It had burned nearly out; black coils of smoke twisted upward from only a few patches of dawn-paled flame.
A step or two in from the edge of the puddle lay a body.
It lay on its side, curled in the characteristic fetal burn-victim ball. One of its arms seemed to have escaped its general contraction. The arm pointed at the near rim of the puddle's scorch mark, palm-down, as though this corpse had died trying to drag itself, one-handed, from the flames.
Mace couldn't even tell if it had been a man, or a woman.
He squatted on his heels at the edge of the scorch, staring. Then he wrapped his arms around his knees, and just sat. There didn't seem to be anything else to do.
He had asked that last captive where she'd last seen the girls' mother.
He could not possibly determine if this corpse had once been the woman who'd given birth to Pell and to Keela; if this smoking mass of charred dead flesh had held them in its arms and kissed away their childish tears.
Did it matter?
This had been someone's parent, or brother, or sister. Someone's child. Someone's friend.
Who had died anonymously in the jungle.
He couldn't even tell if this corpse had been killed by a Korun bul let, or a vibroshield, or a Balawai blaster. Or if it had simply been unlucky enough to get in the way of a stream of fire from a steam-crawler's turret gun.
Perhaps in the Force, he might have been able to sense some answers. But he couldn't decide if knowing would be better than not knowing. And to touch the Force again in this dark place was a risk he was not prepared to take.
So he just sat, and thought about the dark.
Sat while the guerrillas splintered into bands that melted away down the mountainside. Sat while the prisoners were marched off in a gang, surrounded by akk dogs. Sat while the sun slanted past a pair of northeast peaks, and a wave of light rolled down the slope above him.
Vastor came to him, rumbling something about leaving this place before the gunships arrived.
Mace did not even look up.
He was thinking about the light of the sun, and how it did not touch the darkness in the jungle.
Nick stopped on his way out of camp. In one arm, he carried Urno; Nykl slept against his other shoulder, tiny arms clasped around his neck. Keela stumbled along behind, one hand pressing against the spray bandage that closed her head wound while she used the other to lead little Pell. Nick must have asked Mace a question, because he paused at the side of the Jedi Master as though waiting for an answer.
But Mace had no answers to give.
When he got no response, Nick shrugged and moved on.
Mace thought about the dark. The Jedi metaphor of the dark side of the Force had never seemed so appropriate before-less the dark of evil than the dark of a starless night: where what you think is a vine cat is only a bush, and what appears to be a tree may very well be a killer standing motionless, waiting for you to look away.
Mace had read Temple Archive accounts written by Jedi who had brushed the dark and recovered. These accounts often mentioned how the dark side seemed to make everything clear; Mace knew now that this was only a delusion. A lie.
The truth was exactly opposite.
There was so much dark here, he might as well be blind.
Morning sun struck the compound, and brought gunships with it: six of them, a double flight, roaring straight in from the stinging glare of Al'har as it cleared the mountains. Their formation blossomed into a rosette as they peeled off to angle for staggered, crisscrossing strafing runs.
Mace still didn't move.
Might as well be blind, he thought, and perhaps he also said it aloud- For the voice that spoke from behind him seemed to be answering.
"The wisest man I know once told me:,'/ is in the darkest night that the light we are shines brightest." A woman's voice, cracking with exhaustion and hoarse with old pain-and perhaps it was only this voice that could have kindled a torch in Mace's vast darkness, only this voice that could have brought Mace to his feet, turning, hope blooming inside his head, almost happy- Almost even smiling- He turned, his arms opening, his breath catching, and all he could say was, "Depa." But she did not come to his embrace, and the hope inside him sputtered and died. His arms fell to his sides. Even prepared by what Nick had told him, he was not remotely ready for this.
Jedi Master Depa Billaba stood before him in the tattered remnants of Jedi robes, stained with mud and blood and jungle sap. Her hair-that had once been a lush, glossy mane as black as space, that she had kept regimented in mathematically precise braids-was tangled, spiked with dirt and grease, raggedly short as though she had hacked it off with a knife. Her face was pale and lined with fatigue, and had gone so thin her cheekbones stood out like blades. Her mouth seemed lipless and hard, and bore a fresh burn scar from one corner to the tip of her chin-but these were not the worst of it.
None of these were what kept Mace motionless as though nailed to the ground, even as gunships swept overhead and rained blaster-fire on the compound around them.
In the inferno of explosions, amid the whine of rock splinters and the hammering webwork of plasma, Mace could only stare at Depa's forehead, where she had once worn the shining golden bead of the Greater Mark of Illumination: the symbol of a Chalactan adept. The Mark of Illumination is affixed to the frontal bone of an adept's skull by the elders of that ancient religion, as a symbol of the Uncloseable Eye that is the highest expression of the Chalactan Enlightenment. Depa had worn hers with pride for twenty years.
Now, where the Mark had been was only an ugly ripple of keloid scar, as though the same knife that had slashed away her hair had crudely hacked the symbol of her ancestral religion from the bone of her skull.
And across her eyes, she wore a strip of rag tied like a blindfold: a rag as weathered and stained and ragged as her robes themselves.