41/World’s End
SCABROUS SWUNG THE SITH SWORD DOWNWARD. WITH THE FIRST CUT, THE BLADE slashed through the dirty outerwear and animal skins that Zo had been wearing since her arrival here, exposing bare skin. She looked down and saw the shallow white trough that the sword had gouged through her flesh, a pale streak of pain, the cut turning red as it filled with blood.
Scabrous grinned at her, staring down at the wound, actually salivating now as he raised the sword a second time, extended high over his head, clutching its handle with both hands for maximum leverage, angling its tip directly toward her chest. His eyes rolled madly, utterly lost to the Sickness that had overtaken them. Zo went rigid, yanking at the straps, knowing even as she did it that there was no way she could get loose.
Not with your muscles, Hestizo. Reach out with the Force.
It was the same voice that had called out to her just a moment before. She drew in a breath and fell absolutely still, closing her eyes, surrendering her mind to the moment so that time itself seemed to fall motionless, settling down around her like silt. And when she raised her arms up again, in one smooth motion this time, the bindings fell loose beneath her—it was as if she’d passed through the leather straps without a whisper of resistance. Her wrists swung outward, her torso and legs suddenly, shockingly free.
Snapping upright, Zo swung her body off to one side of the slab.
“No!” Scabrous roared from the other side, the blade still held up high in the air above him. His voice was shrill, and as he shouted, Zo realized that she was hearing two voices, one forming the words in her ear while the other emitted the piercing, ululating scream in her mind. “You shall not! You dare not!”
She scrambled farther back. She was upright and on her feet for the first time, and the confines of the temple where she stood were only now beginning to register to her—an oblong room centered on the sacrificial altar, the stone floor beneath her cluttered with braziers, casting shallow pools of shifting firelight.
The Sith Lord charged at her, angling the sword downward, its blade whickering past her so closely that Zo heard the steel hissing crosswise through the air, shearing molecules from their bonds. It clanged off the wall and he spun around with sickening, eye-watering speed, slicing sideways for her.
Hestizo, it’s me—
The voice in her head again, the one that she still couldn’t identify, although its words continued to waft upward through her mind, resonating outward, ripples in a pond. Even as she lurched backward again, the corner of the temple pressing into her back so that there was literally nowhere left to turn, she heard it calling out.
Hestizo—
Where are you? her brain cried back. Who are you? A remote possibility, wild but somehow impossible to ignore, burst into her mind fully formed. Rojo? Is that you?
“Jedi trash.” Scabrous appeared in front of her, raising the sword between them, the sticky ruin of his face glinting off the engraved steel. He moved forward to administer the death blow but in that same moment a crash erupted behind him, clanging deafeningly across the temple, followed by the rolling tinny clatter of an upset brazier.
The Sith Lord whirled, sword still raised, lips drawing backward, and glared at the man standing before him. The man wasn’t even looking at Scabrous. He was looking at Hestizo.
“Get behind me,” Trace told Zo. “Now.” Not waiting another instant for her reaction, he sprang upward, arcing around and landing on the floor in front of Zo so that he was face-to-face with Scabrous, locked directly into the Sith Lord’s stare. His lightsaber pulsed to life, its beam humming. “This is over.”
Scabrous’s answer came in the form of a scream. The Sith sword slashed downward in his right hand while his left swung upward, gripping his own lightsaber. He flung himself forward, both blades whirring in front of him, spinning outward, flashing steel and pure blood-red energy lashing out, the long, terrible scream still stretching from his jaws.
From the first thrust, there was no art to his attack, no evidence of grace or form. It was already too late for that, and both Trace and Scabrous seemed to know it. They went at each other viciously, head-on, like animals with no air between them, slashing and blocking, edging around the open place in the floor. Every time their blades crashed together Zo felt it in the hollow of her chest and the roots of her teeth.
She watched as Trace probed the Sith Lord’s weak places, or where he must have hoped they’d be, but Scabrous seemed to anticipate each move. The Sickness had made him incredibly fast, insurmountably strong. For every attack that her brother made, one of Scabrous’s two blades had an effortless reaction, as if he already held the outcome of the duel in the palm of his hand.
Yet for some reason he was still allowing Rojo to force him backward, across the temple, back toward the sacrificial altar, his movements almost ethereal behind the constant reckless smear of blue and red and steel blades all carving through the air.
Scabrous was poised in front of the altar now, standing before the slab where he’d laid Zo out for her sacrifice. He stepped lithely between the braziers, even the one that Rojo had knocked over when he’d landed, maneuvering without the slightest effort past the rising bank of flames where the fire had started to spread. It was climbing the black wall, orange peaks and tongues flickering upward, rising.
Zo watched her brother press forward again, keeping the duel tight and close, but the Sith Lord made no move to back away any farther now. Even as he continued to deflect Trace’s blade, his lips were moving. Zo couldn’t make out what he was saying, and when Rojo brought his lightsaber up for a final attack, she saw that Scabrous wasn’t just smiling; he was actually laughing.
Trace swung down again, one final blow, the coup de grâce that was intended to finish things between them permanently. Just then, Scabrous glanced up and gestured, a small, insignificant flick of the fingers in the direction of Trace’s lightsaber.
There was a slight airborne tremor in the space above his arm.
And Trace’s lightsaber went out.
“Did you really think,” Scabrous’s voice was saying, “that after all that, I would trust the outcome to a duel?”
Trace didn’t even bother looking at the deactivated lightsaber in his hand. He tossed it aside and pivoted backward as Scabrous’s blade slashed across the open space where he’d been standing a split second earlier. The red blade crashed into the floor, shaking it under Trace’s feet.
Everything had gone wrong. The Sith Lord had laid a trap, and he’d walked right into it.
Scabrous swept toward him, triumphant now. The remains of his eyes were huge and dead, bulging in their sockets. At first he looked as though he was going to scream again. But when he spoke, his voice was oddly mellifluous, almost a purr.
“Tell me a story, Jedi. Tell me about the Force and how it binds everything together. Tell me how it protects the good and sacred in life.” The Sith Lord’s lips drew back to show all his teeth. “Tell me all your lies.”
Trace raised up one hand. He’d intended to levitate the stone altar behind Scabrous into the air—he could probably flip it around and drop it on top of Scabrous fast enough that he wouldn’t have time to react. But Scabrous sprang forward with the lightsaber, and when Trace moved to dodge it, he thrust himself directly onto the waiting edge of the Sith sword.
Trace looked down and saw the blade plunge through him. He felt a peculiar weightlessness pass over him, as if the gravity in the room had been suspended, as if—by lifting his feet off the floor—he might dematerialize completely.
When he looked down again, all he could see was blood.
Zo was staring at her brother when Scabrous’s blade sliced him apart. Trace staggered back, wobbling on his feet, and as he wheeled around toward her she saw that he’d been cut wide open from neck to belly.
“No.” It came out like a choke. “No.”
Trace stumbled again, fighting to keep on his feet. The wound in his abdomen was even deeper than she’d first thought, pouring out whatever remained of his life. From where she stood, she could see pigtails of small intestine poking visibly from beneath his ribs. Trace’s cheeks had gone chalky white. Blood pattered on the floor between his feet, and he skidded in the puddle and fell, first to his knees, then to his back, where he lay motionless in front of her. He looked like a dancer for whom all music had permanently stopped.
He stretched out one hand. “Zo …”
And then nothing.
No. No. No.
“That was easy,” Scabrous snarled, and turned to her. “You’re next.”
Zo shook her head. It wasn’t going to happen like this, she wanted to say, it didn’t get to end this way. He didn’t get to win.
But Scabrous was lumbering toward her, circling the pool of blood and the hole in the floor. The last dregs of his humanity had drained from his face, and now he was a shambling skeleton, a thing like those things that had dropped from the tower.
When he opened his mouth again to speak, all he could do was scream.
His transformation was complete.
Hestizo …?
She closed her eyes and heard that voice again, ringing out, growing steadier, like a sleeper awakening from a deep and disorienting coma.
Are you there? she asked the orchid. Are you alive?
Silence, and then: … felt the Sickness for so long … thought I was dead…
Never mind that now, she thought. Just grow.
Hestizo, please—
Grow.
Not sure I’m strong enough yet to—
GROW, Zo cried out, shouting at the orchid, needing more than anything to be heard. GROW. GROW! FOR THE SAKE OF MY BROTHER AND ALL THAT HE LOST, FOR MY SAKE, JUST—
The Scabrous-thing stopped in its tracks.
The rotting chamber of its skull cocked slightly to one side, as if it had just heard an unfamiliar sound, a voice shouting out from a far-off room. With one gnarled, spade-claw hand, it reached up and clutched at its left ear, working the finger around inside and wincing at the results.
Zo could see something inside the gray shell of his ear, just a glimpse.
But a glimpse was enough.
Something was inside there.
The Scabrous-thing made one final effort at speech. At that same moment an abrupt, brilliant javelin of pain sprang across the demolished remnants of its face, like a glint of light from a broken mirror. Then its head—its entire upper body—lurched forward. Its right hand opened, releasing the Sith sword, dropping it, letting it rattle to the stone floor. When the thing slung itself around sideways, Zo saw the thin green tendril sprouting out of its ear, spreading downward to trace the exposed mandible that made up the jawline.
Its mouth fell open. Just beyond its teeth and tongue, she saw another flash of green, darker, thicker, a stalk poking upward in the back of its gullet.
The thing that had once been Darth Scabrous began to convulse, producing not a scream now but a milky gagging cough as if to expel the green, to get it out, but the stalk only grew farther, stretching outward over the rag of the corpse’s tongue. A second runner was sprouting up alongside it, twisting down over its chin. As Scabrous’s head went backward, Zo saw the vine reaching down out of its left nostril. The vine began stretching straight out, oddly curious looking, with a single petal from its tip, like a tiny hand reaching for the sky.
An orchid blossom.
The Scabrous-thing fell to its knees in front of her, next to Rojo Trace’s body. No more sound came out, not even a rasping wheeze. Its temples were bulging now, rippling with what looked like veins, except the vein-shadows were moving under whatever remained of the crepe-paper skin, shifting and squirming around its eye sockets.
Hands opening and closing randomly at its sides, Scabrous made a soft, hiccuping whimper. The right half of its skull bulged, the skin splitting open.
Grow, Zo told the orchid, one last time, no longer an order or even an instruction but just a word. Grow.
The Sith Lord stared up at her, its one remaining eye filling with blood. Its lips puckered, twitched, and fell still.
Its skull exploded in a thick nest of vines.
The corpse slumped the rest of the way down, right arm flopping bonelessly to the floor while the left was tucked under it in a mock-protective gesture. The next time Zo looked at the thing, she saw only the severed neck teeming with mad floral life, dozens of small, black blossoms erupting amid the demolished kettle of the thing’s skull.
The vines were already stretching out toward her, screeching and hissing in her mind.
Can’t hold them back, the Murakami told her. I can grow them, but I can’t control—
Zo shook her head. “I can.”
And reaching down, she picked up the Sith sword.
The blossoms screamed as she hacked them off at the vine, the arms of the Scabrous-thing still groping blindly for her as she swung the sword, the floor beneath her littered with shrieking black buds and petals. She stepped on them indiscriminately, crushing them under her feet as she forced the Scabrous-thing backward toward the wall, the blade still swinging until every vine had been cut down to the stump of the neck.
This is for Rojo, she thought, and rammed the Sith sword through the torso of the thing that had once called itself Darth Scabrous, plunging it home as hard as she could with both hands, embedding it in the black wall behind him, pinning him there.
The Sith Lord’s body trembled once.
Zo staggered back, hair dangling in her face, chest on fire, trying to recover her breath. Her arms hung at her sides, limp and exhausted. Heat crackled behind her, orange flames from the toppled brazier spreading along the far side of the wall. Her lungs weren’t the only things that were burning. In her mind, the orchid was making its enervated clicking noises, warning her that she had to get out of here now.
She was starting to turn away from Scabrous’s headless corpse when it sprang at her again, arms outstretched, jerking the Sith sword halfway out of the wall with the suddenness of its attack. The raw green ends of slashed vines bristled up from the hole in its neck as if it were still, against all odds, trying to scream at her.
As the hilt of the sword struck its breastbone, halting its advance, Zo grabbed her brother’s lightsaber and switched it on, even as the shriek of rage burst up from her lips.
“Enough!”
She slashed the lightsaber across the corpse’s torso, hacking it cleanly in half, so that its lower body dropped to the floor while the chest, arms, and neck remained pinned to the wall. Still shrieking, inarticulate now, she cut through the legs and pelvis, chopping them to pieces, and then turned her attention to what was left on the wall, swinging Rojo’s lightsaber back and forth, reducing the upper torso to chunks of smoking, twitching flesh. Only when she realized that she was literally unable to cut it down anymore did she finally deactivate the lightsaber.
She looked around the temple. The fire had now spread across a full two-thirds of the floor, still rising, the flames reaching shoulder height, heat rippling visibly in the air. It was already starting to creep this way, as if drawn to the chopped-off petals and vine sections scattered over here.
Take them, she thought. Burn it all.
Hestizo, the orchid’s voice murmured in her mind, I’m so sorry. I was sick, and I couldn’t…
I just couldn’t…
I know.
Bending down, she gathered her brother’s body in her arms and lifted him up, pressed his cold cheek next to hers. Pulling his eyelids shut, she looked slowly upward, up the seemingly endless wall toward the faint gray promise of daylight.
I’m sorry.
She kissed his cheek, crying a little, and released him, laying him slowly back down.
Then she went to the far wall, running her hands over it. Again she saw the lines of inscription that had been carved deep into the sleek black stone, row after row, going all the way up. Scabrous had told her that Darth Drear had built this temple to achieve immortality, engraving the walls with writings, plans that signaled the end of the Jedi.
Instead, it would be her salvation.
Hooking her fingertips into the chiseled letters, using the carved words for a toehold, she drew herself up and began to climb.