Darth Plagueis (24 page)

That the Sith had never demanded anything other than battle hadn’t kept the primitives from attempting to adopt a policy of appeasement, leaving at the ships’ perpetual landing site foodstuffs, sacrificial victims, and works of what they considered art, forged of materials they held precious or sacred. But the Sith had simply ignored the offerings, waiting instead on the stony plain for the primitives to deploy their warriors, as the primitives did now with Plagueis and Sidious waiting.

Announcing their arrival with low runs over the city, they had set the ship down and waited for six days, while the mournful calls of breath-driven horns had disturbed the dry silences, and groups of
primitives had flocked in to gather on the hillsides that overlooked the battleground.

“Do you recall what Darth Bane said regarding the killing of innocents?” Plagueis had asked.

“Our mission,” Sidious paraphrased, “is not to bring death on all those unfit to live. All we do must serve our true purpose—the preservation of our Order and the survival of the Sith. We must work to grow our power, and to accomplish that we will need to interact with individuals of many species across many worlds. Eventually word of our existence will reach the ears of the Jedi.”

To refrain from senseless killing, they wielded force pikes rather than lightsabers. Meter-long melee weapons used by the Echani and carried by the Senate Guard, the pikes were equipped with stun-module tips capable of delivering a shock that could overwhelm the nervous systems of most sentients, without causing permanent damage.

“The next few hours will test the limits of your agility, speed, and accuracy,” Plagueis said, as several hundred of the biggest, bravest, and most skilled warriors—their bodies daubed in pigments derived from plants, clay, and soil—began to separate themselves from the crowds. “But this is more than some simple exercise in proficiency; it is a rite of passage for these beings, as they are assistants in our rise to ultimate power, and therefore servants of the dark side of the Force. Centuries from now, advanced by the Sith, they might confront us with projectile weapons or energy beams. But by then we will have evolved, as well, perhaps past the need for this rite, and we will come instead to honor rather than engage them in battle. Through power we gain victory, and through victory our chains are broken. But power is only a means to an end.”

To the clamorous beating of drums and the wailing of the onlookers, the warriors brandished their weapons, raised a deafening war cry, and attacked. A nod from Plagueis, and the two Sith sped across the plain to meet them, flying among them like wraiths, evading arrows, gleaming spear tips, and blows from battle-axes, going one against one, two, or three, but felling opponent after opponent with taps from the force pikes, until among the hundreds of jerking, twitching bodies sprawled on the rough ground, only one was left standing.

That was when Plagueis tossed aside the stun pike and ignited his crimson blade, and a collective lament rose from the crowds on the hillsides.

“Execute one, terrify one thousand,” he said.

Hurling the warrior to the ground with a Force push, he used the lightsaber to deftly open the primitive’s chest cavity; then he reached a hand inside and extracted his still-beating heart.

The keening of the crowd reached a fevered pitch as he raised the heart high overhead; then it ended abruptly. Following a protracted moment of silence, the fallen warriors were helped from the battleground and the crowds began to disperse, disconsolate but emboldened by the fact that they had discharged their duty. Horns blew and a communal chant that was at once somber and celebratory was carried on the wind. In the principal city, a stone stele would be carved and erected for the dead one, and the day-count would commence until the return of the Sith.

Plagueis placed the still heart on the primitive’s chest and used the hem of his robe to wipe the blood from his hand and forearm.

“At one time, though I recognized that Muuns are a higher class of beings, I puzzled over the fact that beings would relinquish their seats for me, or step into the muck to allow me to pass. But early on in my apprenticeship I came to realize that the lumpen species were making room for me not because I was a Muun, but because I was in fact superior to them in every way. More, that they should by all rights allow me to step not merely past them but
on
them to get where I needed to be, because the Sith are their salvation, their only real hope. In that we will ultimately improve the lives of their descendants, they owe us every courtesy, every sacrifice, nothing short of their very lives.

“But there are dark times ahead for many of them, Sidious. An era of warfare necessary to purge the galaxy of those who have allowed it to decay. For decay has no cure; it has to be eradicated by the flames of a cleansing fire. And the Jedi are mostly to blame. Crippled by empathy, shackled to obedience—to their Masters, their Council, their cherished Republic—they perpetuate a myth of equality, serving the Force as if it were a belief system that had been programmed into them. With the Republic they are like indulgent parents, allowing their offspring to experiment with choices without consequence, and supporting wrong-headedness
merely for the sake of maintaining family unity. Tripping over their own robes in a rush to uphold a galactic government that has been deteriorating for centuries. When instead they should be proclaiming:
We know what’s best for you
.

“The galaxy can’t be set on the proper course until the Jedi Order and the corrupt Republic have been brought down. Only then can the Sith begin the process of rebuilding from the ground up. This is why we encourage star system rivalries and the goals of any group that aims to foment chaos and anarchy. Because destruction of any sort furthers our own goals.”

Plagueis paused to take the warrior’s heart back into his hands.

“Through us, the powers of chaos are harnessed and exploited. Dark times don’t simply emerge, Sidious. Enlightened beings, guiding intelligences manipulate events to bring about a storm that will deliver power into the hands of an elite group willing to make the hard choices the Republic fears to make. Beings may elect their leaders, but the Force has elected us.”

He glanced at his apprentice. “Remember, though, that a cunning politician is capable of wreaking more havoc than two Sith Lords armed with vibroblades, lightsabers, or force pikes. That is what you must become, with me advising you from the dark.”

“Are we grand enough?” Sidious said.

“You should ask, are we crude enough?” Plagueis quirked a smile. “We’re not living in an age of giants, Sidious. But to succeed we must become as beasts.”

Taking a bite from the warrior’s heart, he passed the blood-filled organ to his apprentice.

14: THE SHAPE OF HIS SHADOW

“You appear to be enjoying the steak, Ambassador Palpatine.”

“Exquisite,” he said, holding her gaze for a fraction longer than might have been called for.

Working on her third glass of wine since dinner began, she interpreted his ready smile as permission to turn fully toward him. “Not too gamy?”

“Scarcely a trace of the wild.”

A dark-haired human beauty with big blue eyes, she was attached in some way to the Eriaduan consulate on Malastare—host of the gala at which the Dug winners of the Vinta Harvest Classic were being feted.

“Are you on Malastare for business or pleasure?”

“As luck would have it, both,” Palpatine said, patting his lips with a napkin. “Kinman Doriana and I are members of Senator Kim’s party.”

He indicated the clean-shaven, slightly balding young man in the adjacent seat.

“Charmed,” the woman said.

Doriana smiled broadly. “You’re not kidding.”

Her gaze moved to the neighboring table, where Vidar Kim sat with members of the Gran Protectorate and politicians from nearby Sullust, Darknell, and Sluis Van.

“Senator Kim is the tall one with the quaint beard?”

“No, he’s the one with the three eyestalks,” Doriana said.

The woman blinked, then laughed with him. “A friend of mine was asking about Senator Kim earlier. Is he married?”

“For many years, and happily,” Palpatine told her.

“And you?” she said, turning to him again.

“Frequent travel forbids it.”

She watched him over the rim of the wineglass. “Married to politics, is that it?”

“To the work,” he said.

“To the work,” Doriana said, raising his glass in a toast.

Just twenty-eight, Palpatine wore his reddish hair long, in the tradition of Naboo statesmen, and dressed impeccably. Many who encountered the ambassador described him as an articulate, charismatic young man of refined taste and quiet strength. A good listener, even-tempered, politically astute, astonishingly well informed for someone who had only been in the game for seven years. A patrician at a time when few could claim the title, and destined to go far. Well traveled, too, courtesy of his position as Naboo’s ambassador-at-large but also as the sole surviving heir to the wealth of House Palpatine. Long recovered from the tragedy that had struck his family more than a decade earlier, but perhaps as a result of being orphaned at seventeen, something of a loner. A man whose love of periodic solitude hinted at a hidden side to his personality.

“Tell me, Ambassador,” she said, as she set her glass down, “are you one of those men with a friend in every spaceport?”

“I’m always eager to make friends,” Palpatine said in a low monotone that brought sudden color to her face. “We’re alike in that way.”

Taking her glossy lower lip between her teeth, she reached for her wineglass once more. “Are you perhaps a Jedi mind reader disguised in ambassadorial robes?”

“Anything but.”

“I’ve often wondered whether they have secret relationships,” she said in a conspiratorial voice. “Gallivanting around the galaxy, using the Force to seduce innocent beings.”

“I wouldn’t know, but I sincerely doubt it,” Palpatine said.

She looked at him in a calculating way, and raised her hand to caress his chin with a manicured forefinger. “On Eriadu some believe that a cleft chin identifies someone the Force has pushed away.”

“Just my luck,” he said in mock seriousness.

“Just your luck, indeed,” she said, sliding a flimsi-card across the
table toward him. “I have hostess duties to attend to, Ambassador. But I’m free after midnight.”

Palpatine and Doriana watched her walk away from the table, teetering slightly on high heels.

“Nicely played,” Doriana said. “I’m taking notes.”

Palpatine slid the flimsi-card toward him. “A gift.”

“When you earned it?” Doriana shook his head. “I’m not that desperate. Yet, anyway.”

The two of them laughed. Doriana’s engaging smile and innocent good looks belied a sinister personality that had brought him to Palpatine’s notice several years earlier. A Naboo, he had a troubled past and, perhaps as a consequence, talents that made him useful. So Palpatine had befriended him and clandestinely drawn him into his web, in accordance with Plagueis’s instructions that he always keep an eye out for allies and would-be co-conspirators. That Doriana wasn’t strong in the Force made no difference. In eleven years of Sith apprenticeship and of traveling far and wide in the galaxy, Palpatine had yet to encounter a single being whose strength in the Force had gone unrecognized or unexploited.

At the neighboring table, Vidar Kim and the rest were enjoying themselves, their privacy ensured by the table’s transparent sound-muting umbrella. Envy gnawed at Palpatine while he watched Kim … the position he enjoyed in the Galactic Senate, the posting on Coruscant, easy access to the galaxy’s elite. But he knew that he needed to bide his time; that Plagueis would move him to the galactic capital only when there was some good reason to do so.

As often as Plagueis maintained that the Rule of Two had ended with their partnership, the Muun remained the powerful one, and Palpatine the covetous one. Bane’s dictum notwithstanding, denial was still a key factor in Sith training; a key factor in being “broken,” as Plagueis put it—of being shaped by the dark side of the Force. Cruelly, at times, and painfully. But Palpatine was grateful, for the Force had slowly groomed him into a being of dark power and granted him a secret identity, as well. The life he had been leading—as the noble head of House Palpatine, legislator, and most recently ambassador-at-large—was nothing more than the trappings of an alter ego; his wealth, a subterfuge; his handsome face, a mask. In the realm of the Force his thoughts ordered
reality, and his dreams prepared the galaxy for monumental change. He was a manifestation of dark purpose, helping to advance the Sith Grand Plan and gradually gaining power over himself so that he might one day—in the words of his Master—be able to gain control over another, then a group of others, then an order, a world, a species, the Republic itself.

Doriana’s elbow nudged him out of his reverie.

“Kim’s coming.”

“Don’t think I didn’t see that,” the Senator said when he reached Palpatine.

Palpatine let his bafflement show.

“The flimsi-card that woman slipped you,” Vidar said. “I suppose you entertained her with the usual tall tales.”

Palpatine shrugged in a guileless manner. “I may have said something about getting to know the galaxy.”

“Getting to know the galaxy’s women, he means,” Doriana interjected.

Kim laughed heartily. “How is it that I come to have assistants who leave trails of conquests, and a son who meditates on the Force in the Jedi Temple?”

“That’s what makes you so well rounded,” Doriana said.

More than even Plagueis, Kim had been Palpatine’s mentor in the sphere of mundane politics. Their relationship went back fifteen years, to when Palpatine had been forcibly enrolled in a private school in Theed, and Kim had just completed his stint in the Apprentice Legislator program. In the time since, Palpatine had watched Kim’s family grow to include three sons, one of whom—Ronhar, six years Palpatine’s junior—had been turned over to the Jedi Order as an infant. When Plagueis had learned of this, he had encouraged Palpatine to allow his friendship with Kim to deepen, in the expectation that sooner or later his and Jedi Ronhar’s paths would cross.