Chapter 30
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Boroda Orka
Getting sticky.
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The Supreme Chancellor was deep in thought. Lately, his mind had been returning far too often to the sorcerer from Jabiim. At first, reports of a new organization of Force-sensitives had merely prompted him to make a note to investigate them later—potential threats were not something one left unattended. But there was always too much to do and never enough people he could truly trust, so for the time being, the matter had been left in limbo.
Then came their face-to-face meeting at the opera, during which Palpatine had all but convinced himself that he was dealing either with a representative of yet another cell of Dark Side Force-users—or with someone who had known Plagueis.
A kaleidoscope of thoughts and possibilities flashed through his mind, theories taking shape only to be discarded moments later. His formidable, disciplined intellect worked through every possibility, refusing to dismiss even the wildest assumptions. Beneath it all, passions churned in the Sith Lord's soul—not masters to obey, nor mindless slaves, but loyal, unruly companions kept firmly under control.
Anger and fury never clouded his judgment; they drove him to act. Fear forced him to revisit hundreds of moments when the Sith might have slipped up and compromised his otherwise impeccable disguise. Pride steadied him, keeping reflection from curdling into self-reproach. Excitement kept him sharp. And beneath it all burned the hunger for power—the determination to claim what was rightfully his, and the will to keep moving forward.
A finely tuned engine of unrestrained power, built not on the weakening calm of serenity but fueled by emotion, carried the adept of the Great Force toward his ultimate Goal: the fulfillment of a grand design a thousand years in the making. It was a perilous path. The weak or the foolish risked sinking so deeply into darkness that nothing remained of them but a bloodthirsty monster—or, worse still in Sidious's eyes, becoming a madman unable to master the immense power of the Dark Side and destroying with his own hands everything that men like him had worked toward for a millennium. A dangerous road. Dangerous and fraught with risk—but one that granted extraordinary power, freedom of choice, and the means to realize his Ambitions.
Palpatine exhaled softly through his nose. The barely audible sound was enough to make Sly, seated nearby, straighten at once and turn toward her master with a look of immediate readiness to serve.
"Am I correct in assuming you couldn't get inside the red-eyed one's head?"
"Yes, my Lord. The sorcerer was protected. I didn't even try to probe the defenses—they were too unusual. I did, however, read his little Twi'lek slave, though how useful the information will be to you..."
"That judgment is mine alone," the man said with a nod, holding out his hand expectantly.
The woman immediately reached out, her slender fingers brushing against her master's open palm. She allowed herself the faintest smile, and a barely perceptible glimmer of pleasure appeared deep within her white eyes. For nearly a minute, neither of them moved. Then Sidious broke the contact and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes.
"Living dead..." the Chancellor murmured thoughtfully without opening his eyes. "This just keeps getting more interesting."
"And in that conversation with the slave, the sorcerer said he'd never met any Dark Side Force-users," Sly Moore ventured, daring to draw her Lord's attention to one more detail from what she had shown him.
"That too," the man agreed with a nod, paying no attention to the Umbaran holding her breath. "It doesn't add up..."
In the vision, the little Twi'lek was massaging her master's shoulders while he studied something on a datapad. The sorcerer was groaning with such obvious pleasure and occasionally letting out such contented little grunts that, for a moment, Sidious found himself tempted to summon a masseuse of his own... Perhaps he would indulge himself. Later.
"I'm starting to think the Jedi are basically Sith who castrated themselves," the red-eyed sorcerer grumbled, setting the datapad aside. "I can't make heads or tails of these Force-users. This whole concept of the Force having two opposing sides is something else entirely. And everything the Jedi make publicly available is so damned lofty and spiritual that I can barely figure out what they're actually saying. As for the Sith, it's nothing but horror stories—which, to be fair, makes sense."
"Would you like me to ask Shmi to make you some more herbal tea, sir?" the Twi'lek's voice chimed like soft bells.
"That would be lovely, Suti. Thank you."
Judging by the surroundings, this was already on Coruscant, and the sorcerer's words suggested that he had thrown himself into researching the Force, the Sith, and the Jedi in earnest. Most likely, this had been after his visit to the Temple—possibly even after the opera.
The now-empty mug earned a moment of the Chancellor's attention as well. It was a large one, easily half a liter, with the words "Do Not Mention the Pantaloons" printed across it. The meaning of the phrase escaped the Sith entirely, but its sheer absurdity still brought a faint smile to his face.
"And then there are these Jed-eyes... balance-shmalance..." Siith muttered as he scrolled through the data on the device he'd picked up again, while the girl contacted the servants over her comlink. "How do I steal the Jedi Archives without anyone noticing? Although if I'm stealing the Archives, I'll have to swipe Lady Nu too. I'll never make sense of all this high-minded mystical gibberish on my own. 'Feel the Force,' Dozdrogodul damn it! I can always feel magic, so what? How the hell do you glowstick paladins use magic like this? There isn't even a speck of divine power involved. If someone had told me about it, I wouldn't have believed them..."
"That proves nothing," Sidious said with a slight shake of his head, surfacing from the memories he had been replaying. "He may simply have allowed the slave to see and hear exactly what he wanted her to. Especially since he acquired her only recently—a readily replaceable asset. Perhaps even a disposable tool."
If one assumed the Umbaran's abilities were known, then a gambit like that was certainly possible. But why? The more the Sith thought about it, the less sense any of it made.
His new acquaintance seemed almost insane. One moment he appeared to be deliberately provoking a Sith, the next he behaved like a child—only to look at the Chancellor a heartbeat later with the eyes of a very old man.
With every sentence, the sorcerer added another pinch of chaos to Sidious's thoughts. One moment he had Palpatine nearly convinced that all his suspicions about the man's ties to some secret Dark Side sect were nothing more than paranoid nonsense—that Siith was simply a Force-user who interacted with it in a completely different way. Then, almost immediately, something would slip from the sorcerer's lips that convinced the Chancellor of the exact opposite.
The one thing the politician—and, incidentally, powerful Dark Side adept—was certain of was that the sorcerer had nothing to do with the Jedi. Those squeamish purists would never have anything to do with raising the dead in any form. But the possibility that the JMG belonged to some kind of Sith cult could not be dismissed. There were simply too many suspicious details, from the literature—the Chancellor glanced at the two volumes lying on the table—to little things like that deeply unsettling smile.
Palpatine allowed himself a quiet chuckle. The theory that the sorcerer was simply insane fit rather nicely with an amusing thought that had just occurred to him: perhaps the red-eyed man simply hadn't wanted to give up his habitual nasty grin and had invented an explanation so absurd that everyone had actually believed it.
But jokes aside.
"Visions of the future?" the Chancellor asked, once again regarding the Umbaran with focused seriousness. Sly faltered, and the Sith caught a rare expression on her face: genuine confusion.
"It was strange, my Lord. In the vision, the sorcerer was little more than a vague shadow. Everything around him was blurred and indistinct. Everything except one strange black kath hound with claws instead of hooves. It looked straight at me—and the vision ended."
"Some kind of protection?" Palpatine asked the empty room irritably, then calmed somewhat as he considered the implications. "If so, that's very interesting. Perhaps these sorcerers really are as good at defensive magic as they claim."
With a glance, Sidious dismissed the Umbaran. Then he drew a deep breath and returned to considering the situation.
Even after pulling together everything available so far, there were still too many questions and nowhere near enough answers. Unfortunately, Jabiim's brutal weather and the almost paranoid level of scrutiny directed at outsiders had made reliable intelligence difficult to obtain. Even so, several points stood out.
Siith had appeared out of nowhere, yet somehow managed to establish good relations with the leadership of that rain-soaked planet. Rumor even had it that he was either Cordelia Stratus's secret husband or her lover. At present, she headed Jabiim's internal security service.
The Stratuses, who had become his "patrons," had risen to power almost at the same time the red-eyed sorcerer appeared, following an extremely peculiar epidemic. An epidemic that had been almost absurdly convenient for them, to be precise. The Jabiim Fever had done the rain-soaked world one undeniable favor: it had sent the popularity of healthy living through the roof, wiped out the most committed addicts and alcoholics, and—what a surprise—taken out most of the ruling elite as well. Those who survived were politically dead, because the public never forgave them for being friendly with actual corpses. After the dead were gone, so much filth came pouring out about them that execution by lethal diarrhea would almost have counted as merciful.
The accounts of wealthy dead magnates emptied out, the planetary treasury filled up, and both the military and civilian sectors began expanding at a breakneck pace. Pirate raids ended in bloodbaths, while nature itself seemed to be siding with the Jabiimites—opening "windows" in the cloud cover and ion storms almost exactly when they were needed...
In short, genuine magic. Sidious gave a crooked smile and drew a slow, deep breath. Nothing even remotely like this had ever happened on that mudball before. Jabiim had been a truly backward world, plagued by endless problems: ion storms, ceaseless rain, corrupt leaders... and then suddenly, this. Well, not a transformation just yet. More like the beginnings of one. But the signs were promising.
"There's definitely some kind of scheme at work here. Small, insignificant—but it may be part of something larger," Sidious murmured thoughtfully to his reflection in the mirror.
After another few minutes of consideration, the Chancellor ordered Pestage to find and prepare three loyal but uninformed young men, along with a fourth who was diligent but expendable. All four would be sent to Jabiim to study magic. The last one, however, Sidious would personally tear apart afterward, extracting every scrap of knowledge he had acquired.
He would also need to contact Tyranus, Palpatine thought. At least one Dark Side Force-user thoroughly familiar with concealing himself in the Force should try his hand at sorcery. There was no reason for Palpatine himself to fly out there and experiment firsthand, and Dooku hardly belonged in a classroom.
The Chancellor had not fully discarded a single one of his theories about Siith. In his position, with the stakes in the Great Game as high as they were, the price of being wrong was unacceptable. For now, the priority was simple: learn as much as possible about the sorcerer and his Guild. Decisions could come later—whether to begin integrating them into the New Order while maintaining ostensibly friendly relations; eliminate the most powerful among them, seize their knowledge and novices, and put the latter to use; or wipe them out root and branch, just as he intended to do with the Jedi.
The Chancellor cast another glance at the two volumes Siith had given him, then picked one up and opened it to the page he had marked. Vivec, in Sidious's estimation, was an intelligent man: driven, ruthless, cynical, effective. Some of the traditions described among his people even made the Chancellor shake his head in admiration from time to time. The dark elves were Sith in spirit through and through—but without, let's be honest, the excesses. Some of their principles would have had many of his fellow Sith, dead and otherwise, choking on their own bile.
Darth Bane himself would have appreciated it: "The apprentice, in the course of training, learns from the Master, gains wisdom, and tries not to die. The Master, while training the apprentice, learns how best to beat knowledge into him, gains wisdom, and tries not to die. To complete his training, the apprentice must either kill the Master—or survive. The Master has it harder: he must survive himself while trying to kill the apprentice in such a way that the lesson sinks in and the apprentice doesn't."
In general, sorcerer mentorship among the "ash folk" was remarkably similar to the Sith approach: "If your apprentice hates you, they'll learn combat sorcery faster," or, "Beat your apprentice often enough, and they'll master defensive spells sooner." Unfortunately, there wasn't much of that sort of thing in these books. They were, after all, primarily the work of a politician writing about politics. Still, since Vivec himself was a sorcerer, the occasional remark like that slipped through.
Hmm... Did Siith have any actual treatises on teaching written by Vivec?
Our new bird was carrying us to Corellia—more specifically, to the local shipyards. Shmi, Romri, and I had already sketched out a rough plan for remodeling the ship's interior. I wanted a proper cabin of my own, with an en suite bathroom and an enormous bed. Suti would live in the smaller adjoining cabin next door, still with all the amenities; she had turned out to be an extremely useful assistant. The ship already had a galley and a common room, so aside from those changes, most of the work would simply involve replacing some of the internal systems with better ones.
A message came in from Jabiim: the literature I needed had been released onto the Net, and special programs would periodically send out messages introducing people to Hecate. The target audience was students. Personally, I thought it was brilliant! That whole army of slackers would eat up the idea of a patron goddess of knowledge, and more than half of them probably wouldn't even pay attention to the fact that there was some magic-shmagic involved as well. Especially since I hadn't been smacked in the back of the head with a book when I suggested adding "better memory" and "eloquence during exams" to the list of benefits, so I figured the Moon Goddess didn't object. In any case, I considered that the bare minimum needed to fulfill the goddess's task: with billions of sentients out there, someone was bound to perform the initiation on their own, and once Hecate had an actual devotee, she could establish contact with them herself.
I knew firsthand how superstitious students could be. Just look at those idiots who used to lean out of windows before exams and shout, "Freebie, come to me!" Morons... The instructors had long since gotten into the habit of tagging them with tracking spells the night before exams and grading those freeloaders more harshly than anyone else—if only to keep their ignorance from embarrassing the reputation of a respectable institution.
The memories of teaching brought on a faint bout of melancholy. Vacation had turned out to be a wonderful thing, with one enormous drawback: it ended. Never mind that I hadn't even reached the halfway point of the time I'd set aside for myself—the mere thought of it was depressing.
It wasn't that I didn't want to get back to work. Quite the opposite—I'd be perfectly happy to return to projects I actually found interesting. What weighed on me was the thought of having to run a school of magic. We called it an academy, sure, but let's be honest: three or four youngsters doing the teaching, plus one genuinely experienced instructor—me—made it a school. And it was going to stay that way for another five years or so...
And after that it would only get worse: hordes of students, reckless young idiots, drunken dorm parties ending in every kind of disaster imaginable... cleaning up the aftermath, putting students back together from assorted body parts... And fine, if a heap of remains that had once belonged to three sentients could be reassembled into three sentients again. But what if I ended up with only two? Or, Hecate forbid, FOUR?!
And then there'd be the inevitable contempt between departments, because obviously they—the combat mages—were the best of the best, unlike those... artificers. Ugh. Or flocks of young women desperate to get into healing... And healing, in my humble opinion, was second only to chimerology in how brutal it was to master. Blood, guts, shit, horrific deaths. A good healer had to be cynical, decisive, ruthless, and extremely well trained. To be fair, some truly excellent sorceresses did go on to become outstanding healers, but most switched departments after a couple of practical lessons.
The best student to pass through the healing department during all my years of teaching was a hulking orc brute named Ghazghull—two and a half meters tall, nearly two meters across, all green flesh and steel-hard muscle. Brusque, intelligent, ruthless, and outrageously talented.
I'll never forget one of his exams. He grabbed a mortally wounded criminal—freshly released from stasis—by the head in one enormous hand, and while casting diagnostic spells on him, roared straight into the terrified man's face loud enough to make half the examiners' ears ring: "If you die, I'll gnaw your face off and then fuck the corpse."
He went on to become one of the finest practicing healers around, by the way. Rumor had it that for some patients, one look at his kindly smile was enough to cure whatever was wrong with them on the spot.
"Ah..." I sighed, staring unfocused through the three-dimensional schematic of the ship-control interface, now more or less finished in rough form. It was a complicated piece of work—both to build and to use.
"Would you like anything, sir?" chimed the Twi'lek's bell-like voice as she looked up from the training assignment she had been working on.
"I do, Suti." I nodded sadly, looking at the focused girl with outright longing. "Take over the Guild for me, would you? Please?"
She really was adorable, I thought, feeling the melancholy drain out of me. At first, the girl drew her brows together as she processed what I'd just said. Then she shot me a startled look and flashed a sweet, slightly shy smile.
"I'll help you with anything, sir. Would you like me to bring you some caf and sweets? Or put on a holovid of Romri counting money?"
"All of it," I declared with a regal wave of my hand, sprawling comfortably in the chair as I closed the schematic. They say there are three things you can watch forever: fire burning, water flowing, and other people working. But watching our Togruta sort through credits while giggling and occasionally snorting with delight was a pleasure all its own. "And then we'll do your homework together! Oh, don't look at me like that—I'm interested!"
Original Russian story
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The translation of new chapters will also be published here—but with a bit of a delay.
Then came their face-to-face meeting at the opera, during which Palpatine had all but convinced himself that he was dealing either with a representative of yet another cell of Dark Side Force-users—or with someone who had known Plagueis.
A kaleidoscope of thoughts and possibilities flashed through his mind, theories taking shape only to be discarded moments later. His formidable, disciplined intellect worked through every possibility, refusing to dismiss even the wildest assumptions. Beneath it all, passions churned in the Sith Lord's soul—not masters to obey, nor mindless slaves, but loyal, unruly companions kept firmly under control.
Anger and fury never clouded his judgment; they drove him to act. Fear forced him to revisit hundreds of moments when the Sith might have slipped up and compromised his otherwise impeccable disguise. Pride steadied him, keeping reflection from curdling into self-reproach. Excitement kept him sharp. And beneath it all burned the hunger for power—the determination to claim what was rightfully his, and the will to keep moving forward.
A finely tuned engine of unrestrained power, built not on the weakening calm of serenity but fueled by emotion, carried the adept of the Great Force toward his ultimate Goal: the fulfillment of a grand design a thousand years in the making. It was a perilous path. The weak or the foolish risked sinking so deeply into darkness that nothing remained of them but a bloodthirsty monster—or, worse still in Sidious's eyes, becoming a madman unable to master the immense power of the Dark Side and destroying with his own hands everything that men like him had worked toward for a millennium. A dangerous road. Dangerous and fraught with risk—but one that granted extraordinary power, freedom of choice, and the means to realize his Ambitions.
Palpatine exhaled softly through his nose. The barely audible sound was enough to make Sly, seated nearby, straighten at once and turn toward her master with a look of immediate readiness to serve.
"Am I correct in assuming you couldn't get inside the red-eyed one's head?"
"Yes, my Lord. The sorcerer was protected. I didn't even try to probe the defenses—they were too unusual. I did, however, read his little Twi'lek slave, though how useful the information will be to you..."
"That judgment is mine alone," the man said with a nod, holding out his hand expectantly.
The woman immediately reached out, her slender fingers brushing against her master's open palm. She allowed herself the faintest smile, and a barely perceptible glimmer of pleasure appeared deep within her white eyes. For nearly a minute, neither of them moved. Then Sidious broke the contact and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes.
"Living dead..." the Chancellor murmured thoughtfully without opening his eyes. "This just keeps getting more interesting."
"And in that conversation with the slave, the sorcerer said he'd never met any Dark Side Force-users," Sly Moore ventured, daring to draw her Lord's attention to one more detail from what she had shown him.
"That too," the man agreed with a nod, paying no attention to the Umbaran holding her breath. "It doesn't add up..."
In the vision, the little Twi'lek was massaging her master's shoulders while he studied something on a datapad. The sorcerer was groaning with such obvious pleasure and occasionally letting out such contented little grunts that, for a moment, Sidious found himself tempted to summon a masseuse of his own... Perhaps he would indulge himself. Later.
"I'm starting to think the Jedi are basically Sith who castrated themselves," the red-eyed sorcerer grumbled, setting the datapad aside. "I can't make heads or tails of these Force-users. This whole concept of the Force having two opposing sides is something else entirely. And everything the Jedi make publicly available is so damned lofty and spiritual that I can barely figure out what they're actually saying. As for the Sith, it's nothing but horror stories—which, to be fair, makes sense."
"Would you like me to ask Shmi to make you some more herbal tea, sir?" the Twi'lek's voice chimed like soft bells.
"That would be lovely, Suti. Thank you."
Judging by the surroundings, this was already on Coruscant, and the sorcerer's words suggested that he had thrown himself into researching the Force, the Sith, and the Jedi in earnest. Most likely, this had been after his visit to the Temple—possibly even after the opera.
The now-empty mug earned a moment of the Chancellor's attention as well. It was a large one, easily half a liter, with the words "Do Not Mention the Pantaloons" printed across it. The meaning of the phrase escaped the Sith entirely, but its sheer absurdity still brought a faint smile to his face.
"And then there are these Jed-eyes... balance-shmalance..." Siith muttered as he scrolled through the data on the device he'd picked up again, while the girl contacted the servants over her comlink. "How do I steal the Jedi Archives without anyone noticing? Although if I'm stealing the Archives, I'll have to swipe Lady Nu too. I'll never make sense of all this high-minded mystical gibberish on my own. 'Feel the Force,' Dozdrogodul damn it! I can always feel magic, so what? How the hell do you glowstick paladins use magic like this? There isn't even a speck of divine power involved. If someone had told me about it, I wouldn't have believed them..."
"That proves nothing," Sidious said with a slight shake of his head, surfacing from the memories he had been replaying. "He may simply have allowed the slave to see and hear exactly what he wanted her to. Especially since he acquired her only recently—a readily replaceable asset. Perhaps even a disposable tool."
If one assumed the Umbaran's abilities were known, then a gambit like that was certainly possible. But why? The more the Sith thought about it, the less sense any of it made.
His new acquaintance seemed almost insane. One moment he appeared to be deliberately provoking a Sith, the next he behaved like a child—only to look at the Chancellor a heartbeat later with the eyes of a very old man.
With every sentence, the sorcerer added another pinch of chaos to Sidious's thoughts. One moment he had Palpatine nearly convinced that all his suspicions about the man's ties to some secret Dark Side sect were nothing more than paranoid nonsense—that Siith was simply a Force-user who interacted with it in a completely different way. Then, almost immediately, something would slip from the sorcerer's lips that convinced the Chancellor of the exact opposite.
The one thing the politician—and, incidentally, powerful Dark Side adept—was certain of was that the sorcerer had nothing to do with the Jedi. Those squeamish purists would never have anything to do with raising the dead in any form. But the possibility that the JMG belonged to some kind of Sith cult could not be dismissed. There were simply too many suspicious details, from the literature—the Chancellor glanced at the two volumes lying on the table—to little things like that deeply unsettling smile.
Palpatine allowed himself a quiet chuckle. The theory that the sorcerer was simply insane fit rather nicely with an amusing thought that had just occurred to him: perhaps the red-eyed man simply hadn't wanted to give up his habitual nasty grin and had invented an explanation so absurd that everyone had actually believed it.
But jokes aside.
"Visions of the future?" the Chancellor asked, once again regarding the Umbaran with focused seriousness. Sly faltered, and the Sith caught a rare expression on her face: genuine confusion.
"It was strange, my Lord. In the vision, the sorcerer was little more than a vague shadow. Everything around him was blurred and indistinct. Everything except one strange black kath hound with claws instead of hooves. It looked straight at me—and the vision ended."
"Some kind of protection?" Palpatine asked the empty room irritably, then calmed somewhat as he considered the implications. "If so, that's very interesting. Perhaps these sorcerers really are as good at defensive magic as they claim."
With a glance, Sidious dismissed the Umbaran. Then he drew a deep breath and returned to considering the situation.
Even after pulling together everything available so far, there were still too many questions and nowhere near enough answers. Unfortunately, Jabiim's brutal weather and the almost paranoid level of scrutiny directed at outsiders had made reliable intelligence difficult to obtain. Even so, several points stood out.
Siith had appeared out of nowhere, yet somehow managed to establish good relations with the leadership of that rain-soaked planet. Rumor even had it that he was either Cordelia Stratus's secret husband or her lover. At present, she headed Jabiim's internal security service.
The Stratuses, who had become his "patrons," had risen to power almost at the same time the red-eyed sorcerer appeared, following an extremely peculiar epidemic. An epidemic that had been almost absurdly convenient for them, to be precise. The Jabiim Fever had done the rain-soaked world one undeniable favor: it had sent the popularity of healthy living through the roof, wiped out the most committed addicts and alcoholics, and—what a surprise—taken out most of the ruling elite as well. Those who survived were politically dead, because the public never forgave them for being friendly with actual corpses. After the dead were gone, so much filth came pouring out about them that execution by lethal diarrhea would almost have counted as merciful.
The accounts of wealthy dead magnates emptied out, the planetary treasury filled up, and both the military and civilian sectors began expanding at a breakneck pace. Pirate raids ended in bloodbaths, while nature itself seemed to be siding with the Jabiimites—opening "windows" in the cloud cover and ion storms almost exactly when they were needed...
In short, genuine magic. Sidious gave a crooked smile and drew a slow, deep breath. Nothing even remotely like this had ever happened on that mudball before. Jabiim had been a truly backward world, plagued by endless problems: ion storms, ceaseless rain, corrupt leaders... and then suddenly, this. Well, not a transformation just yet. More like the beginnings of one. But the signs were promising.
"There's definitely some kind of scheme at work here. Small, insignificant—but it may be part of something larger," Sidious murmured thoughtfully to his reflection in the mirror.
After another few minutes of consideration, the Chancellor ordered Pestage to find and prepare three loyal but uninformed young men, along with a fourth who was diligent but expendable. All four would be sent to Jabiim to study magic. The last one, however, Sidious would personally tear apart afterward, extracting every scrap of knowledge he had acquired.
He would also need to contact Tyranus, Palpatine thought. At least one Dark Side Force-user thoroughly familiar with concealing himself in the Force should try his hand at sorcery. There was no reason for Palpatine himself to fly out there and experiment firsthand, and Dooku hardly belonged in a classroom.
The Chancellor had not fully discarded a single one of his theories about Siith. In his position, with the stakes in the Great Game as high as they were, the price of being wrong was unacceptable. For now, the priority was simple: learn as much as possible about the sorcerer and his Guild. Decisions could come later—whether to begin integrating them into the New Order while maintaining ostensibly friendly relations; eliminate the most powerful among them, seize their knowledge and novices, and put the latter to use; or wipe them out root and branch, just as he intended to do with the Jedi.
The Chancellor cast another glance at the two volumes Siith had given him, then picked one up and opened it to the page he had marked. Vivec, in Sidious's estimation, was an intelligent man: driven, ruthless, cynical, effective. Some of the traditions described among his people even made the Chancellor shake his head in admiration from time to time. The dark elves were Sith in spirit through and through—but without, let's be honest, the excesses. Some of their principles would have had many of his fellow Sith, dead and otherwise, choking on their own bile.
Darth Bane himself would have appreciated it: "The apprentice, in the course of training, learns from the Master, gains wisdom, and tries not to die. The Master, while training the apprentice, learns how best to beat knowledge into him, gains wisdom, and tries not to die. To complete his training, the apprentice must either kill the Master—or survive. The Master has it harder: he must survive himself while trying to kill the apprentice in such a way that the lesson sinks in and the apprentice doesn't."
In general, sorcerer mentorship among the "ash folk" was remarkably similar to the Sith approach: "If your apprentice hates you, they'll learn combat sorcery faster," or, "Beat your apprentice often enough, and they'll master defensive spells sooner." Unfortunately, there wasn't much of that sort of thing in these books. They were, after all, primarily the work of a politician writing about politics. Still, since Vivec himself was a sorcerer, the occasional remark like that slipped through.
Hmm... Did Siith have any actual treatises on teaching written by Vivec?
Our new bird was carrying us to Corellia—more specifically, to the local shipyards. Shmi, Romri, and I had already sketched out a rough plan for remodeling the ship's interior. I wanted a proper cabin of my own, with an en suite bathroom and an enormous bed. Suti would live in the smaller adjoining cabin next door, still with all the amenities; she had turned out to be an extremely useful assistant. The ship already had a galley and a common room, so aside from those changes, most of the work would simply involve replacing some of the internal systems with better ones.
A message came in from Jabiim: the literature I needed had been released onto the Net, and special programs would periodically send out messages introducing people to Hecate. The target audience was students. Personally, I thought it was brilliant! That whole army of slackers would eat up the idea of a patron goddess of knowledge, and more than half of them probably wouldn't even pay attention to the fact that there was some magic-shmagic involved as well. Especially since I hadn't been smacked in the back of the head with a book when I suggested adding "better memory" and "eloquence during exams" to the list of benefits, so I figured the Moon Goddess didn't object. In any case, I considered that the bare minimum needed to fulfill the goddess's task: with billions of sentients out there, someone was bound to perform the initiation on their own, and once Hecate had an actual devotee, she could establish contact with them herself.
I knew firsthand how superstitious students could be. Just look at those idiots who used to lean out of windows before exams and shout, "Freebie, come to me!" Morons... The instructors had long since gotten into the habit of tagging them with tracking spells the night before exams and grading those freeloaders more harshly than anyone else—if only to keep their ignorance from embarrassing the reputation of a respectable institution.
The memories of teaching brought on a faint bout of melancholy. Vacation had turned out to be a wonderful thing, with one enormous drawback: it ended. Never mind that I hadn't even reached the halfway point of the time I'd set aside for myself—the mere thought of it was depressing.
It wasn't that I didn't want to get back to work. Quite the opposite—I'd be perfectly happy to return to projects I actually found interesting. What weighed on me was the thought of having to run a school of magic. We called it an academy, sure, but let's be honest: three or four youngsters doing the teaching, plus one genuinely experienced instructor—me—made it a school. And it was going to stay that way for another five years or so...
And after that it would only get worse: hordes of students, reckless young idiots, drunken dorm parties ending in every kind of disaster imaginable... cleaning up the aftermath, putting students back together from assorted body parts... And fine, if a heap of remains that had once belonged to three sentients could be reassembled into three sentients again. But what if I ended up with only two? Or, Hecate forbid, FOUR?!
And then there'd be the inevitable contempt between departments, because obviously they—the combat mages—were the best of the best, unlike those... artificers. Ugh. Or flocks of young women desperate to get into healing... And healing, in my humble opinion, was second only to chimerology in how brutal it was to master. Blood, guts, shit, horrific deaths. A good healer had to be cynical, decisive, ruthless, and extremely well trained. To be fair, some truly excellent sorceresses did go on to become outstanding healers, but most switched departments after a couple of practical lessons.
The best student to pass through the healing department during all my years of teaching was a hulking orc brute named Ghazghull—two and a half meters tall, nearly two meters across, all green flesh and steel-hard muscle. Brusque, intelligent, ruthless, and outrageously talented.
I'll never forget one of his exams. He grabbed a mortally wounded criminal—freshly released from stasis—by the head in one enormous hand, and while casting diagnostic spells on him, roared straight into the terrified man's face loud enough to make half the examiners' ears ring: "If you die, I'll gnaw your face off and then fuck the corpse."
He went on to become one of the finest practicing healers around, by the way. Rumor had it that for some patients, one look at his kindly smile was enough to cure whatever was wrong with them on the spot.
"Ah..." I sighed, staring unfocused through the three-dimensional schematic of the ship-control interface, now more or less finished in rough form. It was a complicated piece of work—both to build and to use.
"Would you like anything, sir?" chimed the Twi'lek's bell-like voice as she looked up from the training assignment she had been working on.
"I do, Suti." I nodded sadly, looking at the focused girl with outright longing. "Take over the Guild for me, would you? Please?"
She really was adorable, I thought, feeling the melancholy drain out of me. At first, the girl drew her brows together as she processed what I'd just said. Then she shot me a startled look and flashed a sweet, slightly shy smile.
"I'll help you with anything, sir. Would you like me to bring you some caf and sweets? Or put on a holovid of Romri counting money?"
"All of it," I declared with a regal wave of my hand, sprawling comfortably in the chair as I closed the schematic. They say there are three things you can watch forever: fire burning, water flowing, and other people working. But watching our Togruta sort through credits while giggling and occasionally snorting with delight was a pleasure all its own. "And then we'll do your homework together! Oh, don't look at me like that—I'm interested!"
Original Russian story
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