Fate of the Jedi: Backlash Read Free Page B

ignited his lightsaber, then lunged at the rancor’s extended shield hand, still sweeping away from him.
    His energy blade caught the rancor’s wrist and cut a bloody trench from that point deep into the forearm, severing the shield’s laces, leather or sinew cables as thick as those used on ancient seafaring ships. Lightsaber attacks normally cauterized the flesh they contacted, but the rancor’s limb was too thick, the wound too deep for that. Dark rancor blood gouted up, and the shield dropped away from the arm.
    The rancor howled and straightened. It glanced at the injury—Luke knew it not to be a life-threatening cut by rancor standards, for all that his strike would have severed a tauntaun leg or wampa arm—and glowered at Luke. Then it took a step back, looked left and right, and saw what it wanted, a fallen tree trunk some eight meters long. It sidestepped to the trunk and, using both hands, unimpaired by Luke’s attack, lifted it by one end, clearly intending to use it as a club.
    In his peripheral vision, Luke saw movement, the bob-and-weave of Ben’s speeder bike.
    At almost the same moment Luke felt a pulse in the Force from the opposite direction. He spun around, dropping into a ready crouch.
    Ten meters away, standing in front of a thornbush, stood a human woman. Luke saw a mane of black hair, strands of white animal teeth hanging from it to frame her face, and abbreviated garments and accoutrements fashioned from ruddy tanned hide.
    Then it was as though Luke, the rancor, everything within sight was enveloped in a ball of lightning. Arcs of electricity a few centimeters thick and several meters long snapped and crackled between ground and sky, incinerating vines, igniting leaves, causing the rancor to howl as though it were witnessing the end of the galaxy. As the barrage began, Luke let the Force flow through him, let it direct his instincts, and leaped where it guided him, bounding forward–left–right in a seemingly random pattern that kept all but a few errant lightningstrikes from hitting him. The woman vanished from his sight and other perceptions as he moved.
    The lightning strikes that hit Luke did not seem too dangerous, though he felt the hair all over his body stand on end. Suddenly his lightsaber switched off.
    The engine howl of Ben’s speeder bike turned into a series of coughs, then cut out entirely.
    And then the lightning storm was over. Luke saw the oncoming speeder bike dip, nose-down, toward a rock outcropping. Ben leapt free, clearing the jagged black stones by less than a meter, and somersaulted toward a trio of tree trunks.
    Luke raised a hand, extending control through the Force, and directed his ballistic son to one side of the trees, slowing Ben’s velocity as he did so. By the time Ben came to ground, he was hurtling at a pace his gymnastic skills could handle. The boy shoulder-rolled through a shallow patch of algae and came to his feet, slick green slime adhering to his back and right arm, poised and ready to fight.
    But their visible opponent was no longer interested. The rancor looked around, an almost human expression of fear on its face, then glanced again at its forearm injury. It turned away from the two Jedi and plunged into the forest, heading directly away from them.
    Ben frowned and prepared to give chase, but Luke gestured for him to stand down. “That’s not our real enemy. Look for a Force-user.”
    “That woman? Who was she?”
    Luke shrugged. “A Dathomiri Witch, I expect.”
    They cast about in the Force, but the woman was not to be found. They could feel teeming rain-forest life in the Force, could detect the lumbering rancor moving away from them at high speed, and Luke could still feel, distantly, his own blood the Sith girl was carrying, but there was no pulse to suggest that anyone was using the Force.
    Ben sighed. “What was that all about?”
    “Somebody did not want us to proceed.” Luke reignited his lightsaber. It came on, but