Yoda Read Free Page B

Geonosis. I could have stopped the whole war then. And still he is key. Could he come to parley in earnest? There is only a little chance. Could he come all the way back to us? Surely the chance is less than a little. But balance that chance, however small, against a million lives, and it’s a chance we must take. So I think, Master.”
    Yoda grunted. “Hard it would be, to dare to hope again for this lost student!”
    â€œTough,” Mace said. “Nobody said being a Jedi Master was easy—even for you.”
    Yoda grunted, glaring around at the Temple. “Pfeh. All too wise, you have become. Better before it was, when only Yoda was wise!” He glanced over at Mace and snickered. Mace would have laughed, too, if somewhere in the ring on Geonosis he hadn’t lost the knack.

    On the other side of the galaxy, the Order’s most gifted apprentice reached out to tap a lightsaber with the toe of his boot. Count Dooku grimaced. The lightsaber was still attached to a hand. The hand was soot black and rimed with frost; it ended in a gory stump of frozen blood just above the wrist. Dooku was in his study, a place for reflection, and the severed hand hardly struck the contemplative note. Besides which, as hard as it had frozen in the bitter vacuum of space, it would be thawing out in a hurry now. If he wasn’t careful, it would leave a stain on the tiles. Not a good thing, even though one more bloodstain on the floor of Château Malreaux would hardly be noticed.
    On the other side of Dooku’s desk, Asajj Ventress hefted a bag of foil insulation. “There wasn’t much left of the ship, Master. The Force was strong, and I hit the reactor chamber with my first shot. It took me several hours to find that,” she said, glancing at the frozen hand. “It occurred to me a magnetic scan might turn up the lightsaber. Funny to think he was reaching for his weapon when his ship blew up. Instinct, I suppose.”
    â€œHe?”
    â€œHe, she.” Asajj Ventress shrugged. “It.”
    When her first Master died, Asajj Ventress, scourge of the Jedi and Count Dooku’s most feared associate, had tattooed her hairless head and left her girlhood behind. Her skull was striped with twelve marks, one for each of the twelve warlords she had killed after swearing their deaths. She was a dagger of a woman, slender and deadly. Even in a galaxy cluttered with hate, such a combination of speed and fury comes only once in a generation; Dooku had known that from the first moment they met. She was the rose and the thorn together; the sound of a long knife driving home; the taste of blood on one’s lips.
    Asajj shrugged. “I never found a head, but I did pick up a few assorted bits out of the wreckage if you want to take a look,” she said, giving the foil bag a heft.
    Dooku regarded her. “What a little cannibal you have become.”
    She said, “I become what you make me.”
    No easy answer to that.
    With an expert Force tug, Dooku brought the severed hand, still clutching its weapon, to hang in the air before him, as easily as he had drawn up Yoda’s glow light all those decades earlier. Before the starfighter explosion had ripped the hand so untidily from the rest of its body, Dooku rather thought it might have been olive-skinned. The charring made it hard to tell if it was even human. The dead flesh, unconnected to any spirit, was merely matter now—no more interesting than a table leg or a wax candle, and bearing no more imprint of its owner’s soul and personality. Dooku always found this astonishing: how
transitory
the relationship was between one’s body and oneself. The spirit is a puppeteer to make one’s flesh limbs dance: but cut the spirit’s strings, and nothing remains but meat and paint, cloth and bone.
    A Jedi’s lightsaber, now: that was something different. Each weapon was unique, built and rebuilt by its owner, made to be a