Light of the Jedi(48)
“Ottoh,” she called to her husband, who was not far away, spreading feed for their small herd of steelees. The long-legged beasts were clustering around the trough, their excitement at getting their morning meal obvious. “What do you suppose that is?”
Ottoh turned to look. He froze. Unlike his wife, he kept up with galactic affairs—he had not entirely cut himself off from the news of the Republic. And so he had heard stories, and he knew what it meant when a storm came creeping toward your home, or business, or family.
“Get Bee,” he said, dropping the sack of feed he was holding. “I’ll find Ronn. We need to get in the house and seal it up. Now.”
Erika didn’t ask questions. She didn’t hesitate. They were many kilometers from help, and even a good world in the Outer Rim Territories was full of danger. She called for her daughter and ran to the house.
“Ronn!” Ottoh shouted, not taking his eyes off the cloud. “Get in the house right now!”
Within the approaching fog, figures were beginning to become visible, ten or so. He couldn’t make out details yet, but he knew who they were. He had heard the stories—of impossibly vicious marauders who appeared from nowhere and left the same way, leaving nothing in their wake but terror that they would return.
The Nihil.
* * *
Bell reached out to the Force. He knew that, as a Jedi, he could survive this fall. He had seen Loden do similar things many times in the past—most recently on Hetzal Prime, but in training, too. Loden could drop like a rock and then slow himself at the last moment for a perfect landing. It wasn’t flying—no Jedi born without wings could fly as far as Bell knew—but it also was not exactly falling.
Bell knew it could be done, and he knew Loden Greatstorm believed he could do it. His master—probably—would not have used the Force to shove him off that obscenely high cliff otherwise. Bell thought the Jedi Council would frown on inadvertent Padawan murder—but he also thought Loden could talk his way out of it, probably by arguing that the Order had no use for a Padawan who couldn’t master something as simple as a controlled descent.
All of this flashed through Bell’s head in the merest second after his plummet began. With a massive effort, he forced himself to focus, to find the flame of the Force within and fan it into greater life, and through it connect with the air currents rushing past his face and whipping through his dreadlocks. Loden had given him instruction on how to execute this maneuver safely, though he was frustratingly vague in his description of how it was supposed to work.
In general, the idea was to guide yourself to the updrafts, and use them as a foundation to slow your fall. Once you figured that out, you were somehow also supposed to use the Force to push against the ground as it drew closer. The two elements could slow you down enough to land safely. Bell had achieved it easily enough in Temple training when falling from lesser heights, or if dropping onto a repulsor pad that would prevent any real injury.
But now, when plummeting from a cliff, facing a horrendous maiming if he was lucky, he could barely even remember what Loden had told him to do. He knew the real challenge here was not mastery of the Force, but mastery of fear—always the Jedi’s greatest test.
A test he was about to fail. And from this height, he knew even Loden Greatstorm could not catch him. This was it. The end. Bell closed his eyes. The fear rushed in, and he didn’t even fight it. He asked for serenity, and hoped he would just die quickly and not be left in broken agony on the jagged iron rocks at the base of the cliff.
The wind stopped rushing past him.
Bell opened his eyes and saw the ground, a meter or so below him. Then he dropped, hitting hard, though not as hard as he would have if his fall had not been stopped.
He rolled over, groaning, and a shadow fell across him.
“You need to figure this out,” Indeera Stokes said. “Loden really is going to kill you one of these times.”
She extended a hand, and Bell took it and let the other Jedi pull him up. Indeera was Tholothian, with dark skin only a few shades lighter than Bell’s own, elegant white tendrils in lieu of hair, and eyes so blue they almost seemed to glow, just like every member of her species Bell had ever met. Her leathers were scratched and worn, with the Jedi insignia in white on one shoulder. She wore her lightsaber holster on a strap of yellow webbing slung diagonally across her chest, and kept a dark-gray nanofoil scarf wrapped around her neck—useful as a mask in dust storms, and moldable into almost any shape she might need.
Standing at Indeera’s side was a small, four-legged creature, mostly mottled black, white, and gray, but with spots of red and orange here and there, and bright-yellow eyes. A charhound, native to Elphrona. She took a few steps forward and nuzzled at Bell’s hand; he scratched behind her ears, and the little beast purred with pleasure.
“Hi, Ember,” Bell said. “Nice to see you, too.”
He gave the charhound one last scratch and looked back at Indeera.
“Did Loden ask you to catch me?” he said, brushing dust off his own leathers, originally bright white but now well worn in, stained and mottled, evidence of hard use.
“Yep,” Indeera said. “No shame in it. No Jedi is perfect at everything from the start.”
She held out his lightsaber hilt. He hadn’t even felt it fall from his side. Bell took it and slipped it into his own holster, worn at his hip.