'The strongest were killed, and the weak tore the Sith apart with their petty wars of succession. Meanwhile, the Jedi remained united, confident in the knowledge their enemies were too busy fighting one another to ever defeat them.'
'You discovered a way to break this cycle,' Cognus chimed in.
'Now everything we do is guided by the Rule of Two,' Bane explained. 'One Master, one apprentice. This assures that the Master will only fall to a worthy successor.
'Zannah knows that if she is to rule in my place, she must prove she is more powerful by defeating me herself.'
Cognus nodded. 'I understand, Master. I will not interfere when she arrives.'
As if on cue, the sound of a shuttle's engines roared through the camp. The two of them rose to their feet and stepped out into the desert heat just as Zannah's ship touched down.
She emerged a few seconds later. As Bane had predicted, she was alone.
He marched forward to meet her, Cognus hanging back near the entrance to the hut. He stopped in the center of the camp. Zannah took her stand halfway between the shuttles and where Bane now stood, eyeing the Iktotchi in the background suspiciously.
'She will not interfere,' Bane assured her.
'Who is she?'
'A new apprentice.'
'She has sworn allegiance to you?'
'She is loyal to the Sith,' Bane explained.
'I want to learn the ways of the dark side,' Cognus called out to Zannah. 'I want to serve under a true Sith Master. If you defeat Bane, I will swear my loyalty to you.'
Zannah tilted her head to the side, studying the Iktotchi carefully before nodding her agreement to the offer.
'Who lies in the graves?' she asked, turning her attention back to Bane.
'Caleb's daughter and her bodyguard,' he replied. 'She was the one who imprisoned me. She fled here when the Stone Prison was destroyed.'
He felt no need to explain in any further detail. Zannah didn't need to know who Lucia was, or her connection to Bane.
'I wondered why you chose this place to meet,' Zannah muttered. 'I thought it might have some symbolic meaning for you.'
Bane shook his head.
'The last time we were here you were too weak to even stand,' his apprentice reminded him. 'You were helpless, and you thought I had betrayed you to the Jedi.
'You said you would rather die than be a prisoner for the rest of your life. You wanted me to take your life. But I refused.'
'You knew I still had things to teach you,' Bane recalled. 'You swore you would not kill me until you had learned all my secrets.'
'That day is here,' Zannah informed him, igniting the twin blades of her lightsaber.
Bane drew out his own weapon in response, the shimmering blade rising up from the curved hilt with a low hum.
The two combatants dropped into fighting stances and began to circle slowly.
'I have surpassed you, Bane,' Zannah warned him. 'Now I am the Master.'
'Then prove it.'
He lunged toward her, and the battle began.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Zannah expected Bane to come at her aggressively, but even so she was caught off guard by the ferociousness of his attack.
He opened with a series of two-handed overhead chops, using his great height to bring his blade hacking down at her from above. She easily blocked each blow, but the momentum of the crushing impact caused her to stagger back, throwing her off balance.
She recovered quickly, however, spinning out of the way when he followed up with a low, looping swipe meant to hew her off at the knees. She retaliated with a quick jab with the tip of one of her blades toward Bane's face, but he ducked his head to the side and came back with a wide-arcing, single-handed slash at chest level.
Zannah intercepted his blade with one of her own, angling her weapon so that the momentum of Bane's attack was redirected downward, sending the tip of his lightsaber into the dirt. This should have exposed him to a counterthrust, but he was already reacting to her move, driving his entire body forward into Zannah's before she could bring her weapon up.
His weight slammed into her, knocking her back as Bane snapped his neck forward. Zannah threw her head back just in time, and the head-butt that would have smashed her face glanced off her chin instead.
Scrambling to stay on her feet, Zannah raised her weapon back up, spinning the handle so that the twirling blades formed a defensive wall that repelled Bane's next half a dozen blows.
During her years under Bane, they had sparred hundreds of times. During these sessions she had always known he was keeping something in reserve for the day they would inevitably fight for real. Only now did she realize just how much he had been holding back.
He was faster than she could ever have imagined, and he was using new sequences and unfamiliar moves he had never revealed during their practice sessions. But somehow she had survived the initial flurry, and now she knew what to expect.
The next exchange had a more familiar feel. Bane pressed the action with a devastating, complex combination of attacks, but Zannah was able to intercept, parry, or deflect each one. Her defensive style was simple, but performed correctly it was nearly impenetrable.
Recognizing this, Bane backed off and changed tactics. Instead of a savage, relentless pressure meant to overwhelm her, he settled into a pattern of feints and quick thrusts, probing and prodding her defenses in search of a weakness as the two of them settled in for a long battle of attrition.
Zannah had fought him once before, back when he was still encased in his orbalisk armor. She remembered it had been like battling a force of nature: the chitinous parasites covering his entire body had been impervious to lightsaber attacks, allowing him to attack with pure animal rage. She had survived that encounter only by convincing Bane she hadn't betrayed him, and in the end he had let her live.
His style back then had been brutish and simple, though undeniably effective. Now, however, his technique was more advanced. Unable to simply bully his way heedlessly forward, he had developed an unpredictable, seemingly random style. Each time she thought she could anticipate where the next attack was coming from, he changed tactics, disrupting the rhythm of the battle and causing her to give ground.
She was being driven back in a slow retreat, and she realized he was herding her toward the shuttles, hoping to pin her against the metal hull with no place to go. Zannah was content to play along, taking quick, careful steps backward over the soft, sandy terrain as she began to gather her power.
The key was subtlety. She couldn't let Bane sense what she was doing or he would launch into another wild flurry of attacks, forcing her to focus all her energy on keeping him at bay. She had to give him the illusion he was controlling the action, when in fact she was only a few seconds away from unleashing a burst of dark side sorcery that would rip his mind apart.
Bane circled wide trying to come in on her left flank. Zannah simply altered the angle of her retreat, taking several more steps backward to keep him at a safe distance as she swatted away a few token slashes and strikes.
With her attention split between the enemy in front of her and the Sith spell she was preparing to cast Zannah didn't notice how close she was to the freshly dug graves. Her heel caught on the uneven ground as she backed up, throwing her off balance as she fell awkwardly to the ground and landed on her back.
