when he realized he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. He felt Yoda's eyes on him still, and gave half an apologetic shrug. 'I was only thinking: if she'd been captured or-or killed-there would be no need for such secrecy.' The creases on Yoda's face deepened around his mouth, and he made that tchk sound of mild disapproval that any Jedi would instantly recognize. 'Frivolous, speculation is, when patience will reveal all.' Mace nodded silently. One did not argue with Master Yoda; in the Jedi Temple, this was learned in infancy. No Jedi ever forgot it. 'It's. maddening, Master. If only. I mean, ten years ago, we could have simply reached out-' 'Cling to the past, a Jedi cannot,' Yoda interrupted sternly. His green stare reminded Mace not to speak of the shadow that had darkened Jedi perception of the Force. This was not discussed outside the Temple. Not even here. 'Member of the Jedi Council, she is. Powerful Jedi. Brilliant warrior-' 'She'd better be.' Mace tried to smile. 'I trained her.' 'But worry you do. Too much. Not only for Depa, but for all the Jedi. Ever since Geonosis.' The smile wasn't working. He stopped trying. 'I don't want to talk about Geonosis.' 'Known this for months, I have.' Yoda poked him again, and Mace looked up. The ancient Master leaned toward him, ears curled forward, and his huge green eyes glimmered softly. 'But when, finally, to talk you want. listen, I will.' Mace accepted this with a silent inclination of his head. He'd never doubted it. But still, he preferred to discuss something else.
Anything else.
'Look at this place,' he murmured, nodding at the expanse of the Supreme Chancellor's office. 'Even after ten years, the difference between Palpatine and Valorum. How this office was, in those days-' Yoda lifted his head in that reverse nod of his. 'Remember Finis Valorum well, I do. Last of a great line, he was.' Some vast distance drifted through his gaae: he might have been looking back along his nine hundred years as a Jedi.
It was unsettling to contemplate that the Republic, seemingly eternal in its millennium-long reign, was not much older than Yoda himself. Sometimes, in the tales Yoda told of his long- vanished younger days, a Jedi might have heard the youth of the Republic itself: brash, confident, bursting with vitality as it expanded across the galaxy, bringing peace and justice to cluster after cluster, system after system, world after world.
For Mace, it was even more unsettling to contemplate the contrast Yoda was seeing.
'Connected with the past, Valorum was. Rooted deep in tradition's soil.' In the wave of his hand, Yoda seemed to summon Finis Valorum's dazzling array of antique furniture gleaming with exotic oils, his artworks and sculptures and treasures from a thousand worlds. Legacies of thirty generations of House Valorum had once rilled this office. 'Perhaps too deep: a man of history, was Valorum. Palpatine.' Yoda's eyes drifted closed. 'A man of today, Pal-patine is.' 'You say that as though it pains you.' 'Perhaps it does. Or perhaps: my pain is only of this day, not its man.
'I prefer the office like this.' Mace half nodded around the sweep of open floor. Austere.
Unpretentious and uncompromising. To Mace, it was a window into Palpatine's character: the Supreme Chancellor lived entirely for the Republic. Simple in dress. Direct in speech.
Unconcerned with ornamentation or physical comfort. 'A shame he can't touch the Force. He might have made a fine Jedi.' 'But then, another Supreme Chancellor would we need.' Yoda smiled gently. 'Better this way, perhaps it is.' Mace acknowledged the point with a slight bow.
'Admire him, you do.' Mace frowned. He'd never thought about it. His adult life had been spent at the orders of the Supreme Chancellor. but he served the office, not the man. What did he think of the Supreme Chancellor as a person? What difference coukl that make?
'I suppose I do.' Mace vividly recalled what the Force had shown him while he watched Palpatine sworn in as Supreme Chancellor, ten years before: Palpatine was himself a shatterpoint on which the future of the Republic-perhaps even the whole galaxy-depended.
'The only other person I can imagine leading the Republic through this dark hour is. well-' He opened a hand. '-you, Master Yoda.' Yoda rocked back on his hover chair and made the rustling snuffle that served him for a laugh. 'No politician am I, foolish one.' He still occasionally spoke as though Mace were a student. Mace didn't mind. It made him feel young. Everything else these days made him feel old.
Yoda's laughter faded. 'And no fit leader for this Republic would I be.' He lowered his voice even further, to barely above a whisper. 'Clouded by darkness are my eyes; the Force shows me only suffering, and destruction, and the rise of a long, long night. Better off without the Force, leaders perhaps are; able to see well enough, young Palpatine seems.' 'Young' Palpatine-who had at least ten years on Mace, and looked twice that-chose that moment to enter the room, accompanied by another man. Yoda stepped down from his hoverchair. Mace rose in respect. The Jedi Masters bowed, greeting the Supreme Chancellor with their customary formality. He waved the courtesies aside. Palpatine looked tired: flesh seemed to be dissolving beneath his sagging skin, deepening his already hollowed cheeks.
The man with Palpatine was hardly larger than a boy, though clearly well past forty; lank, thinning brown hair draped a face so thoroughly undistinguished that Mace could forget it the instant he glanced away. His eyes were red-rimmed, he held a cloth handkerchief to his nose, and he looked so much like some minor bureaucratic functionary-a clerk in a dead-end government post, with job security and absolutely nothing else-that Mace automatically assumed he was a spy.
'We have news of Depa Billaba.' Despite his earlier reasoning, the simple sadness in the Chancellor's voice sent Mace's stomach plummeting.
'This man has just come from Haruun Kal. I'm afraid-well, perhaps you should simply examine the evidence for yourself.' 'What is it?' Mace's mouth went dry as ash. 'Has she been captured?' The treatment a captured Jedi could expect from Dooku's Separatists had been demonstrated on Geonosis.
'No, Master Windu,' Palpatine said. 'I'm afraid-I'm afraid it's quite a bit worse.' The agent opened a large travelcase and produced an old-fashioned holoprojector. He spent a moment fiddling with controls, and then an image bloomed above the mirror-polished ebonite that served as Palpatine's desk.
Yoda's ears flattened, and his eyes narrowed to slits.
Palpatine looked away. 'I have seen too much of this already,' he said.
Mace's hands became fists. He couldn't seem to get his breath.
The shimmering corpses were each the size of his finger. He counted nineteen. They looked human, or close to it. There was a scatter of prefabricated huts, blasted and burned and broken.
The ruins of what must have once been a stockade wall made a ring around the scene. The jungle that surrounded them all stood four decimeters high, and covered a meter and a half of Palpatine's desk.
After a moment, the agent sniffled apologetically. 'This is-er, seems to be-the work of Loyalist partisans, under the command of Master Billaba.' Yoda stared.
