Venamis froze, allowing the nascent storm to die away, and dropped to his knees in surrender as Sojourn’s risen primary blazed at his back through the trees.
“I submit, Darth Plagueis. I accept that I must apprentice myself to you.”
Plagueis deactivated Venamis’s blade and hooked it to his belt. “You presume too much, Venamis. Around you I would always have to watch my back.”
Venamis lifted his face. “Is it true, Master? Is Darth Tenebrous dead?”
“Dead, and deservedly so.” He took a step toward Venamis. “The future of the Sith no longer hinges on physical prowess but on political cunning. The new Sith will rule less by brute force than by means of instilling
“And what is to become of me, Master?” Venamis asked.
Plagueis studied him stonily. After a quick glance around, he snapped a yellow, horn-shaped blossom from a dangling vine and tossed it to the ground in front of Venamis. “Consume it.”
Venamis’s gaze went from the flower to Plagueis, and he let misgiving show on his face. “I know this plant. It will poison me.”
“It will,” Plagueis told him in a manner that held no sympathy. “But I will make certain you don’t die.”
7: THERE WHERE THEY USED TO STAND
In the depths of Aborah, Venamis hung suspended in a bacta tank, wireless sensors affixed to his narrow chest, neck, and fissured, hairless cranium.
“You may be Tenebrous’s most important gift to me,” Plagueis said as he watched the Bith’s body bob in the thick therapeutic liquid.
“His brain continues to recuperate from the effects of the coma-bloom alkaloids,” 11-4D remarked from the far side of the laboratory. “His physical condition, however, remains stable.”
Plagueis kept his gaze on Venamis. The wound Venamis’s lightsaber had inflicted to Plagueis’s neck had healed, but the faint scar was a fresh reminder of his mortality. “That’s good, because I’m not interested in his mind.”
In salute, the droid’s new appendages made a surgical slashing motion.
Blood analysis had revealed a high midi-chlorian count, which to Plagueis was further indication that a being could have great potential in the Force and yet still be inept. He wondered: was it Venamis he had felt through the Force after the murder of Tenebrous? A Jedi would have made for a more interesting experimental subject, but a Dark Side Adept was perhaps better suited to his purposes. And soon enough the adjacent bacta tank would contain a Force-resistant Yinchorri, as well.
Immediately following the contest on Sojourn, Plagueis had commanded members of the Sun Guard to locate the starship that had allowed Venamis to infiltrate the Hunters’ Moon, then move it and the poisoned Bith to Aborah. Larsh Hill and the other Muuns had been apprised that an intruder had been captured and disposed of, but no more than that. An investigation of the ship had yielded data that might have surprised even Darth Tenebrous, who had provided the ship. It seemed that well before he had confronted Plagueis or learned of his Master’s fate, Venamis himself had been scouting for potential apprentices. Plagueis could not help being impressed, though begrudgingly. The young Bith would have done well in Bane’s era. Now, however, he was an anachronism, and by extension, Tenebrous also.
That Tenebrous had targeted him came as no shock to Plagueis. He and the Bith had reached an impasse decades earlier regarding execution of the Sith imperative. The product of one of the galaxy’s most ancient civilizations, Tenebrous believed that victory could be achieved through a mating of the powers of the dark side and expert Bith science. With the aid of sophisticated computers and future-casting formulas, the varied beings of the galaxy could be provided for, and the Jedi Order would gradually dwindle and disappear. Tenebrous had tried to persuade Plagueis that the Force did not play games of chance with the galaxy; and that while the fated ascendancy of the dark side could be predicted, its rise could not be influenced or hurried by the Sith.
The Muuns believed in formulas and calculations as strongly as the Bith did, but Plagueis was not a fatalist. Convinced that Tenebrous’s brilliant equations were missing an important factor, he had argued that future events — whether predicted by machines or glimpsed in visions — were often clouded and unreliable. More important, he had been raised to believe in the elimination of competitors, and viewed the Jedi as just that. The Order wasn’t simply some rival corporation that could be secretly acquired; it had to be undermined, toppled, and dismantled. Deracinated. He had assumed that, given time, he would have been able to win Tenebrous over, but his former Master had obviously pronounced him unfit to don the mantle of Sith successor, and had looked elsewhere. The unbridled desires of sentients were a blessing to the Sith, for those desires birthed an abundance of zealous and audacious beings who could be used to further the cause. Plagueis had been instructed to be on the lookout for suitable beings, just as Tenebrous had been when he had discovered Venamis. Perhaps Tenebrous had regarded the sneak attack as beneficial, no matter the results. Had Venamis been victorious, he was deserving of the mantle; and if not, then Plagueis might come to accept the true nature of the Master — apprentice relationship.
An old story that had never made much sense to him.
But it did explain Tenebrous’s curious behavior in the months and weeks preceding the events on Bal’demnic. It was impossible to know how long Venamis’s attack had been in the planning, but Tenebrous, for all his cool detachment, had plainly worried over the decision. On Bal’demnic he had been distracted, and that inattention had cost him his life. But in those final moments, before he had fully grasped the role Plagueis had played, he had been on the verge of revealing the existence of Venamis. It made little difference now, and, in fact, Plagueis found the Bith’s vacillation contemptible.
Like Plagueis, Tenebrous had obviously embraced the fact that Darth Bane’s Rule of Two had expired. Precious few Sith Lords had honored it, in any case, and with good reason, as Plagueis saw it. The goals of the Grand Plan were revenge and the reacquisition of galactic power. But while most Sith Lords since Bane had in their own fashion helped to weaken the Republic, their efforts had owed less to selflessness and allegiance to the Rule than to weakness and incompetence. Driven to discharge Bane’s imperative they might have been, and yet each had fallen prey to individual foibles and eccentricities, and so had failed to exact revenge on the the Jedi Order. Plagueis understood. He would never have been one to lay in wait or devote his reign merely to positioning a subsequent Sith Lord for success. Nor would he have been content to remain in Tenebrous’s shadow as an apprentice had the Bith actually triumphed where others had failed.
How, in all his wisdom, had Tenebrous failed to grasp that
In a rare moment of compliment, the Bith had even said as much.
Was Plagueis now to believe that Tenebrous had also considered Venamis such a one?
If so, it demeaned him.
The data discovered aboard Venamis’s starship failed to shed light on how old he’d been when Tenebrous found him, or reveal anything about his training. Set ways of training an apprentice were a thing of the past, regardless. Doctrine was for the Jedi. Where the Jedi courted power, the Sith lusted after it; where the Jedi believed they knew the truth, the Sith possessed it. Owned by the dark side, they ultimately
For the past five hundred years, the Sith of the Bane line had eschewed selecting children as apprentices, finding it more advantageous to discover beings who had already been hardened or scarred by life.
Plagueis, though, had been an exception.
Muunilinst had not followed suit when, in the madness that was the Third Great Expansion, worlds of the Core and the Inner Rim had stretched out to settle and claim many of the planets surveyed and made available by the Colonization Act and the Planet Grant Amendment. The reason was simple: though the Muuns had wealth
