Something was tugging at his hand - a pattern of suckers across his knuckles. The touch branded Qui-Gon's skin with dark emotions; despair, loss, hunger. Even with his eyes closed he could feel the whirlpool of need in that presence. A need to which his own life meant nothing.
Forty three degrees to the left a spirit like imprisoned flame cried out "No! You can't!", in the voice of a human girl.
He breathed in, trying to focus, and his body screamed at him to stop.
Tentacles were trying to bend his fingers back to get at the lightsabre - he still held it, in a grip like rigor mortis.
A Nimgoni answered the girl, its voice utterly expressionless while the soft suction of its limbs trembled with desire. "These things have precious gems inside. Up to three of them. I can't get him to let go of it, so give me the knife."
"Human limbs don't regrow." Even from the girl there was a dark undertug that said pushed too far she would watch it happen. And another silent presence stood behind her, resentful, hostile, waiting to see how things would work out.
Relaxed, surrendered to the Force, it was an effort to do anything. Sleepily, on a cushion of almost consciousness, he thought Why not fill their need? Let them take what they want? But life wouldn't let him go. ...Obi-Wan!
He eased the splintered ribs out of his lungs, pushed them back into place, pain like a nagging child it was hard to have patience with.
The Nimgoni had lined up a blade against his wrist. He could hear one of its other tentacles slithering across the ground, looking for a stone big enough to use as a maul. Strange, he thought, The difference between species. A human would have gone for the fingers.
"Not the hand, Mama. You'll kill him!"
"He's dying anyway."
"Can't we wait until he's dead? Then use him? This doesn't seem..."
Not like a flame at all - he'd been wrong about that - more like a fusion reactor, bright, but under unimaginable pressure, and capable of terrible destruction if it slipped control.
"It doesn't seem decent, somehow."
He opened his eyes. Felt three reactions - the moment changing in a swirl of complexity. Mute disappointment from the third of them - a young Nimgoni. Guilt from the girl as she recoiled.
The knife hadn't moved from his wrist. Now a second tentacle came writhing over his face, settled on his throat. It was acutely uncomfortable to be touched with that amount of desperation. Its need sucked at him.
Tension cut like razor wire. He understood that if he said nothing it would kill him. If he said the wrong thing it would kill him. And yet it was in so much pain he could not help but pity it. Finally he breathed in, convulsed slightly with the desire to cough, and said "Tell me how I can help you."
Mottled patterns of pink and yellow swept over the creature's skin - where it touched him he could almost feel them; a faint electric tingle. He read bitterness and suspicion, a refusal to hope.
Horns of cartilage over the creature's eyes gave it a look of permanent surprise, but told him it was an adult female. Responsible for the others, and afraid she'll fail them. The thought made her violence instantly forgivable.
The knife trembled against his skin. Blood welled and slid down his wrist.
"Give us the lightsabre."
"No." He lifted his other hand gingerly - even that small movement sending waves of fire across his chest - and lifted the tentacle off his throat. Like walking forward to take the blaster from a terrorist, he succeeded only because her nerve failed first.
"The facetting is unique to the lightsabre design," he said, quietly, trying to show he didn't hold them in contempt for what they had been about to do. "Instantly recognisable. You'd be in deep trouble the moment you tried to sell them."
*On this world anyway.* Though there were collectors on some of the Hutt worlds who would pay a fortune for such a gem - a relic of one more dead Jedi.
Helplessness wiped off every pattern, left her grey. A moment later the younger Nimgoni - Her son? - echoed the colour. The human stuttered forward, as if to give comfort, but could not go through with the gesture. She drooped, sighing.
In the pause he pushed himself up onto hands and knees. Another convulsion, harder now. He gave in to it, coughed, holding his ribs in place with the Force. Gods of Light! It hurt.
He spat the blood out on the ground, wiped his mouth with the dark sleeve of his robe, saw the girl, eyes closing, turning her face away from him. I remind her of something. A death? Her father's death? It was wrong, wrong, that her smooth young face should have to wear an expression like that. But that was war. One of its triumphs was to mutilate even the survivors.
"I'm sorry," he said, trying to catch her gaze. She was very careful not to look.
"Mama?" Empty voice. She was focusing on the present with a narrowness that even he found unhealthy, because both the past and future held nothing but terror for her.
The Nimgoni adult slithered to her side, and the same muscular tentacles which had pinned him down now curled protectively over the girl's shaking shoulders, brushed across her tangled auburn hair.
The lowering sun filled the sky with shades of peach and lime. An acquired taste. Salt flashed up sharp reflections - a myriad of taunting jewels worthless to this mother and her children. In the distance the tombs showed arid, sky mirrored on their smooth surfaces as if they were deliberately trying to hide. Why would I feel that? Unless...
He reached out for Obi-Wan. Their bond, once an intrusion so tight that he couldn't fight it off even when he tried, had failed on Melida/Daan and remained uncertain now. But he thought he felt fear; fear and a concentration so deep it would be dangerous to disturb it even with reassurance. One of his life's certainties re-established itself urgently in his heart. I must find him.
"Well, if you won't give us the weapon there's nothing you can do for us."
It would be easy to watch them walk away and just be thankful that they hadn't hacked off his hand. But nothing happened by accident. They were in need. Why had the Force brought them to him if not to be helped?
Find Obi-Wan or fill the needs of this little party? I will do both.
The mother was gathering up her children, urging them towards a landspeeder like a mobile scrap-pile.
A landspeeder!
"Wait." He barked out the order in one of the milder forms of his harsh voice. It stopped them like a tractor beam, and made the muscles of his chest spasm with pain. Fluid pooled in his lungs as he tried to talk. "Money is not what drives you. There's something else. Tell me."
"Like you care!" Surprisingly it was the young Nimgoni who answered, surging back towards him, swelling, bright green with threat. Not just an adolescent display of temper, Qui-Gon thought sadly, But genuine anguish over a lost faith. He thought he could guess what that faith had been.
"If I can I will help you. My word as a Jedi."
"A Jedi!" The boy spat black ink - it smoked on the salt, dissolving it, "Shouldn't you be out saving a world somewhere? Escorting a princess? You don't give a damn about people like us!"
The faith was extinguished, but the ashes were still smoking, blistering the boy's mind every time he touched them. Another grief on top of everything else.
"Try me," said Qui-Gon.
He expected to be hit - three of the tentacles raised and snapped.
"Dek! Get in the speeder." A pattern of 'v's on Dek's mother meant indignant. Despite everything Qui-Gon's mouth quirked. The parental rebuke! Some things were the same worlds over.
"You too, Eryn." She came over to him, watched him struggling to stand - he focused inwards a moment, regulating bloodflow, swayed, and she put out a long limb to catch and steady him. "Do you mean that?"
"Hmn." He nodded - it hurt less than speaking.
"My name's Im, Im Simik."
"Qui-Gon Jinn."
"I have a little girl..."
Qui-Gon leaned on her, just for a moment, grateful for the support. His weakness was worrying, adding itself to a growing list of concern it was heavy to pick up. I will not fail them. Any of them. But it was difficult to exercise confidence when he could hardly breathe.
"We lived in Ic'Ram, until it was bombed. And the government relocated us."
He caught a sudden vision from her - vivid as the dreams. Panic; crowds bunched and straining for escape. Soldiers pushing her onto a transport. "No! My baby!" Zap of stun-poles, the little girl straining in the press, her skin transparent, like a scream.
"There was a crush and we were put on separate transports."
She had brought him to the landspeeder, a bizarre vehicle that caught his attention by its stench.
"I don't know where she is. She could be anywhere on the planet. I need money to bribe an official to search. They say it's unimportant! They say 'Don't bother us! But...."
"I'll find her."
The 'speeder had been given wheels - they made tracks in the shining plain. Behind the two children some arcane device had been welded onto the engine. Heat came fitfully from it and a smell that caught at his heart, dragged out memories of too many funerals - the smell of cremation. A combustion engine! And they were burning...?
There was a fuel basket by the girl's hand. It carried chunks of fat, bones, a pair of severed feet.
She caught him looking. Anger flared behind sullen amber eyes, "They were only humans."
So that was what she had meant by 'use him'. And still, hardened as she was, she had pleaded for his life. Evidently they had not yet killed for their furnace.
"The dead must serve the living," he said gently, suppressing the flinch of disgust, "But you are human too."
"No I'm not!" She had a question she needed to ask but didn't dare, a question that sharpened the terror of her future. He asked it for her;
"What will happen to Eryn here, when you get your daughter back? Will she be replaced?"
Emerald and ice-blue spelled anger and horror, and yet looked so splendid against the desolation. "How could you think that? Eryn is also my daughter. I wouldn't abandon her!"
He felt it with a rush of relief - the moment had arrived; the moment when he could stop waiting and act. One task would serve another.
"Of course." A child had come to her, unwanted, and now was central to her life. She would understand about Obi-Wan. "I have a son, like your daughter. He's out here somewhere, and in trouble. I was looking for him when I was attacked. Would you help me find him?"
Yellow as a beacon. He thought how marvellous it would be to be that expressive.
"Yeah, that's right." Dek's voice - he was striped with disappointment, "The Jedi offers to help us, just so he can use us."
"You don't think it's fair? I find your daughter. You help me find my son?"
A struggle for her to trust anyone. Why should she, when those in power had left her like this? Reduced to scavenging bodies to live.
"He's over there." Qui-Gon pointed at the distant necropolis, now green as anger under the hills. "And in danger."
"We're not going in there!"
"But you could take me to the wall."
Evening brought a cold breeze off the mountains. It sighed through the dead streets, tugged at Qui-Gon's hair, belled the cloak out around him as he stood with his hand on the wall, searching for Obi-Wan.
Imprisonment. Despair.
Why should he feel despair? Doesn't he know I'll come for him?
Obi-Wan seemed unhurt, for the moment, so Qui-Gon put the link out of his mind - he could not afford despair if he was to confront the guardians of this place.
"If you wait for me here, will they attack you?"
"No, it's safe on this side."
He considered asking Eryn for his comlink, but to do so would be to admit he'd noticed it was gone. It would be an accusation - 'You robbed me while I was helpless,' - which could damage the fragile trust they had managed to achieve. They were welcome to the small amounts of money and food he carried. The breather and comlink were machines he didn't wish to grow dependant on, and besides, he had humiliated these people quite enough just by not being dead.
If Obi-Wan was being attentive to the Force he would sense his master's presence and intent. If not, then he would learn a valuable lesson.
Just inside the transparent wall a reef of ceramic flowers bloomed. Their frail petals trembled in the breeze and filled the twilight with the sound of muted bells. A shingle of broken porcelain coloured the ground beneath them; purple threaded with gold.
The statue of an animal - like his little friend from the lake - sinuous and copper, was climbing up the inside of the wall. Moving air pushed across its open mouth with a sad drone of music. There were fish among the flowers, made of clay and cheap enamel. Every colour, they caught his Nimgoni trained eye in symphonies of beauty - strange combinations of emotion.
This is not a graveyard, he thought suddenly, It's an ocean. They come from the sea and return to it, spending their lives in exile here in a parched and barren land.
He looked back at the two Nimgoni. I'm going to be trespassing on their heaven.
Both were yellow, the shade slightly different, betraying nuances he wasn't sensitive enough to read.
"If he's in there he's dead," Im wavered between suspicion and sympathy.
"No. He's alive but trapped."
"You feel that?" Dek said, suspicion blotched with ...fascination? Yearning?
"Yes."
Qui-Gon lowered himself to his knees slowly, trying not to bend. Meditation posture was rigid enough not to hurt too much when he was there, but a torture to achieve.
"Have you got a plan?" Dek asked eagerly.
Laughter was like being kicked in the ribs, and suppressing it almost as bad. He thought of saying 'There is no plan, there is the Force,' but Dek wouldn't understand either the joke or the teaching. Save it for Obi-Wan.
What was it with young men? Xan - with his brilliant mind - had been a great planner, and Obi-Wan was always nagging him about it; disappointed with his master's lack of forethought. It's a need to be in control. A lack of trust...
"No. The Force will lead me."
He breathed in, deeply, abandoning the pain - it didn't matter - and began to empty his soul, making a space for the Force to fill. He gave up responsibility for this injured family, for the ambassadors, for peace. He let go of Xan - the grief, the shame - and of everything good he had ever done.
Your will, not mine. Even if - a twinge of terror it was hard to loose - even if Obi-Wan is to die? Yes, even then. Use me.
An image of his friend, Nis, flashed into his mind; the look of distaste as he'd tried to explain that the essence of a Jedi was surrender. "I don't do passive, Jinn."
If only he could show Nis what it was really like; like waking from deep sleep. Like being born.
Nis too he left behind. He rose, climbed over the wall and followed the Force into the city of the dead.
At the end of a long avenue of stele and statues stood a massive tomb - the roof bowed in, fine dust still settling like ground-mist around it. Over the sunken courtyard before it there lay a huge crimson stain, filling the wind with the smell of blood.
Oh Gods!
Acceptance. Surrender. Patience. He breathed out shakily and sought confirmation along the bond with his apprentice.
He's still alive. The boy's emotions were clearer now - hopelessness, a struggle for air. Time was running out for him, and he was not paying attention to anything else.
Qui-Gon's shadow was the only moving thing in the courtyard, and yet the Force was full of life. He acknowledged fear, the lancing pain in his chest, uncertainty, then let them go and walked forward.
Liquid metal eyes opened all around him. The monsters rose out of the sand like the dead rising. Tentacles, palps and beaked mouths closed in on him, exactly the same colour as the blood.
The Force asked him to admire them - their silence, their predatory beauty, the clarity of their purpose. He stopped and obeyed. Yes. I see it. They were like a ship's shielding; not monsters but protectors. Like the initiatory rituals of some religions, their terror emphasised only the holiness of what they guarded. He focused on them and felt their minds, violent and pure as suns, watching him with not-quite certainty.
Tentacles wrapped themselves around his legs, pinned his arms, squeezing them together across his chest, bending the broken ribs, scything the sharp points through new wounds. The agony almost made his heart stop; he felt his skin go clammy, cold sweat on his palms. So hard to breathe this pain out, to keep his hold on the Force, but if he lost it he would lose everything.
"I don't...mean...any harm."
One of them had encircled his shoulders and waist. Now it pulled, beginning to climb. Its weight left the ground, settled on his chest. The world shattered, like an explosion of white glass. He could feel nothing else. When he regained his self-awareness he found he was screaming.
The pain doesn't...matter. Even thinking was impossible, but the Force was still there, holding him up, helping him to close his mouth and breathe again.
Teeth by his face - he was aware of plates of sharp cartilage and, oddly, a smell like grass.
Shouldn't I do something?
The teeth came together, shaving a narrow band of skin from his cheekbone. A tongue like a file rasped across the blood.
Oh. They want to know what I am. They're trying to...talk.
Even now he could hardly avoid a wry smile at the other explanation Or they're going to eat me VERY slowly.
Opening his mind completely brought a barrage of visions. Difficult to tell if they were a message, or just delirium.
Pepi, her skin melting in her mother's hands as the woman held her in the fire. The Council, coldly assigning them a mission where Xan would have to choose who to betray - his father or his master. His own hands, covered with blood, as he looked down on the dead face and suddenly saw what he'd done.
Hurtful images. His mind had explanations for them all, but his heart insisted 'They had no right.'
"Is that it? I have no right to be here?"
No response. He concentrated on his right - his absolute right, his sacred duty - to go anywhere, do anything, to save his Padawan.
Sacred?
A whistling, like birdsong, thin and shrill. Then a deep note, phasing in and out. Like...nnh...waves They showed him a Nimgoni priest, skin leafed with platinum, limb-bands, eye-rings, pierced teeth sharp with diamond. Each movement measured out by the staff of the ancients, breaching the barrier between this world and the next, creating a safe path. Behind, came the procession - drummers and singers, the horns voicing the ocean, the dead hero on a litter of coral.
Sacred?
He showed them the Jedi Temple; the healing crystals of fire; the council room, a place between worlds, from which the knights would leave to make the path safe for others.
Fringed fingers pried at his clothes; the distinctive robe, dirty and bloodstained as it was. "Yes. I am a...priest." Close enough. Easy for them to understand, and he needed easy now - his strength was failing fast.
Not how I'd imagined going out. He managed a gesture of regret towards his imagined death - an epic battle, fighting alone against the forces of evil. Not in the middle of a...conversation. Then he abandoned the regret and the vanity together. The Force was bright and close.
A Guardian had found his lightsabre, pulled it off his belt. They passed it among themselves, looking, bringing it to their mouths to taste. Their mood had hardened. They saw it was a weapon.
The pain doesn't...nnh!...matter.
He showed them the Staff of the Ancients - pointed and edged with knives of sharpened shell - compared the two. "To protect."
And saw in return his apprentice's face, scowling with concentration, blue light in his hands like a gash in the world. Saw him leap and cut. Ichor spilled. Blasphemy, and PAIN, PAIN, PAIN.
Ah Gods, Obi-Wan!
The limbs tightened around him. Another burst of eviscerating agony. The teeth, which had been pressed against his cheek, slid apart, coming closer. Only a heartbeat before they closed.
He forgot himself completely and showed them Obi-Wan; a young acolyte, lost, confused and Forgive me, frightened. Worthy of compassion. He let them feel the depths of his duty to protect this boy - a duty embraced as ardently as they embraced theirs. The same. They are the same.
"He has no right to be here. Let me take him and go."
Nnh!
"Please."
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