Excerpt
Star Wars: The Mask of Fear (Reign of the Empire)
Chapter 1The Holy CityThe Holy City was chiseled from the stone of the desert, rising into the twilight like an outcast in a wasteland. Its dun walls were coated in the dust of ages, and from afar it had seemed a lifeless place, blessed only in its failure to erode into the sands.
Yet despite the suffocating clinch of antiquity, despite the dying sun that blanched all things on Jedha, the city streets were full of color: red-cloaked shoulders jostled sapphire pauldrons, and jade arms brushed opalescent antennae. Beings of every shape pressed down the cobbled avenues, striding, crawling, marching beneath archways and merchant awnings and listless banners unstirred by the air. The atmosphere was of grief and whispers, but the movement of thousands—the endless footfalls and the rustling of garments—created a susurrus like the harbinger of a storm.
Someone cried, “The Jedi! The Jedi are gone!”
As if it were news. As if they’d vanished from inside their temples that morning and not been slaughtered weeks before in an act of violence and betrayal and cruel vanity.
Dressed in a Ztenortha pilgrim’s gray wrappings and stukleather boots, Bail Organa—Bail of House Prestor, Royal Consort to the Queen of Alderaan, father of the crown’s heir, once senator of the Galactic Republic and now senator of the Galactic Empire—went unescorted and unrecognized among the mourners, shivering in the winter chill. Deep in the crowd he was mercifully alone, and even the ghosts who pursued him seemed lost in the throng.
The crowd squeezed together. The procession turned a corner and crept down a narrow tunnel. Slits in the primordial brickwork suggested the ruins of a fortress, where hidden soldiers might have once fired upon intruders besieging a keep. Bail kept his head bowed, to keep from stumbling as much as to avoid the prying eyes of hidden cams. The mob was not swift or belligerent, but it possessed the force and inertia of a glacier; to be caught underfoot was to be crushed.
The passage opened into a massive plaza dominated by an upright stone disk on a great dais. In ordinary times, the plaza harbored beggars and criers and would-be prophets, and the structures surrounding it hosted herbal-tea vendors and trinket dealers. It was, Bail had been told, one of eighty-eight such plazas in the Holy City and unremarkable in its sanctity. Only today the beggars and criers and prophets, and the merchants, too, had fled to make room for the endless procession. Of the thousands of mourners in the plaza, perhaps a hundred could squeeze onto the dais, and these crushed together, casting their bodies against the disk and turning it on its axis. Old men pushed on their knees, while a gargantuan Cragmoloid panted and groaned as he leaned onto the disk with his shoulders, eyes cast skyward with a look of profound grief. With every quarter turn, a dozen pilgrims scrambled away and others raced to replace them, ensuring that the grinding of stone went uninterrupted.
Weeping and screaming rose from all quarters, as the mourners were overwhelmed by purpose and ritual. “Master Tiin!” someone called, and another cried, “Sister!” A third began a litany: “Allie! O’ra’ve! Caladastorous!” But mostly the shouts were wordless and instinctive. Bail was tempted to join the chorus, but his was not a howling grief. Not a grief of helplessness, absent of responsibility. If he called out, his ghosts would hear, and the haunting would resume.
The current carried him inexorably toward the dais. A fainter cry rose in the distance: “Betrayers! Betrayers of the Republic!” Yet no one seemed to notice the protest.
He checked his timepiece and delayed climbing the dais steps as long as he could, but soon he was crammed among the mourners striving to rotate the disk. He found it difficult to gain traction—the dais and the carvings on the disk itself were worn smooth, and only the ubiquitous dust of the Holy City offered any purchase. He began to sweat as he pushed, despite the cold. Yet the disk was moving. It seemed that his efforts made no difference, that the larger and stronger mourners were entirely in control, yet he pushed anyway and stone scraped against stone.
To his right was a saffron-skinned Tarsunt in a worker’s jacket and rugged pants. The man was broad-shouldered but squat for his kind, and his wedge of a face turned to Bail and nodded slowly. “You should be home,” he said, “with your wife and newborn girl.”
I should, Bail thought. There was no use denying it. Instead he said, “And you, Admiral, have a fleet to command. But both of us are here.”
Each man returned his attention to the disk. It shrieked and moaned, turning another half a meter, before the admiral asked him, “Why?”
“Why am I here?”
“Yes.”
Bail tried to shrug, but it was impossible when his arms were straining against the stone. He felt likely to collapse if he unclenched his muscles. “You first,” he said.
Bail had never thought of Tarsunts as particularly strong, but the admiral seemed unwearied. It made Bail feel old and feeble—which he supposed he was nowadays. He certainly wasn’t young anymore.
“I saw the Jedi fight in battle after battle,” the admiral said, his body arched against the stone. “Some of their Order I monitored from a distance. Others I dined with, plotted with, shared barracks with in the field. I liked many of them, grew weary of others, but all earned my respect. All were brave and honorable guardians of the Republic.
“I don’t suppose that was true of every Jedi. No organization is free from corruption, and what the Jedi Council plotted in the end I cannot say. But the actions of the Jedi Knights I met are not darkened by the shadows of their masters. I refuse to believe they were less than what they appeared, no matter the Council’s treason.” He paused a moment, glancing at the crowd. “It seems I am not alone.”
“Not alone.” Bail had barely enough breath to speak. “But there was no vigil like this on Coruscant.”
“Nor on my world,” the admiral said, “nor on my brother’s, Alsakan. On Corellia, where I was stationed at war’s end, crowds in every city burned Jedi in effigy. Some blasted the Order for its betrayal, while others . . . others were merely tired and blamed the Jedi for failing to prevent the war entirely or to win it more swiftly.
“Here on Jedha we appear to be many. A million, perhaps, all visitors to this holy world. But scattered across the galaxy, returned to our home planets, we who remember the Jedi with fondness will be so very few.”
A surge of bitterness rose in Bail—directed at the admiral or the Emperor who had ended the Jedi Order or at the people who believed the Emperor’s lies. Directed at the stars themselves, for all it really mattered. He put his anger into his arms and pushed. The disk turned another half meter. Someone to Bail’s left slipped and fell, and there was a scramble to get the mourner upright.
“Why are you here, Bail?” the admiral asked again. It was not a kind or gentle question. Nor was it impatient, but it brooked no equivocation.
Bail’s anger subsided as swiftly as it had risen. What could he tell the admiral? He trusted the man; Bail would never have requested the meeting otherwise. But no single truth seemed sufficient. He could say he’d had Jedi friends, but that seemed trite; say he’d come to honor a woman who’d loved the Jedi dearly and who was now gone; or say it was a way of spitting in the face of the new regime. What he couldn’t do was admit the horror of what he knew—the secrets that had driven him from home and wife and daughter.
“When I was young,” Bail finally said, barely leaning upon the disk as he tried to regain his strength, “I met a Jedi who was involved in a family incident. I didn’t know him well—I thought I did, you know how children are—but I looked up to him. I told myself . . .” He remembered the face of his father and his complicated relationship with his grandfather, then hurried to find what mattered for this moment. “The Jedi Code meant something more real, more substantial, than any set of rules I’d been taught by the house tutors. I grew up among people who valued outcomes more than methods or people. I told myself that if I couldn’t live by Jedi virtues myself, I would assemble my own set to be proud of.”
The admiral showed no sign of hearing. Bail returned to pushing. His fingertips clawed at impossibly ancient carvings, dug out microscopic flecks of kyber crystal embedded within the rock, returning glory and power to the universe. The disk, the Stone of First Tears, turned, and as it turned, the spirits of the dead were milled to stardust, changed from restless wraiths into the energy of life, to be reborn in myriad forms. So the legend went.
Bail put no stock in that particular legend, but rituals had potency all the same. He wished he could tap into the power of the stone and feel what the mourners around him seemed to feel, instead of aching and groaning and pitying himself, along with the whole damned galaxy.
