“I’m not accustomed to being feared. ” Leia shook her head. “Especially for no reason. It makes me angry. “
Ackbar grunted sympathetically. “I intend to go to my quarters and bite the head off a frozen ormachek. I suggest you go home and find something ugly to smash. “
Leia laughed tiredly and patted Ackbar’s hand. “I just may do that. You know, I think we still have that Calamari blessing pot you gave Han and me at our wedding-“
Chapter 2
A hot, humid, breeze blew across the crown of Temple Atun, the steepest of the ruined temples of the Massassi on Yavin 4. Luke Skywalker turned his face into the wind and looked out over the vibrant jungle that stretched unbroken to the horizon.
The enormous orange disk of the gas giant Yavin dominated the sky, hanging just above the edge of the world as its fourth moon turned toward night.
Even after five years, Luke found it a compelling, nearly overwhelming sight. He had grown up on Tatooine, where the only stars in the night were pale speckles of white on a black canvas, and where the terrible daytime heat came from two disks he could easily block from view simply by raising his hand. This, I will miss, he thought.
For months Luke had been using Temple Atun as his sanctuary. Unlike the Great Temple, which had been given new life as the home of the Jedi praexeum, Atun had been left as it had been found, its mechanisms inert, its passageways dark. Its outer chambers had been looted, but a trap made of two great sliding stones had long ago sealed off the upper chambers. The trap still held the crushed bodies of the would-be thieves who had tripped it.
Something tickled Luke’s consciousness at the hazy fringe of awareness. He closed his eyes and lowered his inner shields long enough to search the temple, reading the currents of the Force as they flowed around and beneath him.
There was life everywhere, for the creatures of Yavin 4 had long ago claimed what the Massassi had abandoned. Collapsed stairways limited most vermin to the lower levels. But stonebats had made nests in tiny ventilation shafts all over the temple’s face, and Luke shared the eyrie with purple-winged kitehawks, which soared into the sky each evening to search the jungle’s upper canopy for prey.
There was an unfamiliar presence, too-but not an unexpected one.
Streen was coming, as Luke had asked.
Luke had given Streen no instructions except to meet him at the top of Temple Atun, thereby turning the keeping of the appointment into a final test, and the temple into a puzzle and potential horror-house.
Concealing himself by exerting no will at all on the currents of the Force, Luke marked his protege’s progress.
Even as an apprentice, Streen had distinguished himself by his maturity. That quality was evident in his purposeful ascent of the tower. He moved lightly through the rookeries, surefootedly through the dark passages.
The last fifty meters of the trip to the crown required a dizzying fingertips-and-toes climb up the steep, crumbling sunset face of Temple Atun. As Streen neared the top, Luke nudged the kitehawks into the air with a thought. They passed over Streen’s head like beclawed shadows, crying and beating the air with their wings. But Streen did not startle. Holding very still, he made himself invisible against the crumbling stone until the kitehawks wheeled away, then finished his climb.
“I’m pleased, ” Luke said, opening his eyes as Streen joined him. “You’ve confirmed me in my choice. Come, sit, and face the east with me. “
Streen complied wordlessly. The curve of Yavin was just touching the line of the horizon, forming the geometry of the symbol found everywhere on the Massassi ruins.
“Have you made any progress in your reading of the Books of Massassi? ” asked Luke quietly.
He was referring to a collection of tablets unearthed from a collapsed underground chamber found two years earlier in the jungle nearby. The tablets were written in the dense, arcane symbology of the Sith, but not by a Sith consciousness. The Books were silent on their authorship, but Luke believed they were the creation of a single Massassi, a life work of essays in history and faith. A minority view held that they were the original sacred texts of the Massassi, an ancient oral tradition recorded by educated slaves.
“I thought I would have finished by now, but I’ve only reached the sixteenth Book, ” Streen said. “Reading them is more tiring than I expected. It seems to be a thing that cannot be hurried. “
“And what have you learned about what the sight before us meant to those who built this place? “
“That Yavin was both a beautiful and a terrible god to the Massassi, ” said Streen. “It lifted their eyes to the heavens, but made their hearts small and fearful. “