He shrugged, gestured, exerted himself minimally along dark paths. The boulder swung obediently to one side. There was darkness beyond.
Brisha moved into the darkness and Jacen followed her. Just past the boulder entrance, on the similarly smooth stone to the left, a set of sturdy metal levers and controls was revealed, and she flipped several of those switches from the bottom to the top position.
In the distance a light came on-bright, golden light, cheerful and warm in hue, revealing that Jacen and Brisha stood in an irregular stone corridor, triangular, wide at the base, coming to a point a couple of meters above their heads. The corridor widened a few meters before them, and the cavern beyond was being illuminated by the new light.
Gravity, too, was asserting itself. Jacen’s second step was half the floating, bouncing distance of the first, and the next was almost correct for Coruscant-standard gravity. After that, he felt that he could have been on Coruscant, except for the coldness of the air.
“The heaters are now on,” Brisha said, as though reading his mind. “But it takes awhile to warm a space as large as this.”
“Of course,” Jacen said.
They moved out from the corridor and into the open cavern, and Jacen blinked at what he saw.
The cavern was open, its walls slightly irregular but still of the same dark, smooth material as the boulder-door. The cavern ceiling was perhaps 50 meters up at its lowest point, 60 at its highest, and the space was longer than it was high, some 200 meters in length in one dimension, 150 in another.
But none of that registered at first. Jacen’s eye was drawn to the building that occupied the cavern’s center.
It was a mansion, five stories of stony construction, and it did not seem in the least ominous. The building’s outer surfaces were rock, but dressed white and green marble slabs rather than the ponderous dark stone of this asteroid. Its windows were wide, unshuttered, inviting.
At each corner of the building was a tower, the chamber at its summit roofed but open to the sides, and figures moved there and in various windows of the building. In one tower window, a figure painted; in another, one played an oversized harp, and distant notes, soft and true, reached Jacen’s ears; in one of the lower windows, a figure juggled three glowing yellow balls. At the center of the fifth floor a huge mechanism, all gigantic gears and levers, operated, its whole purpose apparently being to drive a single dial on the face of the building; it turned at a rate of two or three times a minute, carefully watched by a figure who stood on the fifth-floor ledge in front of it.
The moving figures were all protocol droids, and gaily painted, one red, one forest green, one gold. The machine tender was a pastel blue.
And it was all suffused with dark side energy.
“This,” Jacen said, “is insane.”
“Not really.” Brisha walked toward the building with him. “Darth Vectivus enjoyed the architecture of Naboo and incorporated some of its building materials into his home away from home. Other architectural elements are from other worlds.”
“But it’s not very Sithly. The Sith citadel at Ziost-“
“I’ve been there. Very gloomy place. Unnecessarily so.” They reached the steps up to the main doors, and, as they began climbing, those doors swung open for them. Beyond was a marble-lined hallway; waist-high columns along its walls supported busts of men and women, mostly human, some of other species.
“All right,” Jacen said, “no more delays. The truth.” He reached the top of the stairs and moved into the hallway. He felt a little offbalance-the dissonance between the energies he felt and the cheerful surroundings bothered him.
“The truth is, I trained to be a Sith. I was trained by your grandfather, Darth Vader.” She did not seem in the least ashamed by this revelation.
Jacen drew to a stop at the first of the busts. It showed a serene-looking woman, her hair in a layered style that reached high. “But you don’t talk like a galaxy-conquering psychopath.”
“Vader wasn’t a galaxy-conquering psychopath. He was a sad man whose one love in life had died, and whose one anchor to the world of the living was, yes, a galaxy-conquering madman. Palpatine. The bust, by the way, is of Vectivus’s mother. She wasn’t Sith, she wasn’t Jedi.”
Jacen shot Brisha an irritable look and gestured for her to keep going.
“All right. My true name is Shira Brie.”
Jacen blinked at her. “But you’re better known as Lumiya.” In his mind he called up holographic images he’d been shown of the famous monster, the woman whose lower face was always concealed behind a tight-fitting veil, who always wore a triangular headdress, who carried a unique weapon-a lightwhip, as destructive as a lightsaber but pliant and with a greater reach. There was no place for this woman to carry one in the jumpsuit she now wore, but he did not deceive himself that she was unarmed.