Darth Plagueis by James Luceno Page A

one side, parallel to the ground. “What’s more, he died by my hand.”
    “Impossible.”
    Plagueis laughed with purpose. “How powerful can you be if you failed to sense the death of your Master? Even now, your thoughts fly in all directions.”
    Venamis raised his lightsaber over one shoulder. “In killing you I will avenge his death and become the Sith Lord he knew you could never be.”
    “The Sith he wanted me to be,” Plagueis corrected. “But enough of this. You’ve come a long way to challenge me. Now make a worthy effort.”
    Venamis charged.
    To Plagueis, lightsaber duels were tedious affairs, full of wasted emotion and needless acrobatics. Tenebrous, however, who had pronounced Plagueis a master of the art, had always enjoyed a good fight, and had clearly bequeathed that enthusiasm to his other trainee. For no sooner had the blades of their weapons clashed than Venamis began to bring the fight to him in unexpected ways, twirling his surprisingly limber body, tossing the lightsaber from hand to hand, mixing forms. At one point he leapt onto an overhanging greel branch and, when Plagueis severed it with a Force blow, hung suspended in the air—no mean feat in itself—and continued the fight, as if from high ground. Worse for Plagueis, Tenebrous had made Venamis an expert in Plagueis’s style, and so the Bith could not only anticipate but counter Plagueis’s every move.
    In short order, Venamis penetrated his defenses, searing the side of Plagueis’s neck.
    The contest took them backward and forward through the trees, across narrow streams, and up onto piles of rocks that were the ruins of an ancient sentry post. Plagueis took a moment to wonder if anyone at the fort was observing the results of the contest, which, from afar, must have looked like lightning flashing through the forest’s understory.
    Realizing that the fight could go on indefinitely, he took himself out of his body and began working his material self like a marionette, no longer on the offensive, instigating attacks, but merely responding to Venamis’s lunges and strikes. Gradually the Bith understood that something had changed—that what up until then had been a fight to the death seemed suddenly like a training exercise. Exasperated, he doubled his efforts, fighting harder, more desperately, putting more power into each maneuver and blow, and in the end surrendering his precision and accuracy.
    At the height of Venamis’s attack, Plagueis came back into himselfwith such fury that his lightsaber became a blinding rod. A two-handed upward swing launched from between his legs caught Venamis off guard. The blade didn’t go deep enough to puncture the Bith’s lung but scorched him from chest to chin. As his large, cleft head snapped backward in retreat, Plagueis brought his lightsaber straight down, tearing Venamis’s weapon from his gloved hand and nearly taking off his long fingers, as well.
    With a gesture of his other hand, Venamis called for his lightsaber, but Plagueis was a split second quicker, and the hilt shot into his own right hand. Sensing a storm of Force lightning building in the Bith, he crossed the two crimson blades in front of him and said: “Yield!”
    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 fear. ”
    “And what is to become of me, Master?” Venamis asked.
    Plagueis