He pushed into the tunnel, senses groping before him as he moved. Once again, he suspected a trap, and once again he discarded the idea. He was, after all, effectively shielded from detection by his taozin-scale necklace.

The taozin were huge, segmented creatures that inhabited deep underground caverns beneath the planet-city and whose scales rendered their life force transparent to a Force-sensitive. Tesla's synthsilk necklace didn't possess enough of the rare and dangerously gotten substance to block him entirely from another Force-sensitive, but it was enough to scramble whatever emanations of the Force he leaked and render them almost unreadable. Jax Pavan-or any other trained Jedi-would have to work awfully hard even to get a fix on him.

He fingered the strand of synthsilk as he dived farther into the darkness of the pa.s.sage, hastening toward its end. The rectangle of dim light grew ever larger. It was hypnotic, so much so that when he reached the aperture, Tesla very nearly stepped across the threshold to his death. The floor beneath his feet ended abruptly, and he had a momentary impression of a gaping chasm hemmed by unending walls and a drop into sheer nothingness.

His reflexes were such that he was able to catch himself, but it was the wind that saved him, not the Force. A veritable maelstrom spiraled up from the abyss, ripping his cowl from his head and lifting him bodily, tossing him backward into the tunnel like a piece of chaff.

He lay against the wall of the tunnel for a moment, heart hammering, breath coming in short, staccato bursts that echoed harshly against the stone of the walls. Then he picked himself up and approached the end of the tunnel with care. He poked his head through the door to nowhere and looked out.

Above was a pale blur of eternal twilight. Below, he could sec the vertical flank of the cloudcutter through which the tunnel bore disappear into darkness. Hundreds of yards away across the chasm stood another cloudcutter, its broad flanks sweating dank grime.

There was no one in sight and no place anyone could have gone. Anyone except a Jedi.

He looked up, reaching out with his Force sense. He Stretched across to the far building. He angled a look down.

And there it was, far below and to his right: that tiny point of light, the barest whiff of the perfume of power, the merest tinkle of sound. Hair rose up on his half-shaven head and down the backs of his arms. He smiled. Good try. Jedi, he thought, and stepped from the aperture into thin air.

The Force lowered him like an invisible turbolift. The violent updrafts of the abyss buffeted him occasionally, tearing at his robes, but still he rode silently, swiftly, his senses on that spot where one building ended and another began. The target had paused there below but suddenly began to move again, away from the chasm.

At the crumbling intersection of the two buildings- at a point where their b.u.t.tresses seemed almost to intertwine-there was a gap. Just enough of a gap for a humanoid of Tesla's size to pa.s.s through. Tesla jackknifed and threw himself through the air toward the gap, unclipping his lightsaber as he flew but not igniting it just yet. He erupted through the needle's eye and into a cavern filled with rubble. His target had moved on ahead. He took only a moment to orient himself. The sheathing of the wall of the mammoth building on his right-the one from which he had dropped like a stooping raptor-had come away from the substrate and fallen in huge stone and duracrete panels against its nearest neighbor. What had once been a maintenance alley between the two had been transformed into a cavernous tunnel. But where the previous route had been narrow and human-sized with regular surfaces, this was a cave built by decay. Immense and asymmetrical, its ceiling ending in darkness far above his head, its uneven walls canted and uncertain, its floor littered with random chunks of rock and twists of durasteel eroded and fallen from the b.u.t.tresses.

The wind sobbed inconsolably here, and the buildings seemed to groan and tremble at its pa.s.sing. Above this there was another sound-no, not a sound exactly; more of a sensation, almost a tingling in the air.

Tesla hovered, perfectly still, listening, sensing, feeling. It was not the Force he fell, but some type of kinetic energy. He could feel it dancing across his checks and the backs of his hands, raising the narrow strip of red hair that ran from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. A force field of some sort?

He moved slowly downward, senses probing the way before him, eves watchful. His boots touched down lightly on the rubble-strewn floor, and he strode forward. The cleft was about twenty meters long and ended in a dim wash of light that seemed to flicker and weave like the shadow of a fire. At random points along its length, dark apertures suggested other means of egress and regress. He eyed them suspiciously, but none of them held anything of note. Armored rats. Hawk-bats, perhaps. Nothing sentient.

The only sentient target he sensed was ahead somewhere in or beyond that wash of inconstant light. Tesla activated his lightsaber. The blade hummed to life, the color of a sunset he had once seen on his homeworld of Corellia. It was also the color of the lava flows on Mustafar. He moved forward with cautious antic.i.p.ation.

The target had stopped.

The threads Jax followed were slender and impossibly bright, but they seemed to flicker and pulse as he trailed them down into the depths of Ploughtekal Market. When he reached the lowest levels of the structure that housed the rambling bazaar, they were little more than the ghosts of threads-like an afterimage burned into the retina.

They were on the point of vanishing completely by the time he dived into the warren of crevices in the towering resi-blocks that roughly defined Ploughtekal's borders. As he stood at the gaping mouth of one such crevice, several levels below where the marketplace petered out, he saw the threads break altogether.

He stood for a moment, trying co decide what to do next, then froze at the sudden sense of presence behind him. He swept his lightsaber into his hand, activated it, and spun 180 degrees in one smooth movement.

"I sec I'm not the only one who's had her aura tweaked today." Laranth Tarak faced him from an alcove in the dirty wall of the junction in which he stood. She had a blaster in each hand and holstered one of them as she stepped out of the alcove.

Over her shoulder Jax could see a set of steel rungs embedded in the alcove wall. Okay, not an alcove, then a chimney or access tube. He used the trivial observation to hide his reaction to seeing Laranth so suddenly and under such circ.u.mstances, and couldn't decide if he was excited or dismayed.

"You felt something, too?" he asked stupidly.

"I think I just mentioned that." The green-skinned Twi'lek's truncated left lekku shifted slightly on her shoulder and Jax had the irrational feeling that she was laughing at him, despite the fact that her mouth formed a familiar grim line . . . as it ever did. Also irrationally, he was finding it difficult to look away from her face.

He did so with a will, clipping his lightsaber back on his belt and nodding toward the crevice he'd been about to explore. "I lost it right here. What do you think it is?"

She shook her head, moving to peer into the darkness. "No idea."

"Inquisitor?"

"I suspect most of them carry taozin wards these days," she said.

"They what?" There he went, sounding stupid again.

She turned and looked at him, her eyes-which were the same rich shade of green as her skin-showing no amus.e.m.e.nt. "I noticed it about three days ago. I saw one of them plain as day about three levels up, snooping around in the bazaar. Saw him, but couldn't sense him."

Jax nodded.

"So. how ... how have you been?"

She tilted her head to one side, right lekku curling slightly at the end. whatever that meant. He wished he knew how to read the sophisticated subtext that Twi'lek head-tails were said to convey.

You can't tell?" she asked.

"No, I..

"I can tell how you've been," she said cryptically, then jerked her head at the crevice. "You want to check this out or what?"

He nodded and let her precede him into the dark gap.

They'd gone maybe ten meters along its Stygian length when Jax remembered that he'd thought of looking for her earlier. "Laranth," he said quietly, "about Tuden Sal ..

"What about him?"

"You know him."

"He came to us about three weeks ago. Got in touch with us through our contact at Sil's Place."

"Sil's Place," repeated Jax.

"A dive near the Westport. The Amani pubtender is an operative."

"And you trust him?"

"I wouldn't have helped him find you if I didn't."

He let that settle for a couple of beats. "Did he tell you why he wanted to find me?"

"He didn't want to find you, exactly. He wanted to find I-Five. To repay an old debt, he said. He told me what he'd done ... or rather what he failed to do." Her voice was grim, cold. It took Jax back to the night he and the Gray Paladin had met in the ruins of the Jedi Temple complex amid the death and smoke and flame. She knew as well as he did that what Tuden Sal had failed to do may have been responsible, among many other things, for what they referred to as Flame Night. Responsible for the deaths of all those innocent Jedi and Padawans.

"Did he tell you how he plans to repay that debt?"

She shot a glance back over her shoulder. "I figured that was between him and I-Five."

"No. Not really. It's a lot more complicated."

He was about to explain just how complicated when the Force nearly yanked him off his feet for the second time that day. This time there was no question what direction the pull was coming from-the tether stretched away into the darkness of the crevice.

He didn't have to ask if Laranth had felt it, too; the Twi'lek Paladin was already in motion. Jax undipped his lightsaber and hurried to keep up.

Tesla stepped from the shadows of the fallen b.u.t.tressing into light that was brilliant only in comparison with the midnight gloom he'd just traversed. The sight that met his eyes was confusing at first. Stretching away from him for perhaps a hundred meters was a debris field roughly twenty or thirty meters wide, formed by the gap between Two ma.s.sive resi-blocks. It made what he'd just pa.s.sed through look like a well-tended garden path; twisted lengths of duralumin and gigantic shards of transparisteel, some thicker than his body, lay like strange, misshapen skeletons over and around chunks of masonry and plasticrete. The two resi-blocks on either side were apparently in an advanced state of decay, and this bizarre landscape was the result.

But there was more to it than that, Tesla sensed as he drew closer. The air here was charged with electrostatic energy that made every hair on his body stand on end and created strange creeping halos around the pieces of debris. As he continued to move, he found it more difficult, as if the very molecules of the air conspired to push him back. He realized that this was a repulsor field, subtly tugging and twisting due to an everlasting state of flux, which had, over the centuries, warped the huge pieces of various metals into the agonized postures that lay all about him.

Peering down the length of the cluttered swath, Tesla saw the source of the weird auroras. At the far end of the wreckage a repulsor held generator thrummed, the subtle, light-bending contours of the region pressing against the canted walls of the buildings and coating them with shimmering iridescence. A faulty field generator would explain the state of flux that caused the visible effects. Under normal circ.u.mstances the field would be invisible.

He smiled. If his quarry had come in here thinking to escape him, he had erred grievously. That repulsor field would thrust back whatever approached too closely. The Jedi had come to a dead end, and the slice of darkness that marked an exit, which Tesla could just make out through the writhing veil of the energy barrier, might as well be on another world-he would never be able to enter it.

Tesla started forward again, his lightsaber at the ready. HE was halfway across the open expanse when he saw a figure emerge from the crumble of rock and steel, to clamber up and stand atop a huge chunk of ferrocrete. Two things struck him simultaneously: One was that the figure thrown in relief against a rippling curtain of light was not Jax Pavan, but a teenage human boy with a wild mane of pale hair. The other was that there were two field generators-one on each side of the canyon formed by the two resi-blocks. At a point just beyond where his unknown target stood the two fields overlapped, creating a sort of hole through which the boy doubtless intended to flee ... unless Tesla did something to stop him.

That he should stop him was obvious. No, this was not Jax Pavan, but it was a Force-user of such power that he had drawn Tesla to him as a lodestone draws iron.

In the moment of decision, Tesla flung himself into the air in a graceful Force leap calculated to carry him within striking distance of his quarry. But instead of landing at the foot of the ferrocrete block, he was met in midleap by a resilient energy barrier that slapped him to the ground. Flard.

He fell between a gleaming shard of transparisteel and a twisted spur of durasteel b.u.t.tress, only his finely honed reflexes and a sweep of his lightsaber saving him from serious injury. He thought for an instant that he must have connected with the repulsor field, but realized the impossibility of that as quickly as the thought occurred to him. His quarry had been standing at the edge of the field-the barrier he'd struck had met him several meters from that verge. He hadn't collided with the repulsor field; he had been struck down by the Force, wielded by someone who had remarkable strength in it.

Someone he could not afford to let get away.

He gathered himself and leapt again, up into the charged air of the ersatz canyon. He lit upon the block of ferrocrete as lightly as a bird, ready to fire a bolt of Force-lightning at his opponent.

His target was gone.

Tesla reached out with his senses toward the interstices of the two repulsor fields. He found his prey with eyes and the Force simultaneously. Two strides took him over the edge of the block of debris and down onto the ground behind it. Above him the energy fields pulsed and flickered, making him feel as if fire gnats crawled over his body. But directly before him was a warped corridor of safety-a buffer zone in which the opposing fields canceled each other out.

It writhed and shifted as if alive-a twisted gullet that bent light and refracted color. It conjured the image of two deep pools of troubled water kept back from each other by an invisible and uncertain barrier. How in the name of the Force was the boy able to navigate it?

It hardly mattered. Tesla reached out with the Force and grasped the fleeing figure, yanking it to him. The boy fell backward, his tattered cloak fluttering about him. Tesla could feel the presence in his hand almost as an actual, tactile sensation. He tightened his Force grip and dragged the boy toward him.

One pale hand reached out of the tattered cloak as if to try to arrest his headlong slide. Tesla smiled grimly and squeezed-then cried out in surprise and consternation as his feet were wrenched out from under him. He landed hard on his back, air driven from his lungs, and dropped his lightsaber.

He took only a second to recover, by which time his quarry was gone again. The boy might be young, but he was obviously no novice; Tesla would not allow himself to be lulled into stupid complacency again.

He picked up his lightsaber and hooked it to his belt, then went after the boy with both hands. This time he would not be deflected or caught off-guard. He would capture this prize for his master. Failure was not an option.

At the mouth of the energy corridor, he reached out anew with the Force, using one hand to restrict his target's limbs and the other to haul him in. Concentrating his full attention on his task, he almost failed to catch the sudden movement of a five-meter-long section of fallen b.u.t.tressing that swung suddenly toward his head.

Tesla whirled, using both hands to deflect the deadly length of metal. In his frustration and anger he did more than deflect it-he sent it flying. It hit the edge of one of the repulsor fields and exploded skyward. By the time it fell, hitting the ground with a shriek of metal on stone, Tesla was in motion, pursuing his elusive quarry into the wriggling corridor of energy.

It was an unnerving place-an ever-changing pa.s.sage of creeping light and shadow through which the external world could be seen as if through a thick wall of gel. Now the walls were rippling toward him; now they flew away like a sac swollen by a breath of ionized air. Far above-forty stories, perhaps-he could see a thin sliver of twilight sky. Then that was wiped from view in the rippling distortions of the walls.

The sounds, too, were distracting; deafening screeches and roars, like metal sheets being ripped asunder, and his nostrils were constantly a.s.saulted by the stench of ozone. He ran, using the Force to speed him along and deflect the billowing walls of the pa.s.sageway. He tried nothing else until the boy was perhaps three meters ahead of him; then he reached out and tripped him. Or tried to... It was as if the boy could read his intentions and knew just when to defend himself; this time he simply lifted his feet from the ground and somersaulted up the pa.s.sage several meters before turning, touching down, and doing something that changed Tesla's mind utterly about the nature of their contest.

The boy reached into the transparent energy fabric of the repulsor field-something that should have been impossible-and literally wrenched out a blazing ball of energy, molding the ma.s.s of writhing static between his hands as if it were made of modeling gel instead of highly charged energy particles. Then he flung the blindingly bright ball at Tesla.

The Inquisitor whipped into a defensive position, erecting a barrier against the salvo. It seemed to matter little; it still took him by storm, knocking him backward almost to the entrance of the corridor. Only his own well-honed control of the Force kept him from tumbling out of control. He jackknifed in the air and came at the boy again, this time with his lightsaber lit.

He saw the boy's face clearly as he charged. The cowl of his cloak lay back on his narrow shoulders, his hair floated wildly about his head, and his eyes were huge with fear and fury.

Feeling the youth's anger, Tesla was exultant. He had a fleeting thought of what a prize this child would make for his lord, but the proud thought was swamped by survival instinct-and by his own wrath. He would not be bested by a mere boy! He roared aloud, using the Force to amplify the sound, and saw the teenager's eyes widen farther.

Tesla was ready when the second ball of repulsor energy came flying at him. He raised his lightsaber to parry it-and was blown upward into the heights of the field tunnel in a flash of scaring crimson light. At a height of seven or eight meters, he collided with a ripple in the energy barrier that deflected him downward again with just as much force. He came down on the gritty duracrete surface face-first, only just gathering the presence of mind to wrap the Force around him like a coc.o.o.n. It was all that kept him from breaking bones.

He levitated back to his feet, enraged, and threw back his own cowl. "Fool!" he roared at the retreating form. "I offer you freedom and you choose to hide with the vermin!"

The youth hesitated and turned. "You're an Inquisitor.'" His voice came to Tesla's ears warped and tortured by the skittering, moaning sounds of the warring repulsor fields.

"So could you be, with your power."

The boy's unspoken scorn was immediate and powerful, as if it, like his unlikely ability, was fed by the Force. He started to turn away.

"Return with me or die!"

The boy turned back, his gaze meeting Tesla's so strongly that the Inquisitor heard it as a rending sound in his head and felt it as a scaring pain behind his eves. His heart pounded, his breath was suddenly constricted - he felt like a lidded vessel tilling with some white-hot substance until it must surely burst. The fire gnats were crawling over him again, inflaming every nerve in his body.

"Leave me alone," the boy said quietly, and the words sounded in Tesla's head, each one like an icy dagger in his paralyzed brain. "Just leave me alone."

Then suddenly he was free. He stumbled to his knees, fury and humiliation sweeping through him in waves. Tesla lifted both hands and fired a bolt of Force-lightning at the corridor just above the boy's head, uncaring of the result. If the wretch would rather die than be taken by an Inquisitor, then so be it.

The lightning struck the rippling surface and bifurcated, each sizzling lash recoiling to strike again centimeters apart. They twinned again, then quadrupled.

Tesla cut off the flow of Force-lightning from his body, but it had little, if any, effect. Suddenly the corridor was filled with a dozen random lightning strikes, then twice that many. They were advancing on him in a trenchant storm, eating up the pa.s.sageway before him. He couldn't see what had happened to the boy; his figure was lost in the erratic pulses of light. Tesla threw up a defensive barrier and backed swiftly away from the advancing lightning. Surely, with its motive energy cut off, it would soon fade.

He kept moving, staying just ahead of the scaring, draining discharges until he was certain the exit must be directly behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. It was not. In fact, only a meter or two farther along the pa.s.sage, what had been an open pa.s.sageway seemed to end in a pocket of charged and warped air.

He hesitated, heart thudding. How was this possible? The interstice in which he stood was formed by a cancellation effect. The two fields' overlap was unstable, but the instability was linear. There was no way the two opposing fields could meet and meld in that way, no power that could...

He peered beyond the barrier, through the fluctuations in the cul-de-sac. Beyond them, out in the open debris field, he saw a lone figure standing atop a slab of ferrocrete. A figure with a bright mane of pale hair, rippling and warping as if viewed beneath the surface of a storm-tossed sea.

The dance of energy on the left side of his face alerted Tesla to the fact that he had hesitated too long. He had barely enough time to stiffen his Force shield against the lightning before it struck, exploding the tiny pocket of relative calm in which he stood...

When Jax first emerged from the cut into what pa.s.sed for daylight at this level of the city, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. At the far end of the plaza, between the walls of two ma.s.sive buildings, a pair of indistinct figures struggled within what looked like a writhing bowl of transparent, gelatinous light. It looked like the interstice between two force fields, but Jax had never encountered such a thing except in theory.

He glanced at laranth, who gave the Twi'lek equivalent of a shrug, both lekku lifting slightly before settling again, the shorter one just brushing her shoulders.

That both combatants possessed the Force in abundance was obvious. They knocked each other off their respective feet several times before one hurled a ball of such brightness at the other that it was painful for Jax to look at it, even from meters away.

Laranth stopped in midstride, peering at the unstable slot between the fields. "What was that? It didn't look like Force-lightning."

A second charged ball erupted toward the figure nearest the entrance to the flux. This time the would-be victim met it with his lightsaber-his bright crimson lightsaber.

"Sith," hissed Jax under his breath as the repulsor fields lit up like a festival barge. "Or an Inquisitor."

"Then who's the other guy?"