Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber

Author:Joe Schreiber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Science-Fiction.Star Wars
ISBN: 9780307796035
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-03T23:00:00+00:00

39/Down in It

ZO AWOKE TO A TIGHT BAND OF PAIN ACROSS HER CHEST AND SHOULDERS, TWISTING in her joints like ground glass. When she tried to shift her position to alleviate the pain, she realized that she couldn’t move at all.

The pit where she lay was settled at the bottom of a deep shaft, its high onyx-colored walls shining up as far as the eye could see, in some unfathomable expanse of glassy black. Her head spun. She realized that she had been tied down here, strapped to a large stone slab by wide leather bands and iron rings that crisscrossed her chest and looped over her wrists and ankles, pinning them in position. Torches burned on either side of her, rows of them in the hundreds, leading upward, flickering up over the walls, gleaming off tiny, ornate lines of script and filigree that moved across it like rows of programmer’s code.

She breathed, coughed a little, and tried to summon moisture onto the back of her tongue. The air down here tasted metallic, dusty, and very old. It was like inhaling through a hole in some archaic stone tablet. Oily tallow from the torches dripped on the floor around her, and the greasy black smoke wafting up from their flames only made her throat feel more parched.

From somewhere behind her, she heard movement, the scuff and rustle of footsteps, the soft clink of objects being arranged outside her peripheral vision.

“Look up,” Scabrous’s voice croaked.

Zo turned and moved her neck, straining to tilt her head as much as the straps would allow. The Sith Lord was gazing down. The decay process had accelerated drastically since she’d last looked at him. The Sickness had taken over his face completely now, remaking it into gelid, shapeless soup from which two bloodshot eyes gleamed at her with terrible scrutiny. Gray strips of gristle quivered from the exposed bone of his skull, and when he spoke she saw the tendons swing inside his throat.

He was holding a sword.

Not a lightsaber, but an actual Sith sword. Its shining blade seemed to have been forged from the same black durasteel as the walls around them, and stretched as long as Scabrous’s arm. As the Sith Lord raised it up, Zo realized that the designs from the walls of the pit had been echoed along the blade’s entire length, great thorny rows of script and inscription gleaming in the torchlight. The resulting weapon seemed almost to blur and merge with its surroundings, its lethal edge shimmering and disappearing again as the Sith Lord swung it overhead.

“This blade,” Scabrous said, “belonged to Darth Drear. It was forged exclusively for him, to ensure his immortality. So today, in accordance with his legacy, I will use it to slice out your living heart, and devour it while you watch.”

Zo tried to answer—with no idea of what she might say—but the knot in her throat blocked out all speech. Terror, bright and uncontrollable, had fastened itself over her conscious mind, and she could not stop staring at the sword.

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