The quartermaster hadn’t argued when Kael claimed the supply shed for the dead hours between shifts.
He’d taken one look at Kael’s face and found somewhere else to be, and Kael hadn’t needed to say a single word to make that happen, which told him something about how his face had started reading to people lately.
A week ago that same quartermaster would have demanded a requisition slip for the privilege of standing in his own storeroom after hours.
Something in Kael’s bearing had rearranged the local hierarchy without a single official document changing hands.
He activated the holocron on the workbench, and the crimson light spilled out and filled the shed corner to corner, folding itself into a featureless humanoid shape that wore its own malice like a crown, proud of it, comfortable in it, certain of its right to sit there.
Outside, the mine’s night shift went about its business unaware that a dead man was holding court twenty meters from the supply racks.
“Ask,” it said.
“Ask and earn.” “What era is this.
What galaxy am I actually standing in, underneath all of this.” “A dying one, propped up by an institution too complacent to notice its own decay.
The Republic still calls itself a Republic.
The Jedi Order still calls itself vigilant.
Neither word has meant what it claims to mean in longer than either institution would admit out loud.” “The Jedi.
Tell me everything about them.” “Peacekeepers who have forgotten what they were ever meant to keep peace against.
They patrol a galaxy convinced the old wars are finished.
They are not looking for me, or for anything like me, because looking would require believing I still exist.
Belief costs them nothing to withhold and everything to extend, so they withhold it.” “And the Sith.
Tell me what’s left of them.” The gatekeeper’s crimson shape seemed to lean forward, delight threading through the pressure of it.
“A hidden pair.
Master and apprentice, one to hold power and one to hunger for it, ruling the galaxy’s shadows from underneath a Republic too complacent to look there.
That is the law they live by.
Two, and no more, because more than two turns a doctrine into a crowd, and a crowd is exactly what got the old Sith empires exterminated the first time.” “Where do I fit, against all of that.” “Nowhere yet.
That’s the honest answer, and I notice you didn’t flinch from asking for the honest one.” A pause, weighted, deliberate.
“There is a gap in that structure, though.
A hidden pair rules the shadows, but a galaxy this large has more shadow than two men can occupy.
Room enough for a clever aspirant to build something in the spaces they haven’t claimed.
I can show you where those spaces are.
I can show you faster than you’d find them crawling through this life one year at a time.” “How much faster, exactly.” “Decades, compressed into a night.
Take more.
Take faster.
Why waste years learning what I can hand you complete, exactly as I was handed it, exactly as the Lord before me was handed it, on and on back to whoever built the first door I ever walked through?” Kael turned the offer over, the same cold audit he ran on every offer this thing had made him, looking for the seam where the price hid.
It didn’t take long to find it, because the gatekeeper wasn’t hiding it especially well: a night of compressed decades wasn’t a gift; it was an invitation to hand over the exact amount of himself that would be required to hold that much borrowed knowledge without breaking under the weight of it.
Every door the gatekeeper described led to a corridor that led deeper into a design Kael hadn’t authored and couldn’t fully see the end of.
“No,” Kael said.
“I’ll take the map.
I’m leaving the corridors.” “You say that like there’s a difference.” “There’s every difference.
A map tells me where I am.
A corridor moves me somewhere you’ve already decided I should go.
I want the first thing.
I don’t want the second.” “You are going to waste so many years learning the slow way what I could teach you in a single night.” “Maybe.
They’ll still be my years when I’m done with them.
That’s worth more to me than your night.” “Sentiment.
From you, of all the vessels I’ve been offered across three centuries.” “Call it sentiment if it comforts you.
I call it the only asset I own outright that nobody else has a claim on yet.
My time is mine.
Whatever you’d hand me in a night would come with your fingerprints all over it, and I’d spend the rest of my life scraping them off.” “You assume I’d want them scraped off eventually.
Perhaps I’d prefer they stayed.” “That’s the whole problem with your offer, isn’t it.
I noticed that part on my own.” The gatekeeper didn’t answer that immediately, and in the pause Kael felt something that might have been respect, or might have been recalculation, or might have been both wearing the same crimson face.
“Discipline again.
You lean on it like a crutch.” “I lean on it like a strategy.
It’s the only one that’s kept me alive since I woke up on this world with nothing to my name.” “Fine.
Ask more, then, if you insist on earning it one question at a time.” He did.
He spent the rest of the dead hour pulling threads out of the gatekeeper’s endless patience: which sectors the hidden Sith favored, which corners of the Republic’s bureaucracy had rotted furthest, what a bondsman with no name and no standing would need to become before either side of that hidden war would bother noticing he existed at all.
“You ask like a strategist,” the gatekeeper said, somewhere in the middle of it, an odd note of approval creeping into the pressure of its voice.
“Not like a man hungry for power.
Like a man building an army out of facts instead of soldiers.” “Facts are cheaper than soldiers.
They don’t need feeding, and they don’t die on you at the worst possible moment.” “Soldiers have their uses too.
You’ll want some, eventually, when facts alone stop being enough to move a galaxy this size.” “When I need soldiers, I’ll ask you about soldiers.
Right now I’m asking about maps.” “Fair.
Ask, then.” He kept asking.
Which worlds sat closest to whatever territory the hidden Sith considered their own, and which sat far enough on the fringe that a man with no name could operate for years before drawing notice.
Which Jedi enclaves still bothered patrolling the Outer Rim, and which had quietly stopped, more interested these days in Coruscant politics than in frontier ghost stories about dark-side relics buried under dead mining worlds.
The gatekeeper answered every question, and every answer came wrapped in the same faint poison, the same whispered suggestion that a stronger will could simply reach out and take what a weaker one would have to earn across years of patient, unglamorous work.
Kael took the maps.
He left every corridor exactly where it stood.
The gatekeeper had gone quiet toward the end, the crimson light guttering low like a fire that had burned through its best fuel and was deciding whether to bother with what remained.
Even its patience had a bottom, apparently, and Kael had spent most of an hour scraping toward it without once handing over the thing it actually wanted.
“One last question tonight,” Kael said.
“You’ve had a great many questions already tonight.” “Will you keep asking me, every single time I touch this thing?
The fast way, the shortcut, all of it?” “Every time.
Patience costs me nothing.
I have three centuries of practice spending it.” “Then I’ll keep saying no every time.
That costs me nothing either.” “We’ll see how nothing it costs you, across a hundred more nights like this one.” Kael didn’t answer that.
He let the shed go quiet instead, the crimson light dimming back down to the holocron’s resting glow, and decided the last word in that particular argument could belong to the dead man for tonight.
His own ignorance had turned into something he could actually use: a dying Republic, a complacent Order, a hidden pair who would kill him on sight the day they noticed him, and nothing at all standing between his bondsman’s cell and the apex of either hierarchy except time, power, and the same cold discipline that had carried him through an illusion chamber and out the other side of a collapsing ruin.
It wasn’t much.
It was more than he’d walked in with, and he’d paid for it with patience instead of pieces of himself, which was the only kind of payment he intended to make from here on.
There would be other nights to argue the rest of it.