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Popping out of hyperspace near Ciutric, Jantra was immediately hailed.
“Ciutric Spaceport Authority here. You will be switched to local control. Destination beacon at three-three-six-three-seven coming on now. Please tune your auto-landing function to that frequency and initiate auto-landing programs.”
“As ordered, Ciutric. Executing now.” Jantar punched a button and felt the control buck a little as the ship’s computer controls locked on to the beacon and began to use the data it was sending to plot the entry landing speed and vectors. Jantar relaxed her grip on the yoke, but didn’t let it go entirely. She had a pilot’s distrust of mechanical flying systems.
Ciutric IV’s twin moons shone brightly down on her ship as it travelled through the night sky. The evening’s rain clouds were just beginning to build; they were still no more than wispy veils that simply tore apart as her ship ripped through them.
On the ground below, still a few kilometres ahead, she could see the lights of the spaceport.
Located on the Outer Rim, far from the then seat of galactic power and far from the prying eyes of the Jedi Council, Ciutric had the good fortune to exist at the nexus of several hyperspace trading routes. Vessels stopped at the planet frequently, giving rise to a small but highly profitable industrial society centred on trade and shipping. For Jantar it was the perfect location.
A light on the navigation panel blinked a warning, indicating she was approaching the two-kilometre limit of restricted airspace that surrounded the port. As the vehicle gently touched down on the pad located on the starport’s perimeter, she exhaled a sigh of relief.
The automatic beacon had brought her ship down without incident.
Jantar hired a speeder and headed for the estate. It would now be derelict of course, but who knew what she might find there.
She made good time but the moment she saw it, she knew she would not be in luck. But to step where Jantar and Zannah lived? That was worth the trip, and she had a plan B up her sleeve anyway.
She padded around the former mansion. The marble floors were thick with dust and where luminous tapestries once covered the walls and colourful, hand-woven rugs lined the corridors, there was now nothing but peeling plaster. Rooms once filled with custom-made furniture and rare objets d’art were now empty. It took her half a standard hour to search the building and reach the back door that led out to the open-air grounds surrounding the estate.
She glanced down at the now faded abstract mosaic of the stone courtyard illuminated in the light of Ciutric IV’s twin moons.
A shadow passed over one of the twin moons; a dark cloud heavy with the threat of a fierce storm. Feeling a blast of cold wind blow in, she heard the first fat drops of rain splatter onto the patio stones around her before she felt them.
It was quaint and it was historic, but it was no more than a tourist attraction to the Sith. The wind rose to a howling gale, and the scattered drops quickly became a downpour. Apparently sudden storms were an almost nightly occurrence on Ciutric, particularly here in the lush forest on the outskirts of the capital city of Daplona.
The estate was close enough to the city to give Jantar easy access to everything Ciutric had to offer, yet isolated enough to allow Zannah to continue her lessons in the ways of the Sith.
A cool zephyr wafted across the courtyard, chilling Jantar’s rain-soaked body.
She looked around and saw it. A short walk and she was at a small annex at the rear of the estate. The door was once locked, sealed by a coded security system. Now the door hung off its hinges. She pushed the door open and stepped into the building that once served as Bane’s private library.
The interior consisted of a single square room, five metres on each side. The walls were lined by shelves that would once have been overflowing with the scrolls, tomes, and manuscripts Jantar had assembled over the years: the teachings of the ancient Sith.
Jantar walked to the centre of the room. Here once stood a large podium and a small pedestal. On the pedestal rested the Dark Lord’s greatest treasure: his Holocron.
A four-sided crystal pyramid small enough to be held in the palm, the Holocron contained the sum of all Bane’s knowledge and understanding. Everything he had learned about the ways of the dark side-all his teachings, all his philosophies – they had been transferred into the Holocron, recorded for all eternity. It was his legacy, a way to share an entire lifetime of wisdom with those who would follow him in the line of Sith Masters.
Jantar walked to the shelves and ran a finger along the dust that now covered them. Once upon a time they would be filled with thick tomes, leather covers pockmarked, pages yellow and cracked with age. Nadd’s journal would have been amongst them, she simply knew that to be true.
So all she had to do was find out where the contents were now.
The attempts of the Jedi to locate and confiscate anything that could be linked to the Sith had only succeeded in driving up the prices and forcing collectors to work through middle-beings to preserve their anonymity. And it wasn’t just Jedi that collectors feared. The light-siders would take their collection – dark-siders would kill them too.
So Jantar had developed a persona and back-story of a Sith fetishist, an anonymous collector obsessed with the dark side, willing to spend a small fortune to possess banned manuscripts and artefacts. Just as Jantar once had.
Most of what she had been offered was of little use: amulets or other trinkets of negligible power; second-hand copies of histories she had read in the Sith Library.
The cantina was almost empty at this time of day; the crowds wouldn’t start arriving until the late evening. Which was exactly why Jantar had arranged this meeting for early afternoon.
Her contact was a nondescript, white-haired man of about fifty. Just the right age to be flattered by the attentions of a young woman. He was already there, seated at a private booth in the back of the bar.
Jantar sat down in the seat across the table from the man and summoned a waitress with a discreet wave of her hand. She came over and took their order, then slipped away to leave them to their business. On Ciutric it was common for merchants to make deals in the backs of bars and clubs, and the serving staff knew how to respect the confidentiality of their customers.
“Welcome to Citriuc. It’s wonderful to meet face to face at last,” the man said by way of greeting.
“I trust it will be worth it,” Jantar replied.
They stopped speaking while the waitress returned and set their drinks on the table, then continued once she was gone.
The dealer was, according to those in the know, the sector’s leading procurer of banned Sith items; trading things that never appeared on Invisible Market. By all accounts, he had built a small fortune by discreetly seeking them out, purchasing them, and delivering them in person to his clients while keeping their names from ever being linked to the transaction.
Of course, most of his clients were nothing but egocentric billionaires who simply longed to possess a work that had been officially banned by the Jedi Council. They had no real understanding of the dark side or its power. They bought and sold the items in blissful ignorance, unaware of what they were truly dealing with.
“Have you been able to find what I was looking for,” she continued.
“The details you provided were rather vague.” Then, as if sensing he had said the wrong thing, he held up a hand and continued, “I am confident you will not be disappointed.”
“But you have no idea how hard this was,” the man continued, “I had to go outside all the normal channels. The owner is not your regular collector. But I came through, like I always do in the end.”
“I trust you were careful. I wouldn’t want word of this to make its way back to anyone.”
“Don’t worry, nobody will ever know you were involved. I only bring it up because I am regrettably forced to renegotiate our original price.”
“We had a deal.”
“Now, now – you should understand my initial quote is only an estimate,” the man said, as if this was regular business practice and Jantar would be foolish not to understand. “I had to outlay triple my normal expenses to track these particular items down.”
“But I’m willing to give you a bargain and only charge you double my original offer.”
“I’ll give you a ten percent bonus. Nothing more.”
For the next twenty minutes they haggled back and forth, finally settling on 40 percent above the starting price. It was never about the money for Jantar – but to simply agree would make the transaction appear too suspicious.
“But what do you mean…items.”
“Ah. That was to be my next point. The collection was bought en masse. The journals were sold as a job lot. Someone took them all and did not individually catalogue them, at least not as part of the sale agreement. They simply stated how many. And my intelligence says the collection has never been split. So if your document was there originally, it is still in the collected works.”
From inside his jacket, he produced an envelope. It was sealed the old-fashioned way, with wax. Jantar wanted to roll her eyes at the theatrics of it all.
“If the arrangements are unsatisfactory,” the man said, holding on to the envelope tightly, “I can find another buyer.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Jantar replied as she took the envelope.
With the transaction complete there was no point in staying at the cantina. Jantar was eager to open the envelope, but she resisted until she was safely back inside the privacy of her ship. There, she carefully opened the envelope, allowing the single sheet of paper folded up inside to slide out.
Jantar found the apartment easily enough. It was lavish enough to make her own look average. For a start it occupied three floors, and not just any three floors, but the top three.
Her eyes were accustomed to the dark. She checked the time and counted down. Three…two…one.
A small explosion knocked out the power in the apartment block. A few seconds later, an internal generator kicked in and power was restored. They would investigate the nature of the blast and find foul play was responsible. But in seeking the solution, they would not spot that, in the few seconds there was no power, Jantar had switched the networks for the security system. They still operated, but just went through to a dead-end and not the private security form they were supposed to link to.
She stood on the roof and dropped onto the balcony with the grace of a jungle cat. A few seconds later and she was inside the top floor and more accurately, the owner’s personal study. She knew she’d triggered the silent alarm – but knew she had a period of grace before someone worked out that nobody was coming to save the day.
The study was a buzzing hive of endless electronic activity. Even when unoccupied, the room was illuminated by the flickering images of HoloNet news feeds, the glow of data screens showing stock tickers from a dozen different planetary exchanges, or blinking readouts on the monitors indicating private communications filtering in.
It looked more like the communications hub of a busy starport than a den in a private residence. Yet the study was no grandiose display of wealth; rather, it was a testament to efficiency and practicality. Every single piece of equipment had been carefully chosen to handle the staggering volume of data passing through the room: thousands of data units every hour, all recorded and stored for later review and analysis.
Jantar figured this was why the man was able to afford the things he could. And good luck to him. She was sure that every credit spent on the study was an investment that would eventually payoff a hundredfold.
As as Sith, she knew that power came from knowledge, and this man’s vast fortune had allowed him to assemble the priceless collection of ancient Sith teachings he kept secured in this private library.
Jantar walked over to the bookshelves. It was interesting that they resembled the ones she’d left behind in Bane’s estate.
She let her fingers dance over the book. Many of the volumes here were worthless – if the owner knew what he had, he’d sell them on. But others were priceless. She was tempted to look but remembered she had to be focused. She was here for one reason and one reason only.
It was a thin, leather-bound manuscript in amongst much more impressive tomes – items that were more deserving of catching the eye.
How poignant.
The volume was thin, a few dozen pages, and the cover inscribed with arcane words traced in blood-red ink. It was in the tongue of the ancient Sith – which Jantar had no learned.
And the contents were written in delicate script in the same blood-red ink – as well as elaborate illustrations. And the margins of each page filled with handwritten notes in Galactic Basic. And in more than one hand.
She glanced through the pages and was relieved and excited in equal measures. In her hands was a compilation of the history and teachings of Freedon Nadd. In the Dark Lord’s own hand.
