Read Online Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force by Michael Reaves - Free Book Online

things, he’d had to learn at an early age to filter and control the impulses the Force evoked in him. It had been a lifelong struggle to work through the potency of those impulses, and he often wondered if all Force-sensitives experienced it in this way.
    It was not the sort of question one was encouraged to ask other aspirants during Inquisitorial training. He had spoken of it to his master, of course, for he had to learn the discipline of his gift.
    Master Kuthara had not commented on whether his particular experience of the Force was unusual or common. He had only said, “The Force flows through you, around you. You must learn to sail its currents and harness its winds without letting them swamp you or blow you off-course. Your discipline is a vessel, and you are the being whose hand is on the tiller.”
    He had been about fourteen when that conversation had taken place and had suspected that his master experienced the Force in just such a way—as a current to be ridden. He had been naïve enough at the time to ask, “But wind and wave have no motive, do they, Master? We speak of an ill wind, but isn’t that just a pretty conceit? The wind and waves are random.”
    “Your point?” his Falleen master had asked, oddly puzzled.
    Tesla had grown used to Master Kuthara answering his questions before he could even frame them; the uncertainty thus expressed had been a bit unnerving.
    “Can the Force be said to have dark and light sides? Winds are neither dark nor light; currents are neither dark nor light, they simply
are
.”
    There had been a moment of suspended time in which he waited for his master to applaud his intuition, punish his audacity, or simply astound him with an answer of the utmost simplicity and profundity. He had more than half expected the latter. So the answer he got had stunned him.
    “You disappoint me, Probus,” his master had said. “It is the most elemental of understandings that the Force is a duality. You have mouthed that duality yourself, apparently without understanding it. Light and darkness simply are. It is that elementary.”
    Impulsively Tesla had blurted, “But isn’t darkness merely the
absence
of light? Light is made up of photonic particles. Darkness isn’t made up of anti-photons, is it?”
    For that question he had been instructed to take his lightsaber and spend six hours practicing Shii-Cho—the most basic of combat forms.
    Later, when he had lain on his bed aching with fatigue and numb with boredom, his master had come to him in an odd frame of mind—if not apologetic, at least conciliatory.
    “You will understand in time, Probus,” he’d said, “that the Force is neither as simple nor as complicated as we want to make it. It falls into the realm of neither science nor mysticism. Its use is at once an art and a discipline.”
    “Like sailing,” Tesla had suggested.
    His master had nodded, a wry smile curving his thinlips. “Like sailing. Or like learning to sort through and comprehend the world of the senses.”
    Tesla sorted through his senses now: peering, scenting, tasting, listening, and still hoping that he would catch—
    He raised his head and turned to look out over the marketplace, eyes narrowed. Through a veil of multicolored light he saw a flash of blue-white radiance moving away rapidly. The scent came next, pale and sweet and tangy at once. A sound that was almost musical danced and shimmered at the fringes of his hearing.
    He smiled in anticipation and dived after the sensory ghost. The crowd of shoppers parted before him as people recognized the uniform of the Inquisitor—cloak and cowl of an indescribable hue that seemed to shimmer with phantom color, the Imperial crest upon one shoulder.
    Across the width of the teeming square he trailed the bright target, determined not to lose it as it dimmed. He suspected the Jedi must have used the Force for something to have sent up such a vivid little flare just now. That puzzled him. It had puzzled him