Star Wars®: Red Harvest

Star Wars®: Red Harvest

 Wim Nickter stood just outside the circle, awaiting first blood.
 The cold morning air tasted like ozone, numbing his tongue and lips, making his heart pound harder in his chest until it actually shook the heavy fabric of his wind-resistant tunic.   He had climbed the seventy-seven steps to the top of the temple with the other students, muscles aching, sweat from his exertions still drying in the wind.  The lightsaber training session was over.  Now the duels would begin.
In the three years since arriving at the academy, Nickter had come to anticipate these duels with a special kind of excitement. A tall, rangy seventeen-year-old with a thatch of jet-black hair, he gazed into the circle with hungry blue-gray eyes that matched the unforgiving landscape almost perfectly. 
Nickter looked down.  From the top of the temple, the Sith academy resembled nothing so much as a partially demolished wheel, its spokes radiating crookedly out from the central hub of the Tower.  Its ancient chambers, enclosed walkways, tunnels and temples, and the great library that served as its haunted heart, had all long ago begun to crumble and deteriorate from decades of accumulated snow and ice, and the constantly shifting tectonic eccentricities of the planetary crust.  The result was a sprawling ruin of forgotten spaces—some of them palatial—groaning under tons of age-tortured Sith architecture. 
It was here that they’d come, Nickter and several hundred others, to learn everything they needed to know about the dark side of the Force.
 Directly across from him, Lord Shak’Weth, the Sith Blademaster, took three steps forward into the open space, turning to regard the students from beneath the hood of his cloak.  For a moment the wind had fallen silent and it was quiet except for the scrape of his boots across the flat, uneven surface.  The Blademaster’s stony countenance betrayed no hint of expression.  The thin, lipless slit of his mouth never moved.  No comment was made, nor any needed.  This was the moment when the first challenge would be made and Nickter—along with all his peers—had heard the rumors. 
This was the day that Lussk was going to issue his challenge.
 Rance Lussk was the academy’s top student—a Sith acolyte of such fierce promise and potential that few, if any, dared approach him, let alone face him in duel.   These days he spent most of his time in private training sessions with Shak’Weth and other Masters at the academy.   Some said that he’d even sat in meditation with Lord Scabrous himself, up in the Tower…although Nickter had his private doubts about this last bit.  He hadn’t met a student yet that actually claimed to have been inside the Tower.

Excerpted from Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber Copyright © 2010 by Joe Schreiber. Excerpted by permission of LucasBooks, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.