Without even understanding why he did it, Mace moved away into the middle of the gap. One breath composed his mind. The next expressed his nature into the Force around him: Jedi serenity balancing buried temper, devotion to peace tipping the scales against a guilty pleasure in fighting. Nothing was hidden, here. Light and dark, pure and corrupt, hope, fear, pride, and humility: he offered up everything that made him who he was, with a friendly smile, lowered eyes, and hands open at his sides. Then he sent rippling through the Force the call he’d been taught thirty-five years before …

And he got an answer.

Slipping through the walls of the gap: measured tread blending seamlessly with wind-rustle and flybuzz: horned reptoid heads questing, lidless oval eyes of gleaming black—

“Windu!” A hiss from Nick. “Don’t move!”

Triangular fangs scissored along each other as jaws that could crush durasteel worked and chewed. Steaming drool trailed down mouth folds of scaled hide thick enough to stop a lightsaber. Splay-toed feet with shovel-sized claws churned kilos of dirt with every step. Muscular armored tails as long as their landspeeder-sized bodies whipped sinuously back and forth.

The akk dogs of Haruun Kal.

Three of them.

Nick hissed again. “Back up. Just back up. Straight toward me. Very slowly. Don’t show them your back. They’re good dogs, but if you trigger their hunt–kill instincts …”

The beasts circled, switching tails that could break Mace in half. Their eyes, hard-shelled and lidless, glittered without expression. Their breaths all stank of old meat, and their hides gave off a leathery musk, and for an instant Mace was on the sand in the Circus Horrificus in the bowels of Nar Shaddaa, surrounded by thousands of screaming spectators, at the mercy of Gargonn the Hutt—

He understood now why he had done this. Why he’d had to.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 4