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to strip his false youth away, leaving his bones brittle, his joints worn thin and knotted with tension.
    â€œThese are the envoys from Troxar,” his Master said. How could he know? Dooku didn’t ask. Darth Sidious knew. He always knew.
    â€œThey are considering surrender,” Dooku said. “They claim they have a resistance planned, ready to rise in insurrection when the clone troops withdraw.”
    â€œNo!” the flickering figure said sharply. “The war has already damaged the planet too much to make it worth saving. Its only value now is to chew up more troops and resources. Tell them they have to fight on. Promise them reinforcements—tell them you will be deploying a new fleet of advanced droids to retake the whole system within a month, if only they can hold on. Explain that such weapons will not be put in the hands of those who surrender.”
    â€œAnd when the month passes, and no reinforcements arrive?”
    â€œHelp will come within another month at most. Promise them that, and make them believe it. I’ve shown you how.”
    â€œI understand,” Dooku said.
How casually we betray our creatures.
    The hooded figure cocked its head. “Having an attack of
conscience,
my apprentice?”
    â€œNo, Master.” He met the hooded figure’s hideous eye. “It was their own greed that brought them to you,” he said. “In their heart of hearts, they always knew what they were getting into.”

    The Château Malreaux was alive with eyes.
    The spectacular security system installed by the seventeenth (and last) Viscount Malreaux in the final months of his descent into madness was one of the reasons Dooku had chosen the château for his current base of operations. Optic recorder studs littered the mansion, disguised as upholstery rivets in the parlor, screw heads in the kitchen cabinets, painkiller pills in the apothecary’s pantry, and the black eyes of birds woven into the tapestries of the Crying Room. Top-of-the-line infrared swatches, originally developed as prosthetics for tongue-damaged Sluissi, were grafted into the cream-and-crimson Malreaux livery of the table linen and carpets and drapes. The faux walls that had been built at enormous expense to riddle the château with secret passageways were pocked with spyholes. Microphones nested like spiders in dozens of drawers and linen closets, under every bed, taped to the roof by each of the eleven chimneys, and even glued on the base of a priceless bottle of Crème D’Infame in the wine cellar.
    The seventeenth (and final) Viscount Malreaux, convinced he was being poisoned, had murdered his kitchen staff and then fled into his secret tunnels, coming out only at night. The last anyone saw of him was a murky glimpse shot from a security cam hidden in a fake onion in a hanging basket in the kitchen: a thirty-second recording of a skeletal figure creeping from a hidden grate into the kitchen to drink two hurried gulps of tap water and gnaw a handful of raw flour.
    If it hadn’t been for the smell, the corpse of the seventeenth (and terminal) Lord Malreaux would never have been found.
    Someone hidden in the secret passage that ran over the study, for example, would have been able to watch the whole of the conversation between Dooku and Asajj Ventress through a peephole gimlet in the ceiling. If that person had been patient, and waited until Ventress was well away, he or she would have seen the conference between Dooku and the hologrammic apparition of Darth Sidious.
    And if the watcher had waited a good while after Dooku left the room, he or she might have seen a section of shelving swing out unexpectedly, admitting a small, quick, evil creature, a Vjun fox, its coat a brindled red and cream, with clever prehensile hands instead of paws.
    After pausing a moment to sniff, it advanced warily into the room, speculatively at first, but almost immediately coming to the spot where Dooku had