As he walked cautiously forward, feeling the nearness of Kazdan Paratus but uncertain of his exact location, one of the rubbish piles stirred. From it stepped a humanoid machine made from the junked droid parts he had expected to find on his journey.

The braincase of an FX-8 medical droid was bolted onto a body cobbled together from several types of outdated protocol models. Its limbs appeared to come from a mixture of EV and B1 battle droids, tipped with instruments and tools that wouldn't looked out of place in a workshop. Its sole functioning photoreceptor glared a bright, furious yellow. Its lurching gait achieved an appreciable speed before he sliced its head off.

A second patchwork droid emerged from a different rubbish pile, followed by a third. The sound of more droid golems stirring line from elsewhere in the Temple. The apprentice fought them ¨ with practiced ease. He had been dueling PROXY all his life; knew the weaknesses and strengths of droids, even one capable, by a clever use of repulsor technologies and a specially adapted antique training lightsaber, of imitating a Jedi. Ones such as these, with barely a matching part among them, were child's play.

Soon the foyer was full of the twitching, smoking bodies of the temple's hapless guardians. He began to tire, not from exertion but from the tedium of knocking down droid after droid, to no apparent end. There might have been thousands of them.

Chapter 6