Path of Destruction was about having the idea. Rule of Two is about living inside it, which turns out to be the more interesting book. Two people share a house, share a discipline, and share a written understanding that one of them will eventually murder the other. Karpyshyn plays this almost entirely straight, and it is the best thing he wrote for this franchise.
The two-hander
Bane takes the child he acquired at Ruusan, renames her Darth Zannah, and begins a training programme with an unusual design constraint: he must make her strong enough to kill him, or the doctrine fails. Every lesson is therefore also a risk assessment. Every kindness is an investment in his own execution.
Karpyshyn understands that this is funny as well as grim, and he lets the domestic register do work — the pair bicker, they get bored, they have the same argument twice. A Sith apprenticeship rendered as a long and mutually suspicious cohabitation is a genuinely fresh idea in this fiction.
Zannah
She is the reason the book is better than its predecessor. Bane is a fixed object by this point: certain, armoured, done changing. Zannah is a person constructing herself out of a philosophy handed to her at ten years old, and Karpyshyn is careful to show her arriving at conclusions rather than absorbing them. Her patience — she is prepared to wait twenty years to be ready — is the most Sith thing in the trilogy.
The orbalisks
Bane spends much of the novel encased in a parasitic carapace that feeds on him while making him nearly unkillable, and the metaphor is not subtle, but it is load-bearing: the power is genuine, the cost is continuous, and he cannot take it off. It also produces the book’s best supporting character, the healer Caleb, who is compelled to keep a monster alive and hates every minute of it.
Where it falls down
The Jedi thread is thin. Darovit, Zannah’s cousin, is asked to carry the novel’s moral counterweight and is not written with enough interiority to do it. The action prose is serviceable at best — Karpyshyn is a much better designer of situations than describer of fights — and there is a repeated habit of telling the reader what a scene meant immediately after showing it.
Canon status
Star Wars Legends. The Rule of Two itself survives into current continuity and Bane appears in The Clone Wars as a vision, but Zannah, the orbalisks and everything in this novel do not. See the Rule of Two era page for exactly where the line falls.
Who should read it
Read Path of Destruction first, then this. If you only read one Bane novel, though, make it this one — it is the volume where the trilogy stops explaining its premise and starts testing it.
