The Unifying Force (10 page)

One of the spotlessly adorned shapers rose and hastened from the hall. Moments later, entering through both the priest and warrior portals, marched a group of ten males. Shorter even than Nas Choka, they carried restless amphistaffs and whetted coufees. Steng’s Talons sprouted from their robust bodies, which were smeared black with dried blood.

The ten were unlike the special breed of warriors known as hunters, who were privileged to sport the photosensitive mimetic cloak of Nuun, but something new and disconcerting, and the female seers were the first to voice their dismay.

“What desecration is this?”

“Armed as warriors, yet clothed as attendants to the gods!”

“What shaper is responsible?”

Onimi gamboled over to them and adopted a haughty posture.

One of the seers made a futile grab for Onimi while the others continued to shout dire warnings.

“No shaper other than myself is responsible,” Shimrra said, silencing them. “By my injunction do these warriors come to be. Our
Jeedai
. Charged with guarding the life of your Supreme Overlord, as well as with rooting out our enemies and exterminating them. At their disposal they will have coralskippers of unique design, with advanced weaponry and the ability to travel through darkspace unassisted.” Shimrra paused, then added: “They shall be called slayers, in honor of Yun-Yammka—lest he feel uncomfortable about mingling with
priests.”

“They have the look of Shamed Ones!”

Shimrra whirled on the warrior who said it. “Shamed, you say? By my mandate were they created, Supreme Commander Chaan—by divine edict! If the gods had disapproved, would these warriors not bear the markings of pariahs?”

Supreme Commander Chaan stood his ground. “Shamed Ones shaped to resemble those who have been embraced by the gods, Great Lord. Concealing the deformities that would signal their unworthiness. Is it too much to ask that we be shown proof of their status?”

Shimrra grinned diabolically. “Cursed you are by your own request, Commander. Step forward with ten of your warriors and do your best against these.”

“Fearsome Shimrra—”

“Doubt flew from your mouth like a tsik vai, Commander! If too quickly, then retract your words, or do as I say and stand against these!”

Chaan snapped his fists to his shoulders and summoned ten warriors to their feet; coufees, shields, tridents, and amphistaffs woke to the challenge. At the same time, the warrior-priests spread out, but only two stepped forward.

“Two against eleven,” Chaan said in sudden consternation. “This is vulgar. Dishonor either way!”

Shimrra returned to his throne and sat. “Then we will be pleased to see you humble them, if only to demonstrate that
our shapers have failed in their task. Carve them, Commander, as a dish fit for the gods!”

Chaan saluted crisply.

At his curt nod, the ten warriors attacked, two groups of four moving to outflank their opponents, and the remaining two rushing forward immediately to engage and distract. The reactions of the warrior-priests were almost too fast to follow. They turned slightly to the side, almost back to back, wielding weapons in both hands, meeting the frontal attack and the flanking attacks simultaneously.

The amphistaffs of the attackers struck seemingly unar-mored flesh without finding purchase. Coufees cut and sliced, and yet almost no blood flowed; what little did, congealed instantly. The melee weapons of the defenders were no less enhanced than were the small, muscular warrior-priests who wielded them. The specially bred amphistaffs snapped the heads off their lesser cousins, and stabbed with enough force to paralyze, even through armor. The slayers—Shimrra’s
Jeedai
—leapt to great heights, twisting in midflight and landing behind their attackers, then rushed in, arms windmilling in a blur, gouts of black blood flying in all directions. One by one and sliced to pieces, Chaan’s warriors dropped to the floor.

Silence gripped the hall as the elite of all castes watched with a mix of awe and dread. Shimrra was already powerful enough without this royal guard. Now he was no match for any domain that might think to thwart him.

The fight was over almost as quickly as it began, with the ten warriors—and Chaan—felled and bleeding, and the two warrior-priests unmoved by what they had done, their slender amphistaffs badged with blood.

The shaper who had escorted the group into the hall stepped forward to appraise the warriors and address Shimrra. “Our taller warriors kept rejecting the implants. The faster metabolic rate of our shorter warriors is better suited to the rapid cellular activity of the implant biots.”

Onimi scampered over to one of the dead warriors and prodded him.

Shimrra nodded to Master Shaper Qelah Kwaad. “Show him.”

Few members of the elite were as fearsome to gaze upon as Qelah Kwaad, but the object she held in her eight-fingered cephalopod hand made her writhing-snakes headdress and bulging cranium seem positively ordinary.

“The weapon of the
Jeedai!”
one of the warriors shouted.

“More sacrilege!” another said.

“Hold your tongues or forfeit them,” Shimrra snapped. “This is the energy blade taken from the
Jeedai
who killed you in great numbers in the Well of the World Brain. The one whom so many of you hold in reverence—Ganner. Think of the blade not as an abomination, then, but a holy relic of that warrior’s might.”

“Master Shaper Kwaad has desecrated herself,” a seer said.

“If you take issue with her familiarity with the stillborn technology,” Shimrra replied calmly, “then denounce as well the contrivances Master Kwaad and her shapers created to foil the enemy’s shadow bombs, their decoy dovin basals, and their yammosk jammers. Condemn, too, the
mabugat kan
that have ingested the enemy’s deep-space communications arrays, and have enabled us to subjugate more worlds in a klekket than had been conquered in the time since my arrival in the Outer Rim.” He gestured to the lightsaber. “For this energy blade is powered by one of our own lambent focusing crystals. Hence it has already been
sanctified.”

The remark was enough to quiet everyone in the hall.

Shimrra nodded again. “Carry on, Master Shaper.”

Moving directly to one of the slayers, Qelah Kwaad ignited the lightsaber, raised it to her opposite shoulder, and, with a slashing motion, drew the violet blade diagonally across the slayer’s chest.

The smell of burned flesh wafted through the hall.

Shimrra turned slightly to face the commanders. “Only a furrow where any one of you would lie in two pieces on the floor.”

“They are more vonduun crab than Yuuzhan Vong,” High Priest Jakan muttered.

Shimrra seethed. “Vonduun crab, dovin basal, yammosk, warrior … Need I remind you, of all people, that we are all grown from the same seed?”

Nom Anor—slightly taller than the average human, disfigured by ceremony and by his own hand, fitted with a false eye that could spit poison—waited uneasily at the entry to Shimrra’s private chambers in the rounded crown of the sacred mountain. Three sullen slayers stood stiffly to one side of the membranous curtain, and a pair of priests to the other, purifying Nom Anor with clouds of fragrant vapor puffed from the dorsal scent gland of a well-fed but skittish thamassh.

He hadn’t been summoned to private audience with the Supreme Overlord since his return from Zonama Sekot, and he wasn’t sure what to expect.

The membrane shimmered and parted to reveal Onimi, gesticulating to Nom Anor.

“Enter,
Prefect,”
Shimrra’s pet said, affecting a supercilious tone.

Nom Anor edged past him into the spacious circular chamber. Shimrra sat in the center of the room, atop a circular dais, in a high-backed seat that lacked the pomp of his public throne. A blood moat encircled the seat, and off to one side a yorik coral staircase with a finely wrought railing spiraled into the summit. A hardened module of the worldship, Shimrra’s inner sanctum, like the Well of the World Brain, could be detached from the Citadel if necessary and launched into deep space.

“Did you not wonder when we three would meet again?” Onimi asked softly as Nom Anor passed.

Nom Anor ignored the question and approached the throne, genuflecting at the edge of the foul-smelling moat. From an inner pocket of his green robe, he removed the lightsaber that had stirred so much strife in the Hall of Confluence earlier on.

“Dread Lord, your desire was that this be delivered to you.” Nom Anor kept his gaze lowered while Shimrra took
the weapon from his hand; he looked up with alarm when he heard the distinctive
snap-hiss
of the lightsaber’s energy blade.

The mere sound of the weapon evoked jarring memories of an incident in the Well of the World Brain a year earlier, when Jacen Solo and Vergere had held a similar blade to his neck before they had made their escape from Yuuzhan’tar. Nom Anor had spent countless moments since wondering how his life might have gone had the two Jedi agreed to take him with them. As a source of invaluable intelligence, he might not have been executed by the so-called Galactic Alliance. Perhaps after weeks of debriefing he would have been allowed to don an ooglith masquer and relocate in secrecy to some remote world in the Outer Rim, where he would have been able to live out his days in contentment.

No larger than a votive candle in the grip of Shimrra’s right hand, the lightsaber thrummed as it cleaved the air.

“Answer me honestly, Prefect, do you believe in the gods?” Shimrra brought the violet blade close to Nom Anor’s neck. “Bear in mind: honestly.”

High Prefect Drathul’s predecessor, Yoog Skell, who had died by Nom Anor’s hand, had once warned Nom Anor never to lie to Shimrra. Now he swallowed and found his voice. “August Lord, I … remain open to belief.”

“If there was some benefit to believing, you mean.”

“I follow the example set by the priests, Lord.”

Shimrra’s eyes bored into Nom Anor’s single orb. “Are you suggesting, Prefect, that our priests are not acting out of the goodness of their hearts?”

“Lord, I have seen many hearts, and few showed evidence of goodness.”

“Clever,” Shimrra said slowly. “That’s the word everyone who knows you or who has had dealings with you uses—
clever.”

To Nom Anor’s relief, Shimrra deactivated the lightsaber.

In another scenario, Nom Anor might have remained prophet of the heretics, and even then be attempting to topple Shimrra from the throne. He had faced that choice in the Unknown Regions—
How telling!
—only to decide: better by Shimrra’s side than overlord to a multitude of outcasts.

“What does one like yourself make of the whisperings that circulate among the elite,” Shimrra asked from his simple chair, “that the gods have become angered by my decisions—as far back to my deciding to tip Quoreal from the throne, usurp his position as Supreme Overlord, and pronounce this galaxy our new home?”

Nom Anor risked adopting a cross-legged posture on the floor. From the far side of the moat, Onimi watched him with visible delight. “May I speak freely, Lord?”

“You had better,” Onimi said.

Shimrra glanced from Onimi to Nom Anor, then nodded his enormous head.

“I would answer that many of the high caste fail to grasp that the actions you took were a tribute to the gods; actions no less bold than those taken by Yun-Yuuzhan when he gave of himself to bring the universe into being.”

Shimrra leaned forward. “You impress me, Prefect. Continue.”

Nom Anor grew more confident. “Many of us had accepted as fact that the generations of wandering through the intergalactic void had been a test of faith—which, as you yourself pointed out, we failed miserably, by quarreling among ourselves and worshiping false gods, weakening the hinges of our own gates.”

Shimrra nodded sagely. “Any group without opposition falls inexorably into decay and tyranny—or both.”

“But you, Dread Lord, saw the arduous journey for what it was: a consequence of our previous failures. You understood that our shapers were fast approaching the limits of traditional knowledge—that they were essentially powerless to repair our deteriorating worldships; that our priests were likewise unable to rescue our society from the depths to which it had sunk; that our warriors, left without a war, had nowhere to turn but upon one another. We were dying in the void, Lord, and were it not for your toppling of Quoreal and his cautious followers, the Yuuzhan Vong might have ended there.”

Shimrra stared at him. “Oh, you are a dangerous person, Prefect.” He glanced at Onimi. “But as my familiar knows well, I have a liking for danger.” He paused, then added: “I will educate you about the gods. The question is not whether
they exist, but if we have any further need of them. Their fall began during our long journey, when they failed to come to our aid. As you have undoubtedly learned, Prefect, one cannot keep loyal servants if one neglects them. So the fault lies with them. Absent our bloody support, absent our solicitations and praises, what would they be left with? The gods may have created us, but it is we who sustain them through worship. Now they are bereft because the roles are reversed. They are angry because they have been forced to recognize that their hour has arrived; that the time has come to surrender power to Shimrra and the new order.”

Again, Shimrra ignited the lightsaber and waved it about, as if to emphasize his remarks.

“This is the greater war, Prefect—the Yuuzhan Vong against the gods.”

Nom Anor gulped. “War, August Lord?”

“Nothing less! Because the gods guard their power jealously. But surely you recognize this, Prefect. Would you go quietly into retreat, or would you fight to the last to preserve your status? Abandon all the consuls who now answer to you? Murder even High Prefect Drathul if necessary to hold your ground?”