Conquest: Edge of Victory I (22 page)

“I do.”

Mezhan Kwaad’s eyes were oily pools, utterly unreadable. Nen Yim met her gaze steadily, without flinching, for a very long time.

“I have searched for an apprentice like you,” the master shaper finally said. “I have asked the gods to send you to me. If you are not what you appear to be, you will
not be forgiven. You will not profit from any betrayal of me, I promise you that.”

That gave Nen Yim a start. The thought that the master might be afraid of
her
had never crossed her mind.

“I am your apprentice,” Nen Yim said. “I would not betray you. I have put my life and my position in your thirteen fingers.”

“They are well placed, Adept,” Mezhan Kwaad said softly. “Proceed as you have just suggested. Do not speak to anyone but me about this. If our results are to the liking of our leaders, I assure you they will not look closely at our methods. But we must be discreet. We must move with caution.” She glanced once more at the pool and touched her head.

“When the pain of the Vaa-tumor reaches its peak, there are colors to be seen that have never been seen before, thoughts to be had, strange and mighty … Well, you will see. At times I am almost ashamed to have it removed, to retreat from the final embrace of it. I should like to know where it would take me.” She gave Nen Yim a rare genuine smile. “One day the gods shall ordain it. Until then, I have much work to do for them.” She draped her eight slender fingers on Nen Yim’s shoulder.

“Let us go see our young
Jeedai
, shall we?”

   The
Jeedai
watched them come in. Only her green eyes moved, following them closely, like one beast seeking the soft throat of another.

“I would advise you not to attack us with your
Jeedai
tricks,” Mezhan Kwaad told her. “The provoker has been told to stimulate you to great agony if we are afflicted in any way. Though in time you will come to understand agony, at the moment you seem to dislike it, and it clearly disrupts your concentration. There are worse things we could do to you.”

The
Jeedai
’s eyes widened. “I can understand you,”
she said. Then she stopped, looking even more confused. “I’m not speaking Basic. This is—”

“You speak our language now, yes,” the master shaper said. “If you are to be one of us, you must speak the sacred tongue.”

“Be one of
you?
” The
Jeedai
sneered. “Thanks, but I’d much rather be the slime under a Hutt.”

“That’s because you perceive yourself an infidel,” Mezhan Kwaad said reasonably. “You do not understand us, and there are things that confound us about you and the other
Jeedai
. But we will understand you, and you will understand us. You will become a tissue connecting the Yuuzhan Vong and the
Jeedai
, nurturing both. You will make it possible for understanding to flow both ways.”

“That’s what you want from me?”

“You are the path to peace,” Mezhan Kwaad assured her.

“Kidnapping me won’t get you peace!” the
Jeedai
shouted.

“We did not kidnap you,” Mezhan Kwaad said. “We rescued you from the other infidels, remember?”

“You’re twisting things,” the
Jeedai
returned. “The whole reason they captured me was to give me to you.”

The master’s headdress rearranged itself into an expression of mild anger.

“Memory is a most malleable commodity,” Mezhan Kwaad said. “It is mostly chemical. For instance, you now know our language. You did not learn it.”

“You put it there,” the
Jeedai
said.

“Yes. Your memory of the words, the grammar, the syntax. All introduced to you.”

“So you can implant memories. Big deal. We Jedi can do that, as well.”

“Indeed. I have no doubt those
Jeedai
abilities could do much to confuse one as young as yourself. How many
of your memories are real? How many manufactured? How could you tell the difference?”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is this. Right now you think you are—what is it, Taher’ai?”

“My name is Tahiri.”

“Yes. Tahiri, a young
Jeedai
candidate, raised by a tribe strange to her—”

“Sand People.”

“Of course. But soon enough, you will remember. After we’ve stripped away the false memories and undone the disgusting modifications made to your body, you will remember who you are.”

“What are you talking about?” the
Jeedai
exploded.

“You are Riina of Domain Kwaad. You are one of us. You always have been.”

“No! I know who my parents were!”

“You know the lies you were told, the memories you were given. Fear not. We will bring you back.”

Mezhan Kwaad signaled, and Nen Yim bowed and followed her from the room. Behind them, the young
Jeedai
wailed in the first sign of true despair that Nen Yim had heard from her.

“Do not wait for tomorrow,” Mezhan Kwaad said. “Make your modifications and begin your trials. We must show results, soon.”

Anakin rode in the belly of the beast.

Literally. And it
stank
. The Yuuzhan Vong equivalent of an organic gill, the gnullith Anakin wore did nothing to buffer the confused and odious smells of river crawlfish, silman eel, rotting wetweed, the viscous mucus that coated the inside of the vangaak like jelly—or of the breather itself, which insisted on reminding him, by slowly and constantly writhing, that he had a live animal shoving its tentacles down his throat and nostrils.

The only bright spot was that he hadn’t eaten anything for a day and a half.

It had been better, earlier, when the trawling-boat creature was still making its catch, swimming with its mouth expanded into a flattened funnel ten meters across. The water passed through and out the filtering membranes in its posterior, acting as the underwater equivalent of a fresh breeze. Now that the belly was bloated, the lips had sucked in on themselves, and water flow was cut to the minimum necessary to sustain the live catch squirming all around him.

He was reminded of the story of how his mother and father had met, on the Death Star, a story he’d heard far too many times. Seconds after seeing each other for the first time, they’d ended up fleeing stormtroopers into a garbage hold.

“What an incredible smell you’ve discovered,” his father
had sarcastically told his future wife. He hadn’t been very happy with her at the time.

I’ve found a better smell than you did, Mom
, he thought.

The thought of Rapuung above, in the warm breezes of Yavin 4 and no doubt delighted over the discomfort of his infidel ally, did nothing to improve Anakin’s mood. If he’d had a working lightsaber, he would have long ago slashed his way through the vangaak even if it meant facing a hundred Yuuzhan Vong warriors. Some things made death seem pretty.

He immediately regretted that thought. There were beings in the galaxy who endured misery that made what he was going through look like a day in a garden on Ithor.

Well, back when Ithor had gardens.

Still, he was more than ready to get out. He passed the time by getting to know his bellymates, gently convincing the more adventurous ones he wasn’t something to nibble on. He tried to relax and forget his body and the unpleasant sensory data it was processing. He found Tahiri—in pain, but alive. He thought he briefly found Jaina, then lost her again. Time stretched and ceased to have meaning.

Some strange motion jarred him. Had he been asleep? It was difficult to tell.

The motion came again, a sudden contraction that squeezed water-dwellers against him.

Then a stronger contraction hurtled him forward, blasting into the light in a stream of fluid and fish, then plunging into new water. Something strong caught his arm and hauled him up, and he found himself staring blearily into the face of Vua Rapuung.

The warrior set him down on his feet and detached the gnullith. Anakin coughed up water and then took deep, grateful breaths. He looked up at Rapuung.

“I’ve just been vomited by a fish,” he said.

Vua Rapuung cocked his head. “Obviously. Why are you telling me?”

“Never mind. Where are we?” The vangaak had disgorged its prey at the narrow end of a wedge-shaped pool. The larger end of the wedge, about twenty meters away, opened into an even larger aquatic space. Anakin and Rapuung stood on a landing, of sorts, bounded by slightly uneven coral walls six meters high. Every six meters or so, the walls were marked by ovoids the size of doorways, obvious because of their darker shade. The vangaak had apparently entered this complex through one canal opening at the end of the wedge. Anakin could see daylight and swaying Massassi trees beyond.

He could see the sky above, too.

“I see,” Anakin said. “We’re in one of the—what did you call them?”

“Damuteks.”

“Right. They’re shaped like rayed stars. We’re at the end of one of the rays. This is one of the compounds filled with water.”

“Each damutek has a succession pool. Some have coverings over them so the space can be used for other things.”

Anakin pointed at the canal. “We came up that. It goes to the river, right?”

“Correct again.”

“Why is the water in the canal flowing toward the river, then?”

“Why ask after such irrelevancies? The succession pool is filled from below. Its rooting tubes seek water and minerals. The outflow goes to the river. And that is enough talk.”

“You’re right,” Anakin agreed. “Let’s find Tahiri and get out of here.”

Rapuung glared at him. “It isn’t so simple. First we must disguise you. An unbound human, walking free? Then we must locate your other
Jeedai
.”

“I can find her.”

“I surmised as much, from what I have heard of
Jeedai
. You can sniff each other out at a distance, yes?”

“Something like that.”

“Then you will be my hunting uspeq. But not yet. Even when we know where she is—”

“We have to chart the course. I get it. You’ll figure the layout of the place. And your revenge? What about that?”

“When we find the other
Jeedai
, we will find my revenge.”

The coldness in Rapuung’s voice touched a worry in the back of Anakin’s mind. “Your revenge is not against Tahiri, is it?” he asked. “Tell me now if it is.”

Rapuung showed his teeth in grim humor. “If I wanted revenge on your
Jeedai
, I need only to let the shapers have her. Nothing could be worse than to be in Mezhan Kwaad’s fingers.”

“Mezhan Kwaad?”

“Don’t repeat that name,” Rapuung snarled.

“But you just said it.”

“If you repeat it again, I will kill you.”

Anakin drew himself taller. “You’re welcome to try,” he said softly.

Rapuung’s muscles bunched and tensed and his mauled lips twitched. Again he seemed more like a dangerous, poisonous animal than a person. But then he rasped a sigh. “Here,
I
know what is best. You must learn to listen to me. How else would you have entered the perimeter of the base? But from here, the dangers we face have increased. You must make peace with my commands. Furthermore, the longer we argue, the more likely it is that we will be thwarted here and now. We’re lucky no one has yet chanced by. You have passed through the nostrils of this beast, but you will not live to find the beating heart without me.”

That was probably true, Anakin reflected. Pride was not the way of the Jedi. Rapuung kept pricking at his pride,
and he kept twitching like a Twi’lek’s lekku. He could almost hear Jacen and Uncle Luke scolding him now.

“I apologize,” Anakin said. “You’re right. What do we do now?”

Rapuung nodded curtly. “Now we make you a slave.”

   Anakin had thought he’d been through some hard things before; but nothing had prepared him for the ordeal of letting Vua Rapuung implant the coral growth on him. It looked exactly like the sickening, ulcerous growths he’d seen on more Yuuzhan Vong slaves than he could count. He’d watched and sensed sentient beings lose their reason, grow thin and vanish in the Force, become mindless drones for the Yuuzhan Vong, because of just such infections.

“It is not real,” Vua Rapuung told him, “but you must respond as if it is real. You must follow certain commands.”

How do I know this isn’t a trick?
Anakin’s brain screamed at him.
How do I know this wasn’t the plan all along, to march me into the shaper base and have me willingly give up my very being?

Again he felt as if his eyes had been struck out, his tongue cut off, the nerves of his fingers numbed. He had absolutely no way of knowing what Vua Rapuung was thinking.

But it seemed somehow unlike the mutilated warrior to play out such an elaborate charade.

“So I have to act like a mindless drone?”

“No. We do not use that form of restraint on most work slaves anymore. It proved too debilitating to them. What use is a slave that dies or becomes stupid? The implant merely insures you can be restrained if need be. If it tingles, pretend pain and paralysis. If it actually gives you pain, pretend to die.”

“Got it.”

So Anakin let the Yuuzhan Vong warrior prick the
thing into his flesh, tried not to wince as it rooted. He concentrated on recognizing the first sign—any sign—that his will was being taken from him.

When Rapuung was done, he felt violated, as if his own flesh had become a hateful thing, but he still felt in control. For the moment.

“Where can I hide my lightsaber?” Anakin asked. Rapuung had made him shed his clothes and gear back in the jungle. The broken weapon was the only possession he retained.

“It does not work.”

“I know. Where can I hide it?”

Rapuung hesitated for a moment. “Here,” he said. “In the far corner of the succession pool. It will be unnoticed in the organic material on the bottom.”

Anakin reluctantly followed Rapuung’s advice. It was a hard thing to watch the lightsaber he had built with his own hands sink into the water. But right now, it could only get him caught.

   Moments later, Anakin was suddenly surrounded by Yuuzhan Vong, hundreds of them. They’d exited the larger compound at the same point the boat creature entered it, walking along the quay that ran parallel to the canal. The latter he could see curved off to join the river.