Reunion: Force Heretic III

by Sean Williams

  His plaeryin bol tensed automatically, reacting to the stress hormones that had begun to surge through his blood. If he could get in just one good shot at his attacker—

  “Now!”

  The word spat out of the darkness, and in an instant Nom Anor was rushed from two sides at once. He felt hands clutching at him, trying to pin him down. He fought them off as best he could, but it was difficult, surprised as he was by both the attack and the number of people involved.

  He faced the assailant to his left in the hope of getting a better look. It was impossible. All he saw were shadows within shadows. He could make out an outline of the figure, however, and that was enough for now. Relaxing as though in defeat, he focused on the individual and fired his plaeryin bol directly into the attacker’s face. He fell back with a cry. With his arm now free, Nom Anor swung his clenched fist at the one restraining his other arm and struck him firmly on the side of the face.

  There was a grunt of pain, but this attacker continued to hang on.

  “Hold him!” someone cried, and suddenly more figures emerged from the shadows.

  Hands clutched at his skull and something pressed tight against the eye socket containing the plaeryin bol. It spasmed but was unable to fire.

  How many are there? he thought desperately, kicking out at the new attackers trying to restrain both his legs and arms. It was hopeless. Soon two of them had managed to pin down his shoulders, while his legs were being crushed beneath the large torso of a third. In the end he let the fight genuinely leave him and his body sag back onto his cot. There were simply too many of them. Better to conserve his strength than waste it on a pointless struggle.

  He took deep and steady breaths in order to relax and focus. Battles were rarely won with blind rage, he reminded himself. He needed to know his enemy before he could beat them, and here in the shadows he knew nothing about them whatsoever.

  A lambent flared from the doorway, casting a dim light across the faces of those holding him down. He didn’t recognize the two pinning his shoulders, although that hardly surprised him. They might have been members of his own group, but he rarely paid attention to any but those important to his plans. Whoever they were, they were just the lackeys of whoever was the mastermind behind the attack. A traitor, presumably.

  The figure holding the lambent was another story altogether. Shoon-mi stepped forward with a coufee in his other hand. The light gleaming off it matched the light in his eyes: cold, hard, and deadly.

  Nom Anor frowned, feeling both confused and, strangely, delighted at the impudence of his religious adviser. This was not what he had expected at all.

  “Shoon-mi?” he said, feigning debilitating surprise.

  The Shamed One stared down disdainfully at Nom Anor, the blue sacks beneath his eyes pulsing with repressed delight. He shook his head slowly, as if in disapproval of his master.

  “You see?” he said to his lackeys. “He is no god!”

  “Nor have I ever professed to be, you fool!” Nom Anor responded. “Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve taught you—”

  “But you could have been.”

  A sense of the absurd rolled over Nom Anor as he lay there, pressed flat to the bed. He was unable to resist a bark of laughter. “You are either far more intelligent than I gave you credit for, Shoon-mi, or more stupid than I could have ever imagined.”

  The Shamed One uttered a vitriolic hiss and struck Nom Anor across the face with the back of the hand holding the coufee. Then, flipping his hand over, he pressed the blade firmly against the ex-executor’s throat. “You dare call me stupid when I am the one holding your life in my hands?”

  “Holding the power of life or death over another doesn’t automatically give you intelligence, Shoon-mi,” Nom Anor retorted. “You have me at a disadvantage at the moment, that’s all.”

  “At the moment?” Shoon-mi laughed. “You believe you can escape your end here, Master?”

  There was only a hair’s breadth of skin between Nom Anor’s artery and the coufee. A simple push was all that separated him from death. Nevertheless, he didn’t allow alarm to show on his face.

  “The question is not whether I will escape my death,” he said slowly, carefully, “but rather how you will escape yours.”

  Shoon-mi glared down at Nom Anor. “You threaten me even when you stand on oblivion’s precipice?”

  There was a manic look in Shoon-mi’s eye—a desperate need to prove himself against the one who’d had him at such a disadvantage for so long.

  “I’m in no position to threaten you, Shoon-mi,” he said. “I’m merely wondering how you ever expect to get away with this. The faithful will rise against you when they find out. You know that, don’t you? Without me, there will be nothing to hold them together.”

  “That would only be a problem if they knew you were dead.”

  “Ah.” Nom Anor would have nodded, but with the coufee against his throat, it wasn’t advisable. “The Prophet will not be dead, although I might be. You’re planning on becoming me, is that it? Using the masquer, you intend to use my public face to hide your own and take control of the heresy.”

  Shoon-mi allowed himself a slight smile, then. “Yes, I do.”

  “And you’ll explain your own disappearance by mutilating my body and saying it’s yours. Then you’ll announce that you narrowly averted assassination by killing the one who was supposed to be your most loyal supporter.”

  “It seems a practical plan,” Shoon-mi said. “I shall hide the truth behind the truth—a practice I have learned from you, Master.”

  Now Anor allowed himself a faint smile; even now, Shoon-mi still didn’t know the entire truth of Nom Anor’s identity.

  “And what of these you have turned against me? What have you promised them, Shoon-mi?”

  The Shamed One hesitated, glancing at those holding Nom Anor down. That brief hesitation was all Nom Anor needed to know what lay in store for them: they would be killed at the first opportunity because they knew too much about Shoon-mi and his ambitions.

  “They will stand beside me as we attain our freedom,” the Shamed One said. “They will be the personal bodyguards of the Prophet.”

  “Indeed. And they expect you to show them the same sort of loyalty as you’ve shown me this night, Shoon-mi?”

  “I would have remained loyal to you until the end,” the Shamed One said earnestly. “For a while I even believed in you. But now …” He shook his head. “This movement needs clarity of vision; this movement needs a true leader.”

  “But you’re forgetting one thing,” Nom Anor said.

  “I’m forgetting nothing,” Shoon-mi hissed.

  “No, you are,” Nom Anor insisted. He knew he had to keep Shoon-mi talking, keep playing for time. Every second he stayed alive was a second longer that a chance to reverse his situation might present itself. And the best way to do this was to play upon the Shamed One’s insecurities and uncertainties. “In fact, I can’t believe you’re so naive as to have missed it.”

  “If you think for a second that that I won’t kill you—” Shoon-mi started, and the coufee pressed harder into Nom Anor’s throat.

  “I have no doubts that you would kill me, Shoon-mi,” Nom Anor gasped placatingly—although there was a look in Shoon-mi’s face that made Nom Anor wonder if the Shamed One really could kill him. He was certainly taking a long time about it. “My life is most definitely in your hands; I don’t deny this. But why are you really betraying me? Because I ordered you around? Because I kept you in the dark about certain things?”

  Shoon-mi pulled back slightly. Nom Anor took the opportunity to catch his breath.

  “Tell me, please, so that I may at least understand why I am to die at your hand.”

  “Because you offer your followers no better than what they had under Shimrra!” There was such vitriol in the Shamed One’s tone that it startled even those holding Nom Anor down. “People came to us, and you used them as though they were nothing to you. You sacri
ficed them without even the decency of learning their names, while yours was on their tongues constantly. They believed in you; they believed in the Jeedai!” Shoon-mi shook his head. “The Jeedai would never have done what you did, Amorrn. All of this has been for nothing but your own glory. You have not spread the word of the Jeedai for the sake of the Shamed Ones; you have used it for your own benefit!”

  “As you do now for yours, Shoon-mi?”

  The blade was once more against his throat, this time hard enough to break the skin. Nom Anor felt blood seep around the edges of the coufee and trickle down his neck.

  “I should—”

  “Yes, you should,” Nom Anor interrupted. “Kill me! Come on, Shoon-mi! I’m sure you have more pressing things to do than stand around here talking to me. You need to start planning your freedom, remember?”

  “You mock me even with death’s breath upon you?”

  Nom Anor allowed himself a wide smile. His display of fearlessness had clearly rattled Shoon-mi.

  “You know, perhaps I was wrong about you, Shoon-mi. Perhaps I was wrong when I said you’d forgotten something. Perhaps you never really knew it at all.”

  “Knew what?” It was clear that, despite the obvious advantage, Shoon-mi wasn’t as self-assured as he was prepared to admit.

  Nom Anor smiled. “That it’s not going to work.”

  “Nonsense. You’re as good as dead—”

  “Not me, you idiot: Shimrra. You’re never going to convince him to give your freedom and honor back. Why would he listen to you? Why would he care the slightest atom about what you want? You can’t see what’s going on under your misshapen nose, let alone in the court of a ruler a million times more powerful than the Prophet will ever be—irrespective of who wears the mask. Whatever power you gain tonight will vanish upon your death, and the death of everyone tainted by your foul stench. Your life was forfeit from the moment you entered this room. My only sadness is that I won’t be there to see it happen.”

  Instead of showing doubt, the Shamed One smiled back. “Don’t think you can trick me, Amorrn. I know you’re only trying to—”

  Something jolted Shoon-mi from behind, causing him to fall forward and lose his grip on the coufee. Nom Anor twisted to avoid the razor-sharp edge as Shoon-mi fell across him, dropping the lambent and turning the world to darkness.

  Sudden commotion in the blackened room renewed Nom Anor’s desperation to survive. He struggled wildly, ineffectually, under the heavy weight of Shoon-mi’s body. Voices in the dark, the sound of painful grunts, the slashing of blades, the soft, wet sound of tearing fabric and flesh, the clash of weapons—all filled the air in a grisly cacophony. The hands that had been holding his shoulders down and his plaeryin bol closed had gone, but he was still pinned beneath Shoon-mi, who was breathing heavily, painfully. An agonized cry came from someone nearby, followed by the sound of a body crumpling to the floor.

  Nom Anor finally rolled from under Shoon-mi’s limp body, removing the coufee from the Shamed One’s hand as he did. Shoon-mi hit the ground with a grunt and whimper, but didn’t make any attempt to move or defend himself. Then Nom Anor collected the lambent and cast the light in the direction of the fighting. The sudden light upon the two combating warriors was enough to startle one into turning marginally. It was all Kunra needed to gain the advantage and dispose of his opponent. Crouching low, he swung his long blade and buried it deep in the other warrior’s side. The eyes of the Shamed One died as they stared at Nom Anor, then the body sagged to the ground with the others, cut virtually into two halves.

  Kunra straightened, wiping the flat of his blade clean on his robes.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  Nom Anor nodded, glancing around at the bodies lying about his chamber. “I will be now.”

  “Sorry it took me so long,” the ex-warrior said. “Three of them jumped me in my room. I figured when they didn’t kill me right away that it wasn’t me they were after. They just wanted to keep me out of the way until Shoon-mi had finished with you. I guess they thought I might decide to join up with them once he’d taken over role of leader.”

  Nom Anor put a hand on Kunra’s shoulder. “Either way, that was astoundingly good timing.”

  “Not really. I stood outside for a while, listening.” Kunra’s flat, gray eyes looked away.

  Nom Anor studied the ex-warrior. “Of course you did. You thought about letting Shoon-mi kill me. Then you could have killed him at a later date and taken over as Prophet yourself, right?”

  “Perhaps.” Kunra placed his weapon beneath his robes. There was no sign of an apology, but Nom Anor didn’t want one. He didn’t mind treacherous thoughts, as long as the end result was loyalty.

  “You would have made a better Prophet than Shoon-mi could have ever hoped to.” Nom Anor looked down at the Shamed One on the floor, moaning piteously with the handle of a coufee protruding from his back. The blade had severed his spinal column, rendering his limbs useless.

  “What you said to him just then,” Kunra started, then stopped, unsure of either himself or the question he was about to ask.

  Nom Anor faced him. “What about?”

  “You told him the plan to reclaim our honor couldn’t work,” he said. “That the Supreme Overlord would never listen to us.”

  “I was merely bluffing.”

  Kunra shook his head. “No, I could tell from your voice that you meant it.”

  Nom Anor nodded, understanding Kunra’s doubt. Was their quest a hopeless one? There were very real uncertainties in his mind—particularly after seeing Shimrra in all his splendor in the palace again.

  “Who knows, Kunra? Shimrra is powerful; there’s no questioning that. But maybe we can convince him. If I had a thousand more warriors as loyal as you by my side, I would have no doubts whatsoever.”

  Nom Anor glanced down again at Shoon-mi. With his foot he rolled the Shamed One over, pushing the coufee in Shoon-mi’s back even deeper. Shoon-mi cried out in discomfort, his pathetic features staring up pitiably at Nom Anor.

  “Forgive me, Master,” he whimpered. “I was a misguided fool! You truly are one of the gods!”

  “No, Shoon-mi,” he said. “You were right the first time. I’m not one of the gods. I spurn them as readily as I spurn you. I prefer the company of the living.”

  With that he reached down and took the Shamed One’s throat in his hands and crushed the remaining life out of him. The terror of death in Shoon-mi’s eyes lasted no more than thirty seconds before being replaced by an almost serene emptiness.

  Standing upright, Nom Anor faced Kunra.

  “Get rid of the bodies,” he said dispassionately. “I don’t want anyone knowing about this. The last thing I need is for others to get the idea into their heads that the Prophet is vulnerable.”

  “I understand,” Kunra said, and immediately began to drag the corpses to the door.

  Nom Anor reached up to touch the seeping wound at his throat that Shoon-mi had inflicted. “I need to see to this,” he said. Before he left the room, he faced Kunra one last time. “You did well this night, Kunra. I won’t forget it.”

  Kunra nodded solemnly, then continued with his grisly work.

  Luke listened to the news from the boras network with a feeling of foreboding.

  “Senshi’s made no attempt to talk to anyone,” he said when the latest reports came to an end. “But he’s up to something.”

  “I agree,” Mara said. “Did he give you any idea what that might be?”

  “Something dramatic, decisive, attention getting.” Luke steepled his fingers under his chin and tried to think. They were seated on the upper floor of one of the mushroom-shaped habitats. Large pores in the ceiling and walls admitted air and light into the domed space. Bowls of aromatic tea had been served on a table around which they had gathered to consider their next move.

  “It would help if we knew where they were going, at least,” Mara said, scowling into her bowl. Both she and Luke had tried to sense Ja
cen through the Force, but they had given up after an hour; the eddying life fields of the planet simply proved too difficult to penetrate. It was now afternoon, and Luke had yet to ascertain whether such interference was normal, or somehow manufactured artificially.

  “We are narrowing down the possibilities,” Darak said from the edge of the habitat. She had taken to pacing nervously, worrying at her hands as she pondered the Magister’s fate. “It’s not easy; the tampasi is very dense in that region, and the trail isn’t marked, but I believe I can guess at his destination.”

  Mara looked up hopefully. “Where?”

  “To the northeast of here lies a stand of rogue boras. Sekot permits their existence in order to encourage genetic diversity.”

  “Rogue?” Mara frowned. “How?”

  “Boras can be very dangerous and territorial when allowed to grow wild,” Darak explained. “They are as strictly contained as they can be.”

  Hegerty’s expression was one of incomprehension. “Wild trees?”

  “Boras are more than mere trees.” There was rebuke in Rowel’s words. “Boras seeds are mobile. They migrate to a nursery every summer, where lightning called down by the boras launches them on the next stage of their life cycle. There are many different types of boras, and correspondingly many different ways that mutants can be harmful.”

  “Particularly during a thunderstorm,” Darak added. “So why would Senshi be taking them there, then?” Mara asked.

  “Maybe he’s unaware that the mutant stand is in his path,” Hegerty suggested.

  “It’s not important why,” Luke said. He fixed Darak with a sober gaze. This was the best lead they had had in hours. “Is it possible to cut them off before they reach it?”

  Darak shook her head. “Even our fastest runners couldn’t get there in time. They’ll be there within two hours.”

  “What about airships?” Luke pressed.