“The Jedi’s name,” he said at last, “is Hestizo Trace. I want you to speak to her in the voice of the orchid, do you understand? You will summon her here to the library in the voice that she trusts, so that I shall deal with her, and fulfill my destiny. Is that clear?”
The Neti garbled out a sound that wasn’t quite a word.
“I asked if you …” Scabrous began, and then he saw why the tree creature wasn’t answering. A huge chunk of pulp, the Neti’s woody flesh, had been ripped out just below its mouth, leaving a hole the size of Scabrous’s fist. Thick amber-colored sap dribbled from the wound, oozing down its rough bark, trickling over its branches.
Scabrous licked his lips and smiled, still tasting the strange sticky blood of the tree creature on his tongue and the roof of his mouth. I did that, he marveled. He’d attacked it without the slightest conscious intent—it had been that thing within, that mouth. On some intuitive level he understood that this explained the vast explosion of strength he’d felt.
“My lord …” the Neti managed at last, its voice trembling. “Please …”
“You do understand what I’m asking,” Scabrous said, “or do you not?”
“Yes … my lord.”
“Excellent. Then I await her arrival.”
He left the Neti stretched from the ceiling, a pool of semi-translucent sap already spreading underneath it across the library’s floor.
31/Flesh Blizzard
ZO STOOD WITH SNOW FALLING IN HER FACE, STARING UP AT THE TOWER.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How did we end up back here?”
The Whiphid didn’t answer. This time, though, any response would have been gratuitous. She knew why they were here. Somewhere inside the paddock they’d lost their sense of direction to a Sith illusion, crude but effective, and now they were back out where they’d begun.
Then she saw the figures.
They were poised like carved grotesques along the uppermost walls of the tower, life-sized statues illuminated by the irregular stammering red glow from the top. At first, she thought that was all they were. Statues. Gargoyles.
Except they were moving.
Crawling, swarming over the others’ backs like some hideously overgrown version of the flesh-eating boski beetles she’d seen aboard Tulkh’s ship. And when the light caught their faces, she could see that they were—or at least once had been—human. Their uniforms, which Zo realized must be the black robes and tunics of the Sith acolyte, were tattered and ragged, and they billowed behind them in the screeching wind. She watched as a cluster of them began to clutch and lever their way closer to the tower’s viewports. One of them threw back its head and began to hammer one fist on the surface with awful ape-like determination.
“What are they doing?”
Tulkh grunted. “Looking for a way in.”
“Why?”
A scream came shearing down from above, the single compressed blast that she remembered from inside the supposedly deserted barracks, and the bounty hunter stepped back, hissing some obscenity under his breath.
“They—”
Before he could finish, one of the things fell from far above, whistling down in front of her.
She looked back at Tulkh.
He was gone.
Zo jerked back and looked up again. Overhead, another of the things on the tower had detached itself and was plummeting downward like a renegade slab of darkness itself, some broken chunk of the universe, falling fast, still screaming, through the flying snow.
The screeching thing slammed into the ground on all fours, and even though its back was to her, Zo could see the hole where its uniform was ripped open to reveal the architecture of exposed ribs and scooped-out portions of vertebrae. Snowy air whistled through the hole, and she saw clumped loops of intestine, blackened with a crust of dried blood, flapping alongside the torn fabric. Part of its lungs seemed to have been jolted loose in the fall, leaving one of them dangling, inflating and deflating raggedly like some small panting animal.
Tulkh. It drove him down into the snow when it landed on him. And now it’s trying to get him out.
The second thing stalked over toward the snowdrift, its head slightly inclined, seeking an angle of attack. Zo heard another scream from above, and the two corpses in the Sith uniforms shrieked back their answering cry.
Tulkh’s arm burst up and out of the snow, holding his spear, and thrust it forward. An instant later the Sith-thing on top of him reared back, staggering blindly, the tip of his spear embedded in its face. Its right cheek was a suppurating cave-in of demolished bone structure. The long shaft protruded from its head like a clumsy oversized horn.
Tulkh sat up, spitting snow.
“Juddering yank-wit,” he snarled. “This should teach you to jump on me.”
He knocked the thing backward with one foot, held it down, and jerked his spear loose from its face. Then using both hands, he brought the spear tip down hard, directly into the thing’s already-demolished torso, hard enough to pulverize the spine, cutting it completely in half. The upper and lower segments squirmed listlessly in the snow, then fell still.
“Hold on.” Breathing hard, he glanced up at Zo. “Where’s the other one?”
“I don’t—”
“Down.” And without waiting for her to comply, he fired the spear directly at her. Zo dropped to her knees, feeling his spear whisk through her hair, just across the top of her scalp. From behind, something landed on top of her, a landslide of meat, flattening the air from her chest, blocking out sight and hearing, driving her into the snow. She felt cold, clutching hands and the sticky-oily drip of partially coagulated fluids seeping down over the skin of her neck, where her collar didn’t quite cover her flesh. It, too, began to scream, and then the scream broke off with a choked flapping noise. It was followed by a series of sharp chops, and the flapping stopped.
“Get up.” Tulkh’s voice, muffled, came from above her.
Zo dragged herself upright. The bounty hunter was standing in front of her. The severed head of the thing he’d just decapitated hung from the top of the spear at an almost jaunty angle, the tip jetting upward through its broken jaw to protrude from one empty eye socket. The gray lips sagged, dangling thick strands of ropy pink drool, and its one remaining eye wobbled back and forth, somehow managing to look both sly and stupid beneath the swollen lid.
“A teenager,” Zo said. “Seventeen, eighteen at the most.” She watched the yellow eye. “It’s still looking at me.”
“They’re dead.” Tulkh shrugged down at the other body he’d left in the snow and shook his head. “Forget about it.”
There was another klaxon-like blast of noise from up above. Zo looked up as far as she could.
It was like a rallying call.
The snow-choked darkness that surrounded the tower was suddenly filled with falling bodies, more than she could count. They came tumbling in twos and threes from the top of the tower, eyes blazing, teeth shining, slamming into the ground in every direction, some almost close enough to grab her from the point of impact. They brought their screams with them so that they seemed to land on a cushion of sound.
In front of her, Tulkh fell into a fighting stance.
“Jedi trained you to fight, didn’t they?”
She nodded once.
“Then fight them!”
The Sith-things were all around them now. Their screams were constant, ululating everywhere, the air itself seeming to stiffen with their shrieks. Zo realized that she couldn’t see Tulkh anymore.
There’s no way we can take them all.
And then something else spoke.
Yes, you can.
Zo paused, brought up short by the voice. It sounded true and strong and clarion-clear. At first, she thought it was the orchid. Then she realized that she was hearing the voice of her brother Rojo.
But that’s impossible, he’s nowhere near here—
And it wasn’t really Rojo—the words were coming from her m
emory, from the storehouse of encouragement that he’d given her in the past, when she’d been training at the Jedi academy. There had been times when she’d felt exhausted and hopeless, and he had spoken to her, encouraged her to stand up, to be strong and be true.
Listen, Hestizo. The Jedi taught you much more than simply how to fight. They taught you how to live. How to live within the Force, and uphold the bond that you share with it.
With these words, Hestizo Trace felt a deep and voluminous feeling of rightness booming through her. At the Jedi Temple she’d heard others in the discipline try to describe the experience, saying it was like this or like that. But for her it was simply the experience of being alive, of wild and ecstatic belief, but amplified. All the encumbrances of frustration and anxiety fell away, filling her very essence with an entire universe of pure, sustaining energy.
She looked around again and saw the Sith-things crashing to the ground on all sides of her, raising their heads and opening their mouths.
And everything.
Slowed.
Down.
“Get …” Tulkh was saying, one arm sludging back to pluck a meter-long arrow from his quiver, moving so slowly that he seemed to be underwater. Zo sprang up into the air like a woman moving through a gallery of wax figures. She came down just behind one of the Sith-things, grabbed its greasy, partially decayed skull in both hands from the back, and wrenched it hard to the left. The cervical spine popped and gave with a crunch, the entire cranium coming loose as she ripped it free from the shoulders. The head was still screaming as she threw it underhand into the next shambling thing, hitting it hard enough to knock it back into the side of the tower. A third she grabbed by the throat and crotch, hoisting it up and pile-driving it straight upward in the direction it had come.
Behind her, she heard the twang as Tulkh’s arrow finally left the bowstring. Without glancing back, Zo reached out and lifted the flying arrow out of the air. She did this effortlessly, without a thought, like someone taking a book from a shelf. Behind her, across the depths of motionless snowflakes, Tulkh stood with his lip still curling to form the last part of his first word while the five remaining Sith-things perched like statues barely moving in various aspects of attack.
Springing forward, snapping the arrow in two, Zo buried the halves of the shaft in two of their skulls hard enough to impale them permanently together, face-to-face like horrific lovers melded for all eternity. She grabbed the arm of the grinning, mossy-faced Sith acolyte who appeared to have gnawed through his own lips and the interior of his mouth up to his hard palate. Twist. Pop. The arm came free at the elbow and she swung it down like a club on the skull of the walking corpse in front of him.
She sensed events moving faster now, her hold on the situation loosening again. The snowflakes were coming unstuck from the air, starting to confetti down in reckless profusion. The Sith-thing that she’d flung upward earlier was finally coming back down. As the last of the things shambled toward her, she heard a dull whacking thump, the kindling-sharp crack of a dozen fractured bones.
“… down!” Tulkh finished, only then seeming to realize that the arrow was gone from his bow and that the Sith-things were all on the ground now, torn apart. He looked up at Zo. His nostrils twitched.
“Leave any for me?”
She pointed at the two bodies writhing in the snow between them. Tulkh drew his spear, raised it up, and rammed it down through them both. His eyes were blazing, saturated with red, almost glutted with pleasure, and there was no misinterpreting the grin that twisted over his face. Zo thought that she’d never seen any living thing, human or otherwise, extract such shameless pleasure from the act of killing.
Hestizo …?
This time the voice of the orchid was unmistakable.
Hestizo, come …
She stopped and listened, felt herself smiling, overcome by a sudden surge of hope. From somewhere in the falling snow, Tulkh was staring at her.
“What is it?” he wanted to know.
“The Murakami,” she said. “It’s alive!”
“I thought you said—”
“I know! But I can hear it! It’s calling me!”
Tulkh scowled, unconvinced. “Where?”
She peered back through the blizzard, pointing.
“The library.”
32/Flametown
IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN.
The Neti saw it now—latched onto this simple tautology in a way that he had never grasped anything in his long life. Within moments after Scabrous had left him here with his mission, to call out to the Jedi, to summon her here, everything within his ageless wooden mind had begun to grow wonderfully, gloriously clear.
And oh, it was a pleasure, a pleasure to burn.
Clutching rows of holobooks with one long branch-hand, the librarian flung them into the rising flames. And the flames surged higher.
After the Sith Lord had bitten him, Dail’Liss had endured a brief but agonizing spasm of physical weakness and distress, the pain compounded by the brooding fear that had been growing in his mind throughout the day. This was what he’d felt outside the walls of his sanctuary. The Sickness was in here now, it had violated the barriers of safety and security, and it was inside him—running through his roots, spreading through his branches and leaves.
And the Sickness was laughing.
At first that laughter had sounded so mocking, so bitter and cold, that the Neti had only cowered before it. Even the Sith themselves couldn’t match the dark malevolence in its voice.
Old fool, it had said, foolish old creature, your life has been wasted here among your books.
The Neti had tried to respond, to tell it no, that these scrolls and texts were his life, but the Sickness hadn’t shown the slightest bit of interest in that. It had more to say, and the Neti realized that he was a captive audience.
It’s not too late, the Sickness said. I have given you new life, and a new purpose, and you will know it if you seek my face. Will you, old tree? Will you seek my face?
What is it? the Neti asked. What is your face?
Mine is the face of blood and fire.
And with those words, everything changed. Looking around now at the contents of the library, the countless scrolls and ancient texts, the holdings and stacks that he had spent his lifetime accumulating here, organizing and cataloging for a thousand years or more, he saw them for what they were.
Fuel.
The flesh is our fuel, the Sickness counseled, and its voice was like thunder now, and the books are our fuel, and this planet is our fuel, all things are fuel, they exist only so that they can be consumed by us.
Yes, yes—
They are meat for the beast.
Yes.
And the beast is you.
Yes.
From there, the Neti discovered that everything came to him with oily, gratifying ease. Giving himself up utterly to the Sickness, he had started the fire without the slightest hesitation. There were years of fuel here, plenty here to burn. Within minutes, the central wing of the library was ablaze, and the seeping, maddened grin of the Neti shone with reflected orange firelight.
Although there were no mirrors here, no means of seeing his reflection, Dail’Liss knew that the Sickness had changed him. Whole chunks of its once-proud bark had begun molting, dropping off in patches, its branches curling and blackening, dripping with thick, foul-smelling drainage that gathered around its roots. But the most profound transformation had happened within him. The Sickness had taught him. He had sought its face. And now the Neti laughed into the fire—its once-kind eyes were twisted now, tightened into knotty slits, its mouth coiled into a wide, salivating grin as it spoke out in the voice of the orchid.
Come, Hestizo Trace. Hurry. Come to the library.
More scrolls, more holobooks, tumbled into the fire. Sap boiled in the coals.
I await your arrival eagerly, I wish to see you here, I have urgent need of you—
He stopped and turned, bra
nches whispering.
She was already on her way.
33/Redwall
“LOOKED BIGGER ON THE HOLO,” MAGGS SAID, HIS VOICE MUFFLED BY HIS HAND.
He and Ra’at and the others were all standing in front of the wall, covering their noses and mouths. The end of the tunnel was filled with a smell so rancid that it almost transcended the definition of the word. In the single breath that Ra’at had inadvertently sucked in without covering his lips, he’d actually been able to taste it on the back of his tongue and the roof of his mouth. It was the horribly organic ripe-rot-reek of once-living tissue whose life force had evacuated it, leaving only a mass of stinking weight.
“What’s it made of?” Maggs muttered.
“Looks like scavenged metal, debris …”
“Metal doesn’t stink like this.”
“It’s not just metal.”
“So what is it?” Kindra asked.
“Well …” Ra’at pointed at a white blade-like shaft sticking out. “I’m pretty sure that’s a shinbone.”
“Human?”
Ra’at nodded.
Hartwig swallowed. It took him a few tries. “Gah.”
“Looks …,” Ra’at started to say, and stopped. He was going to say partially digested, and decided that that observation probably wouldn’t bring anything helpful to the conversation. If the expressions of the others were any indication, they were holding just this side of gastric mutiny.
“The exit’s on the other side,” Kindra said, and activated her lightsaber.
“Hold on.” Ra’at turned and looked back. He’d felt something—not much more than a ripple in the fabric of the Force, but he’d long ago learned to trust such quirks of perception as far more meaningful than anything gleaned by eyes and ears. He shot a glance at Maggs. “Lightsaber. Now.”
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