The Final Prophecy: Edge of Victory III

by Greg Keyes

  But, no, he had to. Since Ngaaluh’s death, Nom Anor’s influence had begun to wane. Shimrra was now extremely vigilant against spies at his court, even at the highest levels. Sweeps of the lower levels had increased, and Shamed Ones removed farther from where they might do harm. Worse, while his following hadn’t dropped off, it hadn’t grown, either, partly because too many of them were getting killed without any apparent movement toward the ultimate goal of “redemption.” The potential for an uprising that might catapult Nom Anor to power was farther away than it had ever been. He needed a new catalyst, a new source of strength. He needed, in short, new allies.

  Still … He patted the pouch-creature fastened to the flesh beneath his arm. It contained the one piece of his past as a respected executor. He wasn’t even sure why he’d risked bringing it, but … if he were to deliver two Jedi, a rogue shaper, and the planet Zonama Sekot into Shimrra’s hands, it might be enough to …

  No it wouldn’t. Not if even a suspicion of his role as Yu’shaa were to enter Shimrra’s mind.

  No, he would have to work with what he had. It was far too late to flinch. Nor could he panic at the prospect of the trip he faced.

  He did not, like his superstitious followers, believe in an ordained destiny—destiny was something created by sheer force of will, and that was something he had in abundance. So he would play the role of compassionate holy man for the Jedi. He would win them or they would die.

  For Nom Anor, there could only be forward and upward, never back or down.

  One moment nothing was happening; the next a yellow-green explosion blossomed from the side of the building across the square and the outer wall collapsed in sticky shards, as if it had melted. Warriors all across the square raced for the source of the explosion, but before they could reach it, a mob of Shamed Ones sprang from a pit near the buildings and fell upon the warriors with coufees, amphistaffs, batons, even pipes and rocks.

  The fighting was confused by distance, but Tahiri could tell they weren’t faring very well, though they fought with absolute conviction, some impaling themselves on the amphistaffs of the warriors, immobilizing the weapons long enough for their companions to drag their foes down by sheer weight of numbers. This distraction wouldn’t last long. She tensed to run.

  “Hang on,” Corran said. “Wait until—”

  Even as he spoke, new actors appeared, four figures in brown cloaks bearing long glowing tubes of light.

  And everywhere went up the cry of “Jeedai,” from warriors and Shamed Ones at once. But their tones were quite different. The Shamed Ones were exulting, while the warriors were crying out in challenge and fury—and perhaps a little fear. There were few things that could bring a warrior greater honor than bringing down a Jedi in combat—the warriors didn’t worship them as the Shamed Ones did, but they had learned respect.

  The “Jeedai” suddenly turned and ran, and guards went after them, howling. Indeed, guards who had not already left their posts now did so. Corran had called that one pretty well. If there was anything that could make a warrior forget every duty he had, this was it.

  Of course, when it came to their superiors’ attention that they had abandoned their posts to chase Shamed Ones bearing the light-plants that grew below their feet, things would not go well for any of them.

  “Now,” Corran said.

  Tahiri was already springing forward, now utterly focused on the single guard who still remained at the front closure of the damutek.

  To the guard’s credit, he wasn’t too distracted by the fighting to see them coming. Unfortunately, his attention did not do him much good against two Jedi.

  At the door, Tahiri put her hand against the membrane.

  “Veka, Kwaad.”

  The opening dilated.

  “That was easy,” Corran said.

  “It should be,” Tahiri answered. “This damutek belongs to my domain.”

  “Master Yim,” someone asked from the doorway.

  She looked up from the series of kul embryos she’d been vivisecting. It was Qelah Kwaad. “What is it?”

  “There’s some sort of disturbance in the outer compound. They say it is Shamed Ones.”

  “Disturbance? What are they doing?”

  “They’ve attacked the amphistaff nursery.”

  “Trying to arm themselves, I suppose,” Nen Yim replied. “Go, secure the laboratories.”

  “Yes, Master Yim.” The adept hurried off.

  Well, she considered. This must be it. She straightened from her task and moved to the wall. From a pouch adhered to her belly, she withdrew a thorn-shaped creature with a thin, hard shell, located a nerve cluster in the wall, and thrust it in. It hissed softly as it began injecting toxin into the damutek. It would paralyze the living structure’s defenses, allowing whoever was coming after her to do so without having to deal with corridor-sealing membranes and debilitating gas. Of course, those defenses had not stopped the Jedi on Yavin, but this needed to move quickly. The thorn tapiq would soon dissolve and leave no trace of itself or its effect.

  She grabbed an enveloping cloth surrounding a set of selected shaper bioware and a qahsa and hurried up the corridor toward the Sekotan ship. She was amazed at how calm she felt. Of course, she still hadn’t taken any irrevocable steps. She could counteract the effects of the tapiq, and she probably had the means at her disposal to stop the Jedi.

  But no. Zonama Sekot was a mystery she could not let lie. The planet called to her. She would go, if she survived the next few moments.

  The ship was as she had seen it the day before, shimmering gently, waiting for her. Excitement grew in her. She was stepping forward, touching it with her master’s hand, when several figures burst through the doorway into the room.

  Two humans, and, by their whipping, burning unlife brands, certainly Jedi. They were engaged with eight warriors. Both of the humans already bore several bloody gashes, but as she watched, two more Yuuzhan Vong warriors fell from sizzling, cauterized wounds.

  One of the remaining guards turned to face her.

  “Master Yim, flee. There is danger here.”

  She knew him—Bhasu Ruuq, quiet for a warrior. She thought she’d caught him giving her admiring glances before.

  “My apologies,” she said. She extended her master’s hand, and a long, whiplike sting no thicker than a straw snaked out and impaled him through the eye. He died without a sound. She curled her hand, and the sting wrapped around the neck of another warrior and bit through the arteries of his neck. She released it, recalled it, and shot it back out to kill a third.

  The Jedi cut down the last of their stunned opponents and stood panting over corpses, staring at her.

  The gaze of the yellow-haired one struck Nen Yim like a thud bug, and a jolt of recognition ran through her. Everything changed, suddenly, and she realized her only triumph was death.

  “You,” she said. “You’ve come to kill me.”

  Tahiri gave Nen Yim a cold grin.

  “You think so?” she said. “Why would I do that? Merely because you tortured me, turned my brain inside out, tried to turn me against everything I had ever known?”

  “You two know each other, then,” Corran speculated.

  Tahiri nodded grimly. “She’s one of the shapers who experimented on me. Her name is Nen Yim.” She looked at the fallen warriors. “I see you’ve got a new hand. Like Mezhan Kwaad’s.”

  “Mezhan Kwaad was a master. Now I am.”

  “I should have known it was you,” Tahiri said. Rage was suddenly a whirlwind in her. “Watch her hand, Corran. She has—”

  “I saw what she did to the warriors,” Corran said. “If she thinks it will work on me, she’s welcome to try.”

  “She’s mine, Corran,” Tahiri growled. She stepped forward, raising her weapon to guard between them. Turning to the shaper, she continued, “You have no idea what you’ve put me through, Nen Yim. I nearly died. I nearly went mad.”

  “But you did not.”

  “I did no
t. Nor did I become what you were trying to make of me.”

  “That was fairly clear when you decapitated Mezhan Kwaad,” the shaper replied.

  “Yes,” Tahiri said. “That was a quick end for her. My torture lasted a lot longer.”

  The rage was blackening in her, a vua’sa nearing a rival’s den. She watched for the slightest twitch of the shaper’s hand, the smallest excuse to—

  To what? Kill her?

  She took a deep, slow breath, and lowered her weapon. Her hand was trembling and her belly was tight. She willed the muscles to relax.

  “We’ve come a long way through a lot of trouble for you,” she said. “I don’t intend to kill you, not now. You’re the reason we’re here, aren’t you?”

  “I wish to see Zonama Sekot,” the shaper said. “If you have come to take me there, then yes.”

  “We should talk about this later,” Corran said.

  “We will,” Tahiri said. “We certainly will. After we’ve gotten out of here but long before we reach Zonama Sekot. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand you,” Nen Yim replied. “But for now, if we’re to escape, you must do as I say.”

  “Time’s wasting,” Corran said. “What do we do?”

  “The warriors I killed. Use your weapons on them.”

  Corran grinned wryly. “I thought so.” He did as instructed, cutting through the wounds that were already there, erasing any sign that they had been killed by a shaper’s hand. Tahiri watched in disgust. A Yuuzhan Vong ought to own the violence she did.

  “Next?”

  “I need an opening in that wall, large enough for this ship to pass through. I’m certain your infi—your weapons can accomplish it.”

  Tahiri nodded at Corran, and together they moved to the coral wall indicated and began carving chunks from it. While they were still less than half done, shouts went up behind them.

  Before Corran could react, Tahiri spun and charged the new attackers. There were three of them.

  “Finish!” she cried. “I’ll take these.”

  All three bore amphistaffs. She hurled herself at them as if committed to a full-on charge, but at the last instant stopped short. As a result, the counterattack from the lead warrior was also short. She picked up the rigid end of his staff in a high bind and cut down through the juncture of neck and shoulder, sweeping her blade around to catch a second attacker in a high parry. Then she dropped, instinctively ducking the slash from the third. Even so, the second warrior recovered quickly and wrapped his suddenly flexible staff around her ankle. Tahiri used the Force to leap away, and the warrior yanked her back, which was what she’d been planning. She went with the pull, and both of her feet hit him in the face. He grunted and fell back, but didn’t release the staff. As she fell, she reversed her weapon and let the third warrior impale himself through the armpit. Black vapor exploded from the wound and the scent of burning blood sang in her nostrils.

  She rolled to get back to her feet, but the remaining warrior kicked her in the side of the head. The blow rang in her skull, and white lights threatened to blot out her vision. She swung wildly, but failed to connect with anything. Then everything went strange as something hard and sharp went through her shoulder.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Her arms were suddenly rubber.

  The warrior grinned in triumph.

  “No,” she told him. “No, absolutely not.”

  She grabbed the amphistaff that had impaled her, but she barely felt it. She tried to focus beyond the pain, use the Force to throw herself back, but all she saw was the snarling face of the warrior who was about to kill her, and all she felt was her body husking out, going light, fading …

  She saw the warrior look away, and then suddenly he was headless. His body dropped away almost gently.

  Corran stood above her. “Come on,” he said.

  “Poison,” Tahiri mumbled. She tried to stand, but her legs were already beyond answering her demands.

  She was vaguely aware that Corran got her up on his shoulder and was taking her toward the strange ship. After that, time condensed. She remembered yelling, and concussions, and the ship shivering. New voices, then nothing.

  Nen Yim settled in the pilot’s couch and placed the cognition hood on her head. The ship hadn’t come with one, but it had been an easy matter to implant a Yuuzhan Vong matrix ganglia to the alien but relatively straightforward neural web. It ought to respond like any Yuuzhan Vong ship.

  She hadn’t been able to regenerate all the ship’s systems, and had replaced them with specially bioengineered equivalents. She had installed dovin basals in place of the abominable machine drive; she wouldn’t have known how to repair that even if she had wanted to. The frame she could do nothing about, and she’d left many of the other bits of infidel technology in place because she either wasn’t sure what they did or because it was unclear whether the ship would function properly without them.

  A flutter of tension moved through her as she melded with the ship’s senses. The ship felt confused, uncertain, as if it was wondering—as she was—whether the repairs and modifications would work. Her experiments suggested they would, but of course she had never flown it.

  We’ll try this together, yes? she thought to the ship, and received a tentative affirmation.

  Where were the Jedi?

  She could not see them from the transparent cockpit, so she activated the ship’s exterior optical sensors and quickly located them. They seemed to have gotten into another fight, and the yellow-haired one was down, wounded.

  That wasn’t entirely bad, Nen Yim considered. Things might go more smoothly if the girl died.

  A few moments later, the two were on board and Nen Yim dilated the inner and outer locks.

  “Tahiri’s hurt,” the male Jedi called. “It’s an amphistaff wound.”

  “Do what you can for her,” she told him. “I can’t help at the moment. We have to leave.”

  Hoping once again that the inelegant mixture of Sekotan and Yuuzhan Vong technology wouldn’t fail her, she willed the ship to fly.

  In a blur they were through the opening, though she felt it scrape along her skin on one side. No damage, though—the hull could shed starstuff for a time, so yorik coral was no real problem. She might even have been able to break through the wall with the nose of the ship, but the Jedi had been there with their swords, so why not use them?

  “We’re meeting the Prophet at the shrine of Yun-Harla,” the Jedi told her. She didn’t like his tone of voice. It sounded as if he imagined she was under his orders.

  “I’m aware of that,” she said, trying to remain calm when all her instincts told her that she was far too high above the ground, that she was going to fall.

  There was the shrine, the same one she’d met Harrar at what seemed like a very long time ago. The skies were still eerily quiet, as if Yuuzhan’tar were asleep, as if they hadn’t just fled from the compound of the Dread Overlord himself. Oddly, the quiet brought a sense of doom that she hadn’t felt up until now.

  She settled the ship down next to the shrine and opened the hatch. Outside, a breeze was blowing, thick with the astringent scent of blister flowers. She was glad they’d bloomed before she left—she’d wondered what they would smell like.

  She noticed a movement from behind the shrine, and saw the grotesque figure of a Shamed One coming toward her.

  “This, then, must be the Prophet,” she murmured. He was tall, and his body looked well formed enough, save for a lump beneath his left arm that was probably a limpin implant gone bad. He wore a masquer that bore every mark of the Shamed she could imagine, as if he had cataloged every possible disfigurement before having it made, as if he was determined to carry the burden of all the Shamed on his own neck.

  It was both revolting and oddly intriguing. What sort of Yuuzhan Vong would do such a thing? And why?

  “I am Yu’shaa,” he said as he boarded. His gaze fastened on her, intense, nearly animal. This was no simpering Shamed One, n
o. This was an altogether different breed of the creature. He carried his marks with impossible dignity.

  “I am Nen Yim.”

  “I am honored, Master,” the Prophet replied. “You undertake a great task. All went well?”

  “Could have gone a bit more smoothly,” Corran muttered.

  “According to plan,” Nen Yim said.

  “Tahiri being stabbed was not in the plan,” Corran said.

  “The one-who-was-shaped is injured!” the Prophet exclaimed.

  “A risk we all take,” Nen Yim pointed out.

  “She’s dying!” Corran said. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “I will heal her,” Nen Yim said, “when I have the chance.”

  “You’ll heal her—”

  He stopped when someone else stepped into the ship. He yanked out his infidel weapon and ignited it.

  “No!” Nen Yim shouted. “This is Harrar, a priest. He’s going with us.”

  The male Jedi crouched into a fighting stance. “No, I—”

  A blast of plasma slammed into the ship—the skies were no longer quiet. Cursing, Nen Yim realized she had disengaged from the long-range sensors. As she reengaged now, she saw a flier above them and ten more within range. She closed the hatch and jolted the dovin basals to life. The ship jumped straight up, slamming into the atmospheric flier. The flier flipped over and smashed into the shrine, then slid into the water below, food for the p’hiili.

  The other fliers quickly dwindled, but faster ships were coming, from everywhere. She turned toward what she perceived to be the most open space. Far above, the rainbow bridge was a faint band in the sky, another legacy of their conquest of Yuuzhan’tar. They had shattered a moon to make it.

  She saw with some relief that she was faster than the pursuing ships, if only marginally so. Most Yuuzhan Vong spacecraft had been designed primarily for space, and were clumsy in atmospheres. The Sekotan ship was sleeker, streamlined.

  Once they were in vacuum, it might be a different matter.

  “Prepare for a darkspace jump,” she called back.

  “Bloody—” the male Jedi sputtered. “No! Not this close to the planet. We’re still in the atmosphere!”