Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [28]
Then it was closed. No one moved to do his bidding. Nor were his guards and closest advisers supposed to. They had been carefully instructed in what to do, how to act. Takhaff Uul would indeed be summoned … but only in a few minutes.
Another portal widened and Nen Yim entered at a hurried pace. Once at his side, she pulled tool-creatures from her garments and headdress and began scraping and prodding at his arm, just at the join, taking flesh, capturing flesh-eaters. At any other time, touching him without permission would have been a crime punishable by the most ignoble of deaths, but he had instructed her to do so, to waste no time with words.
He ignored her and turned to Denua Ku, who stood as if on guard duty among his other bodyguards. “Was it done?”
Denua Ku bowed his head. “It was. I flung the tracer spineray onto his back, and he did not react, did not acknowledge its presence. It will spawn within minutes, and its spawn will spread.”
The warmaster nodded, satisfied.
It was not enough to take the heads of the traitors he already knew and suspected. He would have to tear this conspiracy out by the roots so that it could not grow again. The agony the conspirators felt in the last weeks of their lives, the shame they and their families would bear, would become legendary among the Yuuzhan Vong.
FOUR
Now a crew of men and women, most of the same species as the tall man but some furrier or rounder, labored at the black wall.
One of them used a flame device like Ryuk’s to heat the wall. Then he nodded and stepped back, and a woman stepped up and used her own device. Whiteness sprayed from the hose she held, the hose attached to the tank on her back, and the air got cold, very cold. The whiteness struck the heated stone.
The stone shrieked. The tall man liked the sound of that.
But only a small bit of the stone fell free. The tall man picked it up. It stung his fingers with lingering heat. It was heavy, far heavier than stone should be.
The man and the woman looked over the tiny crack formed in the wall’s surface. They made noises at one another. Then the woman, apprehension on her face, turned to the tall man, forming images. The tall man reached out and plucked them forth.
The hot-and-cold would succeed, she told him. In a long time.
What is a long time? he asked. A light and a dark?
Many lights and darks, she said. Many groundshakes would come and go, the plants would make many more buildings fall, small things would grow and old things would die.
The tall man growled, and the woman staggered back from the force of his anger.
But she had another thought, and she forced her way forward to give it to him. It was a machine with arms and knobs and treads, and she imagined it standing before the wall, using its own cutting flames and pounding knobs to shatter the stone.
With contempt, he dismissed the idea. He imagined himself standing side by side with the machine, striking the wall himself, neither of them doing any harm to its surface.
She shook her head, a sign he’d come to understand, and changed his image. In it, he became smaller and smaller, until he was nothing but a tiny dot standing beside one of the machine’s treads.
He scowled at her, not understanding.
She showed herself beside him, also tiny, and drew him into her eyes. He saw through them as she looked up, and up, and up at the machine.
He understood, then. He hadn’t shrunk. He’d misunderstood. The machine was vast, the width of a gap between buildings, as tall as this enormous chamber.
The tall man laughed. The woman and all the other workers, suffused with his humor, also laughed. Weaker than he, they laughed until they coughed, laughed until they fell over, while he watched them in good cheer. Only when some of them began coughing out blood did he relent.
He stood over the woman with all the thoughts and made one of her own. In it, she found one of those machines and brought it here.
She nodded, but, too weak to obey immediately, it was minutes before she could rise and go about her new errand.