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“Yes, darama,” said the attaché, coming at a run. One glance was enough to tell him the viceroy’s state, and Eri Palle took care to abase himself well out of the viceroy’s reach. “How can I serve you?”

“Send for Vor Duull. Tell Vor Duull to bring his boxes,” said Nil Spaar, plunging himself into the deep, comforting folds of his own nesting. “And then bring Han Solo to me—I have a message to send to the vermin queen.”

For once, there was no craft or subtlety in a transmission from Nil Spaar—and for once, there was absolute silence in the conference room. Leia watched it with her arms wrapped tight against her body, one hand covering her mouth. When it was over, she left the room, her face white, her eyes dead.

Ackbar was little better off, despite having looked away through the worst of it. Alole was weeping silently, fat tears painting her round cheeks. Behn-Kihl-Nahm wore a scowl of ultimate contempt.

Alone in his office, Drayson wore a mask of cold rage.

They had seen Nil Spaar savagely beating a bound Han for nearly twenty minutes—not just beating him, but kicking and hurling him about an empty compartment in an animal rage. The beating went on until Han was bleeding freely from his mouth, his nose, from gashes on his face and arms, his chest, his calf. The beating went on until Han’s blood was smeared on the bulkheads, the deck, and halfway up Nil Spaar’s powerful forearms. The beating went on until Han could no longer stand when the viceroy dragged him to his feet, not even with a wall to support him.

For long seconds, Nil Spaar had stood in a half crouch over Han’s crumpled form. The viceroy was partly turned away from the lens, and they could not see his face. But they could see his thorax plates rise and fall, and one hand flexing menacingly as a great claw appeared, vanished, appeared, and vanished again.

Then Nil Spaar had straightened and turned to face them. They saw that he was bleeding as well—tiny rivulets running from the two enlarged scarlet crests at his temples. Staring into the holocam, he had wiped at the blood with the back of one hand, then sucked his hand clean.

Finally, he had made his message explicit, though with unusual economy of words—the only words spoken throughout the entire horror, delivered in a dark, angry growl:

“Leave Koornacht now.”

Chapter 8

Akanah was the first to discover the Yevethan starship orbiting J’t’p’tan.

As soon as Mud Sloth dropped out of hyperspace on the fringe of the Doornik 628 system, Akanah slipped away to the service compartment. There she entered a deep meditation, submerging herself in the Current and searching for the presence of the Circle.

Staying at the skiff’s controls, Luke first performed a sweep with Mud Sloth’s feeble sensors, then closed his eyes and entered his own reverie, connecting to his new surroundings and searching for local disturbances in the Force.

Neither he nor the skiff found anything of note, but when Akanah rejoined him, she told him of her discovery.

“How do you know? Can you actually see this ship?” he asked skeptically.

“It is difficult to explain. Let me try to show you—”

“In a moment,” Luke said. “Explain first.”

“Is this important now? What does it matter how I know? I know.”

“It matters if you expect us to base what we do on what you’ve told me,” he said.

The unspoken tensions dating back to Utharis were fully awakened by then. “Have you become a skeptic, now?” she asked, her expression more hurt than angry. “You no longer trust my gifts?”

“Akanah, I know there’s more than one source of knowledge and more than one kind of truth—”

“Is it that the Jedi are unwilling to share the Force, then?” she asked. “Are you uncomfortable knowing I have a path to knowledge that doesn’t require you, that isn’t yet open to you? At the same time that you ask me to teach you, you seem to need to doubt, even to discredit—”

Luke was shaking his head vigorously. “No—no, that’s wrong. The Force is a river from which many can drink, and the training of the Jedi