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Over his left shoulder, one of the dark iron sconces still hung on her wall. Something about the intruder’s presence seemed to turn its abstract form into a misshapen, multihorned head.

Leia had faced down Borsk Fey’lya. She’d defied Grand Moff Tarkin and a dozen other petty tyrants, but this creature lived by utterly different standards of respect and behavior. She must get through to him. To stop the killing, once and for all.

“Sir,” she said, “we are both leaders. Our people respect us, and we have many things to say to each other. My name is Leia Organa Solo.”

“I know who and what you are. I have vowed to my gods to sacrifice you and your kind. You will merely be the first, and surely one of the most famous Jeedai I give them.”

Leia’s stomach churned. “I am not Jedi,” she said. “Not really.”

“Our reports say otherwise.”

“Your reports are wrong. I have a little training, but that’s all. In this galaxy, we have learned to live alongside each other. Surely, you—”

“We do not live side by side with impurity,” he said. “Your civilization is built on abominations. Your galaxy is polluted. We have come to cleanse it, so that others besides our warrior caste may occupy it and live cleanly here. It is our destiny, according to Supreme Overlord Shimrra and the priests.”

Destiny? She shuddered. “Like this world,” she insisted, sweeping a hand aside, “pollution can be cleansed without killing everyone who lives in it.”

“It will be cleansed,” he answered. “All that mocks life is an abomination. Do you not understand that, Jeedai Organa Solo? Your machines mock life. They are abominable. An affront to life. An insult to the gods, who created all that exists by sacrificing parts of themselves.”

Understanding flashed through her. These people believed that their own creators had mutilated themselves. Naturally, they tried to follow that example.

“We admire your creature-servants,” she said cautiously. “We are deeply impressed by your biotechnology. May I suggest that you, too, have much to learn from us?”

“We are learning,” he said somberly. “We have seen that you deny the all-transcendent reality. Instead of learning the most worthy way to meet it, you forestall it, or pretend it does not ultimately own you … forever.”

“We have also developed creature-servants capable of healing,” she said, rising to the argument. “We call them bacta. Other creature-servants help us make food, and—”

“And still you mock death and try to evade its servant, pain. Death, Leia Organa Solo, is the highest truth of the universe.”

“No,” she said. “Life is the highest truth.”

“Death ends life.”

“There can be no death where there has been no life. Life binds the galaxy together. Life—”

“Silence, blasphemer!”

The force of his shout drove her back half a step, but Leia was in her element now. “Sir,” she said, determined to try angle after angle until she forced his vision open a hair, just a hair. “You and I can speak because we are alive. Your gods—” Yes, he’d definitely mentioned gods, plural. “Your gods can only be served by the living, not the dead.”

“You know nothing.”

He turned slightly aside and said something in a strange, guttural language. Behind her, one of her guards laughed horribly, and she realized she must’ve said something that seemed unutterably stupid from their point of view.

“What is it you want, here at Duro?” she asked. “You,” he said, “who mock death, will meet it very soon. Then, for Yun-Yammka—the true master of war—we will purify this world of the abominable machines in their orbits.”

The Duros’ cities, she realized with a sinking sensation. Millions of lives.

“We will preserve the people you call refugees, though. Their labor is needed for the task of cleansing this world.” He nodded at Nom Anor. “Finally, Duro will become our platform to take other worlds. The ones you call the Core.”

Leia’s head felt light, as if it were floating over her shoulders. They meant to take everything—and she no longer doubted that they could.

“Sir,” she said, “even the gods can’t want you to remove all other life from the—”