Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 06_ Balance Point - Kathy Tyers [14]
Over the years, slowly, she’d learned to give it. She loved both sides of him, the knight-errant and the scoundrel—but this time, she must wait until he came to her. She couldn’t baby a full-grown man.
At least he’d been involved in the Ryn rescue episode. Unlike Han, she tried to stay current on HoloNet news. His ongoing involvement with the Ryn seemed like a sign of recovery.
Four hours later, she let down her long coil of hair and tumbled onto her cot. What am I doing here? flitted through her mind. Living with only a protocol droid for company—Basbakhan and Olmahk slept in the stairwell—made her feel as if she’d forgotten something critically important, day after day. It really was fortunate she was too tired to worry … much too tired … to worry too much, anyway … about him … or the children …
Her last thought was, I really should reach out through the Force for them. How many days has it been? …
CHAPTER THREE
The war vessel Sunulok, under way for decades, showed its age in a thousand small ways.
Luminescent colonies of lichen and bacteria grew at intervals near its passengers’ head level. Many of those colonies flickered, and some had dulled or dimmed. Communication nodes, where tiny nondedicated villips stood on protrusions of fiery red-orange phong coral, had turned as gray as ash.
Striding down one of its coral-lined arteries, Tsavong Lah ignored those marks of age and death. A living cape clung to his shoulders by its needle-clawed gripping fingers. Rust-colored scales hung like armor plates from his breastbone and shoulder blades. Each larval armor scale had been seeded against bone while a priestly choir sang atonal incantations on his behalf, renewing his pledges of devotion to Yun-Yammka, god of war. Over half a year, the plates had grown slowly, stretching his tendons, tugging his joints to new angles. Then the priests had declared Tsavong Lah’s painful transformation to warmaster complete.
Tsavong Lah embraced pain. Suffering honored his gods, who had created the universe by sacrificing parts of themselves.
Two sentries stood ahead. Their claw joints were immature and deadly sharp, their tattooed insignia far from complete. Outside his communication center, they snapped their fists to opposite shoulders. Tsavong raised one hand, receiving their homage and signaling his door. The organic door valve thickened at its edges, then dilated.
A striking young attendant, black honor bars burned across her pale cheeks, sat at her station. Seef sprang up and saluted. As she did, her seat extended pseudopodia and propelled itself sideways.
“Warmaster,” she said reverently. “I roused the master villip in your privacy chamber, and I commanded the executor to present himself.”
She strode to the far bulkhead. This part of Sunulok had grown an array of geometrically staggered coral blastulas where dozens of smaller villips lay quiescent.
Tsavong Lah strode past them, into the largest blastula of all. He waited until the cubicle’s sphincter closed, then frowned at the leathery ball isolated on a display stand. Budded like yeast from master villips and nurtured in onboard nurseries, or raised in berrylike galls that parasitized certain swamp plants, the mollusklike genus enabled instantaneous, long-distance communication.
The villip mirrored the disgraced executor’s face, sparely fleshed, with the crooked nose of multiple breaks showing great devotion—and maybe more vanity than was appropriate. In place of his left eye, he’d inserted a venom-spitting plaeryin bol.
Few of Nom Anor’s contacts had ever suspected his true identity, not even his succession of duped human servants. His long-term mission included finding and neutralizing their people’s most dangerous enemies. Ironically, after