Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [51]
Nen Yim stepped from the ceremonial bath into a darkened oozhith. At her touch it wrapped itself firmly about her, and she felt the tingle as it inserted cilia into her pores. It was not a full-skin oozhith, but a shortened garment that left her arms and most of her legs bare. She smoothed back her short dark hair and held out her right hand, looking at it as if for the first time rather than the last. Then she allowed the attendant to escort her into the darkened grotto of Yun-Ne’Shel, where the master waited.
The grotto smelled of brine and oil. It was close and damp and reacted faintly to the touch. The grotto was a distant relative of the yammosk; what you felt in the chamber came back to you, enhanced.
And so now both her eagerness and her trepidation had her pulse hammering as she knelt at the mouth of the grotto, a hole the size of a fist surrounded by a massive bulge of muscle. Without pausing or flinching, she placed her hand through the opening.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the teeth slid out of their sheaths, eight of them, and pricked into her wrist.
Sweat started on her brow as she surrendered to the pain, as the teeth, with glacial slowness, sank through tissue, grated into bone. The lips closed occasionally to suck away the blood. The grotto gave her back her pain, amplified, and her breath went choppy. She lost her sense of time; every nerve ending in her body was raw, as if the cilia of her garment were writhing needles.
Until, finally, the teeth met in the center of her wrist; she felt them click together. She tried to take a long, calming breath to prepare for what was to come next.
It happened quickly. The mouth suddenly rotated ninety degrees. Her arm twisted with it no more than a degree or so, and then the hand came off with a wet snick. Nen Yim held up the stump of her wrist and stared at it in dull astonishment. She barely noticed the attendant taking her by the shoulders, guiding her toward the dark basin in the center of the grotto.
“I can do it,” she whispered. She knelt by the basin, her head spinning. Dark things moved in the waters, five-legged things that came to the scent of her blood eagerly. She pushed her gushing stump into the water.
She had thought her body could feel no greater pain than it already had. She was wrong. She didn’t feel it in her hand at all, but in a great spasm that arched her body like a bow and kept it cramped there. She couldn’t see the creature grappling with her wrist. For a horrible moment, she didn’t want to. A great flash of light exploded in her head, and for a time she knew nothing.
She awoke, and tears of shame started. Through them she saw the master standing over her.
“No one has ever endured it without a brief lapse the first time,” she said. “There is no shame, on this occasion. If you ever receive your master’s hand, it will be different. But you will be ready.”
Hand. Nen Yim raised it before her.
It was still seating itself, a thick greenish secretion marking the line between it and her wrist. It had four narrow fingers and a thumb protruding from the thin but flexible carapace that now served as the top of her hand. Thousands of small sensor knobs covered the fingers and palm. The two fingers farthest from her thumb ended in small pincers. The finger nearest the thumb had a thin, sharp, retractable claw.
She tried to wiggle the fingers; nothing happened.
“It will take some days for the nerve connections to complete themselves, and some time after that for your brain to become used to the finer modifications,” the master said. “Rejoice, Nen Yim—you are now truly an adept. You will join me in shaping the Jeedai, and will bring glory to our caste, our domain, and the Yuuzhan Vong.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Anakin sank farther beneath the roots of a marsh-grubber tree and submerged himself up to his mouth, peering through the twisted growths at