Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [65]
But in that pulse was a raw edge of pain.
Only then did it strike him what he had done. To save himself, he had burned countless square kilometers of forest. He had felt beasts dying, peripherally, but in the moment his own pain had been paramount. Now the forest’s anguish hit him like a hard slap in the face. He was a swarm of stintarils, clustered in the top of a tree, the fire climbing after them. Their fur was beginning to singe. He was a big, harmless runyip, too slow to outrun the flame, trying to nose its calves ahead to safety, but not herself knowing where that was. He was charred flesh and scorched lungs. He was dead and dying.
“You were right,” he told Rapuung later, when they stopped to splash water on themselves, to clear the ash from their eyes, nostrils, and lips.
“About what, infidel?”
“What I did with the fire. It was wrong.”
The Yuuzhan Vong’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”
“I killed innocent life to save us.”
Rapuung laughed harshly. “That is nothing. Killing and dying are nothing; they are the way of the world, part of the embrace of pain. What you did was wrong because it was an abomination, not because you killed. Do not fool yourself. I see now how determined you are to rescue your Jeedai companion. If you could reach her only by filling in a chasm with corpses to walk over, you would do it.”
“No,” Anakin said. “I wouldn’t.”
“A goal desired so lightly is not a goal at all.”
Anakin sighed. “We’ll get her. But I don’t like to kill.”
“Then the warriors will kill you.”
“Warriors are different,” Anakin said. “I will defend myself with extreme prejudice. But the forest did nothing to me to deserve what I did to it.”
“You make no sense,” Rapuung said. “We will kill who and what we must.”
“And I say no.”
“Indeed. So you would have me pollute myself with the first abomination in order to achieve your purposes, and yet you will force me to cling to a childish fear of killing? All life ends, Jeedai.”
Anakin felt that one. Did the Yuuzhan Vong really think nonbiological technology was as wrong as the Jedi philosophy taught indiscriminate killing was? Intellectually he supposed he’d understood that, but it had never reached his gut. Only now, when they both agreed something terrible had been done—but for absolutely different reasons—did it make any kind of sense to him at all.
If only he could feel Rapuung in the Force. If only he could tell if the Yuuzhan Vong were of the light or of the dark side.
Or was that even a relevant question, without the Force? Were Jedi so dependent on their Force-given senses that without them they were moral cripples?
Rapuung had kept a stinging gaze on Anakin as the Jedi searched for a response. Now he suddenly looked away toward some middle distance.
“You make no sense,” Vua Rapuung said. “But … I acknowledge you have saved my life. My revenge will owe to you, when it is complete.”
“You’ve saved me a couple of times,” Anakin replied. “We’re not even yet.”
“Not what? What is that word?”
“Never mind. Vua Rapuung, what is this revenge you seek? What has been done to you that would make you turn against your own people?”
Rapuung’s eyes hardened. “Do you really not know? Can you really not see? Look at me!”
“I see your scars fester. You have implants that seem dead or dying. But I don’t have the faintest idea what that means.”
“It does not concern you,” Rapuung said. “Do not presume, infidel.”
“Fine. Then tell me this plan of yours, the one that will get me to Tahiri.”
“Follow and see,” Rapuung answered.
They crouched in a tangle of roots at the water’s edge on a tributary of the great river.
“We’re farther away from the shaper base than we were yesterday,” Anakin complained.
“Yes, but in the right place, now,” Rapuung said.
“Right place for what?”
“Wait. See.”
Anakin’s mouth twitched around a retort but didn’t form it. Was this what people were complaining about when they accused him of being tight with words?