Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [71]
He could see the sky above, too.
“I see,” Anakin said. “We’re in one of the—what did you call them?”
“Damuteks.”
“Right. They’re shaped like rayed stars. We’re at the end of one of the rays. This is one of the compounds filled with water.”
“Each damutek has a succession pool. Some have coverings over them so the space can be used for other things.”
Anakin pointed at the canal. “We came up that. It goes to the river, right?”
“Correct again.”
“Why is the water in the canal flowing toward the river, then?”
“Why ask after such irrelevancies? The succession pool is filled from below. Its rooting tubes seek water and minerals. The outflow goes to the river. And that is enough talk.”
“You’re right,” Anakin agreed. “Let’s find Tahiri and get out of here.”
Rapuung glared at him. “It isn’t so simple. First we must disguise you. An unbound human, walking free? Then we must locate your other Jeedai.”
“I can find her.”
“I surmised as much, from what I have heard of Jeedai. You can sniff each other out at a distance, yes?”
“Something like that.”
“Then you will be my hunting uspeq. But not yet. Even when we know where she is—”
“We have to chart the course. I get it. You’ll figure the layout of the place. And your revenge? What about that?”
“When we find the other Jeedai, we will find my revenge.”
The coldness in Rapuung’s voice touched a worry in the back of Anakin’s mind. “Your revenge is not against Tahiri, is it?” he asked. “Tell me now if it is.”
Rapuung showed his teeth in grim humor. “If I wanted revenge on your Jeedai, I need only to let the shapers have her. Nothing could be worse than to be in Mezhan Kwaad’s fingers.”
“Mezhan Kwaad?”
“Don’t repeat that name,” Rapuung snarled.
“But you just said it.”
“If you repeat it again, I will kill you.”
Anakin drew himself taller. “You’re welcome to try,” he said softly.
Rapuung’s muscles bunched and tensed and his mauled lips twitched. Again he seemed more like a dangerous, poisonous animal than a person. But then he rasped a sigh. “Here, I know what is best. You must learn to listen to me. How else would you have entered the perimeter of the base? But from here, the dangers we face have increased. You must make peace with my commands. Furthermore, the longer we argue, the more likely it is that we will be thwarted here and now. We’re lucky no one has yet chanced by. You have passed through the nostrils of this beast, but you will not live to find the beating heart without me.”
That was probably true, Anakin reflected. Pride was not the way of the Jedi. Rapuung kept pricking at his pride, and he kept twitching like a Twi’lek’s lekku. He could almost hear Jacen and Uncle Luke scolding him now.
“I apologize,” Anakin said. “You’re right. What do we do now?”
Rapuung nodded curtly. “Now we make you a slave.”
Anakin had thought he’d been through some hard things before; but nothing had prepared him for the ordeal of letting Vua Rapuung implant the coral growth on him. It looked exactly like the sickening, ulcerous growths he’d seen on more Yuuzhan Vong slaves than he could count. He’d watched and sensed sentient beings lose their reason, grow thin and vanish in the Force, become mindless drones for the Yuuzhan Vong, because of just such infections.
“It is not real,” Vua Rapuung told him, “but you must respond as if it is real. You must follow certain commands.”
How do I know this isn’t a trick? Anakin’s brain screamed at him. How do I know this wasn’t the plan all along, to march me into the shaper base and have me willingly give up my very being?
Again he felt as if his eyes had been struck out, his tongue cut off, the nerves of his fingers numbed. He had absolutely no way of knowing what Vua Rapuung was thinking.
But it seemed somehow unlike the mutilated warrior to play out such an elaborate charade.
“So I have to act like a mindless drone?”
“No. We do not use that form of restraint