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“I saw … the end. The end of the protocols. The end of the secrets. Besides those few marvels the gods have gifted us with since our arrival at the infidel galaxy, the store of our knowledge is nearly exhausted.”

“So it is,” Shimrra acknowledged. “You alone of all shapers know this.” Something that was not a natural hand gestured at Kae Kwaad from the shadows. “Onimi. Reveal yourself.”

“Yes, Dread Lord.” Kae Kwaad—no, Onimi—capered, then. With a twist, the dead shaper hands dropped from his wrists, revealing ordinary Yuuzhan Vong digits. He stripped off the masquer that hid his face, and bile rose in Nen Yim’s throat at what she saw there.

The man she had thought a master shaper was deformed. Not scarred or modified as sacrifice to the gods, but misshapen as one born cursed by them. One eye lolled lower on his face than the other, and part of his skull was oddly distended. His mouth was a twisted slash. His long, lean limbs twitched with a sort of mad delight.

“Onimi is my jester,” Shimrra murmured. “He amuses me. Sometimes he is useful. I sent him to watch you and fetch you.”

“You see, my sweet Nen Tsup?” Onimi crowed. “You see?”

But Nen Yim did not see. She did not see at all.

“Silence, Onimi. Prostrate yourself and be silent.”

The jester flattened himself against the coral deck and whimpered like a fearful beast.

“Yun-Yuuzhan shaped the universe from his own body,” Shimrra intoned, his voice now modulated like a sacred chant. “In the days following his great shaping, he was weak, and in that time Yun-Harla tricked him into giving her some of those secrets. These she passed to her handmaiden, Yun-Ne’Shel, and thence to me. I am the gateway of that knowledge. But Yun-Yuuzhan never gave up all of his secrets. Many he still holds for us, free of Yun-Harla’s deceptions. They await us. I have seen it in a vision.”

“I still do not understand, Dread Lord. The eighth cortex—”

“Silence!” The voice raised suddenly to a mind-numbing rumble, and Nen Yim found herself as prostrate as Onimi. She prepared herself for death.

But surprisingly, when he resumed, Shimrra’s voice was again mild. “In my vision, Nen Yim, you were raised to the rank of master. In my vision, you quested for the knowledge that Yun-Yuuzhan holds out. He offers it, but he demands sacrifice and labor to obtain it. He requires that you pursue your heresy.”

Nen Yim, afraid to speak, lay quiet, slowly understanding that she was not to die after all.

“The other shapers are the dupes of Yun-Harla,” Shimrra went on. “They shall not know of this. You will labor here, with me. You will have the resources and assistants my household provides. Together with me, you will bring the deepest secrets of shaping forth from the waking mind of Yun-Yuuzhan, and before that unleashed knowledge, the infidels will fall.” He paused. “Now, you may speak.”

Nen Yim composed herself. “Dread Lord, the inhabitants of the worldship Baanu Miir—”

“They are nothing. They are dead. They might have been spared but for the infidels, who desecrated our shipwomb and destroyed the new worldship there. It is nothing. They were the old. The shapers are the old. You are on the new path, the most sacred of all, Master Nen Yim. Forget what has gone before.”

They are nothing. The infidels had killed them, everyone on Baanu Miir, on every worldship too old and worn to achieve faster than lightspeed. In her heart, at that moment, Nen Yim felt a hard rage and made a solemn vow. Up until now, the infidels had been an interesting problem to her, almost an abstraction. Now they were her enemies in the deepest sense. Now she would work to bring about their annihilation.

And behind that quiet rage, quickly overwhelming it, overwhelming even the godlike presence of Shimrra, rose a strange, dark glee.

Now my shaping truly begins, she thought. And the universe shall tremble at what I create.

EPILOGUE

Luke warily regarded the holographic image of Borsk Fey’lya, chief of the New Republic.

“So you’re saying I’m free to return to Coruscant?” the Jedi Master asked the cream-colored Bothan