Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [13]
“This may have value,” Tsavong Lah admitted.
“May?” Nom Anor said. “May? Warmaster, you have personally performed every sacrifice the True Gods demand for victory—every sacrifice save one—”
The spark in the warmaster’s eyes suddenly blazed into a fusion furnace. “The Great Sacrifice—you speak of the Sacrifice of the Twins!”
“Yes. You yourself, Warmaster, must have wondered in your heart of hearts, must have doubted the True Gods’ promise of victory, when the final sacrifice could not be performed.”
“The True Gods do not mock, and They do not promise in vain,” the warmaster intoned piously.
“But Their gifts are not given,” Nom Anor said. “You know this. They require that we earn them: that we bring Their prophecies to pass.”
“Yes.”
“And so on that great day, Jacen Solo will himself capture his sister, his twin—he will drag her to the altar, and he will himself take her life in the Great Twin Sacrifice, and the will of the True Gods shall finally be brought to pass.”
“The True Gods’ will be done!” Tsavong Lah thundered.
“The True Gods’ will be done,” Nom Anor agreed.
“You will do this.”
“Yes, Warmaster.”
“You will not fail.”
“If it be within my power, Warmaster—”
“No,” Tsavong Lah said. “You do not understand. I tell you, Nom Anor, you will not fail. The True Gods are not mocked. Should Jacen Solo not turn to the True Path, no breath of this can be whispered; no hint of this can be thought. For Nom Anor, there is only victory; lacking victory, the creature that is currently called by the name Nom Anor shall be sacrificed to the True Gods as a nameless thing.”
Nom Anor swallowed. “Ah, Warmaster—?”
Tsavong Lah went on inexorably. “All who have breathed the air of this plan shall die, screaming and without names, and their bones shall be scattered to drift between the stars. In every Name of all True Gods, this is my word.”
Abruptly, the villip inverted to its quiescent state, folding in upon itself with wet slaps like raw meat smacking bone.
Nom Anor sat back, and discovered that he was trembling. This was not quite how he had expected matters to go. There’s the trouble with fanatics, he thought. They’re easy to manipulate, but somehow they take everything five steps too far.
He took a long sip of the dragweed broth in the sacworm that he had held, forgotten, throughout the interview. He turned to the other occupant of the small chamber. “Well, now we are partners in truth: together, we face either total victory or utter destruction,” he said heavily. “We are, as the Corellians say, off to a flying start.”
Across the quiescent villip, his partner met his gaze with unblinking avian calm.
“Well begun,” Vergere said neutrally, “is half done.”
TWO
THE NURSERY
Deep in the infinite space above the plane of the galactic ecliptic—in the spark-scattered velvet so far from any stellar system that the place was not, strictly speaking, even a place at all, only a statistical array of vectors and velocities—a small vessel of yorik coral dropped from hyperspace. It was so far from any observable point of fixed reference that its motion was arbitrary: on an Obroa-skai referent, the vessel streaked away at a respectable fraction of lightspeed; referent to Tatooine it swung in a long, lazy arc; referent to Coruscant it infell, gathering velocity.
Its twin dovin basals pulsed, emitting expanding ripples of gravity waves; some considerable time thereafter, those same dovin basals registered other space-time ripples in reply.
The vessel was not alone.
These answering ripples had a direction; the dovin basals of the small vessel were sensitive enough to register the femtosecond-scale difference between the instant one dovin basal detected a wave of space-time and the instant that wave reached its twin.
The small vessel of yorik coral altered course.
The object toward