Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [28]
Only results counted.
He could now exchange information with the dhuryam, in the form of emotions and images. By using these in combination, they had developed a wide-ranging mutual vocabulary, but their connection had gone beyond this. As his bond with the dhuryam had deepened, Jacen had found he could tap into the dhuryam’s own senses: with concentration, he could become as aware of the various life-forms within the Nursery as was the dhuryam itself.
To reach the dying Devaronian, he’d had to fight his way through the mob of shouting, weeping, struggling slaves. Hundreds of them had gathered near the hivelake, all hoping that Jacen might treat their wounds or illnesses. Many of the slaves had been driven here by other dhuryams, lashed by slave seed-web agony burning their nerves; though the other dhuryams had tried to develop medics of their own, they could neither find nor create other healers of Jacen’s skill. His empathic bond with the slave seed let him use the dhuryams’ own telepathic connections to feel the extent of wounds and diseases and internal injuries, and to treat them with an efficiency that would have astonished a trained meditech.
At first, his own dhuryam had tried to stop Jacen from treating slaves who belonged to its sibling-rivals; for nearly a day, Jacen and the dhuryam had gone back to their war of unendurable pain against unbreakable will. Through it all, Jacen had kept hearing Vergere’s voice echo inside his head.
Which are flowers? Which are weeds? she had said. The choice is yours.
He had chosen.
No agony at any dhuryam’s command could unmake his choice.
There are no weeds here.
Every slave was a flower. Every life was precious. He would spend the last erg of his strength to save every one of them.
There are no weeds here.
He had built an aid station near the bank of the lake that surrounded the dhuryam hive-island. Since the domains radiated from the lake like sections of longitude, here was the place where slaves from rival domains could reach him while passing through the least amount of enemy territory. His own dhuryam had cooperated to the point of giving Jacen the occasional help of a few members of his slave gang, to gather medicinal mosses and herbs, supplies of clip beetles, and young robeskins that could be used for bandages.
The Devaronian had been one of these temporary assistants. Jacen had sent him upland for a bundle of grain-bearing grasses that grew on a nearby hillock; when ground fine, these grains made an excellent coagulant, and were mildly antibiotic. The Devaronian had given a nod of his vestigial horns, offered a smile full of needle-sharp teeth, and set off willingly, without requiring any spurring from the dhuryam.
Before he could return, the crowd of wounded had grown to a mob. Shoving matches broke out as the competing dhuryams set their injured slaves against those of other sibling-rivals; some of these shoving matches had turned starkly violent before Jacen could intervene. The Devaronian had been caught at the edge of one, and all that his hissing and sharp-toothed threat displays had accomplished was to get himself shoved off around the fringes of the mob. He couldn’t fight back without dropping the bundle of grasses Jacen had sent him for, and the two stunted horns that curved from his forehead were far from intimidating. He had tried to skirt the mob by slipping around the hive-pond’s shore, since the ring of Yuuzhan Vong warriors around it prevented the mob from extending in that direction.
It was this that had killed him.
Jacen didn’t know if the Devaronian had stumbled, or slipped on the scummy reeds