Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [86]
When he looked again, with slightly clearer vision, it was still Jacen.
But he was no longer the boy Ganner remembered.
Jacen was taller now, and broader across the shoulders. His brown curls had been sun-bleached to streaks of golden blond, and a dark beard sprang wiry from his jaw. His face had thinned, sharpened, refined: he had lost that impish softness, that playful roguishness that once had made him resemble his father, and replaced it with a cold-forged durasteel expression that reminded Ganner of Leia denouncing a corrupt Senator from the Chief of State’s Podium of the Great Rotunda.
He wore a long, flowing robe of black so dark that its folds vanished into formless night. Along his sleeves spidered an intricate design that glowed with a light of its own, chased in scarlet and viridian like a network of external arteries that pulsed light instead of blood. Draped over his shoulders he wore a surplice of shimmering white on which strange, unidentifiable sigils wrote themselves in twists of shining gold.
He opened his mouth to ask Jacen what kind of stupid masked ball he was planning to crash in this ridiculous costume, but before his drug-numbed lips could shape the words, he remembered:
Jacen Solo is a traitor.
“Do not fear, Ganner Rhysode,” he said, in a weird dark voice like a bad imitation of a hypnotist. “Instead rejoice! The day of your Blessed Release has arrived!”
“Does …” Ganner had to hack a wad of haven’t-talked-in-days out of his throat. “Does this mean … you’re going to let me go?”
“The Gifts of the True Gods are three.” His words fell like boulders down a well. “Life They give us, that we may serve Their Glory: this is the least of Their Gifts. Pain They give us, that we may learn Life’s value lies only in Their Service: this is a greater Gift. But the Greatest Gift of the Gods is Death: it is Their Release from the Burden of Pain and the Curse of Life. It is their reward, their grace, their mercy, granted liberally even to the unjust and the infidel.”
Captured. Drugged. Helpless. About to be murdered. Boy, it’s a good thing I was so cautious and unobtrusive, Ganner thought muzzily. Otherwise I might have gotten myself into trouble.
“Um, yeah, y’know,” he said with a weak laugh, “those wacky gods … I guess they mean well, but they just don’t know when to stop. They’re way too generous. I’m getting along fine with just the first Gift. The other two, hey, y’know, I can wait—”
“Silence!” Jacen commanded, stretching forth his arms, hands high, palms forward as though to address a multitude from a mountaintop. “Waste not your breath in prattle! Hear now the lore of the True Way!”
Ganner stared, speechless, but instead of continuing, Jacen’s eyes drifted closed. He swayed in place as though he were about to faint.
“Jacen?”
One hand curled to a fist, then extended a forefinger: Wait.
“Jacen, what did they do to you? Whatever it is, we can fix it. You have to come back with me, Jacen. You don’t know what’s been happening. Jaina … everyone needs you. I don’t know what they’ve done to you, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’ve done, it’s not your fault. We can help you—”
Jacen’s eyes opened, then his left lid drooped in a long, slow wink. Ganner’s mouth snapped shut.
Jacen’s eyes closed again.
Then slowly, one at a time, so did each eye on the end of each of the tentacle-vines that hung from the ceiling: as the red glow within each orb faded into darkness, a pair of vertical eyelids squeezed across them, and the tentacle-vines gradually relaxed, hanging limp, motionless.
Jacen dropped his arms and opened his eyes. His face seemed to collapse into an exhaustion too profound for any human to bear. “How do you feel? Any strength coming back? You think you can walk?” He sounded like a teenager again—but a teenager old beyond his years.
Old—too old—that’s part of what was so strange about him. Something in his eyes: some