Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [27]
SIX
It was raining insects on Yuuzhan’tar—the former Coruscant, once bright center, now dimmed, defiled by war, transformed by the Yuuzhan Vong into a riotous garden. A seeming mishmash of ferns, conifers, and other flora blunted what only two years earlier had been technological sierra. Verdant growth nudged through mist in valleys that had once been canyons between kilometer-high megastructures. Newly formed lakes and basins created by the fall of mighty towers and orbital platforms were filled to overflowing with water, initially brought by asteroids but since delivered with regularity from a purple sky.
To some, Yuuzhan’tar, “Crèche of the Gods,” was a world returned to its bygone splendor, lost and rediscovered, more alive for having been conquered, its orbit altered—tweaked sunward—three of its moons steered away and returned, and the fourth pulverized to form a braided ring, a bridge of supernatural light, along which the gods strolled in serene meditation.
And yet insects were raining down on Supreme Overlord Shimrra’s rainbow-winged worldship Citadel—his holy mount, rising from a yorik coral cradle to tower over what had been the most populous and important precinct of the galactic capital. An unrelenting tattoo of falling bodies that sounded like a thousand drummers pounding out different rhythms.
The stink beetles spattered the dome of the Hall of Confluence and the stately, organiform bridges that linked the hall to other hallowed places. The plague had been born on the other side of Yuuzhan’tar because of a mistake by the World Brain—an overbreeding—and now the creatures were dying because of yet another mistake by the dhuryam. The air around the Citadel reeked, and the ground was slippery with smashed bodies.
The atmosphere inside the great hall was somber. A place of assembly for the Yuuzhan Vong elite, it was defined by a curving roof supported by pillars sculpted from ancient bone. Broad at the four palpating portals where the high caste entered, the hall attenuated at the opposite end, where Shimrra sat on a pulsing crimson throne, propped by clusters of hau polyps. Dovin basals provided a sense of gravity, of uphill walking, increasing the nearer one came to Shimrra’s spike-backed seat.
And yet the atmosphere inside the hall was moody and silent.
A kneeling gathering of priests, warriors, shapers, and intendants waited for the Supreme Overlord to speak. The brooding silence was fractured by the sound of insects striking the roof, or being swept from the fronting causeways into the accommodating mouths of a dozen maw luur …
“You are asking yourselves, Where have we erred?” Shimrra said at last. “Does the fault lie with our cleansings, our sacrifices, our conquests? Are we being tested by the gods, or have we been abandoned? Is Shimrra still our conduit, or has he become our liability? You are preoccupied with fears concerning balance and derangement. You wonder if all of us haven’t become Shamed Ones in the eyes of the gods—spurned, disdained, ostracized because of our pride and our inability to prevail.”
Shimrra paused to look around the hall, then asked: “Do you think that your distrust in me, your whispered doubts, benefits our noble cause? If I can hear you, what must the gods be thinking when they look into each and every one of you? I will tell you what the gods are saying to another: They have lost faith in the one we set upon the polyp throne. And in doubting the Supreme Overlord, our yoke to them, they doubt us.
“And so the gods visit plagues and defeats on their children—not to castigate me, but to demonstrate where you have failed—where you have failed them.”
Shimrra’s black-and-gray ceremonial robes were the flayed and preserved flesh of the first Supreme Overlord. His massive head was scarified with design; his features rearranged to suggest a godly aspect: eyes widened,