Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [28]
Below the yorik coral throne sat his shamed familiar, Onimi, part pet, part speaker of truths few dared to voice.
It had reached Shimrra’s ear, through a network of eavesdropping biots and actual spies, that some of his opponents and derogators were gossiping that he had fallen out of favor with the gods—a speculation more ironic than dangerous, since Shimrra had long ago abandoned real belief in any power other than that which he wielded as Supreme Overlord.
Even so, there were undeniable reasons to fear that he had fallen out of favor. The slow progress of the conquest; a plague of itching that had commenced with his arrival on Yuuzhan’tar; the still-unabated heretical movement; the disastrous defeat at Ebaq 9; the treachery of the priestess Ngaaluh; the attempt on Shimrra’s life … Many believed that all these reversals had been engineered by the gods as a warning to Shimrra that he had become grandiose and proud.
He who had proclaimed the galaxy a chosen realm for the long-wandering, homeless Yuuzhan Vong.
As an appeasement to the concerned members of the elite, Shimrra had agreed to allow his proclamations and utterances to be analyzed by a quartet of seers—one from each caste, one for each primary god. Black midnight hags, who sat close to the throne and spoke in contradictions. Not that they dared challenge Shimrra, in any case, except with hand wringing, prayers, and other gestures meant to implore the gods to look kindly on Yuuzhan’tar.
“You disgust me,” he told them. “You think I’m spouting sacrilege. You recoil and grovel because you know that I speak the truth, and that truth rattles you to the core of your being. You’d do well to chop off more of yourselves in penance and devotion. Give all of yourselves and it won’t be enough.” He looked down at Onimi. “You think I speak in riddles, like this one.”
Onimi’s deformities owed not to birth but to rejection by the gods. Once a shaper, he was now little more than a misshapen jester, one eye drooping below its mate, one yellow fang protruding from a twisted mouth, one portion of his skull distended, as if the shaper’s vaa-tumor had failed to seat itself properly. Long and slender, his arms and legs twitched continuously, yanked about by the gods, as they might do to a puppet.
Shimrra made a sound of angry impatience. “Come forward, Von Shul of Domain Shul and Melaan Nar of Domain Nar.”
The two consuls—midlevel intendants—advanced a few meters on their knees.
“I have pondered your grievances with each other,” Shimrra said when the throne’s dovin basal had forced the faces of the consuls to the floor, “and I now decree that you put them aside. I decree further that you redirect the energy that fuels your wrath into serving our common cause. Each of you claims that your troubles with each other began here, on Yuuzhan’tar, as have so many other petty rivalries between this domain and that one. But this is merely camouflage. I know that your dispute had its roots during our long migration through intergalactic space, and that that dispute has resurfaced here. But you are not entirely to blame.
“Absent wars to wage, what did we do but turn upon ourselves, sacrifice one another, compete for the favor of my predecessor Quoreal, or snipe behind one another’s backs? The gods were forgotten. You lost patience, you worried, you thought then that the gods had abandoned us—because our long-sought home was nowhere to be found. And that is precisely what you are doing now. Prefect Da’Gara and the Praetorite domains—what did their blasphemous actions earn them but ice graves on what little remains of Helska Four, a world so far removed from Yuuzhan’tar it might as well be in the galaxy we left behind? None less than Warmaster Czulkang Lah refused to believe me when