Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [31]
“The weapon of the Jeedai!” one of the warriors shouted.
“More sacrilege!” another said.
“Hold your tongues or forfeit them,” Shimrra snapped. “This is the energy blade taken from the Jeedai who killed you in great numbers in the Well of the World Brain. The one whom so many of you hold in reverence—Ganner. Think of the blade not as an abomination, then, but a holy relic of that warrior’s might.”
“Master Shaper Kwaad has desecrated herself,” a seer said.
“If you take issue with her familiarity with the stillborn technology,” Shimrra replied calmly, “then denounce as well the contrivances Master Kwaad and her shapers created to foil the enemy’s shadow bombs, their decoy dovin basals, and their yammosk jammers. Condemn, too, the mabugat kan that have ingested the enemy’s deep-space communications arrays, and have enabled us to subjugate more worlds in a klekket than had been conquered in the time since my arrival in the Outer Rim.” He gestured to the lightsaber. “For this energy blade is powered by one of our own lambent focusing crystals. Hence it has already been sanctified.”
The remark was enough to quiet everyone in the hall.
Shimrra nodded again. “Carry on, Master Shaper.”
Moving directly to one of the slayers, Qelah Kwaad ignited the lightsaber, raised it to her opposite shoulder, and, with a slashing motion, drew the violet blade diagonally across the slayer’s chest.
The smell of burned flesh wafted through the hall.
Shimrra turned slightly to face the commanders. “Only a furrow where any one of you would lie in two pieces on the floor.”
“They are more vonduun crab than Yuuzhan Vong,” High Priest Jakan muttered.
Shimrra seethed. “Vonduun crab, dovin basal, yammosk, warrior … Need I remind you, of all people, that we are all grown from the same seed?”
Nom Anor—slightly taller than the average human, disfigured by ceremony and by his own hand, fitted with a false eye that could spit poison—waited uneasily at the entry to Shimrra’s private chambers in the rounded crown of the sacred mountain. Three sullen slayers stood stiffly to one side of the membranous curtain, and a pair of priests to the other, purifying Nom Anor with clouds of fragrant vapor puffed from the dorsal scent gland of a well-fed but skittish thamassh.
He hadn’t been summoned to private audience with the Supreme Overlord since his return from Zonama Sekot, and he wasn’t sure what to expect.
The membrane shimmered and parted to reveal Onimi, gesticulating to Nom Anor.
“Enter, Prefect,” Shimrra’s pet said, affecting a supercilious tone.
Nom Anor edged past him into the spacious circular chamber. Shimrra sat in the center of the room, atop a circular dais, in a high-backed seat that lacked the pomp of his public throne. A blood moat encircled the seat, and off to one side a yorik coral staircase with a finely wrought railing spiraled into the summit. A hardened module of the worldship, Shimrra’s inner sanctum, like the Well of the World Brain, could be detached from the Citadel if necessary and launched into deep space.
“Did you not wonder when we three would meet again?” Onimi asked softly as Nom Anor passed.
Nom Anor ignored the question and approached the throne, genuflecting at the edge of the foul-smelling moat. From an inner pocket of his green robe, he removed the lightsaber that had stirred so much strife in the Hall of Confluence earlier on.
“Dread Lord, your desire was that this be delivered to you.” Nom Anor kept his gaze lowered while Shimrra took the weapon from his hand; he looked up with alarm when he heard the distinctive snap-hiss of the lightsaber’s energy blade.
The mere sound of the weapon evoked jarring memories of an incident in the Well of the World Brain a year earlier, when Jacen Solo and Vergere had held a similar blade to his neck before they had made their escape from Yuuzhan’tar. Nom Anor had spent countless moments since wondering how his