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All around Shedao’s Chazrach other soldier-slaves attacked and fought. More energy bolts lit the further recesses of the warren. Slaves went down, writhing, hands clawing at leaking wounds. Infidels, shrieking out their last moments, collapsed in bloody heaps. Slaves stepped over bodies—both those of other Chazrach and of infidels—pushing themselves to get at more of the enemy. The ambush had become a rout, with the infidels seeking escape, but the flood of Chazrach made that impossible.

Then Shedao Shai felt the soothing sting of pain. It entered his back just above his right hip and cut toward his belly. He felt the Chazrach try to suppress the pain as he spun away from it, to the left. This allowed the weapon that had stabbed him to slip free of the wound, minimizing the pain a bit, but doing nothing to stem the panic rising as the Chazrach realized he’d been seriously wounded.

Coming around, the Chazrach brought his amphistaff up and almost missed killing his foe. The infidel that had stabbed him was female and certainly juvenile. The stroke that would have taken an adult across the throat slashed her face at eye height. The weapon crushed bone and ripped through the braincase. The infidel jerked as the weapon came free, spraying blood against the broken ferrocrete of the warren’s walls. She fell to the ground like a discarded wet cloak, yet the vibroblade she’d used to open the slave’s side remained clutched in her hand, buzzing in an abominable imitation of life.

Shedao Shai arched his back and tore the cognition hood from his head. He did not fear the Chazrach’s reaction to the wound, his going into shock and collapsing. Shedao Shai had lived through that sort of thing many times before. This time, though, he would not have himself sullied by the impressions of a coward. I will not be tainted.

The Yuuzhan Vong commander opened his arms and breathed deeply there in the cavity at the heart of Legacy of Torment. He knew others would find his fastidious rejection of the Chazrach’s final impressions to be an affectation. Deign Lian, his immediate subordinate, certainly would, but then Domain Lian had a more glorious history than Domain Shai, at least until recently. A history of successes allowed them to become sloppy and weak. Lian has been given over to me so I may instill in him the proper passions of a warrior.

Shedao Shai knew that what he had sensed in the Chazrach would be seen as a minor thing by many, but it was not the Shai way to allow himself to be tainted. The pain the slave had felt when the vibroblade—a blasphemous weapon that corrupted an innocent and injected her into the war—had been met with rejection. The Chazrach had been given a clear path to salvation, yet had turned from it.

Pain was not to be rejected, but embraced. As Shedao Shai saw it, the only true constant in reality was pain. Birth was pain, death was pain, all change required pain. To reject pain was to deny the very nature of the universe. Personal weakness distanced people from pain, which was not to be worked past, but woven through one so a being could become transcendent and be transfigured into the very likeness of the gods themselves.

Shedao Shai walked to one of the pitted chamber walls and caressed a pearlescent orb embedded in it. As if it were black beach sand being washed away, color drained from the wall, rendering it transparent. Behind it, arranged in a pyramidal hierarchy, lay relics of Domain Shai. Only a fraction of them had been stored here. By no means would so valuable a collection be entrusted to one person, and certainly not placed on a vessel like Legacy of Torment. The relics had been chosen by the domain’s elders specifically to inspire this one of their scions.

Shedao Shai played a hand over the barrier between him and the bones therein encased, pausing only at the open spot in the lower left corner. He intended to enshrine there the relics of Mongei Shai, his grandfather, a valiant warrior who had perished on a scouting mission to a world