Reunion (28 page)

“For the first time in years, I feel … whole,” the girl said. “And that has to be right, surely?” She looked at Jaina. “I remember you being there, trying to help me. You didn’t do anything; you were just there. Even when part of
me wanted to attack you, you didn’t fight back. That convinced me that fighting was wrong. Your example helped heal my wounded mind. We would have destroyed each other had it not been for you.”

The girl’s hands moved weakly, made a strange gesture in front of her face. Then she reached out to take Jaina’s hand.

“That’s known as
us-hrok
,” she said. “It indicates my indebtedness and loyalty to you for your help. I offer it to you not as a Yuuzhan Vong, nor as a human who knows a few foreign traditions. This is from
me.
” The girl’s certainty seemed to falter for a second, then her determination firmed. “I will be grateful to you forever, Jaina Solo, sister of the one I loved. I will always consider you family, and will protect you with my life. I vow this on my honor, with all my strength.”

Jaina glanced briefly at Jag, flustered. “Thank you.”

Jag, too, was thrown by the girl’s newfound confidence. Where before there had been uncertainty and doubt, now he saw strength and surety.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” he said.

Tahiri nodded weakly. “For all of us,” she said.

“Well, you’re going to be okay.” Vigos stepped between them. “Your respiration is even and your pulse strong. You haven’t been out long enough for serious muscle deterioration to begin. You should be on your feet in no time.”

Tahiri tried to reply, but choked on her dry throat.

“Mom will be pleased to hear that,” Jaina said, filling the silence. “Where is she, by the way?”

Vigos glanced at Jag, who said simply, “On the
Falcon.
”

There was no keeping anything from her. “What’s happened, Jag?”

“A lot, to be honest. I wouldn’t really know where to start.”

“Just tell me what’s going on,” she said, sitting up in the bed, concerned.

“We’re in orbit around Esfandia. The Yuuzhan Vong are here, and so is Pellaeon.” He debated whether to tell her about the little surprise the Grand Admiral had ordered, but decided to save that for later. “The relay base itself has gone into hiding, and your parents went to look for it. They’re trapped somewhere on the surface right now. We can’t get in to them, and they don’t seem able to get out, either.”

She raised her eyebrows and shook her head, dumbfounded. “I must have been out for some time.”

“Don’t worry,” rasped a dry throat from the other bed. Tahiri’s eyes were fixed on Jaina. “The one thing a warrior never does is abandon her family. We’ll find them and bring them back, I promise.”

“Rest first, then fight,” Jaina said, smiling at the young girl. “And I’m sure we can fit a ‘fresher in there somewhere, too. I barely feel human at the moment. I dread to think how
you
feel.”

“Like a vua’sa’s armpit.” Tahiri laughed and Jag felt some of the residual tension ease from his posture. He didn’t need to understand the reference to get the joke.

Jaina looked up at him then, and her eyes were shining. That convinced him that it was all going to be okay. Jaina had expressed no reservations about Tahiri’s “new” character, or held any concerns for the girl’s recovery. She was absolutely confident that what had happened was to the young Jedi Knight’s benefit. That spoke volumes in her favor. On the strength of that, and as long as Tahiri stayed fighting on the right side, he would gladly call her a friend.

Nom Anor’s eyes snapped open in the darkness. Instantly awake, but disoriented, he tried to work out what
it was that had awoken him. Had he been dreaming? Had he forgotten to do something? It took him a good ten seconds to realize that the answer lay all around him. When he had reclined on the cot to rest his eyes, he had left a single yellow lichen torch glowing over his desk. Now the room was dark.

He lay silently in the darkness, listening. A soft movement came from the middle of the room, and he tensed, wondering what he should do. He could yell for the guards outside the door, but the chances were that if intruders had made it into his quarters, they’d already taken care of the guards anyway. He could reach for his coufee where it lay beside his cot, but he would have to expose his throat to do so. He could launch himself at where he thought his attacker was standing, judging by the sounds he’d heard, but it would be too easy to miscalculate and miss, or accidentally throw himself into the path of a ready weapon. Numerous possibilities tumbled through his mind, but each was quickly dismissed.

His plaeryin bol tensed automatically, reacting to the stress hormones that had begun to surge through his blood. If he could get in just one good shot at his attacker—

“Now!”

The word spat out of the darkness, and in an instant Nom Anor was rushed from two sides at once. He felt hands clutching at him, trying to pin him down. He fought them off as best he could, but it was difficult, surprised as he was by both the attack and the number of people involved.

He faced the assailant to his left in the hope of getting a better look. It was impossible. All he saw were shadows within shadows. He could make out an outline of the figure, however, and that was enough for now. Relaxing as though in defeat, he focused on the individual and
fired his plaeryin bol directly into the attacker’s face. He fell back with a cry. With his arm now free, Nom Anor swung his clenched fist at the one restraining his other arm and struck him firmly on the side of the face.

There was a grunt of pain, but this attacker continued to hang on.

“Hold him!” someone cried, and suddenly more figures emerged from the shadows.

Hands clutched at his skull and something pressed tight against the eye socket containing the plaeryin bol. It spasmed but was unable to fire.

How many are there
? he thought desperately, kicking out at the new attackers trying to restrain both his legs and arms. It was hopeless. Soon two of them had managed to pin down his shoulders, while his legs were being crushed beneath the large torso of a third. In the end he let the fight genuinely leave him and his body sag back onto his cot. There were simply too many of them. Better to conserve his strength than waste it on a pointless struggle.

He took deep and steady breaths in order to relax and focus. Battles were rarely won with blind rage, he reminded himself. He needed to know his enemy before he could beat them, and here in the shadows he knew nothing about them whatsoever.

A lambent flared from the doorway, casting a dim light across the faces of those holding him down. He didn’t recognize the two pinning his shoulders, although that hardly surprised him. They might have been members of his own group, but he rarely paid attention to any but those important to his plans. Whoever they were, they were just the lackeys of whoever was the mastermind behind the attack. A traitor, presumably.

The figure holding the lambent was another story altogether. Shoon-mi stepped forward with a coufee in his
other hand. The light gleaming off it matched the light in his eyes: cold, hard, and deadly.

Nom Anor frowned, feeling both confused and, strangely, delighted at the impudence of his religious adviser. This was not what he had expected at all.

“
Shoon-mi
?” he said, feigning debilitating surprise.

The Shamed One stared down disdainfully at Nom Anor, the blue sacks beneath his eyes pulsing with repressed delight. He shook his head slowly, as if in disapproval of his master.

“You see?” he said to his lackeys. “He is no
god
!”

“Nor have I ever professed to be, you fool!” Nom Anor responded. “Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve taught you—”

“But you
could
have been.”

A sense of the absurd rolled over Nom Anor as he lay there, pressed flat to the bed. He was unable to resist a bark of laughter. “You are either far more intelligent than I gave you credit for, Shoon-mi, or more stupid than I could have ever imagined.”

The Shamed One uttered a vitriolic hiss and struck Nom Anor across the face with the back of the hand holding the coufee. Then, flipping his hand over, he pressed the blade firmly against the ex-executor’s throat. “You dare call
me
stupid when I am the one holding your life in my hands?”

“Holding the power of life or death over another doesn’t automatically give you intelligence, Shoon-mi,” Nom Anor retorted. “You have me at a disadvantage at the moment, that’s all.”

“At the
moment
?” Shoon-mi laughed. “You believe you can escape your end here,
Master
?”

There was only a hair’s breadth of skin between Nom Anor’s artery and the coufee. A simple push was all that separated him from death. Nevertheless, he didn’t allow alarm to show on his face.

“The question is not whether I will escape my death,” he said slowly, carefully, “but rather how
you
will escape yours.”

Shoon-mi glared down at Nom Anor. “You threaten me even when you stand on oblivion’s precipice?”

There was a manic look in Shoon-mi’s eye—a desperate need to prove himself against the one who’d had him at such a disadvantage for so long.

“I’m in no position to threaten you, Shoon-mi,” he said. “I’m merely wondering how you ever expect to get away with this. The faithful will rise against you when they find out. You know that, don’t you? Without me, there will be nothing to hold them together.”

“That would only be a problem if they knew you were dead.”

“Ah.” Nom Anor would have nodded, but with the coufee against his throat, it wasn’t advisable. “The Prophet will not be dead, although I might be. You’re planning on becoming me, is that it? Using the masquer, you intend to use my public face to hide your own and take control of the heresy.”

Shoon-mi allowed himself a slight smile, then. “Yes, I do.”

“And you’ll explain your own disappearance by mutilating my body and saying it’s yours. Then you’ll announce that you narrowly averted assassination by killing the one who was supposed to be your most loyal supporter.”

“It seems a practical plan,” Shoon-mi said. “I shall hide the truth behind the truth—a practice I have learned from you, Master.”

Now Anor allowed himself a faint smile; even now, Shoon-mi still didn’t know the entire truth of Nom Anor’s identity.

“And what of these you have turned against me? What have you promised them, Shoon-mi?”

The Shamed One hesitated, glancing at those holding Nom Anor down. That brief hesitation was all Nom Anor needed to know what lay in store for them: they would be killed at the first opportunity because they knew too much about Shoon-mi and his ambitions.

“They will stand beside me as we attain our freedom,” the Shamed One said. “They will be the personal bodyguards of the Prophet.”

“Indeed. And they expect you to show them the same sort of loyalty as you’ve shown me this night, Shoon-mi?”

“I would have remained loyal to you until the end,” the Shamed One said earnestly. “For a while I even believed in you. But now …” He shook his head. “This movement needs clarity of vision; this movement needs a
true
leader.”

“But you’re forgetting one thing,” Nom Anor said.

“I’m forgetting
nothing
,” Shoon-mi hissed.

“No, you are,” Nom Anor insisted. He knew he had to keep Shoon-mi talking, keep playing for time. Every second he stayed alive was a second longer that a chance to reverse his situation might present itself. And the best way to do this was to play upon the Shamed One’s insecurities and uncertainties. “In fact, I can’t believe you’re so naive as to have missed it.”

“If you think for a second that that I won’t kill you—” Shoon-mi started, and the coufee pressed harder into Nom Anor’s throat.

“I have no doubts that you would kill me, Shoon-mi,” Nom Anor gasped placatingly—although there was a look in Shoon-mi’s face that made Nom Anor wonder if the Shamed One really
could
kill him. He was certainly taking a long time about it. “My life is most definitely in your hands; I don’t deny this. But why are you
really
betraying me? Because I ordered you around? Because I kept you in the dark about certain things?”

Shoon-mi pulled back slightly. Nom Anor took the opportunity to catch his breath.

“Tell me, please, so that I may at least understand why I am to die at your hand.”

“Because you offer your followers no better than what they had under Shimrra!” There was such vitriol in the Shamed One’s tone that it startled even those holding Nom Anor down. “People came to us, and you used them as though they were
nothing
to you. You sacrificed them without even the decency of learning their names, while yours was on their tongues constantly. They
believed
in you; they believed in the
Jeedai
!” Shoon-mi shook his head. “The
Jeedai
would never have done what you did, Amorrn. All of this has been for nothing but your own glory. You have not spread the word of the
Jeedai
for the sake of the Shamed Ones; you have used it for your own benefit!”

“As you do now for yours, Shoon-mi?”

The blade was once more against his throat, this time hard enough to break the skin. Nom Anor felt blood seep around the edges of the coufee and trickle down his neck.

“I should—”

“Yes, you should,” Nom Anor interrupted. “Kill me! Come on, Shoon-mi! I’m sure you have more pressing things to do than stand around here talking to me. You need to start planning your freedom, remember?”

“You mock me even with death’s breath upon you?”

Nom Anor allowed himself a wide smile. His display of fearlessness had clearly rattled Shoon-mi.

“You know, perhaps I was wrong about you, Shoon-mi. Perhaps I was wrong when I said you’d forgotten something. Perhaps you never really knew it at all.”

“Knew
what
?” It was clear that, despite the obvious advantage, Shoon-mi wasn’t as self-assured as he was prepared to admit.

Nom Anor smiled. “That it’s not going to work.”