Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

slither down their legs. The newly revealed warriors grab a real slave; one holds him while the other crushes the slave’s throat with a knife-hand strike. They step back and let the slave fall, watching dispassionately while he writhes in the dirt, choking to death.

“Jeedai-slave! Come out, or another will die. Then another, and another, until finally only you are left. Save their lives, Jeedai. Come out!”

Now Jacen’s waking meditation dream interpenetrates with the memory of another dream, a real dream, a Force dream so vivid he can still smell the coralskipper buds, can still see the scarified faces of the warrior guards and the coral-maimed bodies of the slaves: a dream he had two years ago, on Belkadan.

A dream in which he freed slaves of the Yuuzhan Vong.

How astonished he felt, how bereft, when that dream did not come true. When his attempt to fulfill its promise ended in disaster, in blood and death and torture, he felt as though the Force itself had betrayed him.

Now he sees that he had not been betrayed. He’d merely been impatient.

“Jeedai-slave! Come out!”

Jacen sighs, and surfaces from the meditation.

“All right,” he says quietly, a little sadly. “If you insist.”

His still shadow becomes a shade in motion, drifting noiselessly through the grove of blood-hungry polyps. He stops at the penumbra bordering the blue-white noon beyond. The amphistaffs whirl lethal halos at his back. “Here I am.”

“Farther,” the warrior commands. “Move beyond the reach of the grove.”

Jacen opens his empty hands. “Make me.”

The warrior turns his head fractionally toward his companions. “Kill another.”

“You,” Jacen says, “are no warrior.”

The warrior’s three companions jabber excitedly among themselves. The leader’s head snaps around as though yanked by a tractor beam. “What?”

“Warriors win battles without murdering the weak.” Jacen’s voice drips acid contempt. “Like all Yuuzhan Vong, you make war only upon the helpless. You are a coward from a species of cowards.”

The warrior stalks forward. His eyes glitter a crazed, feral yellow. “You call me coward? You? You simpering Jeedai brat? You shivering brenzlit, cowering in the shadow of your den? You slave?”

“This Jeedai brenzlit slave,” Jacen says distinctly, clinically, “spits upon your grandfather’s bones.”

The warrior lunges, taloned fingers reaching to tear the eyes from Jacen’s face. With an exhausted sigh, Jacen collapses before the warrior’s rush, falling to his back—while lightly taking the warrior’s outstretched wrists and planting one foot in the pit of the warrior’s stomach to make a fulcrum. Jacen rolls, kicking upward, and the warrior flails helplessly as he flips through the air into the blade-storm of the amphistaffs.

Jacen lies for a moment in the sudden rain of Yuuzhan Vong blood and gobbets of warrior flesh. He turns his head to watch the juvenile amphistaffs rake chunks of the warrior’s corpse toward the salivating gape of the polyps’ groundmouths.

Then he rises. He faces the remaining three. “Well?”

They exchange uncertain glances. At Jacen’s back, the polyps slurp and gurgle, and the amphistaffs whirl hungrily.

The warriors stand their ground, calling out in their own tongue.

In answer to their call, two of the squads who guard the shreeyam’tiz lumber heavily forward bearing amphistaffs of their own, bandoliers of thud bugs and other less familiar weapons, and wearing full vonduun crab armor. The shell of a vonduun crab can stop a lightsaber; it can resist even the atomic-diameter edge of an amphistaff blade.

One of the three nearby shows Jacen his teeth: long and needle-sharp, curving inward like a predator’s. “Nal’tikkin Jeedaihr’zlat sor trizmek sh’makk,” he spits. “Tyrokk jan trizmek, Jeedai.”

Jacen doesn’t need to speak their tongue to understand: no trick of wrestling will help a lone unarmed man against two squads of warriors, Jedi or not.

The warrior is advising him to prepare to die.

Jacen smiles. It’s a sad smile: melancholy, resigned.

He nods.

In a part of his mind far from the pain and the blood and the harsh blue-white glare, he can feel the dark satisfaction of the amphistaff polyps behind him as they swiftly, almost instantly digest the fallen warrior. He feels their glittering anticipation, and the shuddering release as they use the meal of warrior’s flesh to give themselves the strength to reproduce.

Amphistaff polyps breed asexually; the amphistaffs themselves become a polyp’s offspring, released from their nodules to squirm away in search of the proper ground to take root and begin their transformation into polyps themselves. Through his empathic connection, Jacen shows them the ground he recommends.

Trusting their friend, the amphistaffs take his advice.

He stretches forth his arms. The warriors can only stare in openmouthed awe as amphistaffs fall like leaves from the polyps at his back; as amphistaffs wriggle down the polyps’ knobby leathern trunks and slither through the grass.

Amphistaffs twine about Jacen’s ankles and climb his body like vines enveloping a forgotten jungle idol. They twist around his legs, his hips, his chest, coiling the length of his arms, shrouding his neck, curving up to embrace even his skull. The approaching squads of fully armed warriors slow uncertainly, not quite sure, now, how to attack.

Because the vonduun crab is not the only creature that can resist the cut of an amphistaff blade.

Jacen brings his hands together before him, and offers the warriors a solemn bow. When he parts his hands again, a mature amphistaff stretches between them, blade and spike, fully envenomed. As is every one of the seventeen amphistaffs that make up his armor.

Jacen says, “I’d like you all to meet some friends of mine.”

* * *

Nom Anor hurled his sacworm across the chamber. It splattered against the wall, then slid to the floor, where it gave out a tiny whistling sigh, and died. Instantly Nom Anor mastered himself again, wiping his lipless mouth with the back of his wrist.

“So it is over,” he muttered darkly. “We have failed. You have failed,” he amended, wondering if he could get far enough away in his coralcraft to escape Tsavong Lah’s anger at this new disaster, wondering if he could give himself up to the New Republic, if there was any way he could persuade