Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

proclaim the Gospel of the True Gods to the whole galaxy on the day we take my sister—but we must prepare. We must practice, if the ceremony is to be flawless. I must practice.

Practice what? the Prophet asks. A sacrifice is not a complex ritual.

The alien speaks: The Great Sacrifice, when it comes, will be a willing sacrifice: the Other Twin will walk to her death eagerly, with head high and joy in her heart, knowing that she brings the Truth to this galaxy.

As will this one, the traitor claims. This is why you have made me what I am. I must bring him to the Truth. To the Light. He will hear Truth ring from my mouth, and see the Light of the God I Am shine from my eye.

The Prophet appears skeptical, but he says: Preparations will take some time.

Take whatever time you require, the traitor says. When all is prepared, I will speak to this Jedi.

And always, the Jedi Knight reaches into the Force here, to pound the traitor’s brain with the hammer of his refusal, and receives in return another invisible Force wink. The traitor never makes any other indication he’s aware of the Jedi Knight’s presence; and here he turns to the Prophet.

On that day, Ganner Rhysode will walk proudly at my heel, as I lead him into the Well of the World Brain, where we will together offer up his death to the glory of the True Gods.

It is always at this point that a familiar clench of dread squeezes him back down into darkness for a time, until he surfaces once more and begins the dream again. So it goes, over and over and over, etched in psychic acid upon his brain.

Over and over and over and over until—

With a great shuddering gasp, Ganner Rhysode awoke.

   Waking up hurt.

Somebody had stuck his whole arm to the elbow down Ganner’s throat, fingers jammed into his bronchi; now the fingers and hand and wrist and arm slowly withdrew, dry and hard and rough as a scab, grating up the inside of Ganner’s throat as he choked and retched and tried to cough. At the same time, tubes and wires and needles pulled out of his veins and nerves and through his stretching skin—

Ganner Rhysode, awaken! Awake and arise! It is commanded!

He knew he had been dreaming, and he knew he was waking up, but he couldn’t fight free of the dream. It stretched around him, gluey, clinging, membranes of goo dividing into thin strings and sagging ropes that bound him with impossible things: wild fantasies of having been captured by a dozen Yuuzhan Vong warriors who all looked like Jacen Solo, mad images of sacrifice and aliens and Jaina and that Nom Anor character—

His eyelids cranked open like rusted-shut hatches.

The arm that withdrew from his windpipe was less an arm than it was a branch, its bark coated with blood-tinged slime. The tubes that pulled free of his veins through his skin looked like ovipositors of immense bloated wasps that had grown like galls on the trunks of stunted trees to either side of him. He lay in a hammock that seemed to have been made of vines—but the vines writhed muscularly beneath him, flexing and squeezing like a net woven of snakes.

More vines dangled from the ceiling, long ropy vines, knotted and coiled—but they weren’t vines, they were more like tentacles, because vines couldn’t uncoil and coil again, untie and retie themselves in impossibly complex knots—and they weren’t tentacles, because tentacles don’t end in huge round glowing red eyes that even through all the coiling and tying seem to always focus on you with unblinking concentration …

Drugs, he thought groggily. They drugged me. I’m hallucinating.

“Awaken, Ganner Rhysode! Awaken to the Truth!”

This had to be a hallucination—had to be, because when he rolled his head to the side to blearily stare at whoever was giving him these pompous, vaguely stupid-sounding orders, the guy looked just like Jacen Solo.

Ganner blinked, and lifted a hand to wipe sleep gunk from his eyes—which was how he discovered he was no longer paralyzed, nor was he restrained. But he might as well have been: the alkaloids still circulating through his bloodstream made his hand feel only a couple of grams lighter than the Sun Crusher.

When he looked again, with slightly clearer vision, it was still Jacen.

But he was no longer the boy Ganner remembered.

Jacen was taller now, and broader across the shoulders. His brown curls had been sun-bleached to streaks of golden blond, and a dark beard sprang wiry from his jaw. His face had thinned, sharpened, refined: he had lost that impish softness, that playful roguishness that once had made him resemble his father, and replaced it with a cold-forged durasteel expression that reminded Ganner of Leia denouncing a corrupt Senator from the Chief of State’s Podium of the Great Rotunda.

He wore a long, flowing robe of black so dark that its folds vanished into formless night. Along his sleeves spidered an intricate design that glowed with a light of its own, chased in scarlet and viridian like a network of external arteries that pulsed light instead of blood. Draped over his shoulders he wore a surplice of shimmering white on which strange, unidentifiable sigils wrote themselves in twists of shining gold.

He opened his mouth to ask Jacen what kind of stupid masked ball he was planning to crash in this ridiculous costume, but before his drug-numbed lips could shape the words, he remembered:

Jacen Solo is a traitor.

“Do not fear, Ganner Rhysode,” he said, in a weird dark voice like a bad imitation of a hypnotist. “Instead rejoice! The day of your Blessed Release has arrived!”

“Does …” Ganner had to hack a wad of haven’t-talked-in-days out of his throat. “Does this mean … you’re going to let me go?”

“The Gifts of the True Gods are three.” His words fell like boulders down a well. “Life They give us, that we may serve Their Glory: this is the least of Their Gifts. Pain