Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

They give us, that we may learn Life’s value lies only in Their Service: this is a greater Gift. But the Greatest Gift of the Gods is Death: it is Their Release from the Burden of Pain and the Curse of Life. It is their reward, their grace, their mercy, granted liberally even to the unjust and the infidel.”

Captured. Drugged. Helpless. About to be murdered. Boy, it’s a good thing I was so cautious and unobtrusive, Ganner thought muzzily. Otherwise I might have gotten myself into trouble.

“Um, yeah, y’know,” he said with a weak laugh, “those wacky gods … I guess they mean well, but they just don’t know when to stop. They’re way too generous. I’m getting along fine with just the first Gift. The other two, hey, y’know, I can wait—”

“Silence!” Jacen commanded, stretching forth his arms, hands high, palms forward as though to address a multitude from a mountaintop. “Waste not your breath in prattle! Hear now the lore of the True Way!”

Ganner stared, speechless, but instead of continuing, Jacen’s eyes drifted closed. He swayed in place as though he were about to faint.

“Jacen?”

One hand curled to a fist, then extended a forefinger: Wait.

“Jacen, what did they do to you? Whatever it is, we can fix it. You have to come back with me, Jacen. You don’t know what’s been happening. Jaina … everyone needs you. I don’t know what they’ve done to you, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever you’ve done, it’s not your fault. We can help you—”

Jacen’s eyes opened, then his left lid drooped in a long, slow wink. Ganner’s mouth snapped shut.

Jacen’s eyes closed again.

Then slowly, one at a time, so did each eye on the end of each of the tentacle-vines that hung from the ceiling: as the red glow within each orb faded into darkness, a pair of vertical eyelids squeezed across them, and the tentacle-vines gradually relaxed, hanging limp, motionless.

Jacen dropped his arms and opened his eyes. His face seemed to collapse into an exhaustion too profound for any human to bear. “How do you feel? Any strength coming back? You think you can walk?” He sounded like a teenager again—but a teenager old beyond his years.

Old—too old—that’s part of what was so strange about him. Something in his eyes: some old, cold knowledge, a broken admission of bitter truths, that made him not resemble a Solo at all.

“What are you—what’s going on? Jacen—”

“We can talk now, but not for long. I persuaded all the creatures monitoring us to take a nap.”

“Creatures? Monitoring? I don’t—”

“They were watching us. That was the point of that silly nerf-and-Wookiee show just now. The Yuuzhan Vong have decided I’m the avatar of one of their Twin Gods.”

Ganner stared. His life had become a succession of inexplicable strangenesses.

“I had a dream—a dream about a sacrifice—you were going to kill me, then find Jaina and kill her, too … That was just a dream, wasn’t it?” He swallowed. “Wasn’t it?”

Jacen reached into one sleeve and pulled out a pouch similar to the one in which he’d carried that poison pad back on the camp ship; this pouch contained a similar wad of damp fabric, which Jacen began to apply directly to the blood-welling punctures where the tube-vines had withdrawn through Ganner’s skin.

“They can’t see us or hear us right now. Pretty soon somebody’s going to come around to find out why. We have to be ready to go when they get here.”

“Go? Go where? Where are we, Jacen? What—hey, what are you doing to me? What is that stuff?” Everywhere the moisture of the pad touched, Ganner stopped bleeding. Strength flowed back into his drugged muscles.

“We’re on Yuuzhan’tar.” Jacen kept wiping him down with the pad. “The Yuuzhan Vong homeworld.”

Ganner had heard the name from refugees on the camp ships. “You mean Coruscant.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Just changing a name doesn’t make it—”

“The Yuuzhan Vong remake everything they touch.” Jacen’s hand fell to his side, and a dark distance stretched his gaze far beyond the walls of this small chamber. “It’s not about names. My name is still Jacen Solo.”

Ganner frowned.

An instant later, Jacen seemed to remember where he was. He dropped the pad on the floor and shook out a long, flowing robe of white. “Here, sit up. Put this on.”

Ganner discovered, to his astonishment, that he could now move without discomfort. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the hammock. The Yuuzhan Vong had left him his boots and leggings, but he was obscurely grateful to Jacen for providing the robe; being bare-chested here made him feel oddly uncomfortable. Vulnerable. He stood and shrugged into the robe, marveling at how good he felt. Being dressed. Being able to stand. He never could have guessed what profound joy might spring from such simple pleasures.

A shimmer of motion caught his eye, and he looked down. The robe he wore bore glowing designs like Jacen’s, colors pulsing along arterial networks down the sleeves and front, except the designs on Ganner’s robe were in black and green upon the white.

He frowned. “What’s this?”

“It’s your sacrificial robe. For the processional to the Well of the World Brain.”

Ganner stared. His dream flooded back to him.

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.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he said. He started pulling the robe off over his head.

“Oh, yes I do.”

“This is some kind of trick.” Wasn’t one of the Yuuzhan Vong Twin Gods supposed to be some kind of trickster or something? How much truth was Jacen telling? “This is all some kind of trick. You’re lying to me.”

“Well, actually, yeah. I am.”

Ganner stopped, staring at Jacen out through the neck hole of the robe, which was now halfway over his head. Jacen’s lips twitched in that unmistakable Solo half smile. “Everything I tell you is a lie.”

“What?”

“See, the thing is, everything everyone tells you is a