Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

he intoned, once more in the rolling-thunder mode of his Avatar-of-God voice. “How do you dare disturb Me as I share the Light?”

Nom Anor stepped forward, and leaned close to Jacen to murmur, astonishingly, “Very good, Jacen Solo. You wear the mantle impressively.” Then he stepped back, and said more loudly, so that those nearby could hear, “The monitor creatures suddenly lost consciousness. We were concerned. Is all well?”

“Your concern is an insult,” Jacen snapped with magnificent arrogance.

Nom Anor’s eyebrows quirked as though he struggled to suppress a smile, but the master shaper and the ring of fancy-dress Yuuzhan Vong—priestly caste, Ganner guessed—seemed to take him considerably more seriously. Several of them flinched openly.

“Nothing can occur that is not My Will. If these creatures slept, it is because I made it so!”

Ganner blinked. Funny, he thought, how he can take pure truth and make it come out a lie.

Jacen turned to Ganner grandly. “Tell these weak, faithless creatures what has transpired within this chamber.”

Ganner blinked some more. “I, uh, I uh, I mean—”

“Speak! For I so command!” On the side of his face turned away from the vaulted hall, one of Jacen’s eyelids momentarily drooped again.

Ganner experienced an instant of perfect clarity.

He didn’t have to know.

He just had to decide.

Death waited for him no matter what. It wasn’t a question of whether he’d die.

It was only a question of how.

“I have seen the Light of the True Way!” His voice came out surprisingly steady, considering the flutter in his chest and the way his guts had turned to water. Hands within his sleeves, he squeezed Anakin’s lightsaber as though it were a talisman that could lend him strength. “And I, uh, I go to the Gods with joy in my heart, and, uh, and gratitude for Their Third Gift!”

Do you indeed? Nom Anor mouthed silently, a wicked gleam in his eye as though he were not in the least deceived, but one of the priests called out in a voice like an air taxi’s blarehorn: “Tchurokk sen khattazz al’Yun! Tchurokk’tiz!”

The assembled warriors answered with an avalanche roar. “TCHUROKK!”

Enthusiastic little beggars, aren’t they? Ganner thought unsteadily. They sounded like they were leading a cheer. He muttered softly to Jacen, “What are they saying?”

“They offer me a shadow of my due respect,” Jacen replied with regal assurance. “The words mean ‘Behold the avatar of the God.’ ”

“Tchurokk sen Jeedai Ganner! Tchurokk’tiz!”

“TCHUROKK!”

“And they, uh, like me too, huh?”

“They do not like you,” Nom Anor interjected, as cheerfully malicious as a well-fed Hutt. “No one likes you; they merely honor your willing sacrifice to the True Gods.”

“Yeah. My, uh, willing sacrifice. The True Gods. That’s right. So—what are we waiting for?”

“Nothing at all,” Nom Anor said. “Let’s get this show started, shall we?”

THIRTEEN

GLORY SICKNESS

Ganner walked one pace behind Jacen’s left shoulder, trying to look solemn and dignified rather than scared out of his mind. He was so nauseated his eyes were watering.

He fought to pay attention to something else. Anything else. If he kept thinking about how sick he was getting, he’d drop to his knees right here and vomit his guts out.

A broad ring of those Yuuzhan Vong who’d led the cheers back in the vaulted hall—whom Ganner had correctly guessed to be of the priestly caste—surrounded them at a respectful distance of about ten meters. Ahead, ringed at a similarly respectful distance by an honor guard of warriors, walked Nom Anor and the shaper who’d been in the hall: a big ugly beggar with a cluster of tentacles growing out of one side of his mouth.

The vanguard of the processional was a wedge of bizarrely mutilated warriors who carried various creatures of all sizes and indescribable shapes, creatures that the warriors stabbed and squeezed and twisted in time with their march, producing a kind of rhythmic music from their antiphonal screams of agony. And then behind the priests who ringed Ganner and Jacen marched an immense parade of warriors, rank upon rank marching in lockstep, carrying unit banners that were some kind of sapling whose tops sprouted multicolored snakes’ nests of writhing cilia, each different, distinctive, weaving patterns of color and motion that made Ganner’s queasiness decidedly worse.

But there was more to it than this. The whole business was making Ganner sicker and sicker.

He hated it.

Jacen spoke in quiet tones throughout the processional, relating bits of insight he’d gained into Yuuzhan Vong culture and biotechnology, keeping his voice low, half whispered, lips barely moving so that none of their escort would know he was talking. Ganner could only understand half of what he heard, and he was sure he wouldn’t remember half of what he understood. He couldn’t concentrate on what Jacen might be telling him; most of his attention had to stay focused on walking while his legs wobbled and kept trying to collapse. And did it matter what he remembered and what he didn’t? He wouldn’t live to tell anyone.

It wasn’t fear that was making him sick. He was afraid to die, sure, but he’d faced that fear before—without this knee-buckling nausea.

He clutched the handgrip of Anakin’s lightsaber up his sleeve; only that smooth solidity let him keep a composed expression on his face instead of puking down the front of his robe.

Maybe part of what was making Ganner sick was the world itself.

He’d thought he’d be ready for his first view of Coruscant; he’d heard dozens of tales about it from the refugees on the camp ships during his investigation. He’d heard about the insanely prolific jungle that patched the ruined planetary city. He’d been told about the dazzling orbital rings that some of the refugees called the Bridge. He knew that the Yuuzhan Vong had altered Coruscant’s orbit to bring it closer to its star.

But knowing these things was entirely different from walking out of cool shadow into a blue-white noon that jammed needles into his eyeballs and pounded sweat from his hairline, sweat that trickled into his mouth, his ears, trailed like a river down