“Yes.”
“And so on that great day, Jacen Solo will himself capture his sister, his twin—he will drag her to the altar, and he will himself take her life in the Great Twin Sacrifice, and the will of the True Gods shall finally be brought to pass.”
“The True Gods’ will be done!” Tsavong Lah thundered.
“The True Gods’ will be done,” Nom Anor agreed.
“You will do this.”
“Yes, Warmaster.”
“You will not fail.”
“If it be within my power, Warmaster—”
“No,” Tsavong Lah said. “You do not understand. I tell you, Nom Anor, you will not fail. The True Gods are not mocked. Should Jacen Solo not turn to the True Path, no breath of this can be whispered; no hint of this can be thought. For Nom Anor, there is only victory; lacking victory, the creature that is currently called by the name Nom Anor shall be sacrificed to the True Gods as a nameless thing.”
Nom Anor swallowed. “Ah, Warmaster—?”
Tsavong Lah went on inexorably. “All who have breathed the air of this plan shall die, screaming and without names, and their bones shall be scattered to drift between the stars. In every Name of all True Gods, this is my word.”
Abruptly, the villip inverted to its quiescent state, folding in upon itself with wet slaps like raw meat smacking bone.
Nom Anor sat back, and discovered that he was trembling. This was not quite how he had expected matters to go. There’s the trouble with fanatics, he thought. They’re easy to manipulate, but somehow they take everything five steps too far.
He took a long sip of the dragweed broth in the sacworm that he had held, forgotten, throughout the interview. He turned to the other occupant of the small chamber. “Well, now we are partners in truth: together, we face either total victory or utter destruction,” he said heavily. “We are, as the Corellians say, off to a flying start.”
Across the quiescent villip, his partner met his gaze with unblinking avian calm.
“Well begun,” Vergere said neutrally, “is half done.”
TWO
THE NURSERY
Deep in the infinite space above the plane of the galactic ecliptic—in the spark-scattered velvet so far from any stellar system that the place was not, strictly speaking, even a place at all, only a statistical array of vectors and velocities—a small vessel of yorik coral dropped from hyperspace. It was so far from any observable point of fixed reference that its motion was arbitrary: on an Obroa-skai referent, the vessel streaked away at a respectable fraction of lightspeed; referent to Tatooine it swung in a long, lazy arc; referent to Coruscant it infell, gathering velocity.
Its twin dovin basals pulsed, emitting expanding ripples of gravity waves; some considerable time thereafter, those same dovin basals registered other space-time ripples in reply.
The vessel was not alone.
These answering ripples had a direction; the dovin basals of the small vessel were sensitive enough to register the femtosecond-scale difference between the instant one dovin basal detected a wave of space-time and the instant that wave reached its twin.
The small vessel of yorik coral altered course.
The object toward which it curved was a sphere of extravagant construction, hundreds of thousands of times the volume of the small vessel, featureless save for an array of black fins that girdled the globe and intersected at random, like mountain ranges on an airless moon. These fins glowed in the deep infrared, radiating waste heat into the void.
The vessel of yorik coral slowed to intercept the sphere, angling toward one of the smooth fleshy expanses between the radiating fins. As it closed the final few meters, a docking claw like the chelicerae of a spider-roach extended from its nose and gripped the semi-elastic surface. A few moments passed while dovin basals shimmered space-time at each other, and the signals thus exchanged were interpreted by specially bred cousins of villips, which passed on the information to the creatures who served as the guiding wills of the two living structures: shapers of the Yuuzhan Vong.
The smooth plain to which the vessel had attached itself bunched into sudden landscape, gathering into a spasmic impact crater whose rim reached out and out and out. A hundred meters beyond the nether tip of the coral vessel, the rim became lips, the crater a mouth that closed around the vessel, slowly contracting to vacuum-fit itself to the vessel’s every angle and curve.
The sphere swallowed.
Within seconds, the place where the vessel had rested was once again a broad, smooth plain of semi-elastic flesh, featureless and warm.
Jacen opened his eyes as the hatch sphincter dilated. Vergere stood outside. She did not seem inclined to enter. “You’re looking well.”
He shrugged and sat up. He chafed the new scars around his wrists, where the Embrace of Pain had rasped away his skin. The last of his scabs had peeled off two sleeps ago. “I haven’t seen you for a while,” he said.
“Yes.” Vergere’s crest fanned an inquiring green. “How have you been enjoying your vacation from the Embrace? I see your wrists have healed. How do your shoulders feel? Your hips and ankles? Can you walk?”
Jacen shrugged again, looking down. He had lost track of how many times he had slept and awakened again since the Embrace of Pain had finally released him. While his body had knit, he had never been able to make himself do more than glance at the branches and tentacles and sensory orbs of the Embrace of Pain. They were still up there, coiled around each other in eel-basket knots, pulsing faintly. Waiting. He didn’t know why they had released him.
He was afraid that if he stared at them too long, they would remember he was here.
Vergere extended a hand. “Arise, Jacen Solo. Arise and walk.”
He met her gaze, blinking astonishment. “For real?” he asked. “You’re taking me out of here? For real?”
A liquid shrug rippled along her too-flexible arm. “That depends,” she said sunnily, “on what you mean by here. And what you mean by real. But to
