Traitor - Matthew Stover (iphone ebook reader .txt) 📗

thought you were nothing but a grandstander. A playacting glory hunter, more concerned with looking good than with doing good.”

Ganner laughed out loud. “You were right.”

“So were you.” Jacen held out his hand. “So: here’s our chance to show the Yuuzhan Vong what a grandstander and a bleeding heart can do.”

Ganner took Jacen’s hand and gripped it fiercely. “It’ll be a show they’ll never forget.”

Jacen stepped back and lifted his arms, and the pulse of scarlet and green glow from the arterial sigils on his robe synchronized with the shifting light of the bubbling slime below. Tentacles coiled upward behind him, beyond the lip of the platform, arching high overhead, trailing slime that shone and pulsed, framing him with a living corona: Jacen’s silhouette became a shadow cross within a bramble of light.

“Jacen—!” Ganner gasped, reaching toward him. “Behind you!”

“I know.” Jacen turned his face upward. The tentacles curved down to meet him; he lowered his hands to accept them as their shimmering coils settled across his shoulders. “Don’t be afraid. This is all part of it.”

The tentacles now lifted Jacen in their grip, bearing him up and off the platform, cradling him gently—almost lovingly—as they lowered him toward the bubbling slime, but down there those immense yellow eyes still glittered alien malice.

“Buy me ten minutes,” Jacen said. “That should be enough.”

The clatter of booted feet grew from the tunnel. Ganner paused for one last moment, watching Jacen be pulled beneath the surface of the slime. He felt a burst of power in the Force, a shove from below, an impulse: Go.

He bunched the front of his robe in his free hand and tore it off his body. The dark-glowing arterial sigils spasmed, leaking black light. He tossed the robe into a heap on the platform.

He went.

* * *

Nom Anor squinted through the smoke that boiled from the shattered gape of what had been the Great Door. Squad after squad of warriors slipped close around the twisted durasteel wreckage that pinged and groaned as it cooled. They spread out within the smoke- and shadow-filled Atrium, weapons at the ready, eyes straining for any glimpse of a target.

A squad of warriors had sprinted down the coral tunnel toward the Well, to reconnoiter.

That had been five minutes ago.

None had returned.

Nom Anor hung back in the doorway. He had not survived so much of this war by underestimating Jedi.

Red-gold slimelight pulsed through the smoke from the Well archway. A figure solidified in that archway: a silhouette approaching lazily through the smoke, haloed by the slimelight.

A human silhouette.

Bonelessly powerful: a sand panther, out for a stroll. Relaxed but alert. Poised.

Predatory.

A superstitious chill climbed Nom Anor’s spine.

Warriors fanned out, officers glancing back to their commander, who looked to Nom Anor. “This is your event, Executor. What would you have us do?”

“You! You there!” Nom Anor called nervously in Basic. “What are you doing there?”

The answer was a deep, mockingly cheerful growl. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m standing in your way.”

Ganner Rhysode. Nom Anor began to relax; this was Ganner Rhysode, the weakling who could not even mount the causeway. Ganner Rhysode who got no respect from the other Jedi. Ganner the poser, the playactor. The joke. Nom Anor snorted. He should just order the fool cut down—but Ganner didn’t sound weak now. Or foolish.

And what had happened to the missing recon squad?

And did Nom Anor really want to be responsible for starting a brawl in the Well of the World Brain?

He bit his lip so hard he tasted blood. “Stand aside! There are thousands of warriors out here! You cannot hope to stop us.”

“I don’t have to stop you. All I have to do is slow you down.”

A sharp buzzing crackle made Nom Anor jump. From the shadow’s hand sprang a meter-long bar of vividly sizzling amethyst.

“You want me to move?” The shadow beckoned with the blade of light. “Come on and move me.”

The smoke thinned, and cleared, and the human within the archway didn’t look at all like the Ganner Nom Anor remembered. This Ganner wore only faded brown leggings and battered leather boots. This Ganner was tall, broad-shouldered, and the light from his weapon gleamed on the sculpted muscle of his bare chest. The blade in his hand was steady as the roots of a mountain, but it was not this that made Nom Anor hesitate, made him run his thin yellow tongue nervously between his filed-sharp teeth.

It was the light in Ganner’s eyes.

He looked happy.

“There are thousands of warriors out here,” Nom Anor repeated, waving a futile fist. “You are only one man!”

“I am only one Jedi.”

“You’re insane!”

The man’s answering laugh was deep and long and bright, full of joy and freedom. “No. I am Ganner.”

He spun his shining blade in a dazzlingly complex flourish that illuminated the arch around him, making it shine like a rainbow frame for the pure, animal grace of his body.

“This threshold,” he announced through a happy grin, “is mine. I claim it for my own. Bring on your thousands, one at a time or all in a rush. I don’t give a damn.”

His flourish ended with the blade slanted before his chest, and his teeth flashed in the gloom.

“None shall pass.”

FOURTEEN

PATH OF DESTINY

They come at him one at a time, an endless stream, each warrior in turn charging toward honorable single combat.

Then—

They come two at a time.

By the time they begin to come in groups, they have to scramble over bodies of their dead comrades to reach him. A pile of bodies.

A pile that becomes a wall, a rampart.

Ganner Rhysode builds a fortress of the dead.

   From a safe vantage point—behind a twisted curve of durasteel that had once been part of the Great Door—Nom Anor watched with appalled fascination. All he could see through the smoke and the mass of warriors who pressed forward to engage the mad Jedi were flashes of brilliant purple, sometimes joined by the Jedi himself as he leapt and whirled and spun, always in motion, always attacking, stabbing