Cilghal spread her webbed hands.

"On what the Force tells me."

Kenth glanced around the table.

"Do any of you also feel that way?"

"I do," Jaina said. "Jacen feels farther away than he did when we received Luke and Mara's transmission." She shook her head somberly. "I don't feel him as distinctly."

Kenth inhaled with purpose.

"That's good enough for me."

He compressed his lips.

"I say we have a talk with the Prophet."

Kyp snorted.

"I agree. But getting onto Coruscant won't be easy-even with Peace Brigade and trade ships being allowed to land there."

Alema looked from Kyp to Kenth.

"Could we appeal to Alliance command for help in inserting some of us? "

Kenth shook his head.

"Not without explaining what we're after-or why we didn't inform command that we'd sanctioned Corran and Tahiri's mission to Zonama Sekot.

If Intelligence learns that we pa.s.sed on a chance to capture a shaper, a priest, and the Prophet, of all people..."

"We could go to Wedge," Markre Medjev suggested.

Kenth nodded.

"We could, and I'm sure he'd do everything in his power to get us onto Coruscant. But I don't want to put him in the position of having to lie to Sovv and Kre'fey."

"I agree," Cilghal said.

Tresina nodded.

"Likewise."

"This is beginning to sound like Myrkr all over again," Kyp said.

Zekk looked at him.

"If Anakin hadn't taken on that mission, all of us might be voxyn fodder by now."

"Zekk's right," Octa Ramis added. "If it sounds like Myrkr, it's because we have no choice but to go."

Kenth straightened and adopted a determined expression.

"We'll give Master Skywalker a week. If we don't hear from him by then, I'll a.s.semble a strike team."

FIFTEEN.

Its balloonlike bone-white outriggers buffeted by gusting winds, the airship moved swiftly over the devastated surface of Zonama Sekot.

Luke, Mara, Jacen, and the Yuuzhan Vong priest, Harrar, were crammed onto the rear portion of the gondola's tiny cabin. Saba Sebatyne and a Ferroan male named Kroj'b had the controls.

Companion of the manta-shaped dirigible Elegance Enshrined, Kroj'b had arrived in the Middle Distance only the previous day, but had agreed to accompany the Jedi on their mission to the southern realm. Next to the two pilots stood Jabitha, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak. At three thousand meters the air was frigid, and the howling wind made conversation difficult. Even if that hadn't been the case, no one seemed inclined to talk. Jacen was broodingly silent; Mara, preoccupied and restless. Saba, at least, had a bewildering a.s.sortment of organiform control levers to busy her. Luke raised the cowl of his robe and shoved his hands deep into the robe's sleeves. The Force spoke quietly on Zonama Sekot. The rain had finally ceased in that part of the planet, but the thick cloud cover remained. The sun-whatever star it was, named or unknown-was a broad smear of incandescence behind the gray veil. Persistent chill wind rustled the giant boras and was fast stripping them of their globular leaves.

Many of the leaves had turned blue and yellow, as if bruised.

Something seldom seen in the Middle Distance-except at high alt.i.tude-vapors froze during the long nights, leaving the canyon floors coated in white until the sun rose. Thin sheets of transparent ice formed over quiet pockets of the still-swollen river. When glimpsed at all, animals could be seen seeking shelter in caves or burrows, or fashioning durable nests, as if in preparation for a long winter. Boras seeds, too, had been observed creeping off into the tampasi, perhaps to seek nourishment among the oldest of the iron-tipped boras and wait for the lightning strikes that would split and shape them. The Ferroans rarely ventured out before midday, and then only for long enough to gather firewood or effect repairs to their cliffside dwellings.

Most of them avoided the Jedi whenever possible or, when not, exchanged few words. None, however, had issued further demands that Harrar be turned over to them. Luke a.s.sumed that young Maydh had allayed fears that the Yuuzhan Vong priest was a threat. He gazed through the cabin's aft windscreen at the wounds Zonama had suffered.

Quakes had opened deep trenches in the savannas, landslides had altered the course of rivers, fires had ravaged vast tracts of tampasi.

Luke had considered taking Jade Shadow up to survey and catalog the damages-perhaps attaining orbit for just long enough to survey the nearby stars, as well-but he couldn't trust that the planet wouldn't jump into hypers.p.a.ce again, as it had after its initial reversion to reals.p.a.ce.

Covertly he looked at Jabitha, then at Harrar. He couldn't recall a time when he had been so close to a Yuuzhan Vong and not engaged in fighting for his life-save perhaps on the occasions he had stood close to Nom Anor. But then, any moments spent with Nom Anor const.i.tuted a duel, of sorts. For the tenth time since the airship journey had begun, Luke tried to see Harrar in the Force, but perceived only an absence. Despite Vergere's a.s.surances to the contrary, Harrar-and by extension all Yuuzhan Vong-did not seem to exist in the Force. There the priest sat, not three meters away, and Luke couldn't sense him. Harrar was nothing more or less than what he appeared to be: a tall, sinewy humanlike man, absent some of his fingers, and marked with tattoos, scars, and other modifications. Luke knew that he could use the Force to levitate Harrar, to pirouette him about the small cabin, but he couldn't see him in the same way he could see Mara, Jacen, Saba, and Jabitha-as a luminous being; not as the crude stuff of flesh and bone, but as an egg-shaped being of light.

Vergere, who had willingly spent fifty years among the Yuuzhan Vong, had maintained that the seeming invisibility of the Yuuzhan Vong owed not to any inherent failure of the Force, but to the way Luke and his fellow Jedi perceived the Force. The implication was they had somehow failed to grasp that the Force was grander and more far reaching than they understood it to be.

Luke could accept that. His training had been rushed; and with the deaths of Obi-Wan and Yoda he had been obliged largely to pursue his own counsel, and find his own way to mastery. He would have been the first to admit that his understanding of the Force might be limited or incomplete; that he had perhaps become more a Master of the Living Force than what the late Vergere had called the Unifying Force.

But even that deficiency should not have prevented him from being able to see Harrar. Either Vergere had left something out of her lectures-which Luke wouldn't have put past her-or her own understanding of the quandary was incomplete. Luke didn't for a moment doubt that the Fosh Jedi had somehow succeeded in tutoring herself to a kind of mastery-despite having been forced to conceal her Jedi abilities from her captors-but the matter of the Yuuzhan Vong's invisibility ran deeper than Vergere knew, or had allowed. Perhaps she believed, as Yoda had at times, that her responsibility ended with setting Luke on the proper path.

Perhaps that was the way among the Jedi of the Old Republic. For all the education and practice each had undergone, the achievement of mastery was ultimately the outcome of a personal quest for understanding.

If any of the new Jedi order grasped this on an intuitive level, it was Jacen. Long before his reeducation by Vergere-some said reindoctrination-Jacen had sought to reach a personal understanding of the Force. In that, he was much like Leia, a Knight in her own right, who had for her own reasons resisted taking up the path of the Jedi. It was Jacen who had insisted that Harrar accompany them on the journey Jabitha had proposed a day earlier, when she had visited Luke, Mara, and the others in their cliff dwelling.

"Sekot is aging," Jabitha had said. "I feel her, and yet I feel estranged from her. She remains in exile to puzzle out what has happened; and in withdrawing, she neglects Zonama. I don't think she has done so deliberately. It is as if she has been abducted by dark forces, and is somehow imprisoned."

"Nom Anor, Nen Yim, and I are responsible for what has happened to Sekot," Harrar had said. "We should never have come here. If the G.o.ds haven't already turned their backs on the Yuuzhan Vong, they will now, for we have despoiled a living world."

Jabitha had listened to the priest's confession without comment.

She said, "I know where we can begin to seek Sekot. A place where the Force is strong..."

Harrar seemed to feel Luke's eyes on him, and turned. His own eyes were moist, and tears had left streaks on his tattooed cheeks. The cause might have been the wind rushing through cracks in the cabin.

"I am overcome," he said sadly. "Even with all its recent injuries, this is the world I have dreamed of. The world all my people have dreamed of. The one that ordained our past; the one we prayed would prefigure our future. A world of symbiosis, rather than compet.i.tion and predation. The very world we have tried time and again to re-create, only to end up with facsimiles. It is no small wonder I felt nostalgic for this place the moment we landed; that I felt I'd arrived home, though I'd never been here. "

"If the Yuuzhan Vong evolved on a world like this," Luke said, "what turned you to war?"

Harrar took a moment to reply.

"The ancient texts are unclear. It appears that we were invaded by a race that was more technological than animate. We called on the G.o.ds for protection, and they came to our aid, providing us with the knowledge we needed to convert our living resources to weapons. We defeated the threat, and, empowered by our victory, we gradually became conquerors of other species and civilizations."

Jabitha interrupted, instructing Kroj'b to steer the airship southwest. The terrain grew more and more rugged. Jagged mountains of crushed lava rose steeply into the clouds. Braided tails of orange-tinted water plunged from the heights into thickly forested gorges. The wind blew fiercely, and the temperature began to fall below freezing. At Jabitha's direction Kroj'b and Saba piloted the airship down toward the expansive talus field of a mountain that struck Luke as being younger than Ben and twice as unpredictable.

"Here is where my father's fortress once stood," Jabitha explained, after the airship had been anch.o.r.ed to the denuded slope. "Sekot showed Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi and Anakin Skywalker a mental image of the fortress as it was before the advent of the Far Outsiders."

"The Far Outsiders have a name, Jabitha," Harrar said. "It is the Yuuzhan Vong who toppled your father's fortress."

"Of course," she said. "Old habits are not easily broken."

Luke asked Saba to remain with Kroj'b in the airship; then he and the rest emerged from the cabin and began to follow Jabitha uphill, fighting a cold, strong wind that swept down from the invisible summit.

Luke saw the cave entrance before Jabitha drew everyone's attention to it.

The air inside was warm and remarkably humid. The cave angled down into the mountainside, and Luke realized immediately that what they were in was actually an ancient lava tube. The floor was paved with coa.r.s.e pebbles that crunched underfoot. Cooled magma from deep in the planet, the walls were composed of dense black stone, but in some places they glowed with a faint bioluminescence.

"How like the interiors of our s.p.a.ce vessels," Harrar said.

Luke could see the resemblance, but he was reminded of something entirely different-the cave on Dagobah that Yoda had dared him to enter.

But while that place had been strong in the dark side, the lava tunnel felt enchanted-strangely maternal and enfolding. He began to sense the presence of the animating intelligence he had come to know during his short time on Zonama, the one helped to consciousness by the first Magister, Leor Hal, who had also named the planet in the Ferroan language "World of Body and Mind."

"Could this be another of Sekot's tests?" Mara wondered while they walked.

"I don't think so," Luke said. "Unless Sekot is testing itself."

"Stop there," the voice of Sekot said, speaking through a suddenly transfixed Jabitha. "Who walks with you, Jedi Master? Two I recognize, but the third..."

"He is called Harrar," Luke said, not to Jabitha but to the tunnel itself. "He came to Zonama in the company of the one who sabotaged you."

Jabitha turned to Harrar.

"How is it I seem to know this one? My memories go back billions of turnings, and this one carries a message to me of distant times and distant events."

"Harrar is of the people you know as the Far Outsiders," Luke said.

"The Yuuzhan Vong, who tried to conquer Zonama, shortly before the arrival of Vergere."

Jabitha shook her head.

"Those times are not distant, Jedi Master. But why can't I perceive him? Not as I do the children of the Firsts; not nearly as I do the Jedi...

. Yes, I recall having the same experience with the Far Outsiders-they seemed to exist outside the Force."

"No, Sekot," Luke said. "Even though you can't perceive Harrar, he exists within the Force."

Jacen's right hand went to his chest, as if to touch the scar left from the piece of slave coral Vergere had implanted in him. He swung to Harrar.

"Why did the Yuuzhan Vong leave their home galaxy?"

Harrar firmed his scarred lips, then said, "Some have interpreted the ancient texts to suggest that we were... banished."

"For what reason?" Jacen persisted.

"Our infatuation with war and conquest. Some interpret our long journey as an attempt to win back the favor of the G.o.ds."

Jacen thought about it.

"Your ancestors were banished because they turned to war. They did the opposite of what was expected of them. Did... the G.o.ds banish you from the Force?"

When Harrar lifted his head, his face was a mask of fearful confusion.

"There is nothing in our legends about the Force."

"But even you compared the Force to your G.o.ds," Mara said.

Luke took Harrar by the shoulders, as if to shake him, but only eased him to his feet.

"A power-call it the G.o.ds if you have to-may have separated you from the original symbiosis. Your people experienced intolerable pain, and pain has been the only way back to that symbiosis."

Harrar nearly collapsed in Luke's grip.

"Separated from the symbiosis. From our primordial homeworld..."

Luke dropped his hands to his sides and turned in astonishment to Jabitha, as if waiting for Sekot to confirm what he was thinking.

"I now understand," Sekot said finally. "This one-his people-has been stripped of the Force."

SIXTEEN.

There hadn't been a ceremony to equal it in untold generations. As vast as the worldships were-and notwithstanding the views of distant stars and even more distant galaxies-they weren't large enough to contain the magnificence of high ritual. Compared to Yuuzhan'tar's Place of Sacrifice, the worldships were mere theaters. And yet, for all the grandeur and spectacle, Nom Anor was too consumed by apprehension to appreciate a moment of it. He marched in step with the procession, but the expression on his face would have been better suited to someone on his way to be executed.

Located midway between Shimrra's Citadel and the skull-shaped bunker that housed the Well of the World Brain, the Place of Sacrifice was dominated by a hundred-meter-high truncated cone of yorik coral, helixed with carved stairways and honeycombed with pa.s.sageways that served to channel blood into fonts and other basins. On the flattened top the priests performed their rituals, and encircling the base were the yawning pits of the corpse-disposing maw luur.

To one side of the spire sprawled a grouping of temples, oriented to the sacred directions; and to the other, a repository, in which were stored the holy relics Shimrra's worldship had conveyed across the dim reaches of intergalactic s.p.a.ce. Constructed in accordance with the hallowed texts, and in homage to the ancestral architecture, the complex was dense with conifers, ferns, palms, and the like, wrong for the lat.i.tude but somehow thriving. The air hummed with the sounds of insects and crab-harps, and was heady with the smell of paalac incense, which wafted in thick, curling clouds from bone braziers. Along the perimeter of the quadrangle were pens for the blood-sopping ngdins, and at each corner sat a mon duul, whose enormous tympanic belly was capable of amplifying the utterances of the various celebrants.