TWENTY-THREE
Master Kae Kwaad was as lean as one of Nen Yim’s shaping fingers. He walked with an odd limp and a strange twist to his shoulders. His headdress was a ropy, unkempt mess. He wore a masquer to conceal his real face, a fashion among the Praetorite Vong but not common among shapers of any domain for decades. The masquer portrayed young, clear features, with scarlet-tinted yellow eyes. His real age was difficult to determine, though his skin had the smoothness of relative youth.
“Ah, my adept,” Kae said as Nen Yim made the genuflection of greeting. “My willing adept.”
Nen Yim tried to keep her expression neutral, but she heard something in his voice that suggested a leer behind his masquer. And the way his eyes traveled over her—what sort of master was this? Masters were above the carnal, beyond it.
No, she remembered. That was what was taught, but her old master Mezhan Kwaad’s downfall had had much to do with her forbidden affair with a warrior. Masters were supposed to be lustless. Supposing it did not make it so.
The master brought up the seven shaping fingers of his left hand and touched them to her chin. To her distraction, the fingers seemed cramped, or paralyzed. “Yes,” he murmured. “A very talented adept, I’m told.” He noticed her regarding his hand. “Ah,” he mused. “My hands are quite dead, you see. They died some years ago. I do not know why, and the other masters did not deign to replace them.”
“That is unfortunate, Master.”
He chucked her under the chin. “But you will be my hands, my dear—what was your name?”
He nodded sagely. “Yim. Yim Yim Yim.” He clubbed his twisted, dead hands together. His eyes were open but seemed to see nothing. “Yim,” he concluded.
Yun-Yuuzhan, what part of you was he? she wondered, quills of disgust pricking up her spine.
“I do not like that name,” Kae Kwaad said in a sudden, angry burst. “It offends me.”
“It is my name, Master.”
“No.” Wiry muscles quivered in his arms, as if he were on the verge of attacking her. “No,” he repeated more calmly. “Tsup shall be your name. Nen Tsup.”
Nen Yim stiffened further. Tsup was the name of no crèche or domain she had ever heard of. It was, however, an antique word for the sorts of slave who tended their masters in unseemly ways. The word itself was so obscene it was rarely used anymore.
“Come, then,” the master said, with an air of detachment. “Acquaint me with my demesne.”
“Yes, Master Kae Kwaad.”
Feeling ill, Nen Yim led him through the moldering halls of the worldship to the shapers’ quarters, through a tremoring hall that had begun to have periodic spasms, past her own quarters to the master’s apartments, which had stood empty since before her coming to Baanu Miir. Five slaves staggered behind them, nearly buckling beneath the weight of enormous transport envelopers.
When the opening dilated, the master stood, staring into space.
“Where am I?” he asked, after a time.
“Your quarters, Master.”
“Quarters? What, by the gods, are you talking about? Where am I?”
“On the Baanu Miir, Master Kae Kwaad.”
“Well, where is it?” he screeched. “The coordinates. The exact location. Must I repeat myself?”
Nen Yim found herself twisting her fingers together, like a terrified crècheling. She stopped it immediately. “I do not know, Master. I can discover it.”
“Do so!” His eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”
“Your adept, Nen Yim.”
A crafty look came over his face. “I do not like that name. Use the one I gave you.”
“Nen Tsup,” she said softly.
He blinked, slowly, then snorted. “What a vulgar little thing you are.” He sneered. “Hurry. Find out where we are. And then we shall shape something, yes? It will amuse us.”
“Master, I wish to speak to you about the ship’s rikyam, when you have the time.”
“Time? What is that? It is nothing. The brain will die. You do not confuse me with your talk, Adept. No, you do not confuse or amuse or titillate me, though you think it. Yun-Harla herself could not have me! Flattering yourself. Trying to trick me. Get out of my sight.”
When she was alone, Nen Yim sank down into a crouch and softly beat the heels of her hands against her head.
He is mad, she thought. Mad and crippled. Tjulan Kwaad sent him to taunt me, nothing more.
Beneath her feet, she noticed, a patch of the inner hull was rotting.
A day passed without her seeing him, but when Nen Yim entered her laboratory, there was the twisted, demented Kae Kwaad. He’d somehow unsealed the dermal shelf where her experiments were hidden and was stroking her personal qahsa with the carapace of his right hand. She hadn’t tried particularly hard to hide anything, reasoning that doing so was wasted effort. Her modifications to the ship were ample evidence of her heresy. Hiding the experiments would only delay the inevitable.
“I like this,” Kae Kwaad said, waving at her tissue samples. “I like the colors.” He smiled vaguely and pointed his useless digits to his eyes. “They trickle in here, don’t they? After that they don’t get out. They just talk and whistle, wriggle and curl.” He scratched one dead hand absently against the other.
“Tell me what you’re doing, Adept,” he said.
“Master, I’m only doing my best to heal the ship. If I have strained protocol, it was only because I thought it best for the Yuuzhan Vong.”
“Strained it? Strained it?” He laughed, an unpleasant scratching sound. Then, as abruptly, he folded down onto one of the slowly shifting benches and placed his head between his hands.
“I requested a master because I do not have access to protocol records above the fifth cortex,” Nen Yim went on. “I had no answer to the rikyam’s dilemma, so I sought one.”
“And now you have a master.” Kae Kwaad chortled. “And now we shall shape.”
“Perhaps Master Kae Kwaad would like to review the damage to the spiral arm.”
“Perhaps the master would have his adept listen instead of speak. Today we are shaping. Recall the protocol of Hon Akua.”
Nen Yim stared at him. “We are to form a grutchin? But the fleet is replete with grutchins.”
“Inferior grutchins. Your generation! In your haste to make them stronger, faster, tougher, you have forgotten the most important aspect of shaping! The essence!”
“What is that, Master?”
“Form. Have you ever seen a perfect grutchin, Adept?”
“I … do not know, Master.”
“You haven’t! You have not! In the mind of Yun-Yuuzhan is a perfect grutchin. It has never been seen by Yuuzhan Vong except in the protocols—never in living form. You and I, Adept, will incarnate the grutchin in the mind of Yun-Yuuzhan. It shall be perfect in form and proportion, precise in hue. When we are done, Yun-Yuuzhan will know us for true shapers, who create in his image.”
“But the rikyam—”
“The rikyam? How can you even think of such a mundane matter when we are to embark upon this? Once we have created the perfect grutchin, do you really expect Yun-Yuuzhan—or those simpletons Yun-Harla or Yun-Ne’Shel—will deny us anything? Now we must work!”
It was soon after this that Nen Yim began to seriously consider the murder of Master Kae Kwaad.