Besh lay stretched out, motionless, barely breathing, on a ledge near the ragged curve of the cavern ceiling. Vaster knelt beside him, eyes closed, one hand above Besh's heart. The medpac tissue-binder that had closed the wounds left by Terrel's knife had lost its glossy transparency, blackening and curling like dead skin, and the wounds had erupted into cruciferous bulbs of fungus that floresced faintly, iridescent green and purple pulsing in the shadows cast by Chalk's glow rod.
Chalk sat cross-legged on Besh's other side, her own chest bulky with spraybandage; head low, she sponged at the growths on Besh's chest with a damp rag. Even from meters away, Mace caught a strong odor of alcohol and portaak amber.
Nick stopped a couple of meters short and gave Mace a significant look, nodding toward the others as if to say, This was your idea. Leave me out of it.
Mace approached slowly, staying on the next ledge down. He stopped when he reached them and spoke softly to Chalk. "How is he?" She wouldn't look at him. "Dying. How are you?" She dipped her rag into the bucket, brought it out again, sponged, and returned it to the bucket with numb mechanical persistence: doing it to be doing something, though she showed no sign of hope that it might help.
"Chalk, we need you to come with us." "Not leaving him, me. Needs me, him." "We need you. Chalk, you have to trust me-" "Did trust you, me. So did Besh." Mace had no answer.
Nick came to Mace's shoulder. "The Archives are starting to look pretty good right now." The Jedi Master squinted at him.
Nick shrugged. "Hey, it's the only immortality any of us can hope for, right?" "And how do you achieve immortality," Mace murmured, "if my journal is buried under a mountain on Haruun Kal?" "Uh. Yeah." Nick looked like his stomach hurt. "That could be a problem." "Forget about immortality. Let's concentrate on not dying today." Vaster's eyes were closed, and the Force shimmered around him. Mace could feel some of what the lor pelek was doing: searching within Besh's chest for the essential aura of the fungus that was killing him, focusing power upon it to burn it out spore by spore.
Another shockwave rattled the cavern. Loose rock clattered from the ceiling.
"Kar," Mace said, "this is not the way. We don't have time." Vastor's eyes stayed closed. His expression did not so much as flicker. Is there something better for me to be doing right now?
"As a matter of fact," Mace said, "yes. There is." Does it involve killing Balawai?
Mace said apologetically, "Probably not more than a thousand. Maybe two." Vaster opened eyes filled with pelekofan's darkness. Chalk lifted her head, rag hanging forgotten from her fist.
"So," said Mace Windu. "Are we on?" Smoke and dust clouded the huge cavern; it reeked of grasser fear-musk, of dung and urine and blood, and with each new DOKAW-shock the smell got worse.
Torchlight flared and blazed and vanished again. The stinking fog swirled with gigantic shapes: grassers bucking and clawing at each other, some with jaws panic-locked on their own or others' limbs. They charged at random, slamming into each other, trampling the injured and their own young. Korunnai darted among them, appearing from the smoke and vanishing again, hands full of sharp goads and blazing torches as they fought to separate the knots of shrieking, honking, fear-crazed beasts.
A swirl opened a gap: a looming akk dog paused to stare into Mace's eyes, measuring him with saurian malice as a thick rope of bloody drool looped from its jaws, then it ponderously turned aside and slipped into the murk, tail tapering so smoothly it might have been dissolving.
Mace threaded through the chaos.
Behind him followed a pair Korunnai, carrying a stretcher that held the EWHB and its generator. Two more brought the shoulder-fired torpedo launchers and the preloaded tubes on another stretcher. Chalk half-walked, her arm looped over Nick's shoulders as he helped her along.
Five more pairs of Korunnai trotted around the circumference of the caverns, sidling past all the confusion and riot; one of each pair carried a homespun sack holding five proton grenades apiece, and the others carried torches. Each pair soon slipped down a different one of the five vast passages along which grassers were daily driven to graze.
Erratic booming shivered the air, sharper and much smaller than the DOKAW-shocks, but still powerful enough to vibrate the floor. Mace pointed toward the source of the booming: a side cave where the great ankkox paced in restless fury. The concussions were its angrily whipping tail mace striking the walls and floor of its pen.
The nearest Korun stretcher bearer saw his gesture, and they moved in that direction, followed by Nick and Chalk.
Mace paused, and looked back over his shoulder. At the mouth of an upper passageway stood Kar Vastor and his Akk Guards. Behind them crouched all twelve of Vastor's Force- bonded akks. The lor pelek met Mace's gaze and nodded.
Mace returned the nod, spreading his hands as though to say, Whenever you're ready.
Vastor and his akks marched grimly down into the grasser cavern. The akks spread out in huge leaping springs, knocking over panicked grassers on all sides, crouching over them to let drool fall from razor teeth and moisten the fur on their necks. The humans stayed together in a flying wedge with Vastor at the point, moving in to manually separate struggling grassers, intimidating the winners and slaughtering any who had been too badly injured to walk.
Mace watched, stonefaced. It was wasteful. It was brutal.
It was necessary.
He turned once again to his own task.
He gestured and the mass of struggling beasts and men parted before him, and the smoke and dust cleared, and he saw her.
She sat on a ledge like a natural gallery that coursed one long-curving wall of the cavern. Her feet hung over the lip, dangling free: a child in a chair too tall for her. Her face was buried in her hands, and even from across the cavern his chest ached with a silent echo of her sobs.
And when he reached her side, he still did not know what to say.
"Depa." She lifted her head and turned to meet his eyes, and knowing what to say would not have helped him because he could not speak.
The rag-the one she had worn across her brow these past days-was gone. On her forehead- On her forehead, where the Chalactan Greater Mark of Illumination should have been- As it had been in his hallucination, days ago at the jungle prospector outpost: on her brow was only an ugly keloid ripple of scar. As though the Greater Mark of Illumination had been carved from the bone of her skull with a blunt knife. As though the wound it left behind had festered, and had not been treated.
As though it festered still.
The Lesser Mark, called the Seeker, still gleamed at the bridge of her nose. The Lesser Mark is fixed between the eyes of one who aspires to become a Chalactan adept: it symbolizes the centered self, the shining vision, the elegant order that seeking illumination creates within the seeker. The Greater Mark is called the Universe; it is an exact replica of the Seeker, writ large.