Mace felt the dark thunder rising in the Force and he knew: the compound hadn’t become a corral. It had become a slaughter pen.

A killing ground.

And then he felt the shadow of the butcher.

Mace looked upslope: there he was, standing on the rock above the bunker’s door.

A Korun.

In the Force, he burned with power.

Huge: his sweat-glistening bare chest could have been fused together from granite boulders. His shaven skull gleamed more than two meters above his bare feet. His pants were crudely sewn from a vine cat’s pelt. He raised arms like a spacescraper’s buttresses over his head.

To each forearm was strapped some kind of shield: elongated teardrops of a mirror-polished metal. Their wide-curved ends extended around his massive fists, and they tapered to needle points a handspan behind his elbows.

Veins writhed in his forearms as his fists tightened. The edges of the shields blurred, and a high evil whine resonated in Mace’s teeth.

The akk dogs turned to the man as though this were some kind of signal. As one, dogs and man together lifted their heads to the smothered stars and unleashed another dark blood-fever howl. It hummed in Mace’s chest, and he felt the echoing answer it drew from his own rage, and he finally understood.

The rage wasn’t all his.

His blood fever was an answer his heart gave to the call of the jungle. To the howl of the akks.

To the power of this man.

The Balawai had not run here of their own will; they had been driven here, herded to ground that had been soaked in violence and malice and savage blood fever only days before. What had been done in this place had been deliberate, the dark mirror image of a religious sanctification. The massacre here had been only a preparation, to prime the jungle for this dark rite.

Mace knew him now: this must be the lor pelek.

This was Kar Vastor.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 7