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- Somewhere along our line of march Kar had located a cave that he deemed adequate to shelter a fire from gunship or satellite detection, and that night he set about curing Besh’s and Chalk’s fever wasp infestation. Besh and Chalk had remained in thanatizine suspension, tied to a grasser’s travois like a bundle of cargo. The crude hacking Terrel had done to them had been mostly repaired with tissue binders from a captured medpac, though of course the wounds could not heal; the body’s healing processes are suspended by thanatizine as well.
- Depa was in attendance, as was I, as well as a select few others. A pair of the Akk Guards had carried her, chaise and all, in from her howdah. She lay back with one slim arm across her eyes; she was having another of her headaches, and the light from the fire of tyruun, the local wood that burns white-hot, was causing her pain. I suspect she might have preferred to skip the whole business.
- Even so, when Kar laid the still forms of Besh and Chalk facedown on the mossy floor of the cave and tore open the backs of their tunics, Depa stirred and sat forward. Though she continued to shade her eyes, firelight gave them glitters of silver and red. She watched raptly, her small white teeth fixed in her lower lip, worrying the corner of her mouth near the burn scar.
- Kar simply squatted beside the two, humming tunelessly under his breath, while a Korun I did not recognize injected them with the antidote. Vastor’s humming deepened, and found a pulsing rhythm like the slow beat of a human heart. He extended his hands, and closed his eyes, and hummed, and I could feel motion in the Force, a swirl of power very unlike any I’ve felt from a Jedi healer—or anyone else, for that matter.
- A streak of red painted itself along their spines, and a moment later this red suddenly blossomed into the glistening wetness of fresh blood oozing through their skin—and details, I suppose, are unnecessary. Suffice it to say that Kar had somehow used the Force—used pelekotan—to persuade the fever wasp larvae that they were in the wrong place to hatch: using the same animal tropism that draws them from the site of the wasp sting to cluster along the victim’s central nervous system, Kar induced them to migrate—
- Out of Besh and Chalk entirely.
- And such was his power that the entire wriggling mass of them—nearly a kilo all told—squirmed its way straight into the tyruun blaze, where the larvae popped while they roasted with a stench like burning hair.
- In the midst of this extraordinary display, Depa leaned close to me and whispered, “Don’t you ever wonder if we might be wrong?”
- I didn’t understand what she was talking about, and she waved her fine-boned hand vaguely toward Vastor. “Such power—and such control—and never a day of training. Because what he does is natural: as natural as the jungle itself. We Jedi train our entire lives: to control our natural emotions, to overcome our natural desires. We give up so much for our power. And what Jedi could have done this?”
- I could not answer; Vastor has power on the scale of Master Yoda, or young Anakin Skywalker. And I had no desire to debate with Depa on Jedi tradition, and the necessary distinction between dark and light.
- So I tried to change the subject.
- - Shatterpoint, Chapter 13
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