Kirru's wild spring sent him hurtling across the room, the knife balanced in his hand. Sharp as obsidian, the blade sliced towards the Prophet's throat. The hooded shape recoiled in a movement full of panic.
Yes! Fabric parted under the knife, then flesh. Yes! This is for my mother. But then the Prophet's white hand came up, opened, loosing a power great enough to shake mountains. Kirru was hurled backwards, slammed against the wall, blacking out for an instant under the weight of that implacable will. The knife fell with a ringing clatter. Blood burst from the boy's nose and dripped on the marble floor. His jaw spasmed and his teeth met in his own tongue, filling his mouth with copper warmth.
Unable to move or breathe, he hung against the wall, an invisible hand crushing his throat. Grey lights exploded behind his eyes as he choked, but he was not permitted even to convulse.
"You...cut me." The Prophet said, astonished, "You cut me." His voice was soft, full of sheer unbelief. He fingered the sliced fibres of his robe, pressed them into the darkness of his hood, held up the bloody fingertips as if staring at a new universe.
Just briefly, the grip which held Kirru wavered. As he gasped for breath the boy had an absurd idea - this man, the one who had murdered his whole family, was squeamish, unable to stand the sight of his own blood. A section of Kirru's mind, divorced from the struggle to live, felt contempt and triumph. It was something of a victory after all. At least I scared him. He would die content.
The hood turned his way and lifted, he saw a cleanly shaven white chin, a mouth shaped for good humour, but bloodless, white as the cheeks. Eyes were nothing more than a stir and glimmer in the shadow.
Now Kirru would have swallowed if he could. In that moment, something about the Prophet had changed - a veil had been dropped - and evil, concentrated as acid, hovered about him, its power mantling him with dark wings.
Go away!
The pale mouth smiled chillingly. At once the pressure on Kirru eased. He tried not to, but his body automatically gasped for air, shuddering in its relief. Traitor piece of flesh. He had wanted to pass out.
"You cut me, child. You need to be taught a lesson."
"I need to be taught how to do it better!" Kirru grated - his mouth burning with pain and his throat bruised. He'd be damned before he showed this man fear. His ancestors at least demanded that of him.
The cold smile grew, more full of teeth than the pit of Sarlacc. "You need to learn who your Master is." Those sleek disembodied hands raised, put down the hood with delicate care. Plump, kindly, patrician, the face revealed was as benign as that of a favourite uncle. It was white, with thick white hair and eyes as frozen as the Spirit of the Snow.
Kirru had dreamed about this face, believing it to be his own invention. He had put words into its mouth - the only words of comfort which had ever meant anything to him. His Master. It was his imaginary Master.
Why had he ever thought they couldn't steal anything more from him? Now they'd taken even his most private hope and twisted it, mocking him.
"I thought you would know me." The Prophet said with satisfaction. His voice was not right. Kirru had never imagined this shard-filled syrup, which promised sweetness and delivered only pain. He had not forseen the corruptness of it, a maggoty, seething sort of voice, fit for a tomb.
Revulsion swept every emotion away before it like a flash flood. "No. You are not my Master, and you never will be."
Kirru thought about the Jedi he had seen in the Eye. Lean and hard where the Prophet was soft, but with a spirit of quiet kindness from which the Prophet had recoiled. They were almost exact opposites. I dreamed of being a Jedi, he told himself sternly, Not of this.
But if this is the truth, maybe the rest of it was just fantasy?
He hated not being whole, not knowing what to believe. It was the Prophet who had done this to him. He hated the Prophet.
"That Jedi," he said, with a rush of determined belief, "He's going to come for you. He's going to come here and rescue me." Insight filled the moment with strange joy - this was what his visions had meant, of course. Not that the Prophet would be his master, but only that he would lead the Jedi to Kirru. It made sense now.
Excitement was so strange to his fear-soaked body that he barely recognised it. He had been gored by hatred and revenge so long, it was...bizarre to feel something pleasant. This is the path to my knighthood after all. My family held me back, so they had to be destroyed. It makes so much sense!
Kirru would repay his family's sacrifice. He would keep the faith and believe until the Jedi came to find him. When the Knight arrived he would see what a gem of loyalty and endurance Kirru was, and he would take Kirru back to the Temple - where he had always been destined to be.
"You fool." Shadows swallowed the Prophet's face as he raised his hood once more, "By now your Jedi is dead, but even if he wasn't, you don't think they would come for you do you? You are a nobody, child of non-entities. You are utterly unimportant to the Jedi, and your importance to me is...negotiable."
A light flashed on the grey steel curve of desk behind him and he turned away from the boy to sit in the smooth egg of his throne.
"You can serve me as my student or my slave. Either way, you will serve me."
Kirru was about to spit on the floor when the door opened and in swept a man of almost heroic magnificence.
Draped in a sweep of white robes, the man carried himself like a king. His face was ageless, smooth, with a masklike immobility which spoke of extensive surgery. The sculpted cheeks and almond eyes were an amalgam of holiness, so the very sight of his face stirred an involuntary urge to worship. Even the smooth dome of his shaved head - which made him look androgynous to Kirru - only increased his aura of otherworldliness. A third eye, open on his forehead, glittered with the fixed stare of a sapphire.
"Ah," said the Prophet, looking all the more like a withered spider, "Enlightened One. You have something to say?"
The Enlightened One folded his arms, hands clasping muscled biceps as if he was cold, or afraid.
Maybe you shouldn't anger this 'Prophet' any more, Kirru's survival-trained persona suggested to him, impressed. If young gods like this fear him, you might do better to be his ally.
The Prophet is my enemy.
If you want to survive, sometimes you need to change sides.
Kirru closed his eyes and banged his head against the wall, driving the hindmost thorn of his crown into the marble. Why was he thinking this now, when he'd just decided to wait for rescue? Why wouldn't his mind or body ever do exactly what he told them to do?
The skin covering the thorn split, and blood slid down the back of his neck. Even in the miasma of the Prophet's evil Kirru badly wanted to reach up and finger the sharp tip of bone - a sign that he was no longer a child. But he still could not move, hanging like a side of meat, his bare feet metres above the carpet.
The Enlightened One looked down and swallowed - humility obviously bitter in his mouth. "I have punished the acolytes responsible for letting this demon-child get free," he said, "Any further candidates will be restrained as well as drugged. I am...relieved to see you've dealt with him."
"Relieved?" The words slipped smooth and poisonous as mercury from beneath the dark hood. A chill wound through the air of the small room, as if a spirit walked. Unreasoning dread filled the Enlightened one's fine eyes. He had stepped into a place where nightmares came true. "You let the boy go, believing he could harm me?"
Before the Prophet, Kirru saw, no-one was strong. They stood like dreaming children, trapped in his gaze. Even the gods.
"As I say, those responsible have been punished."
Silence. Darkness deepened, as if the Prophet's will governed even light. In that shadowed place the white robes of the cult leader seemed an affront against nature. He shivered. The construct of his face was frozen in sincerity and wisdom, but fear rolled off him in an acrid stink.
"How?" said the Prophet at last, when it became clear his servant would not break from silence alone.
"Their throats were cut over the altar. Their bodies will be processed soon, to feed your...children."
If there was disapproval in that sentence, Kirru noticed, it had only been over the word 'children'. The Enlightened One's gaze had slithered over him as he spoke, making it clear he would rather have called Kirru an abomination than a child. In the brief glimpse of the man's eyes, Kirru saw a fanaticism at least as deep as the Prophet's evil. They were two of a kind, however dissimilar they looked, but the Prophet was greater.
I could be his student. I wouldn't have to be afraid any more. I would make the Galaxy fear me. It was a heady thought, - how he'd make Jack and his crew squirm! A tremor went through him, as if he had touched the altar again, feeling a residue of its power, hatred, need. He thirsted for something - to hit, hurt, kill.
He felt rather than saw the Prophet's hood tip slightly in his direction, dim light slide across that satisfied smile. Eyes as grey as liquid nitrogen glimmered as they gazed at him.
He senses it! Kirru thought with a stab of disgust. It's probably him, making me feel like this. He made the altar; he was using it against the Jedi, and now maybe against me. No one had ever told Kirru what to think or feel. No one was going to start now. Get out of my head, *sleemo!*
It was a small victory when the gaze swung away. Vulture-like the cowled head turned from one prey to the other.
"But the performance of your weapon?" Unsubtly, the Enlightened One attempted to close the subject of Kirru's freedom, his sandalled feet shifting nervously on the cold floor. "You are pleased with the weapon?"
Nothing living, nothing flesh and blood should have been able to make a noise so full of elemental terror as the Prophet's hiss. The room was dark, and the inside of his throne shadowed, so it seemed he sat within concentric circles of doom, himself the singularity at their centre - the place from which no light could escape. "The weapon was unable to fully control a single Jedi."
"A Jedi Master, Lord. Surely you didn't expect..."
The Prophet stood. "I expect success." He raised his hand, the wrist looking severed by the black cuff.
"Prophet! Lord!" There was something a little obscene about watching this sculpted hero grovel, "Of course, whatever you expect is your right. Please...Eeeearrrghhh!"
Kirru's heart stuttered and stopped as lightning forked from the Prophet's bare hands and engulfed the abject god. The strobing, scalpel edged light seemed harsher and more terrible than darkness. It's stridor devoured the man's scream. The sight of him, evil though he was, jerking spastic as a newly-dead calf, made Kirru want to throw up. It was so like the way Jenju had died.
"Leave him alone!" he shouted.
The air filled with the smell of burning flesh. The Enlightened One's clothes were on fire. He tried to beat them out, but the electricity had chained his hands as effectively as fetters, making them shake, useless.
Lightning smells like hot iron, A calm voice in Kirru commentated, It must be feel as if you're being beaten with branding tongs.
The prophet was looking at him sideways, like adults all over the universe. Waiting for something. Kirru swallowed his pride. Whatever it took, he could not let this go on. "Please?"
Blind in the sudden darkness which followed, he could hear the cult leader's gasping whines of pain, but not the footfalls. A hand caught his chin, fingernails digging into the flesh under his jaw. There was a crackle and sting as small sparks crawled from the fingers onto Kirru's face. A hooded menace, the Prophet's face pushed threateningly close to his own.
"Something you need to remember. You may not command, but you are allowed to beg."
"I don't beg!"
"You overestimate yourself."
Turning away, the Prophet arranged a stylus and datapad more neatly on his desk. As his underling scrabbled at the floor, he glided calmly back to the great steel throne. Silence filled the dimness, punctuated by wheezing, the hacking of the Enlightened one's breath as he tried to push himself up onto hands and knees. A sense of torment filled the very stillness - like the moment before torture begins.
"The weapon's power must be increased," said the soft, vile voice suddenly - shocking as the first crack of a whip. "You will intensify both the Ren sacrifice and the search for Force sensitive children."
With a great effort the Enlightened One nodded jerkily. He made three attempts to wipe the stream of mucus from his nose, finally succeeded. "Yes, Lord."
"And Jona?" Even half immobilized by lightning, the Enlightened Ones's masklike face flinched at hearing his own name, "You have a month. I will have the success I expect by then, or the Security Division will receive details of your prior identity. Is that clear?"
"Yes, Lord, I'll do it at once."
The press of another switch on the Prophet's gun-metal desk opened the door. Crawling, the Enlightened One shuffled out into the great temple of the Eye. Its brightness was a sham, Kirru knew, but he yearned for it. Even if light was only a thin gilding over the reality of evil he would rather have that pretence than the truth.
A hum and hiss of smooth servos filled his ears, taking him in a brutal flashback to the moment when he left Jack's ship; when his revenge had been snatched away. Uncomfortably he craned his head around and saw the droid with poisoned hands slide into the room. Its long, many jointed fingers reached up for Kirru's neck.
He had not meant to give the Prophet such satisfaction, but the freezing, oily touch of those hands was too much for him. "Leave me alone, damn you!" he cried out at last, ashamed of his childish voice and the edge of tears, utterly humiliated by the Prophet's slow smile, "Why can't you leave me alone?"
"Destiny, young Kirru. It's your destiny to join with me, though you can't see it yet."
He was crying like a girl now - exhaustion and the residue of drugs and beatings making him weak. I'm not really like this, it's just happening to me. He held the picture of the Jedi in his mind and told him this, hoping he would understand. Please come soon. I'm so tired! "I'm *never* going to join you," he shouted, in a last futile gesture of defiance, "Never! I'll die first!"
The stranglehold of air which was holding him up unclenched, and he fell into the cruel metallic grip of the droid. Spent, he could not struggle with the thing's steel and piston strength.
"That is not one of your choices," said the smug cowled shape at the centre of his misery. "I'm going to put you to work now. When you give up this infantile rescue fantasy we will talk again."
"I think he's waking up," said a guttural voice above Kirru. Without opening his eyes he breathed in, testing the scents. Whatever they had given him this time had not clouded his mind - there was no pleasant belief that he might have woken from a nightmare. Nor had he expected comfort, but he found yet again that his imagination was not vivid enough to have prepared him for the stench.
Excrement, and vomit, and the pus-scent of infected wounds filled the air. Force abilities, which he had come to rely on in his many attempts at escape, filled his soul with a similar stink. Despair had a psychic touch more foul than the ordure.
"Here, drink this." An arm around his shoulders was pulling him upright, rubbing on the half healed sores where the Wookie had beaten him. Reluctantly he obeyed the call to consciousness. Looking up, he met the gaze of a pair of iridescent eyes and saw an ocean of loss almost as deep as his own.
The creature was absurdly shaped - the knob-knuckled hand which cradled the cup was clearly on the end of a leg. Arms held its frail, curved body off the ground. If someone had stretched the muzzle of a Tauntaun to twice its natural length, it might have had a face like this. In its embrace, Kirru had a flash of sympathy for the Enlightened One. Though the creature was cradling him gently, urging him to drink, it was hard to accept that such a thing could be sentient, let alone that it had actually spoken to him.
But when you are in a position of weakness, recruit allies.
He took the cup of water - it was white as snowmelt, full of particles. It tasted both of life and of disease, but his parched body gulped it down gratefully and demanded more.
"More?"
The swamp-mottled head shook, its mobile ears each flicking independently forward and back. "Not until after."
"After what?" There was a golden thread between himself and this alien, Kirru saw, just as there had been with the feather-cloaked girl in the lobby. A promise of brightness, shared strength. But feather-cloak's rejection of him had hurt so much! He didn't need the extra anguish which reaching out might bring. Ignoring the offered light, he sealed himself inside his own soul. Though he would take allies, he would not attempt to have friends. Vulnerability only lead to suffering.
"You'll find out," it said quietly, picking up a blanket and draping it around his shoulders. Stiff with someone else's dirt, it caught on his wounds, but it was warm. "What's your name?"
Since the Prophet already knew, there was little point in trying to conceal it. "Kirru."
Absurd as the formalities were in a place like this, the thing touched its knuckles together in some kind of greeting ritual. "I'm Griogha. Welcome to the abyss."
Behind Griogha, another of his species lay on its back in a tangle of arachnid limbs. The room was a cube of metal, and the ceiling still gleamed, but rags and filthy blankets were scattered over the ground. Children lay everywhere, curled in foetal silence, or whimpering. A nine year old girl was rocking, her forehead impacting the wall with a maddening thud, irritating as drumming fingers. In the corner a Nikto child was smearing his own dung on the walls.
Every time Kirru believed there was no where left to fall, the universe opened up a new pit. How can this be? How can they allow it to happen?
But he knew now who 'they' were. 'They' were people like his father, busy somewhere else, or his mother, too weak to defend herself, or Jack - skimming the profits of exploitation. The whole galaxy, the whole universe colluded to let this happen, and no one cared.
The others' despair, foetid in the rank closeness of the prison, closed him about, until every heartbeat was a waste of energy. What was the point of fighting after all? No one cared about him, and there was nothing but darkness at the base of the world. Why not accept and master it, as the Prophet had?
Because this is a test. A test of your endurance. If you pass, you *will* become a Knight.
He couldn't quite remember what the Jedi stood for any more, but he could not forget the dawnburst flowers. A power the colour of light. Just thinking of that living fountain made him feel cleaner.
"What is it?" Griogha's camel-nosed face pushed into Kirru's face. Had he felt the instant of revival? Could all these children feel what the others felt? If that was so, even the despair could be fought.
"I saw..." he began, when the squeal of rusted metal interrupted him. A wave of greater stillness went through the small crouched forms of the children. Part of the wall was lifting up. Ducking through the low doorway came men in biohazard gear, their faces covered with breathing masks, blaster rifles trained steadily on the faces of sleeping infants.
"Get up! One line, Now!"
"Please, Kirru." Griogha fell into line behind him, his strange feet twisted into fists, shoulders as muscled as hips giving him a rolling, drunken walk, "You know something. Have they made a mistake? Is there...good news?"
"Shut up back there! No talking."
Did they really think they could frighten him by shouting, Kirru thought, after he had braved the Prophet's insidious threats? He had rested and drunk, and he felt stronger, more than up to a little defiance. Perhaps with hope these force sensitive children might be of use. If they call all do what I can do, who knows what we can achieve together?
He didn't really want to share what the Prophet called his 'rescue fantasy'. It was private, it belonged to him. But if he was going to train them into an army, to secure their revenge and escape, he had first to break their despair.
"Yes, Griogha," he whispered fervently, "It's good news. There's a Jedi coming for us. I saw him."
Between armed guards, under a bleak white ceiling, the long line of alien children shuffled along one clinical corridor to the next. Behind them, a cult-member followed, disinfecting their footsteps. The sharp medicinal smell of the spray was pleasant after their own filth, though Kirru knew it was the taint of his own inhumanity which was being cleansed.
He could track the progress of his news as it was murmured from child to child - could feel the eyes on him, as the messenger of such a blessing. Even the most catatonic of the infants walked straighter after hearing the rumour. Such a long time it had been, since he bestowed anything other than pain. It was good to bring healing, for a change.
The barren corridor ended in a single door. Inside, like a morgue arranged in some fit of whimsy, rows of clinical beds made a flower around stamens of wire.
A cloth of gold hanging formed the intrusion of another dimension on this medical pallor. One wall was little more than a curtain, and behind it Kirru could hear the muffled vastness of the Temple of the Eye. We could cause chaos if we ran through there during a service.
Taped wisdom stamped hard on that conceit - as wasted effort - even as the guards lined up with their backs to the drape. Any attempt to escape that way would meet a sheet of blaster fire.
As if they'd done this many times before, the children lined up meekly, each in front of a couch. Men in biohazard gear strapped wrists and ankles to the platforms, covered them in wires.
Rough, impersonal hands now pushed Kirru forwards, forcing down on his shoulders. Their polyalloy gloves burnt his skin with pressure as they twisted him, laid him down I'm not going to panic. They've all done this before. It will not kill me. All he had to do was to endure, and keep the faith. How hard could it be?
"Aii!" When the wires touched his skin he screamed. Behind his oxygen mask the man sniggered at Kirru's cry, little realising the boy screamed not from denial but from recognition.
"Ancestors!" Laid bare to him, the machine sucked him in. His spirit was torn from him, pulled along the wires and fed into the morass and burning inferno of power that was the Altar. Leads funnelled in the other children's living Force, and a control circuit took all their accumulated strength and fed it through the coils Kirru had traced under the Temple floor. Wires which rose like spider thread out of the ground and into the shadow of the Prophet's throne.
There was a residue of new death on the Altar; the faint imprint of Biscuit, and even Nails. If he cared to he could just hear their voices, gibbering in the darkness inside his mind. Moss had grown, absorbing their blood, soaking up some part of their personalities. Now their terror was a thrill sawing in his own veins - so sharp it was almost delicious. "Oh! Oh..."
Oh this made sense. This was reality. Pain and horror and loss and cold and scalding anger. Yes, this was the truth. It tore him into pieces, and he let it - it felt so right.
For an uncounted time there was nothing in him but fury, spiralling in a vortex about the Altar. But then a mind slipped under his own, began to shape the whirlwind. Kirru felt himself being used - his own small connection to the Force being drawn on, a strength which was his by right usurped by the cold parasite of the Prophet's mind.
He was flying, dragged like a remora after a shark. A sense of speed - blurred images flashed past him, filling him with nausea. Beneath it all, the great red pulse of the Altar beat, a volcano of malice at the heart of his world.
Victims suggested themselves. Kirru struggled to keep his sense of self intact as the power on which he rode was split. Remembering the Eye - the Jedi tangled in dark threads - he realised what was happening. I am one of the tendrils of his power. I am part of his strength.
There was a sense of prying something open, and then vision, surreal and brilliant. Kirru saw the slopes of a mountain - its peaks sharper and narrower than seemed possible, rising into a sky of pearl.
Sight swung dizzyingly - he was looking out of someone else's eyes, seeing a group of humans, in the loin cloths and feather cloaks of the Temple worshippers. Trying to look at his own host body, Kirru noticed sinewy brown arms, felt the weight of a blaster on his back and the slap of a scabbard against his thigh.
This body might be a useful tool. It occurred to him that perhaps he could wrest control of the device from the Prophet. Could this group of men, who were even now scrambling onto swoops and STAPs, be turned from the mission on which they were now being sent and brought here to storm the monastery and set the children free?
Kirru concentrated hard on pulling his own consciousness back together, remembering who he was. He needed to plan, to work out how this machine was driven, to piece together an idea of the Prophet's weaknesses. Oh, it had been a mistake, connecting him to this sort of power. And he fully intended to exploit that mistake to the limit.
Test your weapons before you commit to combat.
A length of his host's dreadlocked hair fell into his eyes. Kirru tried to brush it away. His own hand jerked against its restraints, but the host did not move.
Their swoop gang had risen out of the damp warmth of the forests now and was flying full throttle along mountain roads of shale and scree. Danger was exhilarating, like playing a vid game, except that he could feel his host's fear and panicked struggle for control. If the swoop went over the cliff, that man would really die. It gave the experience so much more authenticity.
Can I persuade him to slow down? Kirru touched the man's fear this time, not trying to move the body directly, but mentioning firmly that he was going much too fast. The suggestion met with a jolt of surprise which almost sent them both off the road. Damn! He had not meant to be so obvious. Oh damn, this is a lot more difficult than it seems.
Alerted to his meddling, the Prophet's grip on him tightened suddenly, an embrace like an iron maiden's - piercing him in a hundred paces.
*You try my patience.* In his mind, without the kind mellowing of air, the voice was a thousand times more foul. He flinched, and the Prophet's spirit shredded him - as if it had pressed his face into a blender.
Someone screamed. He had no idea if it was himself or his host. He had no idea how to tell himself apart from the man. Surely his name was Pak Okkifo, a settler from the valley with a monster on his back that he couldn't shake off?
He gunned the motor, screeching around the last hair thin path at the summit of the mountain, coming out onto a hidden plateau. Wind hit him in the chest with a smell of cloves. Over his head the sky was forbiddingly dark. Mountain walls disappeared into clouds and fume below him.
As he saw the small settlement of Rens, their spindly, untidy dwellings wedged into the crags, bridges of rope lashing in the turbulent air between them, his heart froze. What was he doing here? He had fields to plant, a garden to tend. Why...?
But then the monster in his head stirred again, and he was taking the blaster from his back, levelling it at the aliens' nesting place.
"Come on out!" It scared him so much to hear his own voice shout, against his will, without even knowing what it was going to say. What was happening to him?
From one of the nearer nests a Ren rose, like a being of legend. She was so beautiful, Pak thought, so delicate. Her span of speckled wings were petrochemical green at the tips. She had no weapons. Defenceless.
"They said you'd come here," the Ren's voice was harsh as a carrion bird's, "I didn't believe it. Why? What have we ever done to you?"
Pak's sympathy for the alien was so great he managed to struggle briefly with the poisonous will which held him pinned. In that heartbeat of resistance, Kirru woke again and pulled the seeping tatters of his self back together as if he was huddling into his ruined shirt.
Ancestors! This was familiar - the pirates, the woman innocently asking 'why?'. An image of his mother's death filled his nostrils with the smell of meat. He had not been able to stop it happening, but he was not going to stand by and watch it happen again.
Smash! doors splintered as the other riders kicked down the frail houses, dragging out women. The Rens were all women.
"Please," green-tip begged, going down on her knees, "This is a nursery. There are only mothers and eggs here." Her feathers ruffed with anxiety, "We can't possibly have anything you need."
Against the cliff a man was fighting to claw another female from her nest. "Please!" she was shouting, "My child is hatching. If he doesn't see me now he will never know who his mother is. Please, just seconds...Coac, help me!"
Green-tip - Kirru believed Coac was her name - sprang into the air. With two beats of her powerful wings, the blast of which almost knocked Pak down, she had crossed the barren clearing and was diving on the other man, clawed feet outstretched to grab his blaster.
Kirru felt the movement go through Pak's form, felt the arms lift and level the blaster; shared the horror in what he was doing. I won't let it happen. I won't!
Pak's finger tightened on the trigger just as Kirru dove from hiding, seized the Altar's power and hammered it into Pak's mind.
There was a moment of great clarity. He watched the shot go astray. Coac tumbled over the edge of the mountain, soared again like an angel into the indigo sky. Confused men dropped blasters from nerveless fingers, just as the Rens leapt one by one into the air, ready to fight back.
Then Pak fell - unconscious from the mental blow, and Kirru was left naked in the spiritual pit of the Altar facing an anger more cutting than broken glass. He braced himself to meet the Prophet's punishment. It didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. He had saved a life. For the first time in weeks, he felt clean.
Why not see what else I have written and am interested in.