Tenel Ka is in a hurry to show Khalee Lah the palace. The warrior must work hard to keep up with the Jedi's pace.
They come into a room with a lot of severed human arms hanging on the wall - most of them rose-colored, but there are also a few brownish to dark brown ones.
"Whose arms are these?" Khalee Lah asks curiously.
Tenel Ka can't see any shock or even dismay in his expression. Apparently the Yuuzhan Vong warrior is used to worse sights. "These are the severed limbs of members of my personal bodyguard," she explains to her guest. "As a Jedi, I want to be sure that I am defended by capable men when it matters most. To do this, they have to prove themselves against each other in a duel - and the best of them can duel with me personally. Fencing accidents occasionally occur."
Khalee Lah raises his eyebrows in surprise. "And after these men lose their arms?"
Tenel Ka smiles confidently. "As long as it only stays with one arm, this loss spurs them on even more – I couldn't ask for better bodyguards as the Crown Princess."
Khalee Lah nods. "I can understand that."
They hurry on and come to a large hall in which white alabas statues of Hapanic personalities are set up on the walls.
"The Hall of Masters," explains Tenel Ka.
Between the statues, pictures with opulent city scenarios or hunting scenes hang on the walls and there are occasional fountains in the wide hall, around which inviting-looking benches upholstered with soft blankets are grouped. Khalee Lah looks at one of these benches, but Tenel Ka doesn't heed the gesture.
"There's no time for something like that," she says, dashing any hope of a cozy chat.
The young princess points to a statue of a man in a corner. "This is the Jedi Master Martor Khal, who came from Hapes before he passed away one hundred and fifty years ago."
She studies the warrior's expression and he seems impressed. "Were there many Jedi of Hapes?"
"There are even more than me and him," Tenel Ka says proudly. "Martor Khal's great-great-grandson Sinsor Khal, for example, is also a Jedi. He is currently leading a research project in a secret laboratory that specializes in studying members of your species - and if they are already dead, the corpses are dissected down to the smallest detail in order to obtain precise information about the Yuuzhan Vong's weak points."
Khalee Lah nods. "Well, these are war times. We do the same with Humans and other species of this galaxy in our shaper damuteks."
Tenel Ka rushes out through the door on the opposite side of the hall and practically flies down the stairs until they reach the basement.
"What do you want to show me here?" Khalee Lah manages a smile. "The torture chamber?"
"No."
Tenel Ka leads him down a corridor that becomes increasingly damp. They turn right and pass locked rooms secured with heavily barred doors. Humans, mostly men, are crouching behind them, and Khalee Lah recognizes them from their blue vests as members of the local branch of the Peace Brigade, which supports the Yuuzhan Vong in the fight.
"There you see your great allies!" Tenel Ka hisses at the warrior.
"Release us, Princess… Your Highness?" one of the mercenaries dares to ask.
"Shut up, otherwise I'll double your prison sentence myself!" Tenel Ka snaps. "And this great commander here won't help you either." Her voice becomes reprimanding. "Now you can see what unreliable people you have yourself allied with."
Khalee Lah decides to ignore this affront of Tenel Ka. "If I have the opportunity, I would be happy to show you comparable prison facilities on our ships."
She makes a face. "Certainly not soon."
Without paying any further attention to Khalee Lah, Tenel Ka suddenly turns around and sprints out of the basement and back up the stairs - floor by floor.
"Are we on a sightseeing tour or on the run?" he asks his blitzy guide.
Tenel Ka doesn't even turn back to look at him. "It is more of a covert attack to avert an impending threat."
"I'll be in, whatever it may be, Princess."
The petite Tenel Ka hurries up a narrow spiral staircase, opens a hatch, climbs through it into the light and stands on the roof of the royal palace. The stairs groan noticeably as the much heavier Yuuzhan Vong climbs up behind her. Tenel Ka doesn't wait for him, but storms along the ridge of the pointed palace roof, jumps from a ledge onto the roof below and continues running there. She bends to the right, disappears behind a round turret and hurries along another roof ridge. When she reaches the end, she sits down and simply slides down the sloping roof for twenty meters until a wide rain eave catches her body. Tenel Ka rises, leaves the eave and creeps along to the right, adjusting her booted feet to the tilt of the roof. She didn't look back at her companion the entire time, but she didn't hear anything that would indicate that Khalee Lah was following her.
Tenel Ka takes a deep breath and looks fifty meters down. The royal palace garden stretches below her. In the middle of a small meadow, carefully lined with falling leaves, stands the birdhouse for the Bliz – those small, portly songbirds whose pink eggs are often served as a delicacy in the palace. An old man in a hooded cloak climbs step by step of the ladder that leads up to the birdhouse - his free hand carries a basket for the eggs, over which a red and white checkered cloth is carefully spread.
The young princess sees her father walking along the path through the garden with two guardsmen. Now the old man with the basket has reached the entrance to the birdhouse and ... Tenel Ka bends down and grabs a loose tile to remove it from the roof... the old man turns around - to her father, at the same moment that Tenel Ka raises her hand with the tile, as something round, brown shoots past her - exactly into the direction where she wanted to throw the brick. She throws it anyway – you never know.
The old man pulls back the red and white checkered cloth from the basket and Tenel Ka recognizes a blaster. But instead of taking the blaster out of the basket, the assassin grabs his neck where the thud bug just hit him and he howls - in a fairly loud voice. Only half a second later, Tenel Ka's brick hits the arm of the old man which was trying to grab the blaster.
Tenel Ka turns around and behind her stands Khalee Lah. "Good throw, but now we won't know who sent him," she reprimands the Yuuzhan Vong.
"Maybe he has something with him that points to his employer."
They jump deeper and deeper from roof to roof and let themselves down to the ground on a trellis covered in vines. Tenel Ka rushes to the old man, pulls back his hood and ... sees her dead cousin lying there. The thud bug breaks free from her neck wound and flies back to Khalee Lah, who puts it back on his weapon belt.
Tenel Ka sighs. "Aunt Chelik must be very eager for the throne if she is willing to sacrifice her own daughter."
"Then we have to find and punish your Aunt Chelik immediately!" says Khalee Lah darkly.
Tenel Ka shakes involuntarily. "These may be your methods, but not mine. And anyway, she'll deny everything anyway."
"Only until I started the breaking," says Khalee Lah confidently, "on our ship."
Tenel Ka's brow clouds with worry. "If word gets out that we are handing our wrongdoers over to the Yuuzhan Vong, then…"
"Why should word get around?" the Yuuzhan Vong tries to calm her down. "But at least you're already thinking about it."
The Hapan princess feels her blood beginning to boil. Suddenly she is no longer crouching on the ground, but standing upright in front of Khalee Lah, without remembering having jumped up. "Just like you broke my fellow Jedi Ulaha Kore before Myrkr until she died! Just like you wanted to break Jaina there! And then you stare at me so covetously with your yellow eyes the whole time. Do you think that just because you threw your stupid bug at my foolish cousin that I owe you anything? Do you really think I couldn't have handled this myself? How dare you?!"
Tenel Ka turns and runs away. And Khalee Lah thinks it wise not to follow her this time.
Three hours later on the Priest Harrar's black gem ship
Harrar is already standing on the command bridge again with two subalterns when Khalee Lah storms onto, abruptly slows down his pace in the middle of the bridge and stops. His forehead and cheeks are furrowed with anger, and his yellow maa'its gaze urgently out at the inviting-looking orb of the planet Hapes. What's more - Khalee Lah's entire posture is so tense, as if he were about to make a move to jump through the transparent viewing window back to their stopover - an energetic bolt of lightning that is looking for an outlet to strike, but finds none.
Harrar feels that something must have happened down there on Hapes in his absence, but thinks it would be wiser to broach another, perhaps more important topic first. "Welcome back, my young friend. You must have noticed how strangely Ta'a Chume reacted to my question about Teneniel Djo, right?"
"Yes, that was strange," the addressed murmurs absently and Harrar notices that the young commander's thoughts are entirely with Tenel Ka.
"If we do it smartly, we will both bring Jaina Solo to the Warmaster and give Tenel Ka enough free time for you to see her even more often."
Khalee Lah's maa'its scurry nervously back and forth to make sure that the two subalterns, who were just standing with the priest on the bridge are not following this now rather spicy conversation. He notes with satisfaction that the two lower-ranking warriors have, according to decorum, walked off to either side of the bridge so as not to disturb the two higher-ranking men. "At the moment I probably won't see her again. And I have not yet fulfilled my blood oath to my father."
Harrar lowers his voice with the next question. "What do you mean you probably won't see Tenel Ka again?"
Khalee Lah told the priest what happened in and outside the palace. "... and if Queen Consort Isolder and his guard had not seen with their own eyes how Tenel Ka ran away, I would have been suspected of having done something to her. So I went straight back to the ship so as not to encourage such rumors any further," he ends his report dejectedly.
"Well, the Queen Mother misses her granddaughter too. Now she has to eat the Bliz eggs alone in the evening. And that can only mean one thing," says Harrar, suggesting a solution to the puzzle.
"Tenel Ka reports what happened to Luke Skywalker?" Khalee Lah is guessing.
Harrar is diplomatic enough not to outright deny this rhetorical shot in the dark. "Tenel Ka comes from both Hapes and Dathomir. If people here don't know where she is, then she will have fled to her second home."
Khalee Lah's face noticeably brightens. "You really are a good friend, Harrar. May the gods always smile upon what you do."
Harrar smiles mischievously. "Thank you, because I think I will need this blessing when I return to Yuuzhan'tar to explain the progress of the mission there."
"You will still keep my survival a secret – even from my father?"
"Of course, my young friend. If you were successful in your mission on Dathomir, your return will be all the more triumphant."
Doubt tugs at Khalee Lah's notched lips. "And Jaina Solo?"
Harrar's eyes crinkle. "I'll take care of Jaina Solo," he winks at the commander with one eye, "but later everyone, including your father, will officially credit this to your skill as well."
Even though Tsavong Lah will know better, Khalee Lah thinks grimly and wonders how long the gods will tolerate such mischief before he also realizes his mistake. "May Yun-Harla always guide you well, Your Eminence."