“Here, now, what’s all this?” bellowed a voice.
The Oldtimers skidded to a halt, milled for a moment, then began to back away.
A weedy-looking eight-foot Ithorian and a fat, slovenly, dark-haired human male, both in the blue uniforms of the Hweg Shul municipal police, came walking down the alley.
“Shame on the lot of you,” warbled the Hammerhead in its soft voice. “What do you think you are, piranha-beetles? Nafen?”
There was a muttering among the Oldtimers. One dropped a rock she’d had in hand to throw. Someone else said something about “the Evil One.”
“Him?” The human jerked a thumb at Luke. His greasy black forelock flipped in the wind. No one replied. He turned to Luke. “You the Evil One, pilgrim?”
“Everyone is evil to someone.” Luke dusted his sleeve, where a rock had nearly broken his arm.
The man chuckled. “Well, my ex-wife would agree with you there.” He turned to the Hammerhead. “What about it, Snaplaunce? There anything in the City Statute about being evil?”
“Not to my knowledge, Grupp.”
“You hear that?” Grupp the policeman turned back to the mob, only about a third of whom remained. “What’s the guy done besides being evil?” He glanced sidelong at Luke, measuring him with a dark eye that was far from stupid.
“Evil is as evil does,” yelled the girl who’d tried to brain Luke with a club.
“Yeah, well, mobbing a man who didn’t even fire that blaster he’s carrying sounds like Evil Does to me, sugar.” Grupp gestured like a man shooing flies. “Get out of here, the bunch of you, before I run you all in for disturbing the peace. You okay?” He turned his back on the Oldtimers to speak to Luke, though Luke was pretty sure he was watching them still. They dispersed, muttering, in their eyes the anger at seeing Newcomers rescuing a Newcomer, not lawmen helping a man innocently attacked.
“I’m fine.”
“Crazy Therans.”
“Not Therans,” warbled the Ithorian. “I know the Therans. These are the ones who have attacked Master Ashgad’s house, four or five times since I have been here. I suspect they’re the ones who killed the last of his human servants early this year, though I can prove nothing. I know it was they who kidnapped that young woman at about the same time.”
“Young woman?” Luke felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest.
The Ithorian regarded him for a moment, speculation in its golden eyes.
“The tall woman who came in on one of the Durren planet-hoppers. She called herself Cray, but forgot on a number of occasions to answer when spoken to by that name. These ragged ones—the remains, I am told, of one of the old gangs that fought for control of this city between the crime-boss Beldorion and another, a woman, many years ago—surrounded and dragged her away one night, but before I could find where they took her I encountered her in the street. She said they were her friends.” The sweet, low voice was dry—Ithorians have an astonishing range of emotional shadings to their words.
“When—when was this?” asked Luke, through dry lips. “Is she still in the city? Have you seen her?”
Grupp and the Ithorian exchanged a look. Not speculative, precisely, but a police look, asking each other whether he, Luke, constituted a threat of some kind to the order and well-being of their city. He saw Grupp take in the lightsaber at his belt and would have been willing to bet that whether or not the policeman knew what such a thing was, he remembered that Callista had worn one, too.
It was the Ithorian who spoke.
“She left Hweg Shul within a week of her arrival, of her own will insofar as we know. But whether she left in quest, or in flight, or at the behest of another, that we cannot tell.”
They had reached the Newcomer area of town, the square white houses like truncated Imperial walkers on their stilts. The antigrav balls were all drawn down close to the ground, and the freezing wind roared like the vanished seas in their leaves and moaned around the permacrete rendering towers where brope and smoor were processed into edible form. Grupp and Snaplaunce looked Luke over one more time, bade him take care where he walked, and strode off to the shadows under a house where they’d left their speeder-bikes.
Luke stood for a long time, looking back toward the tangled walls and algae-covered rocks of the Oldtimer town.
Within a week of her arrival. Eight months ago.
Whether in quest, or in flight …
Luke shivered in disgust and abhorrence. He would have bet anything he possessed that, eight months ago, Taselda had tried to use Callista as her weapon, her striking arm, as Palpatine had used Vader and Vader had tried to use him, Luke. One of the old gangs that fought for control of this city between the crime-boss Beldorion and another. Was that what Taselda had sunk to, however and whyever she had come to the planet in the first place, the planet where the Force seemed to imbue the very stones like radiant light?
She had tried to enslave Callista with the promises of leading her to what she most wanted, with the illusion of belonging, of having found a home.
Callista had come seeking instruction in the Force and had found instead a terrible example of what could happen when you did not have it, when it decayed to almost nothing, leaving only cravings and anger and madness behind.
And Callista had fled.
Luke shivered and, leaning against the wind, turned his steps back toward his room above the Blue Blerd. His mind refused to release the horrible image of Taselda, once a Jedi, now a dirty old madwoman, picking drochs off her arms and eating them, staring at him out of the dark.
9
“Beldorion the Splendid sends his compliments, Your Excellency.” In the doorway, the tall synthdroid bowed. “He would be honored by your presence at tea.”
Oh, would he? Leia had to bite back the words. The ad-cube for synthdroids had mentioned nothing about their aural and visual receptors being wired as remote pickups so that their owners could see and hear what they did, but Leia knew in some circles it was routinely done. The sweetblossom sometimes made her careless, and she knew that with Dzym waiting, she had to be as careful as if she were walking the blade of a razor.
“Will Master Ashgad be present?” She exaggerated the sweet haziness of voice as she always did around the synthdroids or, in fact, around Liegeus—one of her schoolmates many years ago at the Select Academy had been stoned most of the time and the singsong quality was easy for Leia to fake. The mere fact that no one had come in to make her drink the drugged water had told her at least—belatedly—that the room wasn’t wired; due to the effects of the drug the possibility hadn’t even occurred to her until that morning.
“I do not know, Your Excellency.”
“It’s just that I need to know what to wear,” she murmured dreamily, for the benefit of a possible listener.
“I do not know, Your Excellency.”
Not, thought Leia, with the synthdroid’s departure, that she had a whole lot of choice.
From her post on the terrace she’d counted at least five synthdroids, but some of them might be duplicates, so there could be more. At least two bore marks of necrosis, the slow dying of the flesh that covered their metal armatures that was apparently connected, in some way, with both the Death Seed and Dzym.
She wondered if it were indeed possible, as she was beginning to deduce, that Dzym could in some way control the Death Seed. It would explain the preciseness of the timing needed to take over the Adamantine and the Borealis and the fact that she had survived her bout with the disease. It explained why neither Ashgad nor Liegeus had contracted the plague, and at the same time explained Liegeus’s fear. Or would she see some other explanation, some other detail, when her mind was clear again?
If she lived to look at the matter with a clear mind.
Leia shivered, and began to change into her red-and-bronze gown of state, and the heavy crimson mantle that covered it.
The synthdroid appeared a half hour later, as Leia was finishing putting up her hair. She took note as
well as she could of the directions, the layout of the house: along a corridor, down a flight of steps. There were iron blast doors standing open near the bottom, and through them she glimpsed a vast compound like a docking bay, looking out over the open air of the plateau’s edge. A blocky, medium-size freighter stood there, synthdroids moving around it carrying in what looked like the components of a computer core, which meant that construction was fairly far along. Liegeus came out, saying to one of the synthdroids beside him, “… all the green wires first, then all the red wires …” and across the open permacrete his eyes met hers.
He paused, startled: The synthdroid beside her said, “Please come this way now, Your Excellency,” and she realized she’d been standing in the frame of the open blast doors; she hurried after. They turned a corner, proceeded down another flight of steps, and the smell of Hutt rose to meet her like a wave of heat.
“It is dreadfully slow here, dreadfully slow.” Beldorion shifted his enormous, pythonlike bulk on the dais of air duvets and cushions on which he lay. Hutts tend to obesity as they grow older, but despite almost constant snacking, the Splendid One retained his air of physical power and enormous speed, completely unlike Durga the Hutt’s thin and pitiful disciple Korrda, who back on Nal Hutta had been the butt of so many jokes. Unlike many of his species, he favored gold rings on his fingers, and in the folds of his head flesh, and a jeweled stud in his lower lip. On a baldric of gold and reptile leather he wore his lightsaber, the plain dark metal incongruous against the glittering harness. “It is good of you to join me, little princess. You must find the days weigh heavy in your room.”
“They do, a little,” admitted Leia, wondering what all this was leading up to. She recalled some of the more revolting aspects of her imprisonment by Jabba, but reasoned that even if Ashgad were ignorant of the invitation—which she was virtually certain he was—they were still beneath his roof. “Master Ashgad has been very assiduous about seeing to my wants.”
“Oh, and to mine too, mine too,” rumbled that gluey, bottom-of-the-well voice. “Not that I’m in anywhere near the same position as yourself, but well … I have my comforts, of course, and my chef, though quite frankly, little princess, this new fellow’s not the cook Zubindi Ebsuk was. Zubindi … ah!” He sighed revoltingly, and groped around in his porcelain washtub of brandy for the spiky balls of marinated prabkros that floated therein. “Now, there was a chef! I was desolate when he died. Bereft. A Kubaz, like the new fellow—a genius at insects. ‘Grant me the right hormones, the right enzymes to inject,’ he used to say, ‘and I will transform a sand flea into the center course of an Imperial feast.’ And he could, you know.” The deep crimson eyes fixed on her. “He could.”
He rumbled deep in his belly, and she felt the touch of his mind on hers. Faint and weak, but there, subtly drawing at her will. She felt herself in danger of becoming hypnotized by those scarlet orbs and looked away. With that much sweetblossom in her system it was difficult not to submit her mind to his dominance.
“Ashgad, now … he’s made himself the champion of these Newcomers, but what is that? When I ruled Hweg Shul, all the people came to me with their problems, that I could render judgment. And my judgments were just to all, you know.” The red eyes caught hers again, held them. “I was the better ruler—the stronger as well.”
It was an effort to look away. “I’m sure you were.”
He chuckled again, and slithered one tiny yellow hand around among the satin cushions, almost absentmindedly plucking forth a droch nearly the size of the tip of Leia’s finger, which he popped into his mouth and cracked absently with his tongue. “He couldn’t have taken over from me if I hadn’t been tired. That’s all it was. All that fighting with that Taselda woman. It wore me out. Now taste this, little one.”
He extended his hand, and across the room a beaten-silver plate stirred where it lay on the sideboard of black-wood and crystal, then lifted and floated across to them. It had almost reached them when it tipped in midair and fell. Even dazed with the effects of the blossom, Leia’s reflexes were quick enough to let her dive from the pillows and catch it. It contained roulades of some sort surrounding a bed of what smelled like petroleum by-products, topped with a weird blue thing like an enormous berry. In a lifetime of diplomatic banquets—admittedly brief—Leia had never seen the like.
“Who was Taselda?” she asked, handing him the plate.
“A former colleague.” He plucked the berry from the top of the dish. “She and I came to this world together—oh, many years ago. But she grew jealous of the reverence in which the local population held me and of my greater skills—she couldn’t even manufacture the, ah, basic tools of our order. She did everything in her power to discredit me. Pinpricks, mostly, but annoying just the same. Henchmen trying to break into my palace, that sort of thing. Even after I came to live with Ashgad. Now, my dear, tell me if this is not the most exquisite taste in the galaxy.”
Leia picked up the fruit knife and fork from the small table nearby, cut a section from the berry, and watched as Beldorion slurped down the rest with Rabelaisian enthusiasm before she ate her own fragment. She wished at once that she’d taken a larger hunk, because it was delicious, both sweet and meaty, juicy and subtly chambered.
“Zubindi used to grow them three times this size,” Beldorion said with a sigh. “And of a flavor to make this seem a cast husk by comparison. Would you believe it, child? It’s a common Rodian kelp gnat, raised on growth enzymes and kept alive and growing for a year instead of the day of its natural life span. Zubindi could keep them going for five years, turn them into a whole different life form! They’d sing and whistle and move around on little tentacles they developed toward the end of that last year of life. Heaven knows what they would have been, had he been able to prolong them further! And the way he could torture britteths! Britteth flesh, as you must know, improves with the enzymes secreted when they die in pain … ah! Sometimes I think I shall never get over his death.”
He groped in his brandy bowl for another prabkro, and shed a sentimental tear. Leia tactfully took a tiny bite of one of the roulades. Kubaz chefs were famous through the galaxy for injecting insect life forms with growth enzymes and gene-splicing them in quest of newer and more perfect designer foodstuffs, so it was anyone’s bet what these actually contained.
“What brought you here in the first place?” asked Leia.
He shook his great head, narrow eyes like cabochon jewels peeking out at her from beneath heavy lids. “I think you know,” he said, and his great voice sank to a basso murmur, like the mutter that presages typhoon winds. His long, purplish tongue slopped around the edges of his mouth, questing for stray droplets of juice, then vanished within. “I think you’ve felt it—that light. That ocean of brightness that fills the universe; that fills each of our Order with light. Travelers’ tales—old log books. They said it was here. But you know that.”
His eyes held hers again, inescapable. “Now a young lady of your—particular—talents might find herself needing allies in a situation like this. Ashgad can’t be trusted, you know, little one. And he was never that good a ruler.” He held out one small gold-ringed hand, and Leia found herself unable to pull away.
From the doorway a deep, very quiet voice said, “At least he never sold one of his slaves to Dzym.”
Beldorion swung around, hissing; Leia sprang back and pulled her gaze away. Liegeus stood in the doorway, graying hair hanging down in his eyes, broken out of his fear, thought Leia, by anger. For a moment he only stood there, looking at the two of them, then he stepped lightly down and crossed to the dais.
Softly, Beldorion said, “Have a care, philosopher.” The whole terrible length of him twitched, the great seven-foot tail creeping back and forth like a separate, angry being as his red eyes narrowed. “Upon another occasion I told you I do not brook interference.”
Liegeus hesitated for a moment, his dark eyes widening with some evil memory. Then he came forward again and took Leia by the h
and. “What did he offer you, my dear?” His voice was steady, but she felt his fingertips cold, and shaking a little in hers. “Partnership in ruling this planet? Or just that he’d let you go free if you’d put him back in charge?”
He raised Leia to her feet and led her back to the door. Beldorion made no move to stop them, but as Liegeus reached to touch the opener plate Leia saw the Hutt gesture pettishly in his direction. Liegeus gasped as if struck, half-doubled over in agony, his free hand going to his temple. He was ashen with shock and pain as Leia slapped the opener plate with the backs of her fingers. The door sliced open, and she led him through, stumbling blind and clinging to the wall for support.
They were halfway down the corridor, opposite the blast doors that led into the docking bay, before Liegeus straightened up and drew a shaky breath. “Migraine,” he managed to say through lips drained of color and blood. “He does that—sometimes—when I beat him at hologames, too. Sometimes—worse than that.”
He shook his head, his hand stealing to his throat, cast a quick glance at the open blast doors, and putting a hand behind her elbow led her rather rapidly toward the stairs. “Did he try to influence your mind? Don’t trust him, my dear.”
“And I suppose I should trust Ashgad?”
Liegeus looked away.
They mounted the stairs in silence, passed down the corridor toward the doors of her room. He had punched in the code—carefully keeping his body between her and the pad—before he said, “He doesn’t keep his promises. Even should he do so, he couldn’t protect you from Dzym, and he could not defeat Ashgad. Even years ago, when Ashgad first reached this planet, Beldorion was no match for him.”
Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Page 15
