could not allow the deeds I saw to go uncorrected. I lent my skill, and such
talents as I possessed, to the side of the people. With my lightsaber in
hand I led them to a stronger and more peaceful way of life. My craft was
destroyed one night while I was away leading the rescue of hostages from the
enemy; and I knew that I must stay. After the fighting was over, these
people made me their ruler. And I was happy."
Luke nodded, seeing in his mind this beautiful woman in her warrior youth.
The house, indeed, was of the sort that a grateful people would build for a
just ruler who had saved them from tyranny.
"But many years later another Jedi came to this world, an evil creature
selfish, lying, but very plausible. He came here because he had heard that
the Force on this world is strong. It lies close to the surface of reality
here, close enough to reach out and touch, though he was not capable of
doing so. His own abilities to use the Force were not strong, and he sought
to twist and gather them to fulfill his own emptiness.
Beldorion he was called. Beldorion of the Ruby Eyes. Beldorion the
Splendid."
She sighed and passed her hand across her forehead in a gesture of weariness
and grief.
"As you know, Owen, there are always those who will follow such a one.
He worked not only through violence and the threat of violence but through
lies and calumny, turning the truth and people's memories of the truth,
until everything I had done here was given a different meaning, a sinister
significance that those whose power to work evil I had curtailed were
delighted to believe.
"My friends turned against me. Beldorion was too feeble an adept to
manufacture his own lightsaber, so he stole mine from me. I was driven into
poverty. Feared by the weak and courted by the venal, Beldorion came to rule
Hweg Shul like a king, and I was forgotten."
Her voice faltered, and she put up her hand quickly, to cover whatever
expression might have pulled at her mouth. In the quiet street behind them a
blerd brayed its monotonous tenor screech; an
Oldtimer woman drove past in a high-wheeled cart pulled by alcopays,
flipping her long whip at their feet. Luke saw in his mind's eye this
beautiful woman before him, hurrying along these densely twisted walled
streets with her dirty dress fluttering in the endless wind and remembered
Ben again and the way children in Tosche station used to run out in front of
him giggling and making what they considered to be magic signs with their
fingers. Even at this great distance of time--and he'd been only a small
child himself--he remembered the genuine amusement that had tugged the
corners of Ben's mouth.
Taselda went on, "Well, it was inevitable, as we true Knights know, that
Beldorion should succumb to his own greeds and his own vices. He was usurped
and ousted many years ago by a man named Seti Ashgad, a politician sent here
by the old Emperor as punishment, even as the ancestors of these people had
been sent here. Beldorion had become so sunk in debauchery that no power
remained to him. His followers deserted him for Ashgad, and Ashgad took from
him his very house, and all the treasure inside it. Treasure that he had
stolen from me," she said somberly. "And most important, in that house
somewhere is my lightsaber."
Luke said softly, "Ah."
"Because of injuries I suffered in my struggle against Beldorion it was not
possible for me to make another. When I went to Ashgad, many years ago now,
and tried to retrieve it, I was cast forth as brutally as Beldorion had cast
me forth. Since then I have tried many times to recover it. See." With a
movement of simple innocence, she slipped her dress from her right shoulder,
and showed him, among the droch bites, a terrible bruise on her arm.
"We will be vulnerable, when we go to the cave to find your Callista," she
said softly. "Ashgad's servants are merciless, the more so because they are
no longer human, but only human-seeming droids.
And because of that same injury, I no longer have the strength to enter
Ashgad's house and get the lightsaber myself. Indeed, I'm no longer sure
whether it is here or at the house he has in the wastelands, at the foot of
the Mountains of Lightning. For Callista's sake, and for yours, I wish I
could go with you, show you where she is, but I dare not."
She drew in a shaky breath and shoved back the dirty mane of hair from her
face again with both hands. "I dare not."
Rage filled Luke at the sight of the bruises on her arm, self-righteous fury
that anyone would have hurt this gentle, beautiful woman mingled with
anxiety that they--whoever they were--would take out their anger at Taselda
on Callista, should they come upon her alone. He said, "Where would your
lightsaber be, in Ashgad's house?" Its high, glittering white walls came
again to his mind, arrogant among the small cottages of the Oldtimers.
"There is a treasure room beneath the kitchens." Taselda's indigo eyes
brimmed with grateful tears. "The entrance is through the kitchen courts,
here." She turned away, and did something at a small table.
Coming back, she handed him a sheet of coarse local paper, on which was
inked a plan of the house.
Luke saluted her with it, feeling light and buoyant within himself, as if
his bloodstream were filled with sparks of fire. He grinned at her like a
boy. I'll be back. We'll be out of town by nightfall."
"She told me that I could trust you, Owen," said Taselda softly. "I saw the
light in her eyes, when she spoke your name. I think you need have no fear
of what you will find."
Callista. Luke's whole body seemed to be singing, as he strode away down the
ill-paved back streets of the Oldtimers town. Whatever dark the world may
send, still lovers meet . . .
I've found her, i've found her. I've found her I saw the light in her eyes .
. . His steps slowed.
' . . when she spoke your name."
But Callista would not have known that he would be calling himself O wen
Lars.
He stopped and realized he had missed his way among the near-identical white
houses.
And he thought, quite calmly, There was something in the wine.
Luke had never been much of a drinker, and once he'd begun to study and
understand the Force he had given it up altogether. It simply took too much
edge off his concentration. Although, of course, Taselda's wine wasn't like
other wine, still it surprised him that he'd
imbibed the quantity of it that he had. Now as he turned his concentration
inward on his own metabolism, to clear some of the alcohol from his system,
he realized that there was something else there as well.
A synthetic mood-enhancer, he thought, leaning against a wall with one hand
and closing his eyes. Pryodene or pryodase, or maybe Algafine torwe
weed--the kind of thing that made one accepting and friendly.
Leia had told him there had been a time when consumption of pryodase had
been de rigueur before dinner parties among the nobility of Coruscant, as a
counter to the fad for dueling,
and there were always accusations in labor
disputes and divorce proceedings that one side or the other had slipped it
into their opposite number's caffeine just before negotiations.
It was harmless and nonaddictive. it simply lowered one's guard.
Luke thought, How wise of her, to use that method to overcome my prejudices
so that I could see her as she truly is.
He walked two steps, trying to reorient himself toward Seti Ash-gad's house,
and then thought, What did I just think?
A throb of pain seized him. Not physical pain, but the pain of loss, of
abandonment, the deep-seated pain of a child who suspects from earliest
awareness that his mother had given him away like a stray puppy, for reasons
he could not understand. The pain of Callista's flight. The pain of losing
the dream of the father he had invented in his lonely fantasies.
Cold flooded him, cold and anxiety. He couldn't lose Taselda . . .
Through the child's fear of loss, a voice came to him.
Search your feelings, it said, a black voice speaking out of blackness.
You know it to be true.
His father's voice.
Vader's.
Taselda was using him.
The cold in him deepened, the panic of abandonment. If she was lying, using
him only to get her lightsaber back (and what kind of injury would prevent
her from making another lightsaber, if she'd had the skill to do it once?),
it meant she wasn't Callista's teacher. She couldn't restore Callista to
him. No, he thought, not wanting to believe it. Not wanting it to be true.
No . . .
You know it to be true.
And as he had then, he knew.
He turned his steps back, toward Taselda's house.
As a Jedi, she would have been trained in the bending of minds.
Luke had seen Ben do it, had done it himself. The Emperor Palpatine had been
a genius at evoking that kind of desperate loyalty, that need to serve him,
calling forth the echoes of one's own fears like a skilled musician calling
forth beauty from a flute.
And Taselda's ability in that direction was very subtle and very strong.
Wind slapped and howled stronger at him as he wound through the alleyways,
as if forbidding him to return. Buried beneath the avalanche of wrenching
desolation, the oceans of ambient fear that flooded his soul at the thought
of a break from Taselda, Luke felt the cold knowledge he had felt, hanging
on that projection above the Bespin abyss. He didn't want it to be true, but
he knew it was.
He came to Taselda's house from the rear this time, and saw her through the
back door across a grubby yard scattered with rusted speeders in various
stages of disrepair. She was groping and picking in the shadowy corners of
the room for something, behind furniture and under cushions. He saw her jam
her arm under an armoire, then pull it out and stand, facing him across the
yard, her blue eyes wide and furious, her black snaggly hair hanging in a
mat of nastiness over her breasts.
He felt her mind pull on his, angry and futile; felt the weak, diffused
shoving of the Force, and though the wall sheltered them from the wind he
saw around him in the yard the clapped-out water tanks, the bleached old
rags, the scraps of wood and metal all flutter and twitch like live things.
Her eyes still on his, she was pulling things, rochs, they had to be--off
her arm and eating them with her brown, broken teeth.
The anxiety in his mind had gone shrill, like a hectoring scream.
There was desolation in his soul, fake as tinsel beads. Under it, a more
genuine grief.
Luke turned away.
It was less the Force than his years with the Rebellion, his years fighting
battles in vacuum in vessels moving at incredible speeds, that
made him pick up almost instinctively first the sense of danger, and only in
the next second the sound of running feet. He ducked as a spear buried
itself in the dirt just beyond where he'd stood. Someone hurled a rock, and
he sprang back as an old-fashioned yellow sodium blaster bolt ripped a
charred line in the wall at his side.
Ragged-looking men and women came running at him from all sides out of the
alleyways--kids, too, wild-haired and barefooted, throwing rocks.
Luke could have scattered them with a blast of the Force, picked up any one
of them and hurled him or her flying, but dared not. A girl of no more than
sixteen ran at him with a club, and he swept it aside with his forearm as he
sidestepped, dodged another blaster bolt from a weapon so run-down it
probably couldn't have cooked a happy-patty, and fled. The little gaggle of
Oldtimers ran after him, cursing and shaking their weapons.
"Murderer! Thief! Dirtball!" (They should talk! They were fast, appearing
around the corners of the houses and stabbing at him with spears and clubs.
Two or three had blasters, but it took a good deal of practice to hit
anything on the run, and Luke made sure to keep moving. Once two of the men
grabbed him, tried to drag him back into the mazes of alleys--presumably
back to Taselda's house, if as he guessed these people were remnants of
those she'd "ruled" here, but Luke wasn't at all sure. He dropped his
weight, swept one man's legs out from under him with a lashing kick, and
used the falling body as a weapon against the other, then hurled them both
into the angry pack.
He dove over a wall, pelted across a thickly grown garden patch whose leaves
slapped and smote him with the force of the gale winds, and heard the
pursuers run around the long sides of the lot. If worse came to worst he
supposed he could always use the Force to . . .
To what? Start a Force storm that would kill some other innocent old woman
under the care of a Healer two hundred kilometers away?
He grabbed a rake from the tools along the fence, vaulted over the wall
where he could hear the least of the shouting, and made a break for the
wider streets and more open field of vision among the Newcomer houses.
Dust and pebbles smote him and cut his face. Three Oldtimers appeared in
front of him across the width of the street, including the man with the
blaster. Luke dove sideways, slipped past a spear that jabbed down on him
from the roof of a shed, rolled to his feet, and set his back to the wall as
more came running.
"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 lihorian 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
nea
rly 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 Oldtim-ers 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
dryIthorians 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
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