Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  on its way down before it exploded, halfway down the face of the tower.

  While other Therans grabbed metal cable that fell from the beams, snaking

  and snatching at them, Callista knocked ammunition loads and power-cores out

  of every weapon she could lay hands on, hurled them after the flamethrower

  into space. One exploded seconds after it left her hands, and by the

  reflected glare Leia saw the other woman's face, calm and weirdly peaceful

  in the whirlwind of her long dark hair.

  Leia stooped, caught up a blaster rifle whose whole chamber glowed violent

  red, flung it over the parapet. Visibility was down to almost nothing with

  the dust, and the violence of the storm was fast tearing the swaying beams

  free. A coil of razor wire sprang loose and lashed across Leia's back like a

  whip, blood soaking into her clothing as Callista dragged her to the cable

  the Therans had used to climb the tower.

  Climbing down a cable after having scrambled up only hours ago was the last

  thing Leia wanted to do. But she felt the force of the horror building, not

  diminishing. Through the voices crying in her mind she thought she heard

  Luke's voice, sensed Luke's terror and desperation.

  She knew to the marrow of her bones that to remain in this place, with the

  forces being unleashed, might well mean death.

  She swung over the parapet, wrapped her hands around the cable, icy wind

  ripping at her long hair and raking her back with sand through the rent in

  her shirt. It seemed to her she descended forever, alone in howling

  darkness, with flying boulders shattering against the tower walls and beams

  and wire raining down past her. How Be and Callista guided the band to the

  cu-pas and speeders clustered on the canyon ridge, she didn't know. Unlike

  ordinary winds, these terrible upheavals in the Force were not averted or

  thwarted by the canyon walls. They ripped and tore at the Therans as they

  worked their way upward along the canyons, away from the center of the

  storm. Leia clung to the neck of her borrowed cu-pa, glimpsing only now and

  then Callista riding beside her, dragging the beast along by the rein.

  All the time she could hear Luke's voice, feel his consciousness in the

  storm.

  "Leia!" The cry echoed down the stairwell, a man's voice wrung with agony

  and despair.

  Luke stumbled, and let the Force around him fade and ease. She's there. Or

  someone up there knows where she is. Clinging to the wall, knees jellied

  with weakness, he readied his lightsaber again, made himself find the

  strength to climb.

  The psychic stench of the drochs was overwhelming. It washed over Luke as he

  neared the door, and saw what lay in the room beyond.

  It was far too deep in the plateau to be the foundation of the house.

  Probably a guard chamber or security watchroom of some kind, long abandoned.

  Walls, ceiling, and floor, it swarmed with drochs, a vast hideousness drunk

  and re-drunk from droch to droch until the whole air was black with it. Luke

  saw, scuttling along the wall, the carci-noform droch that seemed able to

  command the others, weirdly like a general reviewing troops, but that

  awareness was only for an instant.

  A man lay in the midst of the room. He had ceased trying to get up, though

  Luke saw him pluck weakly at the brown, squirming things as they covered his

  face. The stalk-eyed commander-droch scuttled in now and then to pluck

  smaller drochs from the dying man's body, drinking them dry and casting them

  aside to be picked and finished by the tinier fry that skirmished around the

  edges. Luke was raising his hand, ready to summon the Force again, when

  movement flickered in

  the doorway on the opposite wall, the doorway that led to a further

  ascending flight of stairs, and a soft voice whispered, "Now, now, what have

  we here? Shoo-shoo."

  The drochs scuttered from their victim, and Luke slapped the glowrod on his

  chest into darkness, and stood back out of the room's single dim orange

  ceiling-lamp. They retreated, but remained close around the man, who lay now

  in the midst of the floor, smallish and slim and graying and vaguely

  familiar. His clothing was torn in a thousand places to reveal flesh all

  dotted with the red marks of their bites, and his chest rose and fell with

  the desperate effort to breathe. The man walking toward him from the doorway

  Luke definitely recognized as Seti Ashgad's secretary, Dzym, said to be an

  inhabitant of this planet ....

  But his mind still open, still conditioned to the reactions of this place,

  Luke felt the miasma of him, the vast, dark, stinking aura of rotted power,

  an aura so huge, so dense, that it nearly made him sick.

  Dzym whispered, "Shoo-shoo," again, and the circle of drochs expanded

  infinitesimally. The big stalk-eyed one started to scamper for the doorway,

  where Luke stood, and Dzym strode forward and caught it in two steps,

  lifting it up between his gloved hands. The thing clawed frantically at him

  with its pinchers, and Dzym laughed, a horrible sound, like a computer

  recording of laughter, or a bird that has been taught to mimic the sound.

  Dzym released one hand, and with small, sharp brown teeth pulled off the

  violet leather glove, and Luke saw that his hand bore only the most

  superficial resemblance to a human limb at all. It was, in fact, a sort of

  mouth, orifices gaping on the palm and at the ends of the fingers, tinier

  mouths all red and probing, like the heads of maggots, which Dzym then

  fastened around the crab-thing's body.

  Dzym closed his eyes, and drew deep his breath. The droch in his hand

  squirmed horribly, weaker and weaker, and Dzym smiled in his reverie.

  "Ah, I've been hunting you for a long time, my little friend.

  Sweet . . ." He drew another rapt breath, like a man savoring wine.

  "Sweet."

  At his feet the prone man rolled over, and started, feebly, to try to rise.

  Dzym put his foot down hard on the victim's chest. "I thought we had an

  understanding about this, Liegeus," he said in his soft voice. "I thought

  you knew what the boundaries of Seti Ashgad's house were to be.

  Tell me that you knew."

  The man Liegeus whispered, "I knew." while Dzym closed his eyes again, and

  lifted the still-wriggling super-droch to his face, where he bit and chewed

  at it with his mouth for a time, murmuring in his throat and sighing while

  brown matter ran down his chin and neck. In time he dropped the thing, and

  smiled, his blotted mouth like nothing human.

  "They're so good, when they get that big," he murmured. "So sweet.

  Such a deep rush of life, such a concentration--though that little fellow

  was getting a wee bit big for his boots." He went to his knees at Liegeus's

  side, and the man tried to roll away from him, bringing his arm up over his

  face for protection.

  Dzym reached out with his bare, dripping mouth-hand, and drew' him back

  over. "As I suspect you are, my friend."

  Liegeus made a weak noise of protest, whispered, "Please Ashgad I haven't

  finished installing the launch vectors "but Dzym was clearly not paying any

  attention. He pulled off his other glove and
began to stroke and caress the

  man's face and arms, leaving trails of bites and gashes along the major

  arteries and along what Luke recognized as the energy tracks of certain

  healing systems, the paths of electromagnetic synapse from heart and liver

  and brain. Dzym's eyes were shut in ecstasy, his head bowed forward, and

  Luke thought he could see restless, thrusting movements among the man's

  clothing, as if there were other limbs twitching on his back and chest,

  other mouths gaping and closing. L iegeus wept a little, and then lay still;

  he whispered, "Leia .

  . ." and that decided Luke.

  Lightsaber flaring to life in his hand, Luke reached out with the Force and

  pulled Dzym from Liegeus, as he had pulled the drochs from himself, and

  hurled him against the wall. But Dzym was nimble and swift. He scrambled

  around, twisted as he struck the wall and fell to the floor, gummed mouth

  parting in a hiss of rage, and for a moment Luke felt the Force used to

  strike at him in return.

  Not an expert's blow, not trained, but present, like poltergeist anger

  or the aimless psychokinesis of certain animals. Weakened as he was by the

  drochs, it was strong enough to knock him back against the wall.

  He caught his balance, sprang forward, and Dzym backed from him, pale eyes

  glaring, the front of his robe falling open to reveal the squirming mess of

  tubes and tentacles and secondary mouths beneath.

  The Force smote Luke again, weak and secondhand and stinking in his mind.

  Secondhand, absorbed from someone else, he thought ....

  Then Dzym was gone. The door to the stair leading up slammed--Luke could

  hear the locking-rings clang over. He was readying his lightsaber to cut

  through the wood when a tiny breath behind him w hispered, "Run. He'll use

  the drochs who've bitten you .... " Luke turned. The man Liegeus tried to

  reach out toward him, to move his bloodied hand.

  "They're his to command. They'll be in the stair."

  Luke reached him in two strides, went to one knee at his side. "Lady Solo .

  . ."

  "Gone. Fled. Looking for her--Beldorion and Ashgad. I thought I could . . .

  make good . . . get out . . . synthdroids down . . .

  thought I could find her."

  In the open doorway to the downward-leading stair there was a dark glitter

  along the floor, a skittering movement that turned to a slow, sluggish flow.

  The dense, fetid sense of a million rotted lifetimes rolled out, like the

  smell of clotted blood. Luke slipped his arm under Liegeus's shoulders,

  pulled him to his feet. "Do you know where she might have gone?"

  The lolling head rolled; the older man breathed, "Bleak Point gun station.

  Or a canyon in the hills. I don't . . ."

  "Never mind," said Luke, breathing deep, gathering to him the strength of

  the Force. "We'll find her."

  It was use the Force or die, he thought, and he wondered what they would say

  about it Obi-Wan, and Callista, and Yoda. That he should die, rather than

  cause what he had caused last time-tinnin Droo the smelter in agony from his

  burns, his assistant unable to walk? How was he to know that Leia's absence,

  Leia's death, wouldn't cause greater grief, greater destruction in the

  Republic?

  And in his mind he could almost hear Obi-Wan's voice whispering, Trust your

  feelings.

  And his instinct--he hoped completely detached from a desire not to be

  sucked of life by the filthy swarm flowing toward him across the dirty

  permacrete floor--was clear.

  He smote them with the Force, clearing the way like a maniac broom.

  Half-dragging, half-carrying Liegeus, Luke descended the stair, shaky

  himself and sickened with weakness, feeling the drochs still buried in his

  legs and arms drawing strength from him, feeding the strength into the

  monstrous creature, human only in form, that went by the name of Dzym.

  The hangar doors were locked. Luke dumped the unconscious body he carried

  into the sleek black Star Destroyer-like Mobquet, ran the green laser blade

  of his lightsaber through the lock, and shoved and hauled the door open far

  enough to admit passage of the speeder.

  Mobquet Chariots started up with a coded ignition, but Luke hadn't tinkered

  with speeders for twenty-five years to no purpose--Han joked that Luke could

  hot-wire an Imperial torpedo platform with one of Leia's hairpins.

  Then they were running through the night, under the stars.

  The Theran riders took refuge in a grotto deep in the hills, an enormous

  geode of amethyst away from the storm's heart. Two or three Therans

  illuminated glowrods or torches, and the glare of them twinkled on the rough

  jewels around them, the shadows moving strangely through the fugitive

  brightness. There must, thought Leia, be something in what Callista said

  about the crystals generating a radiance that killed the drochs. There were

  none in the cave.

  After a long time of silence, hearing the boulders crashing like pebbles in

  the surf against the canyon walls outside, Leia asked softly, "Who is Dzym?

  What is he? He's keeping Ashgad alive, isn't he?"

  Callista nodded. "As he's kept Beldorion alive--and Splendid all these

  years. I think he had dealings with Taselda, too. The original split between

  them may have been on his account." Torchlight splintered

  over the faceted pocket of jewels in which they sat, made strange brightness

  over her thin face, in her colorless eyes.

  "He's the key to Ashgad's deal with Loronar, the key to your kidnapping

  along with poor old Liegeus's ability to cut a perfect holofake the one who

  could set the drochs to drink the life out of the ships' crews at a certain

  moment and no sooner. He controls them--drinks life through them."

  "And he enjoys it," said Leia softly, remembering Dzym's face.

  "That's what he wanted me for, wasn't it? Because I'm a Jedi. So he could

  touch the Force."

  "I don't think that was conscious in him," she said. "He couldn't use it,

  really, or not use it to any degree of skill. He just wants that life, that

  addition to his own life. He thinks he can control them all, no matter how

  far they spread. I don't know, but I think he's vrong. I believe it's only a

  matter of time--and not very much time--before they get far enough from him

  to slip from his control, before they breed in such numbers that they'll be

  controlling one another, not obeying him. But he doesn't believe that. And

  at heart he doesn't really care. All he wants is to get off this planet,

  into more fertile worlds."

  "That doesn't tell me who he is," said Leia. "Or how he can do this."

  "He can do this," said Callista, "because Dzym is a hormonally altered,

  mutated, and vastly overgrown two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old droch."

  "Hills," whispered Liegeus. "Up the canyon. Death Seed--takes less than half

  an hour . . ."

  The cold within Luke was unmistakable, terrifying. He couldn't even touch it

  with the Force, because its molecular structure was so precisely his own. He

  was surprised that his voice sounded so calm.

  "Can we outrun it? Get clear of his range?"

  "Have to . . . cross the galaxy . . . to do that. No." Dzy
m's victim

  struggled to sit up, long hair moving back with the wind.

  "Another way."

  Luke's breath was beginning to drag hard by the time he halted the speeder,

  as far up a jagged crevice of crystalline scree as he could manage to

  ascend. His companion had fallen silent, and for a heartstopping time Luke

  feared that the man had died and in so doing condemned him to death as well.

  But Liegeus raised his head when Luke shook him, regarded him with dark eyes

  drunk with fatigue.

  "Ah. Knew I couldn't . . . get out of it . . . this easily. Ground lightning

  kills them. Rig a jump-circuit field through the crystals .

  . .

  lots of them here . . ."

  Luke was already dismantling the speeder's engine with fumbling hands.

  Even a Mobquet Chariot could not generate one-thousandth of the power of the

  ground-lightning storms, but once a crude circuit had been wired to push

  electricity through the huge fragments of crystal that littered the

  talus-slope underfoot, the dim tingling of low-level current was palpable to

  someone sitting between the points of exchange.

  "It won't kill them," whispered Liegeus, as Luke handed him one of the

  thermal blankets from the Chariot's emergency kit, and sat down beside him.

  His hands and body itched with a discomfort that never reached the level of

  pain. "But it weakens them to the point that they can't kill us, can't draw

  off our energy and transmit it to Dzym.

  When the sun rises we'll be well."

  Luke shivered and glanced skyward at the huge, cold, unwavering stars,

  wondering how much was left of the night. The electricity passing between

  the crystals and over the two men was too weak to throw light Only now and

  then, a quick spark or a glow, like luminous swamp gas, seemed to wicker in

  the air. Of greater brightness were the stars themselves, whose pallid

  bluish gleam seemed to be picked up by the slabs and clusters and formations

  of shining stone that clustered the canyon walls.

  He pulled his own too-thin blanket close around him. His words smoked in the

  wan electrical glare.

  "Is she all right?" he asked. "Leia?"

  The older man nodded. "Ashgad forbade Dzym to go near her. He's almost

  completely enslaved to Dzym, but at least until the Reliant was

  ready to take Dzym off-planet, away from all danger of the daytime radiance