Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [112]
They had hardly fallen when the kretch appeared, slithering out of the darkness to feed on the corpses and the blood.
From the depths of the tunnels—behind her, around her, in a dozen directions—the second Mluki’s final cry was echoed by a chorus of screams.
Kill you all. Kill you all …
She fled down a tunnel, Artoo’s beam flashing ahead of her to the archway of an artificial entrance in the rock. She ducked through, to an area of cut stone, hewn chambers, ramps of desiccated and kretch-gnawed wood covering steps and changes of level. A bridge crossed a fast-running stream whose water steamed thinly in the hot air. A tunnel where she sensed an echo of the Force whispering, Don’t come down here …
Dead glowpanels, small trunk beds in corners …
Something huge and hair-matted and stinking fell upon her from a doorway, and Leia slashed without thinking, blood splattering her t-suit as the thing collapsed shrieking at her feet. She sprang over it, Artoo nudging past the body, and the air around them seemed to breathe with foul, snuffling, guttural snarls and what might have been stammered, mind-blasted words.
Refuge. She sensed it, felt a curious lightness, the sudden impulse of safety. A sense of what she’d long been seeking.
It lay to her left, calling her, it seemed, through a dark triple arch.
An open hall, wide and dark with soda-straw stalactites and thin curtains of mineral deposits forming through cracks in the roof. A stream divided the wide room in two, planks thrown across it, but no sign of a bridge. Right, left, and center, three open, arched doorways led out of the room on the far side of the water, and as Leia crossed the plank, the center one called.
Distantly, as Artoo shined his spotlight into the room beyond the center arch, Leia felt as she had felt looking down from the tower, as if she saw and heard things not of her own time.
Children’s voices.
The bone-deep awareness of the presence of the Force.
She stepped through the arch, and Artoo brightened his lights again. Chips and threads of metal winked at her all the length of the long, barrel-vaulted room.
A glass tank a few centimeters thick, empty save for a thin layer of yellow sand.
A glass cylinder a meter tall, hermetically sealed and containing only the withered skeleton of a leaf. Beside it on the table lay a ball of black volcanic glass, a gold ring, and a crude doll wrought of rag and twigs.
The whole back wall of the room was taken up by an exquisitely balanced apparatus of suspended spheres, rings, rods, and pulleys, glistening in enigmatic welcome. Two other machines of shafts and buckets and polished steel balls seemed to beckon, tempt, and tease the mind with a monumental silliness of potential chain reactions.
There was a glass sphere filled with dull pinky-gold liquid that seemed to stir, colors coalescing briefly at the vibration of her stride.
The children were here, thought Leia.
The joy and fascination they’d felt seemed to have soaked into the stone of the walls.
She might not have found their names, Leia thought … but she’d found their toys.
She reached tentatively, touched the sphere of liquid, and where her fingers contacted the glass, molecules of red separated themselves from the pink suspension, hung like dissipating clouds in the fluid atmosphere of the ball. Uncertainly—because Luke had taught her nothing of this, though it seemed ridiculously easy once she tried—she prodded with her mind, and the liquid separated itself, golden on the top, crimson on the bottom. Something in the color of the crimson made Leia look deeper, summon the Force … In the blood-colored molecules were hidden enough of a third color to form between the existing zones a narrow band of cobalt blue.
Jacen and Jaina need these, she thought. Anakin, when he grew older.
There were other things, maddeningly simple things she could not understand.
Why a circle of empty bowls, straight-sided and of varying size? What went in them? Leia could see nothing on the black tabletop