Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [113]
What were all those weirdly heavy metal spheres, lined up according to size in a rack?
The bars, ropes, hanging beams of the ceiling were self-explanatory … or were they?
Luke has to see this.
None of this was mentioned in the Holocron, or in the records Luke had salvaged from the wreck of the Jedi ship Chu ’unthor. Maybe they didn’t think it worth recording, as we don’t think to mention the alphabet when we write literary criticism. Or stop to explain the human enzyme system at the start of a love story.
Or the human need for oxygen, for that matter.
Perhaps it was premonition, some dark tension in the air that keyed and stretched Leia’s senses. But amid the shadows of levers and pulleys of that great toy on the wall she caught sight of something half familiar and, stepping forward, pulled it from where it had been tucked almost out of sight. It was a small packet of black plastene, powdered with a dirty residue whose smell brought back to her the dim blue-green grotto of the Cloud-Mother’s Healing House; Tomla El’s soft voice saying, Yarrock.
New, she thought. Not anything the Jedi would have left here. But who?
By the doorway, Artoo whistled a warning.
Leia froze, not breathing, reaching with her mind into the dark.
The shrieks and snuffles of the mind-stripped guardians of the tunnels were mute.
But the air itself seemed to thicken, coalescing, sinking in on itself.
The Force. An enormous darkness, masquerading as the silence of nothing there.
Then from the darkness she heard a very faint, chitinous scratching.
Some shift of pressure, a change of the deep, hot atmosphere of the caves, brought her the smell, like the vast exhalation of rotting sugarcane or the decaying debris of the fruit-packing plants, a chemical dirtiness that lifted the hair on her nape.
“Let’s get out of here, Artoo.” She slid the packet back where she had found it, crossed quickly to the door, and Artoo flashed the beam of his spotlight past her, to the ebon silk of the water flowing down the center of the room, and the stretch of floor beyond it.
The floor moved. Glistening shapes heaved over one another like a lake of black jewels amid a vast, filthy scratching of claws.
“I wouldn’t advise it, Your Highness.”
Roganda Ismaren, small and pale and fragile-looking in her white gown, stood framed in the narrow archway to Leia’s right. Beside her stood a dark-clothed boy, like her slim and raven-haired, like her small, with a suggestion about him of wiry grace.
Ohran Keldor, Drost Elegin, and another man—stocky, hard-faced, fifty, in black—stood grouped behind.
“Artoo, go!” ordered Leia. “Now—”
Roganda only gestured. Elegin and the third man strode to cut Artoo off before he reached the bridge and Leia brought up the flamethrower. The dark-haired boy snickered derisively and said, “Oh, please!” and Leia, warned by some instinct, flung the weapon from her as the tank glowed and ruptured in a burst of fire. She shucked her carbine and caught up the forcepike, feeling the yank of the boy’s mind on it, forcing her own mind against his like a resistant wall as she sprang between the men and Artoo. Elegin fired his blaster at her but she was already dodging, moving in on him, driving him back. The other man yelled, “Put it away, idiot!” as the bolt hissed and zinged against walls, floor, ceiling in shattering ricochets. Leia couldn’t probe with her mind to strike the weapon out of his hand but she could at least keep it from being done to her.
At Roganda’s side, the boy said, “Don’t waste your time, Elegin, Garonnin. You …”
He fixed his wide eyes, like cobalt glass, on Artoo. “Back here. Now.”
Artoo, who had crossed the plank bridge and was a few meters from the arch leading away into the dark maze of passageways, came to a stop. Kretch crawled and squirmed wildly over his slick sides in a way that turned Leia sick, but the little droid