Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [12]
But he still hadn’t known whether this was Nichos Marr, or only a droid programmed with everything the man had known.
The memory was there. A child’s memory, as Nichos had said: dark tunnels twisting through rock seams, and a dense, damp heat; in other places bitter cold. Snowstorms howling across empty wastes of ice and black rock; caves of ice, and below them caldera of sullenly smoking mud. Crystalline cliffs flashing blue in a dim twilight of a heatless sun; thick jungles; banks of ferns shoulder-deep around streams and pools that steamed in the weird sharpness of the air.
A woman singing.
“Children playing in the field of flowers,
The Queen’s on her way to the King’s three
towers …”
He remembered that song, so far back he couldn’t even recall whose voice he’d heard singing it.
But he was aware of those memories as if he’d read them somewhere. Snowstorms howling across empty wastes … was a string of words in his mind unattached to the sear of the ice-wind he himself recalled from Hoth; he knew the streams had steamed near the glaciers without seeing either water or ice.
All the words of the old song were there—the tune, too, in standard musical notation, he supposed. But no memory of the voice that had sung them, any more than he had himself.
Only a darkness, eerily, heartbreakingly empty.
“The Queen had a hunt-bird and the Queen had a lark,
The Queen had a songbird that sang in the dark.
The King said I’ll hang you from the big black tree
If your birds don’t bring three wishes to me.…”
Then it hit him. Breathtaking, terrifying, a sense of cold horror and a stinging almost-sound that lanced through his brain like a splinter of frozen steel. He saw, for one instant, the massive cliffs of ice glittering like volcanic glass in iron twilight and below them the beveled and faceted jewel face of a shallow antigrav dome closing in all the valley beneath. Lights shone dimly through steaming mists, trees thick with blossom and fruit, gardens like enchanted ships suspended in the air …
A ruined tower, standing dark against the face of the dark cliff.
And something else. Some image, some shock … a wave of darkness that spread outward, reaching, searching, calling in all directions. A wave that chilled him, then folded in on itself before he could identify it, like a black flower growing backward into a deadly seed that vanished …
And he was gasping, fully conscious once more and feeling the startled flinch of Nichos’s hands under his.
“What is it?” he demanded at once, as Cray sprang up and strode across the room.
“Nic …”
The silvery man regarded him inquiringly. He’d felt Nichos’s hands flail away from his, and Nichos was looking at them in some surprise.
“You convulsed.” Cray was kneeling by the chair, already checking the row of gauges on Nichos’s chest.
“What happened?” asked Luke. “What did you feel?”
“Nothing.” Nichos shook his head, a fraction of a second too late to be natural. “I mean, I have no recollection of any untoward sensation at all. I felt Luke’s hands over mine, and then I was out of the trance and my hands had moved away from his.”
“Did you see anything?” Leia had come to stand at his other side. Cray was still checking gauges, though she knew their ranges by heart.
“I think it has to be Belsavis.” Luke rubbed his temples; the ache in them was different from the throbbing that sometimes developed when he’d used the Force to probe deeply against resistance, or to listen for something far beyond human hearing. “I saw an antigrav-supported light-amplification dome of some kind over a volcanic rift valley; Belsavis is the only place I know of that has one like that.”
“But the dome was only built a dozen years ago,” objected Cray. “If Nichos was there as a child …”
Luke hesitated, wondering where that image had come from. Why he felt shaken, shocked … why he felt there was some part of