Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [124]
“Those scans found absolutely zip,” pointed out Kemple hastily. “Zero. A lot of zero. If that wasn’t good enough for Drub, then—”
“Wait a minute,” said Han. “They ran a life scan down there?”
“From the room at the wellhead,” said the Omwat. Like most of his race he had a high, sweetly flutelike voice. “My pal was a treasure hunter. She had a Speizoc g-2000 she’d got off an Imperial Carillion ship and that thing could pick up a Gamorrean morrt in a square kilometer of permacrete.”
“And there was nothing down there but kretch and pitmolds.” Kemple blew a thin cloud of steam. “Drub ran two or three scans—one for the Whiphid and one for xylen and gold. Did the same from the house on Painted Door Street, lookin’ for a tunnel entrance there.”
“What’d he tell the woman renting the place?”
“Miss Roganda?” The boy grinned. “That they’d had reports of ‘malignant insect infestation’ and were inspecting every old Mluki foundation in town. She got all helpful and offered ’em tea.”
“Roganda?” Han felt the hair lift on the back of his neck. “You mean she’s the one who’s renting Nubblyk’s old house?”
“Sure,” said Kemple, turning his attention back to the dancers. “Nice lady—darned pretty woman, too. She could work at this place like a shot, not that this place, or anyplace in town, has that kind of class anymore. Got somebody keepin’ her in high style, anyway. Showed up a month or two after the Slyte disappeared and said she’d made arrangements to rent the place. She seemed to know him.” He gave Han a wink that was supposed to be slyly sophisticated and succeeded only in looking puerile. “Roganda Ismaren.”
The room where they put Leia was a large one, hewn out of rock and equipped—startlingly—with a window of three wide casements, through which wan daylight filtered even before Lord Garonnin slapped the wall switch to activate the glowpanels of the ceiling. “By all means try to break it if it will amuse you, Your Highness,” he said, observing the immediate direction of Leia’s interest. “It was put in long before the dome, and the locks are made to withstand almost anything.”
She walked over to it, leaving Lord Garonnin, Irek, and Roganda in the doorway. The window was in a sort of bay, whose jut from the rock of the cliff hid any sign of it from below. A more massive jut overhung it from above, like every irregularity of the cliffs bearded with curtains of vines, so that light from the window could not be seen from anywhere in the rift at night. Through the dangling creepers Leia could see, ten or twelve meters below her and to the right, the topmost courses of the ruined tower.
She remembered seeing this vine-grown overhang from the tower, one of many in the cliff wall behind Plett’s House. How many of those, she wondered now, hid the windows of this warren of tunnels and rooms? If she angled her head, she could see down into the stone enclosure where she’d glimpsed the echoes of Jedi children playing. Beyond, the rift was a lake of mist and treetops above which the hanging gardens floated like an armada of flower-bedecked airships. Leia could see the feeders—mostly of the nimbler races, like Chadra-Fan or Verpine, since mechanicals were out of the question under the circumstances—scrambling along the ropes and catwalks that stretched from bed to bed, or from the beds to the supply station, clinging amid its own luxuriant cascades of sweetberry to the cliff wall.
“I still say we should put her in one of the lower rooms,” insisted Irek. He shook back his long hair: shoulder-length, black as a winter midnight, and curlier than his mother’s. Like hers, his skin was slightly golden, but pallid with the pallor of life lived mostly underground. Like her, he dressed simply but carried himself with the cocky arrogance of one who believes himself to be the center around