Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [126]
The room had been cut out of stone, accurately but roughly, the walls smoothed after a fashion but not finished. The door was metal, and fairly new. Marks of other hinges indicated it had replaced one probably less substantial. This high above the hot springs that warmed the caves, without her t-suit it would have been unpleasantly cold.
Leia touched the places where the older set of hinges had been, and thought, They changed this place over to be a prison … When? She wished she knew offhand the decay rate of foam pillows. It might tell her something.
And for whom?
The door latches clicked.
She felt, at the same moment, a thick, weighted buzzing in her head, a heavy sleepiness, and for an instant nothing mattered to her but going over to the bed and lying down …
The Force. A trick of the Force.
She shoved it off—with a certain amount of difficulty—and retreated from the door as far as she could, knowing who would come in.
“You’re still awake.” Irek sounded surprised.
He had a blaster and a lightsaber. Leia kept to the vicinity of the window, knowing better than to bolt for the door. “You’re not the only one around here who can use the Force.”
He looked her up and down again, contempt in his blue eyes. He was, she guessed, fourteen or fifteen years old. She wondered if he’d made the lightsaber that hung at his side, or had gotten it from somewhere—someone—else. “You call that using the Force?” He turned and regarded a place on the rock of the wall slightly to the right of the bed. She felt what he did with his mind, with the Force; felt, as she had in the tunnels, the trained power of his will and the dark taint that stained its every usage.
Where there had been only the dark reddish stone, there was now a hole about half a meter square.
He giggled, childishly shrill. “Never seen anything like that before, have you?” He crossed to the place, but Leia still felt him watching her. His hand was close to his blaster and she remembered his words in the hall of the stream.
With her dead, the Republic will crumble.
He hadn’t liked being contradicted and, what’s more, didn’t believe he was wrong. She suspected he didn’t believe he could be wrong.
He would have loved to shoot her while trying to escape.
He took a black plastene pouch from the hole, and at his nod, the stone reappeared as it had been. He gave her his cocky, charming grin. “Even my mother doesn’t know about that one,” he said, pleased with himself. “And she wouldn’t know how to open it if she did.” He tossed the pouch lightly in his hand. Leia recognized it—the twin of the one she’d found hidden in the old toy room, and of the one Tomla El had taken from Drub’s pocket.
“She doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does. She thinks I can’t handle this, either; thinks I can’t use the Force to turn it into another source of power.”
The blue eyes glittered. “But with the Force on my side, everything is a source of power. As they’ll all find out.”
Leia watched him, saying nothing, as he crossed to the door. Then he turned back, his face suddenly clouded.
“Why didn’t your droid stop?” he asked. “Why didn’t it obey me?”
“What made you think it would?” she returned, folding her arms.
“Because I have the Force. I have the power.”
She tilted her head a little to one side, considering him in silence. Not needing to say, You obviously don’t all the time.
And he couldn’t tell her she was wrong, she thought, without telling her how he had acquired that power in the first place.
After a moment he hissed at her, “Sow!” and stormed out the door, slamming and locking it behind him.
It took Leia fifteen sweating, aching minutes to open the hole in the wall once more. She had sensed, quite clearly, what he did—the compartment in the wall was built with a segment of the rock that covered it keyed to be literally shifted into another dimension by the power of the Force. It was old, she sensed, designed and built by a Jedi of vast power, and even so small a quantity of shift required a control and a strength almost beyond