Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [147]
When she spoke her tone was deceptively normal, and very calm. “That reptile,” she said. Her eyes stared out unseeingly, filled with a sudden, vicious, killing hate. “That son of a slime-crawler.”
“What?” Lando stepped quickly back, almost out of range of the holo. “What’s …?”
“He told me I was the only one,” said Mara, still in that calm, almost conversational voice. “The only Hand of the Emperor. His weapon of choice, he said, when he needed a scalpel rather than a sword … his trusted servant.” The set of her red-lipped mouth was hard, the settled rage of one whose position had been not only her pride, but her entire life.
“That lying, drooling, scum-swallowing, superannuated underhanded festering filth-sucking parasite! He had another Hand!” Her voice sank to a deadly whisper. “He had another Hand all along!”
She had not moved from her seat, but the fury that radiated from her was like the pressure drop before a storm. Though it was directed against a dead man it made Solo very glad he was several hundred parsecs away in another star system entirely. “He lied to me! He used me! His ‘trusted servant’! Everything he told me was a lie! Everything!”
“Mara,” said Lando uneasily, “Mara, he’s dead—”
“You know what that means, don’t you?” She turned, cold-eyed, upon Lando, who backed a step. Neither man had ever seen Mara this angry and the sheer intensity of it was terrifying.
“It means he had her in reserve to use against me. Or to use me against her. Or who knows who else, to keep either of us from being anything more than the pawns of his lies!”
She was almost trembling with rage, the rage that had once led her to direct all her energies toward killing Luke Skywalker for taking from her the position that had been her life. “Is she still on the planet?”
“I don’t know. I …”
For some reason he remembered Leia telling him of the Emperor’s concubine, a member of the Emperor’s Court … A woman who claimed to be working in a place where she wasn’t working. A woman who’d shown up suddenly, bare weeks after Nubblyk’s disappearance, knowing exactly what house it was she wanted to rent.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Woman named Roganda …”
Mara’s eyes widened as she recognized the name, then narrowed to green and glittering slits. “Oh,” she said softly. “Her.”
The holo image reached out to where the transceiver switches would be, beyond the range of the transmitters. The image vanished.
“We simply cannot take the risk.” Roganda Ismaren opened the plastene case she carried, took from it the slim silver wand of a drug infuser, and fitted an ampoule into its slot. “Hold her.”
Ohran Keldor stepped warily toward Leia, who had risen from her chair at the sound of the door lock switching over; she backed to the wall, but Lord Garonnin stood in the doorway, stunpistol in hand. Keldor hesitated—though small, Leia was fit, wiry, thirty years younger than he, and quite clearly ready to fight—and Garonnin said, “If it’s risk you’re worried about, Madame, I’d say using that drug on her is more risk than I like to see. You don’t know what it is—”
“I know that it works,” retorted the concubine. “I know it will keep her quiet while our guests are here.”
“We know that it works sometimes. On some people. In some doses. It’s been in those deserted laboratories in the crypts for thirty years at least, maybe twice that. We don’t know whether it’s deteriorated with time, whether it’s become contaminated … That smuggler we used it on four or five years ago died.”
“He had a weak heart,” said Roganda, too quickly. “Oh, Lord Garonnin,” she went on, her soft voice pleading, “you know how much depends upon those who will be here tonight! You know how desperately we need backing if your cause—our cause!—is to succeed! You know Her Highness’s reputation. We cannot risk even the chance of her somehow escaping and interfering with the reception of our guests.”
The Senex Lord’s flat, cold eyes rested on Leia; the muzzle of his stunpistol