Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [33]
“What about the tunnels?” Leia opened her eyes.
Jevax turned, raising his white shelf of brow. Han, who’d been inspecting one of the line of keyhole-shaped openings in the wall—doors or windows, though if they were doors they were so narrow only someone as slight as Luke or Leia could have slipped through—looked surprised at the question.
“That’s just it, Your Excellency,” said Jevax. “There are no tunnels. No ‘secret crypts,’ in spite of the rumors. Every few months someone comes up with a new theory and makes a search, and believe me, nobody has ever found a thing.”
A sleek, small, green mammal Leia didn’t recognize ran along the top of the wall; a yellow manollium perched in one of the window arches and fluffed its feathers, regarding the intruders into its domain with bright ruby eyes. The manollium must have come in with the Ithorians of Brathflen Corporation, she thought automatically. She’d seen hundreds of them already and she and Han had arrived only that morning.
“They hid the children down the well,” she repeated softly. “Nichos mentioned tunnels—I assumed McKumb meant there were crypts of some kind under Plett’s Citadel. I suppose that’s the ‘well’ in question?” She nodded toward the heavy disk of durasteel, sunk into the stone of the floor.
“One of them,” said Jevax. “All of these rift valleys were called wells at one time, because of the hot springs. This …” He gestured up toward the green-hung dome visible high above the roofless walls, the town hidden within the mist, the varying microclimates of hot springs, warm springs, and mud pots that ranged up and down the vent; the towering dark cliffs with their suspended volutes of fern and orchid, the trailing banners of mist, “… this is all Plett’s Well.”
He led the way through the empty doorway—of the same keyhole shape as the windows, a characteristic of the old lava-block houses that clustered in what had been the original town at the foot of the bench at the high end of the valley—and out into the courtyard again. Gorgeous, filmy-winged insects blossomed up from the grass around them as if the warm earth itself had hurled handfuls of celebratory confetti.
Leia said, “But the rumors persist.”
The heavy-browed, simian face widened into another smile. “Your Excellency, for all its beauty, Plawal is a very dull place. The central library, the municipal archives, and all the city services rent space from the computer system that Brathflen, Galactic, Imperial/Republic, and Kuat teamed up to install twelve years ago, and there’s very little room for new entertainment. Those people who don’t have families to keep them interested have only work in the canneries or the silk-packing plants, and the bars along Spaceport Row. Of course they’d like to think there are secret crypts under the only ruins in the town that aren’t being used for the foundations of perfectly ordinary Sorosub prefab housing. One has to do something.”
He gestured around him again, the gluey breezes stirring the silky white fur of his long arms. “You’re perfectly welcome to remain and search if you wish. I warn you, people have gone over the place with sensors of every variety. Research facilities in the archives won’t be available until eighteen hundred hours—which is when the packing houses shut down their systems for the night—but after that, come down to the MuniCenter and I’ll give you whatever help you wish rooting around in the records.”
From a pocket of his utility belt he produced three laminated wafers, and held them out to Han, Leia, and Chewbacca. “These will open any room in the MuniCenter, the spaceport, the city garages, or the elevators that lead up the shafts from the spaceport and out onto the surface of the glacier, though I strongly advise that you get me or someone else local to go with you if you want to go out onto the ice for any reason. Will you care to walk back to the MuniCenter with me, or do you want to stay here awhile? The only decent cafe in town is the Bubbling Mud, by the way, off Brandifert Court.