Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [35]
“So much for there not being any crypts,” said Han cynically.
“It doesn’t mean the jewelry in Drub’s pocket came out of a crypt near this particular spring. Even a source with the same combination of sulfur and antimony could have a number of outlets.”
“You take a whole lot of convincing.”
Leia grinned at him. “I deal with politicians all day.”
“Yeah …” Han glanced toward the wrecked gate through which Jevax had passed. “I think you just got to deal with another one.”
In one of the cliff-cut rooms Chewbacca found an old ladder, which they dragged up after them, floor by floor, to climb the remains of the tower, Leia picking her way carefully through the broken-out doorways, the thick embrasures of what had been windows, the curve of the broken stair. From the highest room the view out over the valley was breathtaking, mist filling the land like swirling water in a dark basin, the white or green plastic roofs of the packing plants rising through on the far end like a floe of bizarrely regimented icebergs where the greater heat stirred the fogs at the dark cliff’s base.
Above them, the gondola beds of vine-coffee moved along their tracks, homegoing boats headed for the small wooden wasp’s nest of the Supply Station, curtained in vines like everything else, clinging to the cliff. From the far end of the broken remains of the tower floor, Leia gazed down at the miniature ecosystem of the rift, a steaming jungle snuggled in the midst of some of the most vicious icefields in the galaxy, fed by the heat of the planet’s core.
What had the place been like, she wondered, when they’d been here, those children whose shrill voices she could almost hear? Those families whose wisdom and love had soaked, it seemed, into the very stone of the walls?
Intermittently colder, without the dome, she thought—necessitating the building of the rock houses of the old town over the hot springs. Wilder jungles near the warm vents, bare tundra perhaps away from them …
Why had the Jedi Master Plett come here in the first place, deliberately seeking a world where none could easily follow? Who had convinced him to offer sanctuary, and how?
A pair of strong arms circled her waist from behind. Han said nothing, just gazed out past her, and Leia leaned back into his strength, closing her eyes and letting her mind drift.
To Ithor, green and graceful and busy.
To the curious, meaningless death of a woman in the Senex Sector, killed by a man too expensive for the job.
To the fact, relayed to her that morning, that the head of the House Vandron, in whose territory the crime had taken place, was obstructing any investigation of Draesinge’s death.
To Drub McKumb.
They hid the children down the well …
The voices of the children floated up to her. They were playing in the big, square room below; she saw them darting among the heavy tables of shalaman wood set along the inner wall, a whole pack of them: mostly human, but including an Ithorian, Wookiees, a Twi’lek, Bith … A woman repairing a half-dissected sterilizer at one of the tables called out an indulgent warning to one toddler who’d ventured too near the bronze, flower-shaped grille that screened the well in the floor’s center, though the grille’s openings were too small to admit anything except the smallest of the toys with which they played. Steam floated up through the openings, warming the room, as did the dim sunlight magnified by the angled crystalplex set in each keyhole window. A dark-haired man played a red-lacquered mandolin. Pittins of every color that pittins came in dozed on the windowsills or tracked the occasional myrmin across the floor.
The door in the rear wall opened, and an old Ho’Din came in, two and a half meters tall and graceful in his black cloak of Jedi mastership, his flowerlike headstalks faded with age. Calm seemed to flow from him, and a deep sense—such as she sometimes felt from Luke—of vast strength bought