Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [36]
She opened her eyes.
The roofless chamber below her at the base of the tower was empty, full of shadows as the feeble daylight waned.
There was no door in the rear wall.
“They sealed it somehow.” Han passed his palms along the smooth dark stone where the rear wall of Plett’s House had been cut into the rock of the cliff. “Even the best patch jobs will leave a join, but this is watertight.”
“It was about here, though.” Leia half closed her eyes again, recapturing the scene. There was a kind of pain in the memory, a sense of having lost or mislaid something treasured, a long time ago.
The happiness she had felt rising from that room? The peace of being loved unconditionally, which had dissolved in searing laser violence when someone on the Death Star had thrown a final switch?
Looking at the man beside her, she wondered if Han had ever known that kind of peace, that sense of belonging, in his childhood.
Chewie growled a query; Han gave it some thought. “Yeah, I think we’ve still got the echolocator—if Lando didn’t borrow it the last time he flew the Falcon for some cockamamie treasure-hunting scheme.”
“I wouldn’t bet on even an echolocator finding the tunnel that Master came out of,” said Leia. She turned to survey the empty chamber once again. “The Jedi …” She hesitated, thinking about the things Luke had taught her, the things the old Jedi Vima-Da-Boda had said. “If the Jedi could cover their tracks to the extent of having everybody in the valley just forget they’d ever been there in the face of some pretty severe bomb damage, I don’t think an echolocator’s going to do us a lot of good.”
“I think you’re right.” Han caressed the stone again, as if he half believed it was illusion rather than technology that concealed it. And perhaps, thought Leia, it was. “But at least now we know two things.”
“Two things?”
“That there was an entrance here,” said Han grimly, “… and that it wasn’t the entrance Drub used.”
Chapter 6
The Jedi Knights had murdered his family.
A band of them had descended on the town where he’d grown up, summoning fog by the power of the Force in the dead of night and moving through it in cold and shadow, wraiths of power and silence with eyes glowing green as marshfire in the dark. He’d fled, gasping, the icy pressure of their minds clutching at his, trying to cripple him and bring him back. He’d lain in the trees outside of town …
(trees?)
… and seen them line up the women, laughing at their screams as they pulled their babies from their arms and sliced them to pieces with their lightsabers. He’d seen cauterized stumps lying on the ground, heard the shrieks that had echoed in the bitter night air. The Jedi had sought him, hunting him in speeders, whooping derisively while he fled over rocks and mud and streams …
(mud and streams? I was raised in the desert.)
… and then turned back, to slaughter the children. He’d seen his younger brother and sister …
(What brother?)
… cut down while they pleaded for their lives …
Who made this up?
It was true. Every word of it was true.
Or something very like it was true, anyway.
Luke shut his mind, breathed deep through the pain that remained in his chest and lungs. He gathered the Force to him, let the knowledge run off him like water from oiled armor. The memories were like those in Nichos’s mind, he realized. Words, sometimes powerful words, but absolutely without images. Words that said they were the truth, that felt like the truth …
His head ached. His body ached. His concentration wavered, darkened, and the feeling of betrayal, the bruised and savaged ache in his heart, returned. The Jedi had betrayed him.
He spiraled back into darkness.
Lying on Han’s bunk in the Millennium Falcon with the bandaged stump of his right arm a blaze of agony underneath the painkiller Lando had given him, and worse than that agony the knowledge that Ben had lied to him. Ben had lied: It was Darth Vader who had spoken the truth.
Yes, revenge, voices whispered. Take your revenge for that.
For a moment he was twenty-one again, his soul