Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [55]
The stone cracked squarely on the thing’s jointed back, rolled off as the kretch spasmed, quivered, and then hauled itself swiftly to vanish between the pipes that ran along the wall. As Leia edged nervously down to retrieve the stone she could see the brown stain it left, and smell a kind of sweet nastiness, like fruit in the final stages of decomposition.
She checked out the repellent little cubicle at the end of the passageway very carefully with the light before entering and afterward hurried her steps along the passage to return to the bar above.
The kretch would eat us …
If those were the kretch, she thought, she was not looking forward to encountering them in the crypts where the Jedi children had once dared each other to hunt for Plett’s Well … provided they could find the crypts at all.
“Just because you keep soap in the pantry doesn’t make it food,” agreed Han thoughtfully, as they walked through the drifting glitters of mist on their way back to the house Jevax had arranged for them. “But it’s no accident you keep it close to where you wash the dishes.”
She nodded, accepting that train of logic, then grinned. “And what do you know about washing dishes … Angelpants?”
“When you spend three quarters of your life bumming around the galaxy, Your Highness-ness, believe me, you end up loading a lot of dishwashers and even washing dishes by hand.” He hooked his hands in his belt, but Leia knew he was watching everything around them to the limits of his senses. The eternal vapors of Plawal were unnerving. Thickest down at the far end of the valley where the true hot springs bubbled forth, even here, where the land lay low around the warm springs, visibility was down to a few meters. Even up on the raised streets that skirted the orchards, scenes had a tendency to appear and disappear like isolated tableaux: fruit trees jeweled with orchids, up which sweetberry and bowvine had been trained so that every branch hung heavy with two or three different varieties of fruit; thousands of tiny bridges spanning the faintly steaming pools and streams whose fern-choked verges swarmed with salamanders and frogs; yellow, green, or sea-blue pittins dozing on the thrusting knees of shalaman and aphor trees or hunting insects in the grass; automated watch-critters crouched at the bases of the more expensive trees, beady eyes of green or amber gleaming eerily through the mists. Lava-block walls loomed unexpectedly out of the shifting vapors, topped by the sleek white plastic of the prefabs; ramps of wood or plastic ascending to the doors from street level, lined with pots of imported red plastic or local terracotta, lush with berries, slochans, lipanas.
Beautiful … But Leia was extremely conscious of the fact that visibility was down to two meters or less.
“So what’s this about smuggler tunnels?”
“Back when I was in the game,” said Han, “I never made it out here—too close to the Senex Sector—but I knew there were at least a dozen landing pads out on the ice. Judging by the number of people in the bars who’re still in the game, I’d be surprised if there’s more than one or maybe two still operational. Now, according to Lando, what’s left of the Empire hasn’t changed its tariffs and the export duties here haven’t changed any … gone up, if anything. Which means that seven years ago, something dried up.”
“Right about a year after the Battle of Endor.”
Han nodded. “Something you might want to keep in mind when you go through the town records—now that old Jevax has had time to pick out the parts that might tell you anything.”
“You know, Han …” Leia paused at the top of the wooden ramp that climbed the high, broken stone of their house’s foundations to the wide front