Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [71]
The beam caught the glint of something in the tunnel, rounded and shiny, like black jewelry or the scales of some monstrous thing. Something like wet cobblestones that suddenly seemed to carpet the tunnel—walls, ceiling, and floor. Something that hadn’t been there before.
Kretch.
The tunnel leading back toward the well was choked with them.
For one moment Han and Chewie stood aghast, staring at the nightmare seethe of insectile bodies that filled the passageway nearly twenty centimeters thick. Then, as if a plug had been pulled, the river of kretch flowed out.
Han screamed something entirely inadequate to the occasion and plunged away to his left into the lumpy ruin of old lava formations and sullenly steaming craterlets, Chewie at his heels and all the legions of darkness shrieking behind.
“Got to find a way back,” panted Han desperately, as frail sinter and twisted crystal crunched underfoot and the patches of glowing lichen throbbed and stirred like rainbow embers at their passage. The air down here burned with volatile gases and the stench of sulfur, chewing at the lungs, and the baking heat made Han gasp. “Back to the vaults … maybe this way …”
More screams, and two black forms sprang suddenly into the glare of the luminator where it fell on the sloped side of an old debris cone rising up before them.
“On second thought, let’s go this way—”
Chewie caught his arm, stopping him, and roared a challenge into the darkness ahead of them.
A challenge was screamed in return.
Han said, “Great.” He raised the light, flashing the beam across the round, smooth terraces of what had been superheated mud pits, now cooled to dance floors of garishly colored hardpan still ringed with the traces of final bubbles—and there they were.
Three of them, maybe four … one running, a couple crawling on all fours.
He swung the flash, the white light splashing over finger-thin columns of rising smoke from a vent to their left, a wilderness of steaming caldera below them where the ground fell farther, picked up the eyes of the things scuffling, shambling, running toward them from behind: eyes and hands and the crude weapons they carried.
Chewbacca fired a bowcaster bolt that went through the chest of something that looked as if it had once been a flat-headed Carosite—it kept on coming, crawling, leaving a broad, bloody smear in its wake. Han opened fire with his blaster at the second group and missed, a huge scar ripping in the mud of the old pits, and from somewhere close by there was a rumble, the ground jarring slightly underfoot and loosened rock showering them from the dark above.
“This way!” he yelled, and swept the light again, picking up, far off in the darkness, what looked like human artifacts: a raised path among the dead caldera, a barely seen trace of stairs, and, at the top of a low black rise, outlined in the jeweled glow of colored lichen, a circle of stone pillars.
“We can pick ’em off the path!”
The second group of attackers was already halfway to the head of the path. Han leaned into his dash, the Wookiee loping ahead of him on his longer legs, their original attackers a feral pack not four meters behind. The first of the new group reached the path at the same moment as Chewbacca, slashing at the Wookiee with a metal bar stolen from some ancient workshop. Chewbacca fired his bowcaster and the impact knocked the attacker backward into an old mud pit, filled with what Han had at first taken for a pale, delicate formation of curled and cranial-looking sinter or limestone.
As the attacker—a Mluki, he looked as if he had been, before madness and neglect had turned him into a screaming beast—went sprawling into the pit, the limestone formation came alive, a sudden heaving of rippling membranes, thrashing layers of fleshy, carnivorous mold. The Mluki, bleeding already from Chewbacca’s energy bolt, rolled over and tried to get up, tried to run, but the thing in the pit gripped it with tentacles like elastic