Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [101]
Dzym made no reply, or if he did speak, it was too low to hear.
“I’d have taken care of that woman in Hweg Shul somehow. Kept her from you. Kept her from talking. Next time …”
“There is no necessity,” whispered Dzym, “for ‘next time.’ ”
“When Larm’s troops land I’ll have her taken care of. I promise. You won’t need to worry about her betraying you. No one believes her anyway. But I … look at me.” The shrill, old-man voice cracked, and Leia, without quite knowing how, realized that he wasn’t wearing a cap, as she had thought. His black hair had grayed almost to whiteness. “I had to get out of there late last night, after the meeting. I had to … to come back.”
“To come back,” whispered Dzym mockingly. “To someone you don’t trust. To someone you think will disobey …”
“I never thought you disobeyed.”
“You believed the whiner.”
“I—I didn’t. I was just—taken off-guard. We need him, Dzym, until this is over. He was the best we could get, one of the best holo fakers in the business. After Larm’s troops land, after the Reliant’s launch tracks are in, you can do with him what you will. But please. Please don’t be angry. Please …” She didn’t hear clearly what he said; she thought it was “help me” or maybe “give me.”
Dzym stepped sideways a little. Leia saw the sleek black topknot silhouetted against the glint of the computer’s power lights, and the spidery motion of his gloved hands as he unfastened the breast of his robe. In the reflected gleam of the lights in which he now stood, she saw clearly that below his neck his skin changed. It was hard, chitinous, catching green and amber glints—broken and blotched, too, all over Dzym’s bare chest and shoulders, with tubes and orifices and groping little mouthed nodules that had no business on any human form. All those little mouths and openings gaped and stretched, dark matter running down, glistening. Dzym’s human mouth opened as well, the long tongue groping like a serpent.
With a noise that was not quite a whimper, not quite a sob, Ashgad bent his head down. He pressed his mouth to the dark, chitinous chest, and with a horrible movement impossible for a human neck, Dzym moved his head around, tongue probing at Ashgad’s nape. The thready radiance sheened on a trickle of blood. Ashgad made noises for a while—thin ones, small and desperate—then was silent. The silence lasted nearly a minute, though it seemed to Leia, trapped in the dark of the shuttered vestibule, to go on longer than that.
At last, barely audible, Ashgad whispered, “Thank you.” The crackle of age was gone from his voice. The room was fully dark now, and only the faintest stain of orange remained in the sky outside, but Leia thought his hair had darkened perceptibly, and when the two left the room, Ashgad moved like a young man. Leia thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he wiped something from his mouth and chin.
She timed their footfalls ascending the stair, knowing she had only minutes now. The sky-colored blade of the lightsaber flashed to life in her hand, and she drove it deep into the center of the control unit in a vicious hiss of sparks and smoke. Then she caught up bedroll and pitcher and fled across the tiled floor, stabbing the combination of the locked door that led to the rest of the house, right down the hall, up the steps. Another combination, another door—a synthdroid standing in the laboratory beyond, blue eyes glazed and staring, androgynous mouth open as it staggered, numbly, from wall to wall. Leia brushed past it and it fell. Guilt touched her as she stepped past the body. In driving her lightsaber into the Central Controller, she had mass-deactivated them, destroyed them …
They’re not living, she told herself. No more living than a droid that might have been deactivated or its memory flushed. But the guilt remained, as if she’d wiped Artoo’s programming or Threepio’s.
They’ll search, she thought. Ashgad and Dzym and Liegeus. They’ll