Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [120]
All the time she could hear Luke’s voice, feel his consciousness in the storm.
“Leia!” The cry echoed down the stairwell, a man’s voice wrung with agony and despair.
Luke stumbled, and let the Force around him fade and ease. She’s there. Or someone up there knows where she is. Clinging to the wall, knees jellied with weakness, he readied his lightsaber again, made himself find the strength to climb.
The psychic stench of the drochs was overwhelming. It washed over Luke as he neared the door, and saw what lay in the room beyond.
It was far too deep in the plateau to be the foundation of the house. Probably a guard chamber or security watchroom of some kind, long abandoned. Walls, ceiling, and floor, it swarmed with drochs, a vast hideousness drunk and re-drunk from droch to droch until the whole air was black with it. Luke saw, scuttling along the wall, the carcinoform droch that seemed able to command the others, weirdly like a general reviewing troops, but that awareness was only for an instant.
A man lay in the midst of the room. He had ceased trying to get up, though Luke saw him pluck weakly at the brown, squirming things as they covered his face. The stalk-eyed commander-droch scuttled in now and then to pluck smaller drochs from the dying man’s body, drinking them dry and casting them aside to be picked and finished by the tinier fry that skirmished around the edges. Luke was raising his hand, ready to summon the Force again, when movement flickered in the doorway on the opposite wall, the doorway that led to a further-ascending flight of stairs, and a soft voice whispered,
“Now, now, what have we here? Shoo-shoo.”
The drochs scuttered from their victim, and Luke slapped the glowrod on his chest into darkness, and stood back out of the room’s single dim orange ceiling-lamp. They retreated, but remained close around the man, who lay now in the midst of the floor, smallish and slim and graying and vaguely familiar. His clothing was torn in a thousand places to reveal flesh all dotted with the red marks of their bites, and his chest rose and fell with the desperate effort to breathe. The man walking toward him from the doorway Luke definitely recognized as Seti Ashgad’s secretary, Dzym, said to be an inhabitant of this planet.…
But his mind still open, still conditioned to the reactions of this place, Luke felt the miasma of him, the vast, dark, stinking aura of rotted power, an aura so huge, so dense, that it nearly made him sick.
Dzym whispered, “Shoo-shoo,” again, and the circle of drochs expanded infinitesimally. The big stalk-eyed one started to scamper for the doorway, where Luke stood, and Dzym strode forward and caught it in two steps, lifting it up between his gloved hands. The thing clawed frantically at him with its pinchers, and Dzym laughed, a horrible sound, like a computer recording of laughter, or a bird that has been taught to mimic the sound. Dzym released one hand, and with small, sharp brown teeth pulled off the violet leather glove, and Luke saw that his hand bore only the most superficial resemblance to a human limb at all. It was, in fact, a sort of mouth, orifices gaping on the palm and at the ends of the fingers, tinier mouths all red and probing, like the heads of maggots, which Dzym then fastened around the crab-thing’s body.
Dzym closed his eyes, and drew deep his breath. The droch in his hand squirmed horribly, weaker and weaker, and Dzym smiled in his reverie. “Ah, I’ve been hunting you for a long time, my little friend. Sweet …” He drew another rapt breath, like a man savoring wine. “Sweet.”
At his feet the prone man rolled over, and