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Luke’s breath was beginning to drag hard by the time he halted the speeder, as far up a jagged crevice of crystalline scree as he could manage to ascend. His companion had fallen silent, and for a heartstopping time Luke feared that the man had died and in so doing condemned him to death as well. But Liegeus raised his head when Luke shook him, regarded him with dark eyes drunk with fatigue.

“Ah. Knew I couldn’t … get out of it … this easily. Ground lightning kills them. Rig a jump-circuit field through the crystals … lots of them here …”

Luke was already dismantling the speeder’s engine with fumbling hands.

Even a Mobquet Chariot could not generate one-thousandth of the power of the ground-lightning storms, but once a crude circuit had been wired to push electricity through the huge fragments of crystal that littered the talus-slope underfoot, the dim tingling of low-level current was palpable to someone sitting between the points of exchange. “It won’t kill them,” whispered Liegeus, as Luke handed him one of the thermal blankets from the Chariot’s emergency kit, and sat down beside him. His hands and body itched with a discomfort that never reached the level of pain. “But it weakens them to the point that they can’t kill us, can’t draw off our energy and transmit it to Dzym. When the sun rises we’ll be well.”

Luke shivered and glanced skyward at the huge, cold, unwavering stars, wondering how much was left of the night. The electricity passing between the crystals and over the two men was too weak to throw light: Only now and then, a quick spark or a glow, like luminous swamp gas, seemed to wicker in the air. Of greater brightness were the stars themselves, whose pallid bluish gleam seemed to be picked up by the slabs and clusters and formations of shining stone that clustered the canyon walls.

He pulled his own too-thin blanket close around him. His words smoked in the wan electrical glare.

“Is she all right?” he asked. “Leia?”

The older man nodded. “Ashgad forbade Dzym to go near her. He’s almost completely enslaved to Dzym, but at least until the Reliant was ready to take Dzym offplanet, away from all danger of the daytime radiance of the crystals, they couldn’t let anyone be sure of her fate. Dzym couldn’t argue with that—and this whole treaty with Getelles to get the mining rights for Loronar Corporation was Dzym’s idea, to get himself off the planet—but he doesn’t think like human beings. I kept him away from her as well as I could.”

He let his head fall back again, on the jacket Luke had wadded up underneath it. “I say that as if I think it mitigates what I’ve done. It doesn’t. It’s just that I … that Dzym … I could not go against him. But when she escaped, I couldn’t let her go alone. Unarmed, with nothing. She’s … It’s been a long time since I cared for anything or anyone except remaining alive another day. But Leia—Lady Solo, I should say … she was kind. And very brave. Certainly braver than I, though that could be said of the average lizard.”

Luke’s head was swimming. With part of his consciousness he was acutely aware of Dzym’s malice, of his attempt to draw away the energy that kept Luke’s flesh warm and his heart beating. But through his dizziness he heard the voices again, whispering, very close to him now. They were saying something. Saying something to him. About Leia, he thought, or at least about the image of her. He saw a slim dark-haired woman doing something with what looked like an antigrav unit. Programming it?

The vision slid away.

Who are they? he wanted to ask. Those invisible beings, the watchers in the hills? Where were their cities, or where had their cities been before the dying of the seas?

Instead he asked, “Who are you?”

In the dark at the bottom of the canyon, Liegeus was only a sense of living, an echo of the Force, but he heard the man’s chuckle. “A failure,” he replied softly. “The blackest sheep the House Vorn ever produced. A philosopher, I’ve styled myself. But my art has always been imitative, mocking up holos,