Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [136]
She shook her head, wonderingly, as if regarding that desperate young woman of nearly a year ago, fleeing the ruin of Admiral Daala’s demolished fleet and seeking a place to go, a clue to lead her through the labyrinth of her quest for her own lost gifts.
“What I found, you know. Pettiness, old feuds, slavery to the base … And I thought, never again. Never again am I going to be anyone’s pawn, because of the powers I was born with, the powers I don’t even possess anymore. But while I was a prisoner I saw the Reliant. I had seen Dzym and guessed what he was planning. I take it you didn’t get my message?”
“I got it.” Leia grimly shifted the rifle on her shoulder, clung to the struts of one of the sled’s makeshift gun turrets. “It’s just that by that time things had progressed too far to be called off. It reached me the day I left.”
“You should have said you were sick.”
“It took Q-Varx and the Rationalists months to set up the meeting. They were operating in good faith—pawns, not spies. I read their correspondence. I wasn’t willing to risk the political repercussions of refusal.”
Callista shook her head, and Leia said, “You have to make these decisions.” She hesitated, and then, because she herself despised surprises, added, “Luke came, too. He was on Hesperidium to see me off. He took a fighter to the planet’s surface, to look for you.”
Callista’s head turned sharply.
“I don’t know where he is.”
She looked away. What could be seen of her face was still as ivory, but above the edge of the veil, the wide gray eyes filled with tears.
They rode for a time in silence, winding down the trails that were barely familiar, scattered with broken rock and shards of crystal, with dunes of gravel hurled up wholesale from the flats below. Dawn winds had started as the wan sun warmed the endless dead sea bottom. Squinting against it in the silky gray light, Leia could make out the taller masses of the cliffs around the gun station, the fretwork of the shattered upper works, black against the pearlescent air.
“I found nothing here that would help me,” said Callista quietly. “The Force is here, but not in a form that I can touch or understand. Whatever is alive here—if anything—is invisible, intangible. Believe me, I’ve tried to reach it, to touch it. The Listeners say it’s the ghosts of the old holy men and women that speak to them, but I think they’re wrong. The voices only use the shapes that the Listeners have already in their minds.”
She shook her head, her eyes narrowing against the shadowless twilight of distances and wind. “There’s a woman in Hweg Shul who has interests in shipping. When this is over I’m going to contact her, see if I can get myself off-planet in one of the little cargo lifters and work my passage elsewhere. Are you going to tell Luke you’ve seen me?”
“Whatever you wish,” said Leia. “I’d like to, yes, but I won’t if you’d rather I didn’t.”
Callista started to say something, then thought about it and asked, “What do you think would be best?”
“I think it would be best if I did.”
“Then do so,” said Callista. “Make him understand, if you can. Tell him that I will love him to the ending of my life, but that mine is a life of which he cannot be a part.”
Across the crystal ridges, sudden snakes of white lightning flickered, cold and pale in the dawning light. Leia grabbed the railing of the speeder as it rocked and swayed, jolted by what felt like a groundquake, though the ground beneath the antigrav lifters was steady. An obsidian boulder several tons in mass wrenched and twisted in the rock side of the mountain before them, and the glittering talus of crystals at the foot of the cliffs around them leapt upward into funnels, like toothed whirlwinds.
The Therans in the speeders cried out, looking around them with weapons at the ready, and Callista and Bé fought their cu-pas to a standstill moments before the beasts could bolt in panic.
“Another,” said Callista softly. “Worse than before, I think.”
“There’s one with them who moves this storm.” Bé’s lizard-black eyes