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Luke was silent, thinking about that. “Is there any chance …? Do the Oldtimers ever talk about there being some kind of—of beings living on this world? Invisible, maybe? Or hidden, back in the mountains? Something that may be causing this?”

Umolly Darm chuckled. “Bless you, pilgrim, this planet was surveyed six ways from next week by the Grissmaths before they ever dropped a soul here. You can bet they’d never have set up a prison colony where there’d be the least chance of getting local help. I’ve been darn near all over this rock myself and never saw nor heard a thing. Even the Listeners will tell you, there’s nothing out there.”

“Then what about the voices they claim to hear?”

“They say those are their old saints, Theras and the others. There’s sure no invisible natives who’re causing the Force storms, any more than they’d cause the ground lightning or those killer blows we get in wintertime. Me, I’m inclined to think it was sunspots.”

Sunspots, thought Luke, later in the day as from the bench of Arvid’s speeder he watched the white stucco buildings, the floating antigrav balls, and topato towers of Hweg Shul grow in distance. Or maybe a Jedi who had come and settled on the planet, perhaps taught a pupil? Who had never realized what was causing the Force storms? Or who had tried, with no regard for the storms, to control the effect?

A Jedi who had learned something previously unknown about the Force?

He was deeply aware of the Force as, later in the day, he sat in the window of the room he took above the Blue Blerd of Happiness Tavern, watching the green-clotted antigrav balls being slowly cranked down out of the hammering of the evening wind. Aware of its weight and its strength, disorienting, frightening; aware of the impenetrability of it. He couldn’t push, couldn’t search for Callista through it, and in any case he didn’t know how much he could manipulate it without causing further harm.

But he had to find Callista. He had to.

The grief came back on him, like a cancer choking his lungs, his throat, his heart. There had not been a day when it hadn’t come back to him like this, with knifing pain, that she was gone. And without her laughter, without the wry glint of amusement in her eyes—without the scent of her hair and the strength of her arms wrapped around him—there was only night without end.

There was an old song, one that Aunt Beru used to sing—a verse of it echoed in Luke’s mind.

Through dying suns and midnights grim,

And treachery, and faith gone dim,

Whatever dark the world may send,

Still lovers meet at journey’s end.

He had to find her there. He had to.

The eight months since the descent of the Knight Hammer in flames to Yavin 4 had been a darkness in which there were times when Luke wasn’t certain he’d be able to go on. He knew academically that there was still some point to life: that his students needed him; that Leia, and Han, and the children needed him. But there were mornings when he could find no reason to get out of bed and nights spent counting the hours of darkness in the knowledge that nothing whatsoever awaited him with the dawn.

He closed his eyes, and pressed his forehead to his hands. Ben, and Yoda, and his studies with the Holocron, had taught him about the Force, about good and evil, about the dark side and the responsibilities that went with the bright. For eight months now he felt that he had walked utterly alone.

His mind relaxed into the silence of the room, seeking only rest. He listened to the noises of the taproom downstairs, the dim gronching of blerds stabled somewhere near; smelled the chemical stinks of the processing plants that were the town’s heart, the musty curtains of the transparisteel behind him, and the not-terribly-clean blankets on the bed.

His mind settled and adjusted to the alien roaring of the Force.

And through it he felt the presence of a Jedi.

There was a Jedi in the town.

8

They had released the Death Seed.

Even through the haze of sweetblossom, the anger that filled her