Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [60]
Luke nodded, seeing in his mind this beautiful woman in her warrior youth. The house, indeed, was of the sort that a grateful people would build for a just ruler who had saved them from tyranny.
“But many years later another Jedi came to this world, an evil creature: selfish, lying, but very plausible. He came here because he had heard that the Force on this world is strong. It lies close to the surface of reality here, close enough to reach out and touch, though he was not capable of doing so. His own abilities to use the Force were not strong, and he sought to twist and gather them to fulfill his own emptiness. Beldorion he was called. Beldorion of the Ruby Eyes. Beldorion the Splendid.”
She sighed and passed her hand across her forehead in a gesture of weariness and grief.
“As you know, Owen, there are always those who will follow such a one. He worked not only through violence and the threat of violence but through lies and calumny, turning the truth and people’s memories of the truth, until everything I had done here was given a different meaning, a sinister significance that those whose power to work evil I had curtailed were delighted to believe.
“My friends turned against me. Beldorion was too feeble an adept to manufacture his own lightsaber, so he stole mine from me. I was driven into poverty. Feared by the weak and courted by the venal, Beldorion came to rule Hweg Shul like a king, and I was forgotten.”
Her voice faltered, and she put up her hand quickly, to cover whatever expression might have pulled at her mouth. In the quiet street behind them a blerd brayed its monotonous tenor screech; an Oldtimer woman drove past in a high-wheeled cart pulled by alcopays, flipping her long whip at their feet. Luke saw in his mind’s eye this beautiful woman before him, hurrying along these densely twisted walled streets with her dirty dress fluttering in the endless wind and remembered Ben again and the way children in Tosche station used to run out in front of him giggling and making what they considered to be magic signs with their fingers. Even at this great distance of time—and he’d been only a small child himself—he remembered the genuine amusement that had tugged the corners of Ben’s mouth.
Taselda went on, “Well, it was inevitable, as we true Knights know, that Beldorion should succumb to his own greeds and his own vices. He was usurped and ousted many years ago by a man named Seti Ashgad, a politician sent here by the old Emperor as punishment, even as the ancestors of these people had been sent here. Beldorion had become so sunk in debauchery that no power remained to him. His followers deserted him for Ashgad, and Ashgad took from him his very house, and all the treasure inside it. Treasure that he had stolen from me,” she said somberly. “And most important, in that house somewhere is my lightsaber.”
Luke said softly, “Ah.”
“Because of injuries I suffered in my struggle against Beldorion it was not possible for me to make another. When I went to Ashgad, many years ago now, and tried to retrieve it, I was cast forth as brutally as Beldorion had cast me forth. Since then I have tried many times to recover it. See.” With a movement of simple innocence, she slipped her dress from her right shoulder, and showed him, among the droch bites, a terrible bruise on her arm.
“We will be vulnerable, when we go to the cave to find your Callista,” she said softly. “Ashgad’s servants are merciless, the