Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [62]
His father’s voice.
Vader’s.
Taselda was using him.
The cold in him deepened, the panic of abandonment. If she was lying, using him only to get her lightsaber back (and what kind of injury would prevent her from making another lightsaber, if she’d had the skill to do it once?), it meant she wasn’t Callista’s teacher. She couldn’t restore Callista to him. No, he thought, not wanting to believe it. Not wanting it to be true. No …
You know it to be true.
And as he had then, he knew.
He turned his steps back, toward Taselda’s house.
As a Jedi, she would have been trained in the bending of minds. Luke had seen Ben do it, had done it himself. The Emperor Palpatine had been a genius at evoking that kind of desperate loyalty, that need to serve him, calling forth the echoes of one’s own fears like a skilled musician calling forth beauty from a flute.
And Taselda’s ability in that direction was very subtle and very strong.
Wind slapped and howled stronger at him as he wound through the alleyways, as if forbidding him to return. Buried beneath the avalanche of wrenching desolation, the oceans of ambient fear that flooded his soul at the thought of a break from Taselda, Luke felt the cold knowledge he had felt, hanging on that projection above the Bespin abyss. He didn’t want it to be true, but he knew it was.
He came to Taselda’s house from the rear this time, and saw her through the back door across a grubby yard scattered with rusted speeders in various stages of disrepair. She was groping and picking in the shadowy corners of the room for something, behind furniture and under cushions. He saw her jam her arm under an armoire, then pull it out and stand, facing him across the yard, her blue eyes wide and furious, her black snaggly hair hanging in a mat of nastiness over her breasts. He felt her mind pull on his, angry and futile; felt the weak, diffused shoving of the Force, and though the wall sheltered them from the wind he saw around him in the yard the clapped-out water tanks, the bleached old rags, the scraps of wood and metal all flutter and twitch like live things.
Her eyes still on his, she was pulling things—drochs, they had to be—off her arm and eating them with her brown, broken teeth.
The anxiety in his mind had gone shrill, like a hectoring scream. There was desolation in his soul, fake as tinsel beads. Under it, a more genuine grief.
Luke turned away.
It was less the Force than his years with the Rebellion, his years fighting battles in vacuum in vessels moving at incredible speeds, that made him pick up almost instinctively first the sense of danger, and only in the next second the sound of running feet. He ducked as a spear buried itself in the dirt just beyond where he’d stood. Someone hurled a rock, and he sprang back as an old-fashioned yellow sodium blaster bolt ripped a charred line in the wall at his side. Ragged-looking men and women came running at him from all sides out of the alleyways—kids, too, wild-haired and barefooted, throwing rocks.
Luke could have scattered them with a blast of the Force, picked up any one of them and hurled him or her flying, but dared not. A girl of no more than sixteen ran at him with a club, and he swept it aside with his forearm as he sidestepped, dodged another blaster bolt from a weapon so run-down it probably couldn’t have cooked a happy-patty, and fled. The little gaggle of Oldtimers ran after him, cursing and shaking their weapons.
“Murderer! Thief! Dirtball!” (They should talk!) They were fast, appearing around the corners of the houses and stabbing at him with spears and clubs. Two or three had blasters, but it took a good deal of practice to hit anything on the run, and Luke made sure to keep moving. Once two of the men grabbed him, tried to drag him back into the mazes of alleys—presumably back to Taselda’s house, if as he guessed these people were remnants of those she’d “ruled” here, but Luke wasn’t at all sure. He dropped his weight, swept one man’s legs out from under him with a lashing kick, and used the falling