Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [65]
She wondered if it were indeed possible, as she was beginning to deduce, that Dzym could in some way control the Death Seed. It would explain the preciseness of the timing needed to take over the Adamantine and the Borealis and the fact that she had survived her bout with the disease. It explained why neither Ashgad nor Liegeus had contracted the plague, and at the same time explained Liegeus’s fear. Or would she see some other explanation, some other detail, when her mind was clear again?
If she lived to look at the matter with a clear mind.
Leia shivered, and began to change into her red-and-bronze gown of state, and the heavy crimson mantle that covered it.
The synthdroid appeared a half hour later, as Leia was finishing putting up her hair. She took note as well as she could of the directions, the layout of the house: along a corridor, down a flight of steps. There were iron blast doors standing open near the bottom, and through them she glimpsed a vast compound like a docking bay, looking out over the open air of the plateau’s edge. A blocky, medium-size freighter stood there, synthdroids moving around it carrying in what looked like the components of a computer core, which meant that construction was fairly far along. Liegeus came out, saying to one of the synthdroids beside him, “… all the green wires first, then all the red wires …” and across the open permacrete his eyes met hers.
He paused, startled: The synthdroid beside her said, “Please come this way now, Your Excellency,” and she realized she’d been standing in the frame of the open blast doors; she hurried after. They turned a corner, proceeded down another flight of steps, and the smell of Hutt rose to meet her like a wave of heat.
“It is dreadfully slow here, dreadfully slow.” Beldorion shifted his enormous, pythonlike bulk on the dais of air duvets and cushions on which he lay. Hutts tend to obesity as they grow older, but despite almost constant snacking, the Splendid One retained his air of physical power and enormous speed, completely unlike Durga the Hutt’s thin and pitiful disciple Korrda, who back on Nal Hutta had been the butt of so many jokes. Unlike many of his species, he favored gold rings on his fingers, and in the folds of his head flesh, and a jeweled stud in his lower lip. On a baldric of gold and reptile leather he wore his lightsaber, the plain dark metal incongruous against the glittering harness. “It is good of you to join me, little princess. You must find the days weigh heavy in your room.”
“They do, a little,” admitted Leia, wondering what all this was leading up to. She recalled some of the more revolting aspects of her imprisonment by Jabba, but reasoned that even if Ashgad were ignorant of the invitation—which she was virtually certain he was—they were still beneath his roof. “Master Ashgad has been very assiduous about seeing to my wants.”
“Oh, and to mine too, mine too,” rumbled that gluey, bottom-of-the-well voice. “Not that I’m in anywhere near the same position as yourself, but well … I have my comforts, of course, and my chef, though quite frankly, little princess, this new fellow’s not the cook Zubindi Ebsuk was. Zubindi … ah!” He sighed revoltingly, and groped around in his porcelain washtub of brandy for the spiky balls of marinated prabkros that floated therein. “Now, there was a chef! I was desolate when he died. Bereft. A Kubaz, like the new fellow—a genius at insects. ‘Grant me the right hormones, the right enzymes to inject,’ he used to say, ‘and I will transform a sand flea into the center course of an Imperial feast.’ And he could, you know.” The deep crimson eyes fixed on her. “He could.”
He rumbled deep in his belly, and she felt the touch of his mind on hers. Faint and weak, but there, subtly drawing at her will. She felt herself in danger of becoming hypnotized by those scarlet orbs and looked away. With that much sweetblossom in her system it was difficult not to submit her mind to his dominance.
“Ashgad, now … he’s made himself