Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [66]
It was an effort to look away. “I’m sure you were.”
He chuckled again, and slithered one tiny yellow hand around among the satin cushions, almost absentmindedly plucking forth a droch nearly the size of the tip of Leia’s finger, which he popped into his mouth and cracked absently with his tongue. “He couldn’t have taken over from me if I hadn’t been tired. That’s all it was. All that fighting with that Taselda woman. It wore me out. Now taste this, little one.”
He extended his hand, and across the room a beaten-silver plate stirred where it lay on the sideboard of black-wood and crystal, then lifted and floated across to them. It had almost reached them when it tipped in midair and fell. Even dazed with the effects of the blossom, Leia’s reflexes were quick enough to let her dive from the pillows and catch it. It contained roulades of some sort surrounding a bed of what smelled like petroleum by-products, topped with a weird blue thing like an enormous berry. In a lifetime of diplomatic banquets—admittedly brief—Leia had never seen the like.
“Who was Taselda?” she asked, handing him the plate.
“A former colleague.” He plucked the berry from the top of the dish. “She and I came to this world together—oh, many years ago. But she grew jealous of the reverence in which the local population held me and of my greater skills—she couldn’t even manufacture the, ah, basic tools of our order. She did everything in her power to discredit me. Pinpricks, mostly, but annoying just the same. Henchmen trying to break into my palace, that sort of thing. Even after I came to live with Ashgad. Now, my dear, tell me if this is not the most exquisite taste in the galaxy.”
Leia picked up the fruit knife and fork from the small table nearby, cut a section from the berry, and watched as Beldorion slurped down the rest with Rabelaisian enthusiasm before she ate her own fragment. She wished at once that she’d taken a larger hunk, because it was delicious, both sweet and meaty, juicy and subtly chambered.
“Zubindi used to grow them three times this size,” Beldorion said with a sigh. “And of a flavor to make this seem a cast husk by comparison. Would you believe it, child? It’s a common Rodian kelp gnat, raised on growth enzymes and kept alive and growing for a year instead of the day of its natural life span. Zubindi could keep them going for five years, turn them into a whole different life form! They’d sing and whistle and move around on little tentacles they developed toward the end of that last year of life. Heaven knows what they would have been, had he been able to prolong them further! And the way he could torture britteths! Britteth flesh, as you must know, improves with the enzymes secreted when they die in pain … ah! Sometimes I think I shall never get over his death.”
He groped in his brandy bowl for another prabkro, and shed a sentimental tear. Leia tactfully took a tiny bite of one of the roulades. Kubaz chefs were famous through the galaxy for injecting insect life forms with growth enzymes and gene-splicing them in quest of newer and more perfect designer foodstuffs, so it was anyone’s bet what these actually contained.
“What brought you here in the first place?” asked Leia.
He shook his great head, narrow eyes like cabochon jewels peeking out at her from beneath heavy lids. “I think you know,” he said, and his great voice sank to a basso murmur, like the mutter that presages typhoon winds. His long, purplish tongue slopped around the edges of his mouth, questing for stray droplets of juice, then vanished within. “I think you’ve felt it—that light. That ocean of brightness that fills the universe; that fills each of our Order with light. Travelers’ tales—old log books. They said it was here. But you know that.”
His eyes held hers again, inescapable.