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Had Taselda tried to get Callista to break in and search for her lightsaber?

Ashgad’s palace itself, though typical of Hutt dwellings in its burrowlike arrangement of rooms leading out of rooms, round doors, and feeding niches in every available wall, had been in human ownership long enough to have had windows put into it and been cleansed many times. As Luke, Arvid, and Aunt Gin struggled against the millrace of the evening wind, Luke fingered Taselda’s sketch map in his pocket.

“You know anything about the meeting, Grupp?” asked Arvid, as the paunchy cop fell into step beside them. Grupp shook his head.

“Far as I can tell nobody did. I did sort of wonder where he’s been these past few months.” Howling out of the fast-falling darkness, the wind thrust them this way and that, making it almost impossible to speak. “Snaplaunce and I have been keeping an eye out here and most times there’s been nobody.”

Luke didn’t think it likely that a prisoner—especially one who’d already attracted the man’s notice—could be kept here undetected. Nevertheless, when they entered the house, he took the occasion to slip away from the others and make his way to the old kitchen courtyard.

Though sheltered by its high walls from the wind, the place gave him the willies for reasons he couldn’t quite define. On one side, wide transparisteel showed him a long room embellished with what he vaguely recognized as state-of-the-art culinary esoterica: Four types of electronic stoves; freeze and slow dryers; dehydrators and rehydrators; bowls and measures and work surfaces of every conceivable size and material; bottles, boxes, and sacks on shelves that reached to the ceiling. A glutton’s heaven, but little more.

Across the court the corresponding chamber was shuttered close. Opening its door, Luke had a dim vision of glass-enclosed vats of every size, tanks of oxygen and methane, feeder-tubes, shunts, and apparatus to which Luke could put no name. He couldn’t imagine the purpose of such a display, but the whole long room resonated with ugliness and evil.

But there was no sign of Callista, no sign of any prisoner. The doorway to the treasure vaults that Taselda had described stood shut behind an iron grille, grille and door both covered with a thick blanket of podhoy of clearly many years’ growth. He reached out with his mind, calling Callista’s name, searching for some trace of her in this place. But whether because of her loss of ability to use the Force or because of the strange, thick presence of the Force in the ether of the planet or simply because she was not and had never been there, he felt nothing.

A tall, androgynous individual whom Luke recognized as one of Ashgad’s synthdroids—either a member of the party who’d escorted him aboard the Borealis or an identical creation—appeared behind him and inquired politely, “May I help you?”

Luke meekly allowed himself to be herded back to the others in what had clearly been the house’s banqueting chamber in earlier times, the biggest room in any Hutt’s dwelling. It was now filled with men and women, some of whom Luke recognized from the abortive attack on the gun station. Others he knew by sight from his brief tenure at Croig’s Fix-It Barn. Their clothing marked them all as Newcomers, following standard cut and fashion in the Core worlds even if they could no longer acquire the usual materials, and there was more diversity in complexion than he’d seen in the limited Oldtimers gene pool.

Croig was there, grayish, orange-eyed, and glum, keeping close to his brother (or sister—the Durosian word was the same) and the two or three other aliens of Hweg Shul: the Arcona who operated one of the majie-processing plants and a couple of Sullustans who owned the biggest branswed towers in the district. Luke noticed that all were vaguely ostracized by most of the Newcomer humans. He’d encountered this a number of times at the shop, this unspoken prejudice against the nonhuman species of the Core worlds. Stupid, when you thought of