Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [229]
The Short’s bulging eyes went distant and a bit glassy, and he responded with a string of burbling glottal hoots that had a decidedly affirmative tone.
Obi-Wan made another gesture. “Get me a saddle.”
With another string of affirmative burbles, the Short waddled off.
While he waited for his saddle, Obi-Wan examined the dragonmounts. He passed up the largest, and the one most heavily muscled; he skipped over the leanest built-for-speed beast, and didn’t even approach the one with the fiercest gleam in its eye. He didn’t actually pay attention to outward signs of strength or health or personality; he was using his hands and eyes and ears purely as focusing channels for the Force. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he trusted that he would recognize it when he found it.
Qui-Gon, he reflected with an inward smile, would approve.
Finally he came to a dragonmount with a clear, steady gleam in its round yellow eyes, and small, close-set scales that felt warm and dry. It neither shied back from his hand nor bent submissively to his touch, but only returned his searching gaze with calm, thoughtful intelligence. Through the Force, he felt in the beast an unshakable commitment to obedience and care for its rider: an almost Jedi-like devotion to service as the ultimate duty.
This was why Obi-Wan would always prefer a living mount. A speeder is incapable of caring if it crashes.
“This one,” he said. “I’ll take this one.”
The Short had returned with a plain, sturdily functional saddle; as he and the other wranglers undertook the complicated task of tacking up the dragonmount, he nodded at the beast and said, “Boga.”
“Ah,” Obi-Wan said. “Thank you.”
He took a sheaf of greens from a nearby bin and offered them to the dragonmount. The great beast bent its head, its wickedly hooked beak delicately withdrew the greens from Obi-Wan’s hand, and it chewed them with fastidious thoroughness.
“Good girl, Boga. Erm—” Obi-Wan frowned at the Short. “—she is a she, isn’t she?”
The wrangler frowned back. “Warool noggaggllo?” he said, shrugging, which Obi-Wan took to mean I have no idea what you’re saying to me.
“Very well, then,” Obi-Wan said with an answering shrug. “She you will have to be, then, Boga. Unless you care to tell me otherwise.”
Boga made no objection.
He swung himself up into the saddle and the dragonmount rose, arching her powerful back in a feline stretch that lifted Obi-Wan more than four meters off the floor. Obi-Wan looked down at the Utai wranglers. “I cannot pay you. As compensation, I can only offer the freedom of your planet; I hope that will suffice.”
Without waiting for a reply that he would not have understood anyway, Obi-Wan touched Boga on the neck. Boga reared straight up and raked the air with her hooked foreclaws as though she were shredding an imaginary hailfire droid, then gathered herself and leapt to the ring-balcony in a single bound. Obi-Wan didn’t need to use the long, hook-tipped goad strapped in a holster alongside the saddle; nor did he do more than lightly hold the reins in one hand. Boga seemed to understand exactly where he wanted to go.
The dragonmount slipped sinuously through one of the wide oval apertures into the open air of the sinkhole, then turned and seized the sandstone with those hooked claws to carry Obi-Wan straight up the sheer wall.
Level after level they climbed. The city looked and felt deserted. Nothing moved save the shadows of clouds crossing the sinkhole’s mouth far, far above; even the wind-power turbines had been locked down.
The first sign of life he saw came on the tenth level itself; a handful of other dragonmounts lay basking in the midday sun, not far from the durasteel barnacle of the droid-control center. Obi-Wan rode Boga right up to the control center’s open archway, then jumped down from the saddle.
The archway led into a towering vaulted hall,