Star Wars_ Planet Of Twilight Part 12

"Wait?" Luke felt a tw.a.n.g of panic. The hills were dangerous.

Callista would come to harm if he didn't get there soon. They might arrive and find her gone once more, or dead. It was unendurable, to be so close. "What's the problem?"

Taselda shook her head, with the air of one not wishing to burden a friend with her troubles, and averted her face a little. A droch crawled out of sight behind her collar. "It's nothing."

"Can I help?"

"I couldn't ask you to," she said. "It's my affair alone."

"Tell me." The world would be a bleak and terrible place if he didn't aid her. He might not find Callista. And somehow it had become important to him that she not seek the aid of another than he.

"Please."

Her smile was shy, and a little self-deprecating. "It's been a long time since I had a champion. Your Callista is lucky, Owen." She raised those flower blue eyes to his again and touched his chest with confiding fingers.

"It's an old story, a long story, my friend. When first I came to this world-oh, many years ago-I had only intended to accomplish the minor mission the Masters of the Jedi had ordered for me and to depart.

But seeing the way the people here lived, squabbling endlessly over pump rights, and tree rights, and who was ent.i.tled to grow which crops on which piece of land, I could not leave. There were Warlords, petty bullies with hired bravos, and though it is against the way of our order to take sides, I could not allow the deeds I saw to go uncorrected. I lent my skill, and such talents as I possessed, to the side of the people. With my lightsaber in hand I led them to a stronger and more peaceful way of life. My craft was destroyed one night while I was away leading the rescue of hostages from the enemy; and I knew that I must stay. After the fighting was over, these people made me their ruler. And I was happy."

Luke nodded, seeing in his mind this beautiful woman in her warrior youth. The house, indeed, was of the sort that a grateful people would build for a just ruler who had saved them from tyranny.

"But many years later another Jedi came to this world, an evil creature: selfish, lying, but very plausible. He came here because he had heard that the Force on this world is strong. It lies close to the surface of reality here, close enough to reach out and touch, though he was not capable of doing so. His own abilities to use the Force were not strong, and he sought to twist and gather them to fulfill his own emptiness.

Beldorion he was called. Beldorion of the Ruby Eyes. Beldorion the Splendid."

She sighed and pa.s.sed her hand across her forehead in a gesture of weariness and grief.

"As you know, Owen, there are always those who will follow such a one.

He worked not only through violence and the threat of violence but through lies and calumny, turning the truth and people's memories of the truth, until everything I had done here was given a different meaning, a sinister significance that those whose power to work evil I had curtailed were delighted to believe.

"My friends turned against me. Beldorion was too feeble an adept to manufacture his own lightsaber, so he stole mine from me. I was driven into poverty. Feared by the weak and courted by the venal, Beldorion came to rule Hweg Shul like a king, and I was forgotten."

Her voice faltered, and she put up her hand quickly, to cover whatever expression might have pulled at her mouth. In the quiet street behind them a blerd brayed its monotonous tenor screech; an Oldtimer woman drove past in a high-wheeled cart pulled by alcopays, flipping her long whip at their feet. Luke saw in his mind's eye this beautiful woman before him, hurrying along these densely twisted walled streets with her dirty dress fluttering in the endless wind and remembered Ben again and the way children in Tosche station used to run out in front of him giggling and making what they considered to be magic signs with their fingers. Even at this great distance of time-and he'd been only a small child himself-he remembered the genuine amus.e.m.e.nt that had tugged the corners of Ben's mouth.

Taselda went on, "Well, it was inevitable, as we true Knights know, that Beldorion should succ.u.mb to his own greeds and his own vices. He was usurped and ousted many years ago by a man named Seti Ashgad, a politician sent here by the old Emperor as punishment, even as the ancestors of these people had been sent here. Beldorion had become so sunk in debauchery that no power remained to him. His followers deserted him for Ashgad, and Ashgad took from him his very house, and all the treasure inside it. Treasure that he had stolen from me," she said somberly. "And most important, in that house somewhere is my lightsaber."

Luke said softly, "Ah."

"Because of injuries I suffered in my struggle against Beldorion it was not possible for me to make another. When I went to Ashgad, many years ago now, and tried to retrieve it, I was cast forth as brutally as Beldorion had cast me forth. Since then I have tried many times to recover it. See." With a movement of simple innocence, she slipped her dress from her right shoulder, and showed him, among the droch bites, a terrible bruise on her arm.

"We will be vulnerable, when we go to the cave to find your Callista,"

she said softly. "Ashgad's servants are merciless, the more so because they are no longer human, but only human-seeming droids.

And because of that same injury, I no longer have the strength to enter Ashgad's house and get the lightsaber myself. Indeed, I'm no longer sure whether it is here or at the house he has in the wastelands, at the foot of the Mountains of Lightning. For Callista's sake, and for yours, I wish I could go with you, show you where she is, but I dare not."

She drew in a shaky breath and shoved back the dirty mane of hair from her face again with both hands. "I dare not."

Rage filled Luke at the sight of the bruises on her arm, self-righteous fury that anyone would have hurt this gentle, beautiful woman mingled with anxiety that they-whoever they were-would take out their anger at Taselda on Callista, should they come upon her alone. He said, "Where would your lightsaber be, in Ashgad's house?" Its high, glittering white walls came again to his mind, arrogant among the small cottages of the Oldtimers.

"There is a treasure room beneath the kitchens." Taselda's indigo eyes brimmed with grateful tears. "The entrance is through the kitchen courts, here." She turned away, and did something at a small table.

Coming back, she handed him a sheet of coa.r.s.e local paper, on which was inked a plan of the house.

Luke saluted her with it, feeling light and buoyant within himself, as if his bloodstream were filled with sparks of fire. He grinned at her like a boy. I'll be back. We'll be out of town by nightfall."

"She told me that I could trust you, Owen," said Taselda softly. "I saw the light in her eyes, when she spoke your name. I think you need have no fear of what you will find."

Callista. Luke's whole body seemed to be singing, as he strode away down the ill-paved back streets of the Oldtimers town. Whatever dark the world may send, still lovers meet...

I've found her, i've found her. I've found her I saw the light in her eyes... His steps slowed. '.. when she spoke your name."

But Callista would not have known that he would be calling himself O wen Lars.

He stopped and realized he had missed his way among the near-identical white houses.

And he thought, quite calmly, There was something in the wine.

Luke had never been much of a drinker, and once he'd begun to study and understand the Force he had given it up altogether. It simply took too much edge off his concentration. Although, of course, Taselda's wine wasn't like other wine, still it surprised him that he'd imbibed the quant.i.ty of it that he had. Now as he turned his concentration inward on his own metabolism, to clear some of the alcohol from his system, he realized that there was something else there as well.

A synthetic mood-enhancer, he thought, leaning against a wall with one hand and closing his eyes. Pryodene or pryodase, or maybe Algafine torwe weed-the kind of thing that made one accepting and friendly.

Leia had told him there had been a time when consumption of pryodase had been de rigueur before dinner parties among the n.o.bility of Coruscant, as a counter to the fad for dueling, and there were always accusations in labor disputes and divorce proceedings that one side or the other had slipped it into their opposite number's caffeine just before negotiations.

It was harmless and nonaddictive. it simply lowered one's guard.

Luke thought, How wise of her, to use that method to overcome my prejudices so that I could see her as she truly is.

He walked two steps, trying to reorient himself toward Seti Ash-gad's house, and then thought, What did I just think?

A throb of pain seized him. Not physical pain, but the pain of loss, of abandonment, the deep-seated pain of a child who suspects from earliest awareness that his mother had given him away like a stray puppy, for reasons he could not understand. The pain of Callista's flight. The pain of losing the dream of the father he had invented in his lonely fantasies.

Cold flooded him, cold and anxiety. He couldn't lose Taselda...

Through the child's fear of loss, a voice came to him.

Search your feelings, it said, a black voice speaking out of blackness.

You know it to be true.

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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

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 sc.r.a.ps of wood and metal all flutter and twitch like live things.

Her eyes still on his, she was pulling things, rochs, 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 body as a weapon against the other, then hurled them both into the angry pack.

He dove over a wall, pelted across a thickly grown garden patch whose leaves slapped and smote him with the force of the gale winds, and heard the pursuers run around the long sides of the lot. If worse came to worst he supposed he could always use the Force to...

To what? Start a Force storm that would kill some other innocent old woman under the care of a Healer two hundred kilometers away?

He grabbed a rake from the tools along the fence, vaulted over the wall where he could hear the least of the shouting, and made a break for the wider streets and more open field of vision among the Newcomer houses.

Dust and pebbles smote him and cut his face. Three Oldtimers appeared in front of him across the width of the street, including the man with the blaster. Luke dove sideways, slipped past a spear that jabbed down on him from the roof of a shed, rolled to his feet, and set his back to the wall as more came running.

"Here, now, what's all this?" bellowed a voice.

The Oldtimers skidded to a halt, milled for a moment, then began to back away.

A weedy-looking eight-foot lihorian and a fat, slovenly, dark-haired human male, both in the blue uniforms of the Hweg Shul munic.i.p.al police, came walking down the alley.

"Shame on the lot of you," warbled the Hammerhead in its soft voice.

"What do you think you are, piranha-beetles? Nafen?"

There was a muttering among the Oldtimers. One dropped a rock she'd had in hand to throw. Someone else said something about "the Evil One."

"Him?" The human jerked a thumb at Luke. His greasy black forelock flipped in the wind. No one replied. He turned to Luke. "You the Evil One, pilgrim?"

"Everyone is evil to someone." Luke dusted his sleeve, where a rock had nearly broken his arm.

The man chuckled. "Well, my ex-wife would agree with you there."

He turned to the Hammerhead. "What about it, Snaplaunce? There anything in the City Statute about being evil?"

"Not to my knowledge, Grupp."

"You hear that?" Grupp the policeman turned back to the mob, only about a third of whom remained. "What's the guy done besides being evil?" He glanced sidelong at Luke, measuring him with a dark eye that was far from stupid.

"Evil is as evil does," yelled the girl who'd tried to brain Luke with a club.

"Yeah, well, mobbing a man who didn't even fire that blaster he's carrying sounds like Evil Does to me, sugar." Grupp gestured like a man shooing flies. "Get out of here, the bunch of you, before I run you all in for disturbing the peace. You okay?" He turned his back on the Oldtimers to speak to Luke, though Luke was pretty sure he was watching them still. They dispersed, muttering, in their eyes the anger at seeing Newcomers rescuing a Newcomer, not lawmen helping a man innocently attacked.

"I'm fine."

"Crazy' Therans."

"Not Therans," warbled the Ithorian. "I know the Therans. These are the ones who have attacked Master Ashgad's house, four or five times since I have been here. I suspect they're the ones who killed the last of his human servants early this year, though i can prove nothing. I know it was they who kidnapped that young woman at about the same time."

"Young woman?" Luke felt as if he'd been kicked in the chest.

The Ithorian regarded him for a moment, speculation in its golden eyes.

"The tall woman who came in on one of the Durren planet-hoppers.

She called herself Cray, but forgot on a number of occasions to answer when spoken to by that name. These ragged ones-the remains, I am told, of one of the old gangs that fought for control of this city between the crime-boss Beldorion and another, a woman, many years ago-surrounded and dragged her away one night, but before I could find where they took her I encountered her in the street. She said they were her friends." The sweet, low voice was dryIthorians have an astonishing range of emotional shadings to their words.

"When-when was this?" asked Luke, through dry lips. "Is she still in the city? Have you seen her."

Grupp and the Ithorian exchanged a look. Not speculative, precisely, but a police look, asking each other whether he, Luke, const.i.tuted a threat of some kind to the order and well-being of their city. He saw Grupp take in the lightsaber at his belt and would have been willing to bet that whether or not the policeman knew what such a thing was, he remembered that Callista had worn one, too.

It was the Ithorian who spoke.

"She left Hweg Shul within a week of her arrival, of her own will insofar as we know'. But whether she left in quest, or in flight, or at the behest of another, that we cannot tell."

They had reached the Newcomer area of town, the square white houses like truncated Imperial walkers on their stilts. The antigrav b.a.l.l.s were all drawn down close to the ground, and the freezing wind roared like the vanished seas in their leaves and moaned around the permacrete rendering towers where brope and smoor were processed into edible form.

Grupp and Snaplaunce looked Luke over one more time, bade him take care where he walked, and strode off to the shadows under a house where they'd left their speeder-bikes.

Luke stood for a long time, looking back toward the tangled walls and algae-covered rocks of the Oldtimer town. Within a week of her arrival.