Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (17 page)

Liegeus came out onto the terrace. “Your Excellency,” he greeted her gently. She hadn't meant to speak of what she had seen--hadn't meant to let him know she knew anythingbut with the sweetblossom it was difficult to remember any kind of resolve.

He looked so pale, his dark eyes so haunted, that she said, “You're as much a prisoner here as I am.”

He flinched a little, and looked aside. He reminded her of an animal that had been mistreated and would shy at the raising of any human hand. Compassion twisted her heart. “You seem to have the run of the place. Couldn't you leave?”

“It isn't that easy,” he said. He came over to the bench where she sat, looked gravely down at her. The synthdroid, Leia could see, still stood on the lower terrace, the pallid sunlight turning its dead, doll-like hair to gold. “How much of that did you hear?”

“I . . . Nothing.” Leia fumbled, and she cursed her own weakness for not being able to do without some of the drugged water every day.

But she knew that most people were not aware of how their own voices carried. “I heard you and Dzym talking, that is, but I couldn't hear what you said. Only the way you shrank away, the way you fear him.”

Liegeus sighed, and his shoulders slumped. A wan smile flickered over his lined face. “Well, as you can see for yourself, Your Excellency, even should I leave--and I'm being very well paid for my work here--there really isn't anywhere for me to go.” He gestured around them, at the wild crystalline landscape, the dazzling gorges and razor-backed ridges of glass. Then he was silent a moment, looking down at her, helpless grief in his eyes.

“Do you spend much time out here on the terrace?” he asked abruptly.

Leia nodded. “I know it probably isn't a good idea. It makes my skin hurt . . .”

“I'll get you some glycerine,” said Liegeus. “Did you hear what I said to the synthdroid? it's convenient to have them all operated from a central controller but it means you never can tell them apart.”

“The only thing I heard was that it's supposed to spend fifteen minutes a day standing on the terrace.”

“I'd like you to do that, too. More, if you can.”

“All right.” Leia nodded. It couldn't be sunlight that was a cure for the Death Seed, she thought. Billions had died of it, daytime or nighttime, on worlds across half the galaxy. “Liegeus . . .”

He was starting to leave; he turned back within the shadow of the house.

“If there's anything I can do to help . . .”

The minute the words were out of her mouth she felt like a fool. The drug, she thought, and cursed it again. Here she was a prisoner, her very life under their control--for it looked to her like Dzym was able to call the Death Seed into being and to take it away again--and she was offering to help him.

But something changed in Liegeus's eyes Shame and gratitude for even that small kindness, replacing the fear. “Thank you,” he said, “but there's nothing.” He disappeared into the shadows of the house.

The house Luke sought lay deep in the heart of the Oldtimer quarter.

In many respects it bore a rather surprising resemblance to Seti Ashgad's, which Arvid had pointed out to him that afternoon on the way into town. Like Ashgad's, this house was built at ground levelsomething that surprised Luke until he remembered that Ashgad's house had been built forty years ago by Ashgad's father--and like Ash-gad's was new. This one had evidently once been surrounded by a luxuriant growth of plants, not just the standard vegetation common to low-light terraformed planets, but rarer growths and trees watered by a complex of droppers and pipes.

But while Ashgad's dwelling still supported this arrogant display of wasted water, this house bore only the detritus of former glory.

Broken pipes crossed the dirty white stucco of the walls. A few dessicated stumps clung to niches, overgrown with snigvine like almost everything else in the grubby Oldtimer quarter. The milky-white stucco of the walls themselves had been smashed by winter windstorms, and beneath the gaps showed the grayish plastopress of which everything in the town was constructed. On the roof, most of the solar panels were broken as well, the cables rattling in the wind. Decay seemed to ooze from the boarded-up transparisteel like the foetor of a swamp Decay and the enormous sense of something terribly wrong.

Not here, thought Luke.

It was something he had not considered That in eight months, Callista would have ceased to be the woman he had known.

She had lasted thirty years inside the gunnery computer on the dreadnought Eye of Palpatine. Could she have deteriorated so quickly in less than one.

But ,whoever it was, whose strength in the Force he had felt, was here.

The door opened before he knocked on it. The woman standing on the low slab of crystal before its threshold wasn't Callista.

She smiled, and held out her hands to him, the smile transforming her to beauty. “Another one,” she said softly. “Thank all goodness.”

It was impossible to tell her age. Luke knew immediately she wasn't young, in spite of the porcelain perfection of her face. It was like a very good reproduction of youth that succeeded only in not looking old.

She lacked the wrinkles and lines of human sorrow' and delight around her mouth, the crow's-feet at the corners of the eyes that made Leia's so wise, lacked the print of even the smallest thought on her forehead.

Her hair was raven black and hadn't been washed in weeks. Neither had her trim, high-breasted, long-legged body or the dingy green dress that wrapped it.

“Welcome.” She drew him into the dense shadows within the first of the house's many rooms. Her hand was like that of a goddess who bit her nails. “Welcome. I am Taselda. Of the Knights.” Her eyes met his, jewel blue under the flawless brows. “But then, you knew that.”

Luke looked around the shabby darkness. Most of the transparisteel had been boarded shut and the room was illuminated only by a string of old-fashioned glow-bulbs tacked to the ceiling. His heart went out to her in compassion. Obi-Wan Kenobi had hidden himself for years in the obscure deserts of Tatooine, mocked at as a crazy old hermit, willingly surrendering the use of his Jedi powers that he might guard the last, chosen hope of the Knights. But he, thought Luke, had had the disciplines of the Force to help him bear it. This woman had been here for who knew how long, unable to use her powers for fear of harming the innocent in another Force storm. From the Newcomers she must have heard that Palpatine was dead, unable to harm her . . .

“I'm called Owen,” he said, realizing that Skywalker was probably a name anathema to most of the old Jedi still alive after Vader's persecutions.

“And I'm looking for someone.”

“Ah.” The blue eyes smiled again, wise and twinkling. She crossed to a cupboard and took out a pair of goblets, old Corellian glasswork, tulip shaped, and very valuable. She flicked a droch off the base of one.

Past her shoulder, Luke had seen that the cupboard skittered with them.

She had a bottle of wine hanging out one of the few unboarded windows into a shady courtyard's chill, which she retrieved and poured.

When she pushed aside the shutters and let a bit of pallid light into the room Luke saw that her white arms were covered with droch bites.

The smell of the insects was fusty-pungent above that of dirt and uncleanness.

“Callista.”

“You've seen her?” His whole body, his whole being, was a shout of triumph; he couldn't keep it out of his voice.

“How not'.”“ smiled Taselda. ”I am her teacher now in the ways of the Force."

The wine was from Durren and not very good. It had been cut with fermented algae sugar a number of times and had all variety of odd backtastes, but Luke sipped it, his eyes on the woman before him.

“Is she here?. How is she?” he asked softly. “How does she look?”

Taselda brushed back a lock of hair from her forehead, and behind the gentle smile there was sadness in her eyes. “Like a woman who has endured much,” she said. “Like a woman torn in her heart, trying to turn her back on her own deepest need.”

It was a curious thing about Taselda's smile. It was wide, and flat, and at first sight little more than a stretching of the lips. But after a moment, looking at it across the rim of the wineglass, it came over Luke that it was very similar in some ways to old Ben's quirky, gentle, amused with human nature. He wondered who this woman reminded him of. Aunt Beru, a little; Leia, a little; and someone else, a woman he had only the dimmest traces of in deep-buried memory. His mother?.

The deep sense of warmth was the same, the giving kindness and the comfort of boundless, unselfish love.

“Where is she?” he asked, sensing that this woman knew and understood all. “Can you take me to her?” The wine was sweet now on his tongue, subtle with resonances he had not comprehended before. He drank deep of it, and she refilled the glass. It soothed his weariness, as her smile did, and like her smile left him thirsty for more.

“Of course. I have been waiting for you, since she spoke your name.”

She reached out and took both of his hands in both of hers again.

“There's a cave in the hills, not so very far from here. The Force is strong there. It's one of the places where the ground lightning emerges. I sent her there to meditate. I'll take you, for it's impossible to find without guidance.”

She got to her feet and drew a deep breath, as if steadying herself, pulled her raggedy romex dress more closely around her, and looked vaguely in the corners for her shoes. Luke noticed, as if from a great distance away, that her feet were filthy and her toenails overgrown, like yellowed claws. His flash of disgust was followed immediately by his memory of Yoda--unprepossessing to say the least--and then by anger at himself.

How could he think so about Taselda?.

And when he looked again her feet did not seem that dirty at all.

He stood, too, and set his goblet on the edge of the table. To his own surprise he almost missed the corner. It must be the dim lighting in the room, he thought, for the wine she'd given him had cleared his head rather than clouded it. Cleared it, it seemed to him, as if for the first time in his life.

“Have you a speeder?” she asked, and he nodded.

“I have to get it fixed, but I can do that in a day or so.” It crossed his mind that he hadn't the money to do such a thing--he'd intended to sell the grounded vehicle for cash to get himself and Callista off the planet. But now that didn't seem to matter. His heart pounded faster even at that mental phrase Himself and Callista.

“And weapons?”

He touched the blaster and the lightsaber at his belt.

Taselda's face fell. “It isn't enough,” she said softly. “We will have to wait.” Her brow creased in a frown.

“Wait?” Luke felt a twang 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 entitled 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 passed 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 amusement that had tugged the corners of Ben's mouth.