Eight months ago.

Whether in quest, or in fright...

Luke shivered in disgust and abhorrence. He would have bet anything he possessed that, eight months ago, Taselda had tried to use Callista as her weapon, her striking arm, as Palpatine had used Vader and Vader had tried to use him, Luke. One of the old gangs that fought for control of this city between the crime-boss Beldorion and another. Was that what Taselda had sunk to, however and wherever she had come to the planet in the first place, the planet where the Force seemed to imbue the very stones like radiant lightS.

She had tried to enslave Callista with the promises of leading her to what she most wanted, with the illusion of belonging, of having found a home.

Callista had come seeking instruction in the Force and had found instead a terrible example of what could happen when you did not have it, when it decayed to almost nothing, leaving only cravings and anger and madness behind.

And Callista had fled.

Luke shivered and, leaning against the wind, turned his steps back toward his room above the Blue Blerd. His mind refused to release the horrible image of Taselda, once a Jedi, now a dirty old madwoman, picking drochs off her arms and eating them, staring at him out of the dark.

"Beldorion the Splendid sends his compliments, Your Excellency." In the doorway, the tall synthdroid bowed. "He would be honored by your presence at tea."

Oh, would he? Leia had to bite back the words. The ad-cube for synthdroids had mentioned nothing about their aural and visual receptors being wired as remote pickups so that their owners could see and hear what they did, but Leia knew in some circles it was routinely done. The sweetblossom sometimes made her careless, and she knew that with Dzym waiting, she had to be as careful as if she were walking the blade of a razor.

"Will Master Ashgad be present?" She exaggerated the sweet haziness of voice as she always did around the synthdroids or, in fact, around Liegeus-one of her schoolmates many years ago at the Select Academy had been stoned most of the time and the singsong quality was easy for Leia to fake. The mere fact that no one had come in to make her drink the drugged water had told her at least-belatedly-that the room wasn't wired; due to the effects of the drug the possibility hadn't even occurred to her until that morning.

"I do not know', Your Excellency."

"It's just that I need to know what to wear," she murmured dreamily, for the benefit of a possible listener.

"I do not know, Your Excellency."

Not, thought Leia, with the synthdroid's departure, that she had a whole lot of choice.

From her post on the terrace she'd counted at least five synth-droids, but some of them might be duplicates, so there could be more.

At least two bore marks of necrosis, the slow dying of the flesh that covered their metal armatures that was apparently connected, in some way, with both the Death Seed and Dzym.

She wondered if it were indeed possible, as she was beginning to deduce, that Dzym could in some way control the Death Seed. It would explain the preciseness of the timing needed to take over the Adamantine and the Borealis and the fact that she had survived her bout with the disease. It explained why neither Ashgad nor Liegeus had contracted the plague, and at the same time explained Liegeus's fear.

Or would she see some other explanation, some other detail, when her mind was clear again?

If she lived to look at the matter with a clear mind.

Leia shivered, and began to change into her red-and-bronze gown of state, and the heavy crimson mantle that covered it.

The synthdroid appeared a half hour later, as Leia was finishing putting up her hair. She took note as well as she could of the directions, the layout of the house: along a corridor, down a flight of steps. There were iron blast doors standing open near the bottom, and through them she glimpsed a vast compound like a docking bay, looking out over the open air of the plateau's edge. A blocky, medium-size freighter stood there, synthdroids moving around it carrying in what looked like the components of a computer core, which meant that construction was fairly far along.

Liegeus came out, saying to one of the synthdroids beside him, '... all the green wires first, then all the red wires..." and across the open permacrete his eyes met hers.

He paused, startled: The synthdroid beside her said, "Please come this way now, Your Excellency," and she realized she'd been standing in the frame of the open blast doors; she hurried after. They turned a corner, proceeded down another flight of steps, and the smell of Hutt rose to meet her like a wave of heat.

"It is dreadfully slow here, dreadfully slow." Beldorion shifted his enormous, pythonlike bulk on the dais of air duvets and cushions on which he lay. Hutts tend to obesity as they grow older, but despite almost constant snacking, the Splendid One retained his air of physical power and enormous speed, completely unlike Durga the Hutt's thin and pitiful disciple Korrda, who back on Nal Hutta had been the b.u.t.t of so many jokes. Unlike many of his species, he favored gold rings on his fingers, and in the folds of his head flesh, and a jeweled stud in his ower lip.

On a baldric of gold and reptile leather he wore his lightsaber, the plain dark metal incongruous against the glittering harness. "It is good of you to join me, little princess. You must find the days weigh heavy in your room."

"They do, a little," admitted Leia, wondering what all this was leading up to. She recalled some of the more revolting aspects of her imprisonment by Jabba, but reasoned that even if Ashgad were ignorant of the invitation-which she was virtually certain he was-they were still beneath his roof. "Master Ashgad has been very a.s.siduous about seeing to my wants."

"Oh, and to mine too, mine too," rumbled that gluey, bottom-of-the-well voice. "Not that I'm in anywhere near the same position as yourself, but well. .. I have my comforts, of course, and my chef, though quite frankly, little princess, this new fellow's not the cook Zubindi Ebsuk was. Zubindi... ah!" He sighed revoltingly, and groped around in his porcelain washtub of brandy for the spiky b.a.l.l.s of marinated prabkros that floated therein. "Now, there was a chef! I was desolate when he died. Bereft. A Kubaz, like the new fellow-a genius at insects. 'Grant me the right hormones, the right enzymes to inject,' he used to say, 'and I will transform a sand flea into the center course of an Imperial feast."

And he could, you know." The deep crimson eyes fixed on her. "He could."

He rumbled deep in his belly, and she felt the touch of his mind on hers.

Faint and weak, but there, subtly drawing at her will. She felt herself in danger of becoming hypnotized by those scarlet orbs and looked away.

With that much sweetblossom in her system it was difficult not to submit her mind to his dominance.

"Ashgad, now... he's made himself the champion of these Newcomers, but what is that? When I ruled Hweg Shul, all the people came to me with their problems, that I could render judgment. And my judgments were just to all, you know." The red eyes caught hers again, held them. "I was the better ruler-the stronger as well."

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 blackwood 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.

Pinp.r.i.c.ks, 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, childS. 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 never 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 ba.s.so 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. "Now a young lady of your-particular-talents might find herself needing allies in a situation like this. Ashgad can't be trusted, you know, little one.

And he was never that good a ruler." He held out one small gold-ringed hand, and Leia found herself unable to pull away.

From the doorway a deep, very quiet voice said, "At least he never sold one of his slaves to Dzym."

Beldorion swung around, hissing; Leia sprang back and pulled her gaze away. Liegeus stood in the doorway, graying hair hanging down in his eyes, broken out of his fear, thought Leia, by anger. For a moment he only stood there, looking at the two of them, then he stepped lightly down and crossed to the dais.

Softly, Beldorion said, "Have a care, philosopher." The whole terrible length of him twitched, the great seven-foot tail creeping back and forth like a separate, angry being as his red eyes narrowed. "Upon another occasion I told you I do not brook interference."

Liegeus hesitated for a moment, his dark eyes widening with some evil memory. Then he came forward again and took Leia by the hand.

"What did he offer you, my dear?" His voice was steady, but she felt his fingertips cold, and shaking a little in hers. "Partnership in ruling this planet. Or just that he'd let you go free if you'd put him back in charge."

He raised Leia to her feet and led her back to the door. Beldorion made no move to stop them, but as Liegeus reached to touch the opener plate Leia saw the Hutt gesture pettishly in his direction. Liegeus gasped as if struck, half-doubled over in agony, his free hand going to his temple.

He was ashen with shock and pain as Leia slapped the opener plate with the backs of her fingers. The door sliced open, and she led him through, stumbling blind and clinging to the wall for support.

They were halfway down the corridor, opposite the blast doors that led into the docking bay, before Liegeus straightened up and drew a shaky breath. "Migraine," he managed to say through lips drained of color and blood. "He does that-sometimes-when I beat him at ho-logames, too.

Sometimes-worse than that."

He shook his head, his hand stealing to his throat, cast a quick glance at the open blast doors, and putting a hand behind her elbow led her rather rapidly toward the stairs. "Did he try to influence your mind?

Don't trust him, my dear."

"And I suppose I should trust Ashgad?"

Liegeus looked away.

They mounted the stairs in silence, pa.s.sed down the corridor toward the doors of her room. He had punched in the code-carefully keeping his body between her and the pad-before he said, "He doesn't keep his promises.

Even should he do so, he couldn't protect you from Dzym, and he could not defeat Ashgad. Even years ago, when Ashgad first reached this planet, Beldorion was no match for him."

Leia looked up, startled. "But the original Ashgad..." she began, and their eyes met. Liegeus looked away, and she could see by the flinch of his mouth that, still disoriented from the migraine, he'd said more than he meant. He ushered her gently into her room and, stepping quickly out, closed the door between them.

Leia groped blindly for the head of her bed, sat down, weak in the knees.

She felt light-headed from thirst and a little ill from the struggle with Beldorion; glancing in the direction of the water pitcher, she got to her feet, carried it outside to the terrace, and dumped all the remaining water over the railing. Right now, her thirst was too great, and she might forget later that she should not drink.

She needed her mind clear. Is it because of the sweetblossom; she wondered. Did Liegeus mean something else, and I'm reading this into it because I'm drugged? Is there some other real explanation?

But the only one she could think of for Liegeus's words-the only conclusion she could draw-was that the man who had proclaimed himself the son of Seti Ashgad, the Emperor Palpatine's old rival for Senatorial power, was in fact the man himself.

"Okay, what have we got?" Han Solo swung himself down the ladder from the observation port, crossed in two strides to Lando Calris-sian's station at the long-range scanners. Bands of red and yellow light played upward across the conman's swarthy features; Lando flicked a calibration switch, altering the flow of the reflections to show the glitch in the spectrograph readings that had caused him to send a flag signal up to Han.

"Looks like a heat reading on the fifth planet of that system there.

Damonite Yors B-nothing there, never has been. The graph's cooling fast..

." He tapped the black bands in the colored spectrum, "... but those are reactor fuel lines."

Han reached past his shoulder to punch through a more accurate readout and swore.

"Good thing I brought my mittens." Lando reached to adjust another screen. "That's sure big enough for the Adamantine. By the heat streak in the atmosphere they've been down there for about ten hours."

Han was already at the main console, keying the course. "Hang on, Leia,"

he whispered. "Don't check out on me now."

Planetfall was a nightmare. The whole atmosphere a whirling wrack of storms, the Falcon was buffeted and thrown like a plastene plate in a riptide. Han and Chewbacca worked side by side over the console, fighting ion storms that struck them in sheets and fritzed out the sensors that were their only guide to the terrain below'. Han allowed himself to think of nothing, to be aware of nothing except the elusive spot of heat on the readout-the spot that slowly dimmed from orange to brown in the hours it took them to struggle down through t.i.tanic gales.

She couldn't die, he thought. He had literally no idea-none-of what he would do, what would become of him, if she should die.

He couldn't imagine life without her.

Through a millrace of flying atmospheric garbage, the sensors began to pick out the debris track on the ice below. Most of it was imbedded meters deep already in the long, hard melt slick where the primordial planetary ice had been liquified by the pa.s.sage of the crashing ship, to refreeze within minutes; a rummage of hull fragments, broken-off stabilizers, deformed nodules unrecognizable already from atmospheric friction.

The slick ran at a steeply acute angle toward a chasm in the ice, kilometers deep and nearly half a kilometer across. Han brought the Falcon in low over it, holding his breath as he followed the trail-It didn't g o over. Tell me it didn't go over.

The ice slick ended in a shallow vee at the chasm's edge.

"There she is," said Lando.

For a minute Han thought his friend was speaking of Leia herself, rather than the vreckage of the ship.

There was a ledge that you could have put a small manufacturing plant on, forty or fifty meters below the edge of the chasm-the drop was unguessably deep beyond that, and the visibility appalling. The crashing ship's hull had ruptured when it had gone over the edge of the glacier plain above, and the whole business balanced near the dropoff to the deeper chasm like a billion-credit house with a seaside view. A dull rubicund glow showed where the dying engines lay, through the buckled panels and flying ice.

The serial numbers were visible.

"What ship is that?"

Chewie was already punching them in. The Corbantis, out of Durren orbital. Reported missing barely two hours before the Falcon had lifted out of Hesperidium.

Not the Adamantine. Not the Borealis. Han didn't know whether to feel relief or despair.

It was a fight to bring the Millennium Falcon around for another pa.s.s, to put her down on the lip of the first drop, a dozen meters from the V-shaped notch where the Orbantis had gone over. They dropped a towline first, using the notch as a site, so that the weighted end of sixty-five meters of megafilament cable hung down the face of that first cliff only a short distance from the wreck. Leaving Lando at the Falcon's controls, Han and Chewie suited up and went out, following the line across the waste, hanging on for dear life against the butcher winds that obscured the face plates of their e-suits with flying ice, and let themselves down the ragged black mess of frozen cliff toward the dying glow of the wreck.

Even the powerful sodium glare of the e-suits' lights couldn't pierce the swirling murk to show much of the damage on the ship. Against the howl of static Han yelled into the helmet mike, "Small craft!" and pointed at the burn marks that scored the hull. Chewie roared a.s.sent.

"You see any kind of Destroyer track on the sensors, Chewie? Anything that could have carried TIEs or fighters?" The Wookiee demurred.

Farther on, the smashed silvery disk of a shield generator dangled from the ice - and blast-scarred metal in the wobbling white glow of the e-suits' light. "That's heavy guns for a planet-hopper, even if you could get one out this far."

Chewbacca's growl rumbled in Han's earpiece. The Wookiee pilot knew more about out-of-the-way smuggler bases in this part of the galaxy than the average miser knew about the contents of his or her creditbox, and Han believed him when he said there was no place in forty pa.r.s.ecs where a planet-hopper fleet could have put in.