Permacrete steps ascended to a landing, then turned out of his view.

Darkness, and something moving along the walls. With the choking inner sense of evil it was impossible to determine anything else about what might be up there, shape or size or sound or smell.

Cautiously, Luke began to climb.

He pa.s.sed one landing, two, then three. Each break in the stair was twenty steps up. The plateau looked well over three hundred meters high, but there was no telling how deep the foundations of the house extended.

As far as Luke could tell, there were no holocams or viewers in the stairwell: only a close-crowding monotony of permacrete walls, grimy with the brown tracks of drochs. The join of the walls and floor was almost sepia with the noisome exudations of their bodies.

Pain stabbed him in the calf and he looked down to see half a dozen huge drochs-the length of his thumb wriggling and climbing up his boots.

Several had bitten through his pants leg and into the flesh already.

Disgusted, he pulled a hypo-driver from his belt and used the shaft of it to dislodge those that hadn't bitten yet, but more were crawling purposefully toward him across the floor.

As he bent down, the light of his little glowrod fell on them, and to his surprise he saw that several of the biggest had definite limbs, pincer-clawed or tentacular, sometimes both on the same organism. He stepped quicker, reminding himself that Arvid said they simply died and dissolved in the flesh....

But the pain in his calf was followed by weariness, a cold la.s.situde, an ache in his chest, and the sudden, overwhelming desire for sleep.

He stepped around a corner, and onto another landing, and there they were.

The floor was brown with them. Among the glistening ma.s.s there were half a dozen nearly the size of Luke's hand, spider-shaped or arthropod, some with the batrachian, springing legs of a Cabuloid pad-hopper....

Luke fell back, appalled, and something struck him from behind, fastening to his back between the shoulder blades, and pain like the slice of a chisel jabbed the back of his neck.

He flung himself back against the wall, crushing whatever it was against the permacrete, but as if that had been a signal the drochs on the floor hopped and skittered and flowed toward him. The pain on his neck still reechoed, though a sticky fluid trickling down his back told him that whatever had attacked him was dead. He turned to flee down the stairs and saw that the drochs had gathered in behind him, big and small, some of them huge, legged, toothed, and fast as lizards.

Weakness flowed over him with the agony of a hundred bites, as if all his veins had been opened-not blood loss, he knew at once, but life-loss, the draining of the electrochemical field of his nervous system, of the life essence of his flesh and heart.

He fell against the wall, clinging to the permacrete to stay upright, knowing that if he went down among them he was a dead man indeed.

They evaded the slashes of his lightsaber, a weapon too big to touch them, too slow for all its speed. On the steps ahead of him Luke saw the biggest droch of all, nearly twice the size of his two fists bunched together, carcinomorphic, staring at him with two bright eyes on short stalks, and he thought, It's sentient. Or nearly so.

And he knew' somehow that it was this thing that had orchestrated the attack on him, letting him come so far up the steps that there was no chance of descent.

He cut at it, staggering with weakness. The thing sprang aside.

Luke's knees gave out and he fell, gasping, dizzy, pain stabbing him as if he were rolled in needles....

And he summoned the Force.

Like a shining wind he called it, and like a shining wind it came, tearing the drochs from his body as Vader had once torn cabinets and spools and railings from the infrastructure of the carbon-freeze chamber on Bespin to hurl at him. But the drochs he hurled away, crushing them against the walls, staggering to rise as more flowed toward him, from up the stairs and from below.

He thought, I can't do this. The balance of the Force is broken. This will destroy some other place....

But when they fastened on him again, stabbing with greedy mouths through the ripped cloth of his suit, panic and horror seized him, and he knew that he must use the Force or die.

Like a whirlwind the psychokinetic energy ripped and chopped at them, plucked them up and flung them against the walls, down the steps, and Luke had glimpses, in the jarring swirl of splintered light, of the bigger drochs seizing and fastening their mouths upon the smaller, then hurling themselves at him. The choking sensation of rotted, fermented life blotted his brain, more and more life, as if each droch were bloated on the lives of those it drank.

In For more creds, so let's rob the bank, thought Luke. No sense in being inconspicuous now. He directed the Force before him, and staggered up the stairs, climbing on his hands and knees, while above him he had the sense of the big arthropod droch retreating, claws clicking on the floor, eyestalks watching him like evil stars out of the darkness.

"What's that?" Leia whirled at something that was less a sound than a stabbing in her mind, a tightening in her chest, flicking her consciousness like a whip. From deep below them in the locked and sealed tower came a crashing sound, something falling. The Listener Be caught up a white lamp and sprang up the steps to the downward-leading door, pressed himself to it like a spider. At the same moment one of the other Therans camped on the roof cried out, pointing. With a shiver Leia saw one of the clapped-out grenade launchers rise from where it lay and begin to smite itself against the black shielding of the central gun.

Eerie in the uncertain starlight, it crashed against the metal wall, over and over, bending the metal of its own barrel in its violence, untouched by any hands. Leia pressed back against the parapet, wondering if she were the only one to hear a sound like dim shouting, the clamor of voices within her own mind, crying something she did not understand.

Then the voices dimmed. The grenade launcher fell to the pavement again, its barrel bent nearly ninety degrees. In the silence the yammer of the cu-pas on the ridge behind the gun station sounded suddenly clear.

"The Force," whispered Callista. "Someone is using the Force."

Leia shuddered. All desire that Callista's words had roused in her to learn to use the Force for good trickled away like ice melting in the summer sun. Not if that's what it is. Not if that's what I could become, mindless p ower hammerinq in raqe.

"BeldorionV' "Maybe," said Callista. "He still has that power within him, though he can't use it, or control it, as once he could. That's why he wanted you under his control."

Leia shook her head. "I don't understand." The very air seemed to whisper with a lambent horror, violence waiting just beyond the finger touch.

"The... the Force here. Could it have done something to him?"

"Not the Force," said Callista. "Dzym. And the drochs. They're lifedrinkers, Leia. They are the Death Seed plague. The Grissmaths knew.

They seeded the planet with drochs, hoping those political foes they exiled here would die. But the light of the sun fragmenting through the crystals here generates a radiation that weakens the electrochemical bonds of their tissues. It prevents the larger drochs from damping the electrochemistry of organic life until they're absorbed harmlessly by their hosts. The smaller ones it kills outright.

"I don't know how the prophet Theras knew this," she went on.

"So little is known of him. Certainly he never knew' that it was the drochs who caused the plague, only that no ship large enough to carry heavy shielding should be permitted to leave the planet. He may have been a spy, or a politician opposed to the Grissmaths. But at least he understood that the planet must be kept in quarantine. Over the years that must have extended to forbidding larger ships to land. Somehow he must have known there was a connection."

"And Ashgad took them out in the flesh of the synthdroids," said Leia softly. "How could he do that? How could he get them past the quarantine screens? How can Dzym control them the way he does?

"I can't prove this," said Callista softly. "But I think the drochs are sentient, after a fashion. Even the littlest ones. They mimic shapes, chemistry, electromagnetic currents, anything, down to the cellular level. That's why they can't be detected. I think in some ways they mimic intelligence as well. They become of the same substance as their hosts, even as they're drawing the life out of them and into themselves.

And the big ones, the captain drochs, can draw life out of the victims through the smaller ones, without themselves attaching to their hosts.

That's when they get dangerous," she went on, shaking her head. "The more life they drink-their victims' or each other's-the more intelligent they become. Bigger, and more capable of mutability.

Those things you described in the stairwell of Ashgad's house weren't related to drochs, they were drochs. Drochs grown big from eating one another, from absorbing one another's energy. People used to eat them, to absorb life and energy into themselves."

"Does it work? The memory of Beldorion digging around in his cushions and popping drochs into that huge, slime-dribbling slit of mouth came revoltingly back to her.

"In its way," said Callista. "In its way."

The stab of pain, of terror, struck Leia again, the voices clamoring in her brain, and a hundred meters off the black mouth of a canyon suddenly spewed forth a whirl of dust, like sparkling smoke in the starlight. Not a breath of wind stirred, but she saw boulders, slabs of crystal and granite and basalt, leap like fish in the maelstrom, and heard the hammer and crash of them striking the canyon's walls. Panic closed her throat.

Callista sprang to the top of the parapet, barely touching the maze of beams and wire for balance, staring out across the salt-white wasteland at the sudden whirl and rise of dust from that direction that collected slabs and boulders as it came. Beneath them in the gun station, other things were falling, or hammering frenziedly against the walls.

Then the horror sank again, the voices in her mind stilled. Leia wondered why she thought they had been saying her name.

Callista stepped down, her gray-black veils stilled, though they had whipped around her as if wind-blown while she listened. "That's too big for it to be simply Beldorion looking for you." Her eyes were grave.

"Something else is going on. This is only my opinion, you understand, but I think that the drochs become part of the brain of those who eat them.

And the bigger ones, if they're eaten, exert influence even after they're consumed. I know the bigger drochs-the truly big ones, the size of a pittin-can control the little ones. 1)zym...."

"Callista!" Be cried out a warning. At the same moment sudden wind erupted from below the parapet, pouring out of the canyons all around the gun station. Grit ripped Leia's face, chunks of gravel and flying arrowheads of broken crystal gouged her cheeks and forehead.

Above them and on all sides the beams and timbers of the defensive works began to shake, wire and rivets groaning and writhing like live things.

Scarred face cut by shrapnel, arms covered with drochs digging into his flesh, the Listener emerged from the doorway of the tower and ran to where Callista stood, even as the grenade launchers, the stacks of pellet guns and spears, were sent sprawling by the kick of some giant, invisible foot. One of the flamethrowers began to spout fire.

Be caught it up, hurled it over the parapet-Leia saw it flare like a torch on its way down before it exploded, halfway down the face of the tower. While other Therans grabbed metal cable that fell from the beams, snaking and s.n.a.t.c.hing at them, Callista knocked ammunition loads and power-cores out of every weapon she could lay hands on, hurled them after the flamethrower into s.p.a.ce. One exploded seconds after it left her hands, and by the reflected glare Leia saw the other woman's face, calm and weirdly peaceful in the whirlwind of her long dark hair.

Leia stooped, caught up a blaster rifle whose whole chamber glowed violent red, flung it over the parapet. Visibility was down to almost nothing with the dust, and the violence of the storm was fast tearing the swaying beams free. A coil of razor wire sprang loose and lashed across Leia's back like a whip, blood soaking into her clothing as Callista dragged her to the cable the Therans had used to climb the tower.

Climbing down a cable after having scrambled up only hours ago was the last thing Leia wanted to do. But she felt the force of the horror building, not diminishing. Through the voices crying in her mind she thought she heard Luke's voice, sensed Luke's terror and desperation.

She knew to the marrow of her bones that to remain in this place, with the forces being unleashed, might well mean death.

She swung over the parapet, wrapped her hands around the cable, icy wind ripping at her long hair and raking her back with sand through the rent in her shirt. It seemed to her she descended forever, alone in howling darkness, with flying boulders shattering against the tower walls and beams and wire raining down past her. How Be and Callista guided the band to the cu-pas and speeders cl.u.s.tered on the canyon ridge, she didn't know. Unlike ordinary winds, these terrible upheavals in the Force were not averted or thwarted by the canyon walls. They ripped and tore at the Therans as they worked their way upward along the canyons, away from the center of the storm. Leia clung to the neck of her borrowed cu-pa, glimpsing only now and then Callista riding beside her, dragging the beast along by the rein.

All the time she could hear Luke's voice, feel his consciousness in the storm.

"Leia!" The cry echoed down the stairwell, a man's voice wrung with agony and despair.

Luke stumbled, and let the Force around him fade and ease. She's there.

Or someone up there knows where she is. Clinging to the wall, knees jellied with weakness, he readied his lightsaber again, made himself find the strength to climb.

The psychic stench of the drochs was overwhelming. It washed over Luke as he neared the door, and saw what lay in the room beyond.

It was far too deep in the plateau to be the foundation of the house.

Probably a guard chamber or security watchroom of some kind, long abandoned. Walls, ceiling, and floor, it swarmed with drochs, a vast hideousness drunk and re-drunk from droch to droch until the whole air was black with it. Luke saw, scuttling along the wall, the carci-noform droch that seemed able to command the others, weirdly like a general reviewing troops, but that awareness was only for an instant.

A man lay in the midst of the room. He had ceased trying to get up, though Luke saw him pluck weakly at the brown, squirming things as they covered his face. The stalk-eyed commander-droch scuttled in now and then to pluck smaller drochs from the dying man's body, drinking them dry and casting them aside to be picked and finished by the tinier fry that skirmished around the edges. Luke was raising his hand, ready to summon the Force again, when movement flickered in the doorway on the opposite wall, the doorway that led to a further ascending flight of stairs, and a soft voice whispered, "Now, now, what have we here? Shoo-shoo."

The drochs scuttered from their victim, and Luke slapped the glowrod on his chest into darkness, and stood back out of the room's single dim orange ceiling-lamp. They retreated, but remained close around the man, who lay now in the midst of the floor, smallish and slim and graying and vaguely familiar. His clothing was torn in a thousand places to reveal flesh all dotted with the red marks of their bites, and his chest rose and fell with the desperate effort to breathe. The man walking toward him from the doorway Luke definitely recognized as Seti Ashgad's secretary, Dzym, said to be an inhabitant of this planet....

But his mind still open, still conditioned to the reactions of this place, Luke felt the miasma of him, the vast, dark, stinking aura of rotted power, an aura so huge, so dense, that it nearly made him sick.

Dzym whispered, "Shoo-shoo," again, and the circle of drochs expanded infinitesimally. The big stalk-eyed one started to scamper for the doorway, where Luke stood, and Dzym strode forward and caught it in two steps, lifting it up between his gloved hands. The thing clawed frantically at him with its pinchers, and Dzym laughed, a horrible sound, like a computer recording of laughter, or a bird that has been taught to mimic the sound. Dzym released one hand, and with small, sharp brown teeth pulled off the violet leather glove, and Luke saw that his hand bore only the most superficial resemblance to a human limb at all. It was, in fact, a sort of mouth, orifices gaping on the palm and at the ends of the fingers, tinier mouths all red and probing, like the heads of maggots, which Dzym then fastened around the crab-thing's body.

Dzym closed his eyes, and drew deep his breath. The droch in his hand squirmed horribly, weaker and weaker, and Dzym smiled in his reverie.

"Ah, I've been hunting you for a long time, my little friend.

Sweet..." He drew another rapt breath, like a man savoring wine.

"Sweet."

At his feet the p.r.o.ne man rolled over, and started, feebly, to try to rise.

Dzym put his foot down hard on the victim's chest. "I thought we had an understanding about this, Liegeus," he said in his soft voice. "I thought you knew what the boundaries of Seti Ashgad's house were to be. Tell me that you knew."

The man Liegeus whispered, "I knew." while Dzym closed his eyes again, and lifted the still-wriggling super-droch to his face, where he bit and chewed at it with his mouth for a time, murmuring in his throat and sighing while brown matter ran down his chin and neck. In time he dropped the thing, and smiled, his blotted mouth like nothing human.

"They're so good, when they get that big," he murmured. "So sweet.

Such a deep rush of life, such a concentration-though that little fellow was getting a wee bit big for his boots." He went to his knees at Liegeus's side, and the man tried to roll away from him, bringing his arm up over his face for protection.

Dzym reached out with his bare, dripping mouth-hand, and drew' him back over. "As I suspect you are, my friend."

Liegeus made a weak noise of protest, whispered, "Please Ashgad I haven't finished installing the launch vectors "but Dzym was clearly not paying any attention. He pulled off his other glove and began to stroke and caress the man's face and arms, leaving trails of bites and gashes along the major arteries and along what Luke recognized as the energy tracks of certain healing systems, the paths of electromagnetic synapse from heart and liver and brain. Dzym's eyes were shut in ecstasy, his head bowed forward, and Luke thought he could see restless, thrusting movements among the man's clothing, as if there were other limbs twitching on his back and chest, other mouths gaping and closing. Liegeus wept a little, and then lay still; he whispered, "Leia..." and that decided Luke.

Lightsaber flaring to life in his hand, Luke reached out with the Force and pulled Dzym from Liegeus, as he had pulled the drochs from himself, and hurled him against the wall. But Dzym was nimble and swift. He scrambled around, twisted as he struck the wall and fell to the floor, gummed mouth parting in a hiss of rage, and for a moment Luke felt the Force used to strike at him in return.

Not an expert's blow, not trained, but present, like poltergeist anger or the aimless psychokinesis of certain animals. Weakened as he was by the drochs, it was strong enough to knock him back against the wall.

He caught his balance, sprang forward, and Dzym backed from him, pale eyes glaring, the front of his robe falling open to reveal the squirming mess of tubes and tentacles and secondary mouths beneath.

The Force smote Luke again, weak and secondhand and stinking in his mind.

Secondhand, absorbed from someone else, he thought....

Then Dzym was gone. The door to the stair leading up slammed-Luke could hear the locking-rings clang over. He was readying his lightsaber to cut through the wood when a tiny breath behind him w hispered, "Run. He'll use the drochs who've bitten you.... " Luke turned. The man Liegeus tried to reach out toward him, to move his bloodied hand.

"They're his to command. They'll be in the stair."

Luke reached him in two strides, went to one knee at his side. "Lady Solo..."

"Gone. Fled. Looking for her-Beldorion and Ashgad. I thought I could...

make good... get out... synthdroids down... thought I could find her."

In the open doorway to the downward-leading stair there was a dark glitter along the floor, a skittering movement that turned to a slow, sluggish flow. The dense, fetid sense of a million rotted lifetimes rolled out, like the smell of clotted blood. Luke slipped his arm under Liegeus's shoulders, pulled him to his feet. "Do you know where she might have gone?"

The lolling head rolled; the older man breathed, "Bleak Point gun station. Or a canyon in the hills. I don't..."

"Never mind," said Luke, breathing deep, gathering to him the strength of the Force. "We'll find her."

It was use the Force or die, he thought, and he wondered what they would say about it: Obi-Wan, and Callista, and Yoda. That he should die, rather than cause what he had caused last time-tinnin Droo the smelter in agony from his burns, his a.s.sistant unable to walk? How was he to know that Leia's absence, Leia's death, wouldn't cause greater grief, greater destruction in the Republic?

And in his mind he could almost hear Obi-Wan's voice whispering, Trust your feelings.

And his instinct-he hoped completely detached from a desire not to be sucked of life by the filthy swarm flowing toward him across the dirty permacrete floor-was clear.

He smote them with the Force, clearing the way like a maniac broom.

Half-dragging, half-carrying Liegeus, Luke descended the stair, shaky himself and sickened with weakness, feeling the drochs still buried in his legs and arms drawing strength from him, feeding the strength into the monstrous creature, human only in form, that went by the name of Dzym.

The hangar doors were locked. Luke dumped the unconscious body he carried into the sleek black Star Destroyer-like Mobquet, ran the green laser blade of his lightsaber through the lock, and shoved and hauled the door open far enough to admit pa.s.sage of the speeder.