Free Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight by Barbara Hambly Page A

whatever escape she could find.
    The air was softer indoors, subtly modified to escape the piercing dryness. That meant magnetic shields on the doors and windows--not cheap--and some kind of mist generators in the ceilings. Away from the jewellike refractions of the sunlight the shadows were thick, and the massive walls sheltered a sour muskiness that no air-conditioning could disperse.
    Anyplace a Hutt occupied smelled of Hutt, of course. Nobody ever liked that heavy, rotted odor. On Tatooine, Leia had learned to hate it, though her experience of living in Jabba's palace had served her well during her negotiations with Durga the Hutt on Nal Hutta. She was one of the few diplomats who could deal with highly odorous species like Hutts and Vordums unjudgmentally and relatively unflinchingly. One couldn't, she knew, discredit their intelligence just because their digestive enzymes were set up to deal with everything from tree roots to petroleum by-products.
    There were bugs, too. She saw them, tiny and purplish brown, skittering along the densest shadows at the base of the wall and under the small, roughly constructed chest of drawers that was the room's single other piece of furniture. Most storage was in wall niches, natural in a world where only intensive agriculture on the part of its unwilling inhabitants centuries ago had been able to eventually produce woody plants large enough to make furniture out of. The niche doors and the old-fashioned manual outer door of the room were high-impact plastic.
    There were bugs in most of the niches, fleeing even the muted indoor light.
    Leia shivered with distaste as she shut the doors again.
    In the end she tore strips from the heavy interfacing between the velvet of the robe and its silken lining to bind the lightsaber to the small of her back under her long, Billowing red-and-bronze figured gown.
    Liegeus Vorn had worn a sort of loose tunic, trousers, and vest, probably standard in an economy poorly supplied with raw materials or the leisure for frivolity in fashionable fit. At a guess, whatever clothing they gave her to wear would be too big. Every hand-me-down she'd ever gotten from the Rebel pilots during the years on the run had been so.
    Moving around the room to search had cleared her mind a little. Luke, she thought. Luke getting into the B-wing, sliding the cockpit closed--Luke's spirit thanking her for the final touch of farewell.
    She had no idea where Ashgad's house was in relation to the city of Hweg Shul, which according to the Registry was the only large settlement on the planet. Even given fairly primitive transportation they could be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. If Ashgad had ships of at least planet-hopper capability--not to speak of synthdroids--he probably had landspeeders as well.
    She scratched the back of her wrist, where a small red bug bite showed her that whatever those little bugs were, they were pests. The sleepy temptation still lay heavy on her, to return to the divan on the sunlit terrace, to sit blinking out over that endless nothingness of glittering gravel, contemplating its colors grayish whites, pinks, dusky blues, and green like unpolished tourmaline, an endless bed from which the sun glare winked like a leaden kaleidoscope.
    I can't, she thought, shaking straight her gown again and pulling on the velvet robe. When the drug wears off a little more i'll have to put out a call to Luke.
    If Luke hadn't contracted the plague on the ship. If his B-wing hadn't smashed into the planet with his dead or dying body aboard.
    She leaned her forehead against the handleless corridor door. I got out of the Termination Block of the Death Star, she thought grimly. I can get out of here.
    “You're to leave her alone!” Ashgad's voice, muffled and distant, came to her through the door.
    Dzym's reply, soft though it was, sounded shockingly near. The secretary must have been less than a meter from the door. "What can you mean, my lord?
    “I mean Liegeus