Free Fate of the Jedi: Backlash by Aaron Allston Page A

either side of where they had just been standing. More stones on the facing slope slid free and toppled into the pass, clattering down among the others.
    “Three stages of fall,” Ben said, his tone still conversational.
    “Very sophisticated. Now let’s find her.”
    They opened themselves to the Force, seeking the woman.
    Luke made an unhappy face. “Uh-oh.”
    “Miscalculated, didn’t you?”
    A rancor scrambled into the pass through the entrance Luke and Ben had just used. It carried a gnarled wooden club that must have weighed two hundred kilograms. On its back and neck was a saddle, in which sat a stout blond woman of middle years. She wore glossy black hide garments, and her expression was furious. For the rancor to have appeared there, presumably in response to the triggering of the trap, it must have been concealed very close by. Perhaps it had been cloaked by the Force.
    Another rancor appeared down the pass in the opposite direction, thirty meters away. It had no club but carried a metal shield like the first one the Jedi had encountered. Beside it, on the ground, ran the woman Luke had seen the previous day, she of the Lightning Storm, and the rancor’s saddle carried another woman, so like her as to be a sister, though this woman’s garments were tan and her dark hair was streaked with bands of white. The woman on the ground looked dismayed; the rancor rider was smiling as though she relished the scrap to come.
    Three more women, dressed in a fashion compatible with the others, appeared at each end of the pass, arriving at a dead run, surefooted. Luke felt a tickle in the Force and looked up. A third rancor was now reaching the summit of the hill where the Jedi sat. This beast was riderless and unarmed, but bigger than the other two.
    Luke turned to his son. “When I spotted the woman, she didn’t have these reinforcements.”
    “Embarrassing, isn’t it?”
    “A bit.”
    “What would one of your old Masters tell you at a time like this?”
    “Never mind that now.” Luke turned toward the woman they had been following. He called out to her, “A pleasure to meet you at last.”
    Looking grave, she opened her mouth to reply. But the woman in the rancor saddle above her gestured, and a sudden wind howled along the pass, plucking Ben from his perch and sending him tumbling down the slope.
    With a sigh, Luke released the Force technique that was holding him in place and followed his son.
    “Hurry, hurry.” Leia’s tone was urgent.
    Han, grim-faced, could not manage any more speed; the airspeeder was at its flat-out maximum. But he could shave off microseconds by taking chances. Veering right and left to avoid the thinning trees, he now came within centimeters of scraping off hull paint against tree bark.
    In the seat behind them, Dyon made a strangled noise audible over the engine shriek. Han paid him no mind. The boy clearly needed some excitement in his life. This was it.
    They shot past the last of the trees onto rising, rocky ground and topped a low slope. Han’s eye was drawn first to the huge rancor standing atop a nearby hill, roaring down into the gap below. “Oh, stang.”
    Leia shook her head. “The rancors aren’t the problem.”
    “Rancors?
Plural?”
    “There are Witches here.”
    Their angle of approach brought them in line with the opening into a rocky pass, and Han could suddenly see what Leia was talking about. Farther down the pass, Luke and Ben, the former in white garments, the latter in black, were leaping side-to-side at the bottom of the pass, dodging head-sized rocks swirling around them. The stones were a cyclone of blunt weapons that could easily crush their skulls. A rancor with a rider stood at either end of the engagement zone, accompanied by three or four Witches of Dathomir. The women gestured, clearly keeping the potentially lethal stones moving with their Force spells.
    Han angled so their approach was straight toward the pass entrance. The combatants hadn’t