She walked over to it, leaving Lord Garonnin, Irek, and Roganda in the doorway. The window was in a sort of bay, whose jut from the rock of the cliff hid any sign of it from below. A more massive jut overhung it from above, like every irregularity of the cliffs bearded with curtains of vines, so that light from the window could not be seen from anywhere in the rift at night. Through the dangling creepers Leia could see, ten or twelve meters below her and to the right, the topmost courses of the ruined tower.
She remembered seeing this vine-grown overhang from the tower, one of many in the cliff wall behind Plett's House. How many of those, she wondered now, hid the windows of this warren of tunnels and rooms? If she angled her head, she could see down into the stone enclosure where she'd glimpsed the echoes of Jedi children playing. Beyond, the rift was a lake of mist and treetops above which the hanging gardens floated like an armada of flower-bedecked airships. Leia could see the feeders--mostly of the nimbler races, like Chadra-Fan or Verpine, since mechanicals were out of the question under the circumstances--scrambling along the ropes and catwalks that stretched from bed to bed, or from the beds to the supply station, clinging amid its own luxuriant cascades of sweetberry to the cliff wall.
"I still say we should put her in one of the lower rooms," insisted Irek. He shook back his long hair: shoulder-length, black as a winter midnight, and curlier than his mother's. Like hers, his skin was slightly golden, but pallid with the pallor of life lived mostly underground. Like her, he dressed simply but carried himself with the cocky arrogance of one who believes himself to be the center around which all the universe turns.
Leia was familiar with that posture from her days in the marriage mart of the Emperor's Court. A lot of the young men had had it, knowing the universe revolved around them and them alone.
"If we keep her at all," he added, and gave her a look, up and down, calculated to be an insult.
Lord Garonnin replied quietly, "Whatever her position in the Republic, Lord Irek, Her Highness deserves the consideration due to the daughter of one of the Great Houses."
Irek opened his mouth to snap a reply and Drost Elegin's lip curled slightly with something close to smugness, as if his opinion about the boy and his mother had been borne out to their discredit. Roganda put her hand quickly on her son's shoulder and added, "And for the time being, my son, she is our guest. And this is what we owe to our guests." It might have been Aunt Rouge speaking--Leia could see Roganda's eyes on Elegin as she brought out the words, and guessed they were more to impress him with her knowledge of how Things Should Be Done than from any true concern for Leia's comfort.
"But..." Irek glanced from his mother's face, to Garonnin's, to Leia's, and subsided. But the full lips were sullen, the blue eyes smoldering with a secret discontent.
"It is time we looked to our other guests."
Irek threw a cocky glance back to Leia and said, with deliberate malice, "I suppose we can always kill her later, can't we?" He transferred his gaze to Garonnin and added, "Have you caught that droid of hers yet?"
"The men are searching the tunnels between here and the pad," said Lord Garonnin. "It won't get far."
"It better not."
The boy turned and strode out, followed by Roganda in a whisper of silk.
Garonnin turned back to Leia. "They are parvenus," he said, his matter-of-fact tone containing, by its sheer lack of apology, something abysmally deeper than contempt for those not of the Ancient Houses. "But such people have their uses. With him as our spearhead, we will be able to negotiate from a position of power with the military hierarchies that fight for control of the remains of Palpatine's New Order. I trust you will be comfortable, Your Highness."
Chief of State of the New Republic and architect of the Rebellion she might be, but Leia could see that she remained, in his eyes, Bail Organa's daughter... and the last surviving member of House Organa. The last Princess of Alderaan.
"Thank you," she said, biting back the annoyance she had always felt at the old Senex aristocracy and speaking to him aristocrat to aristocrat, sensing in him a potentially weak link in the chains that bound her. "I appreciate your kindness, my lord. Am I to be killed?" She fought to keep sarcasm out of her voice, to replace it with that dignified combination of martyrdom and noblesse oblige with which, she had been taught, aristocratic ladies surmounted every adversity from genocide to spotty tableware at tea.
He hesitated. "In my opinion, Your Highness, you would be of far more use as a hostage than as an example."
She inclined her head, veiling her eyes with her lashes. Lord Garonnin came of the class that did not kill hostages.
Whether the same could be said for Roganda and her son was another matter.
"Thank you, my lord."
And thank you, Aunt Rouge, she added silently, as the burly aristocrat bowed to her and closed the door behind him.
The bolts hadn't even finished clanking over as Leia began her search of the room.
There was, unfortunately, little enough to search. Though large, the chamber contained almost no furniture: a bed built of squared ampohr logs and equipped with an old-fashioned stuffed mattress and one foam pillow so old that the foam was starting to yellow; a worktable, also of ampohr logs, beautifully put together but whose drawers contained nothing; a lightweight plastic chair of a truly repellent lavender. A screened-off cubicle contained sanitary facilities; a curtainless rod with pegs embedded in the wall behind it indicated where someone had once hung clothes.
Leia noted automatically that all the furniture was human proportioned, the plumbing fitted for human requirements.
The room had been cut out of stone, accurately but roughly, the walls smoothed after a fashion but not finished. The door was metal, and fairly new. Marks of other hinges indicated it had replaced one probably less substantial. This high above the hot springs that warmed the caves, without her t-suit it would have been unpleasantly cold.
Leia touched the places where the older set of hinges had been, and thought, They changed this place over to be a prison... When? She wished she knew off hand the decay rate of foam pillows. It might tell her something.
And for whom?
The door latches clicked.
She felt, at the same moment, a thick, weighted buzzing in her head, a heavy sleepiness, and for an instant nothing mattered to her but going over to the bed and lying down...
The Force. A trick of the Force.
She shoved it off--with a certain amount of difficulty--and retreated from the door as far as she could, knowing who would come in.
"You're still awake." Irek sounded surprised.
He had a blaster and a lightsaber. Leia kept to the vicinity of the window, knowing better than to bolt for the door. "You're not the only one around here who can use the Force."
He looked her up and down again, contempt in his blue eyes. He was, she guessed, fourteen or fifteen years old. She wondered if he'd made the lightsaber that hung at his side, or had gotten it from somewhere--someone--else. "You call that using the Force?" He turned and regarded a place on the rock of the wall slightly to the right of the bed. She felt what he did with his mind, with the Force; felt, as she had in the tunnels, the trained power of his will and the dark taint that stained its every usage.
Where there had been only the dark reddish stone, there was now a hole about half a meter square.
He giggled, childishly shrill. "Never seen anything like that before, have you?" He crossed to the place, but Leia still felt him watching her. His hand was close to his blaster and she remembered his words in the hall of the stream.
With her dead, the Republic will crumble.
He hadn't liked being contradicted and, what's more, didn't believe he was wrong. She suspected he didn't believe he could be wrong.
He would have loved to shoot her while trying to escape.
He took a black plastene pouch from the hole, and at his nod, the stone reappeared as it had been. He gave her his cocky, charming grin. ”Even my m
other doesn't know about that one," he said, pleased with himself. "And she wouldn't know how to open it if she did." He tossed the pouch lightly in his hand. Leia recognized it--the twin of the one she'd found hidden in the old toy room, and of the one Tomla El had taken from Drub's pocket.
"She doesn't know as much as she thinks she does. She thinks I can't handle this, either; thinks I can't use the Force to turn it into another source of power."
The blue eyes glittered. "But with the Force on my side, everything is a source of power. As they'll all find out."
Leia watched him, saying nothing, as he crossed to the door. Then he turned back, his face suddenly clouded.
"Why didn't your droid stop?" he asked. ”Why didn't it obey me?"
"What made you think it would?" she returned, folding her arms.
"Because I have the Force. I have the power."
She tilted her head a little to one side, considering him in silence. Not needing to say, You obviously don't all the time.
And he couldn't tell her she was wrong, she thought, without telling her how he had acquired that power in the first place.
After a moment he hissed at her, "Sow!" and stormed out the door, slamming and locking it behind him.
It took Leia fifteen sweating, aching minutes to open the hole in the wall once more. She had sensed, quite clearly, what he did--the compartment in the wall was built with a segment of the rock that covered it keyed to be literally shifted into another dimension by the power of the Force. It was old, she sensed, designed and built by a Jedi of vast power, and even so small a quantity of shift required a control and a strength almost beyond her capacity. By the time the shift took place she felt drained, as if she'd worked out with the sword for an hour, or run for miles. Her hands were shaking as she reached inside.
There was a little cream-colored yarrock powder spilled on the bottom.
Easily obtainable enough in any spaceport, of course. If Irek was anything like some of the more self-destructive spirits at the Alderaan Select Academy for Young Ladies, he had packets of the stuff cached everywhere. It would explain how Drub McKumb had come by it, and obtained the temporary sanity it brought.
There were other things in the compartment, shoved farther in. Bundles of flimsiplast notes. Tiny skeins of wire. A couple of small soldering guns. A handful of xylen chips.
A gold ring that, when brought to the light and rubbed, proved to be the mark of an honorary degree at the University of Coruscant.
A small gold plaque commemorating the dedication of the Magrody Institute of Programmable Intelligence.
A woman's gold-meshed glove.
Leia opened the notes, and at the bottom of the last page a signature caught her eye.
Nasdra Magrody.
To this day I don't know if Palpatine =new.
Curled up in the window seat, Leia read the words with a strange sense of almost-grief, of pity for the man who had written them in this room, not all that many years ago. The heavy black lines of the chip schematics traced on the other side bled through the pale-green plast a little, giving the effect of a palimpsest, like an allegory of tragedy. Calm scientific fact and the dreadful usages to which it had been put. In his way, Magrody had been as naive as the Death Star's hermetically sheltered designer, Qwi Xux.
She wondered if he'd written this on the back of his notes because it was the only writing material he was allowed.
Probably, she thought, considering the marginless edges, the way the bold calligraphy cramped at top and bottom. Probably.
I should have suspected, or known, or guessed. Why would an Imperial concubine, with all the pleasures and privileges available to those who have nothing to do but care for their own beauty, have sought out the bookish middle-aged wife of a robotics professor, if not for some kind of intrigue? I never paid attention to the affairs of the Palace, the constant jockeying for position among the Emperor's ministers and the more vicious, behind-the-scenes power plays engaged in by wives and mistresses each intent on being the mother of Palpatine's eventual heir.
I thought such matters beneath the concern of scholarship.
I paid a high price for my absentminded ignorance.
I only pray that Elizie, and our daughter, Shenna, will not be required to pay as well.
Leia closed her eyes. All the reports she had received after the destruction of Alderaan and the demolition of the Death Star had assumed Magrody had disappeared willingly, probably into the Emperor's infamous think tank, in flight from retribution by the Rebellion for what he had done. Those reports, that is, that didn't assume that Leia herself had been behind the distinguished scientist's sudden absence. Many attributed work on the Sun Crusher to him. Took his wife and daughter and went into seclusion someplace...
Would her father have traded his ideals, gone to work for the Emperor, to save her?
It had been her biggest fear on board Vader's Star Destroyer, and later on the Death Star itself--that Bail Organa would yield to threats to do her harm.
She still didn't know. He'd never been offered the choice.
Mon Mothma will laugh, I suppose, at the ease with which I was lured to the place where they picked me up. And well she might, should circumstance ever permit her to laugh at anything connected with the evils that I have been required to perform. I thought all I had to do was some single service--they'd let Elizie and Shenna free, perhaps put me down on some deserted planet, where I'd eventually be found...
A frightening annoyance, but finite.
Dear gods of my people, finite.
Roganda Ismaren told me it was all in the Emperor's name. She had a small collection of bullyboys around her, military types but none in uniform. I suppose she could have bribed them with money juggled from Treasury funds, or deceived them as she deceived me. She was herself clever enough with finances--and blackmail--to obtain whatever she wanted. There seemed to be far more money than personnel in evidence: [Leia had noticed this herself] the finest, newest, most exquisite equipment available, cutting-edge programs and facilities, but the same ten or twelve guards.
Though she told me--and the guards--that all was by his command, I never received one scrap of empirical or circumstantial evidence that Palpatine was in any way involved.
It didn't matter.
I didn't even know what planet they took me to, or where Elizie and Shenna were, after the one time I saw them.
Leia shivered, though the window seat where she read was the warmest spot in the room, and looked out into the eerie rainbows of the atmosphere under the dome. She remembered, the night before the Time of Meeting, sitting beside one of the fountains in the rooftop gardens of the Ithorian guest house while Han pointed out to Jaina and Jacen which star was Coruscant's sun. On Coruscant itself--the Scintillant Planet, old songs called it--the flaming veils of its nightly auroras prevented amateur astronomy, but Ithor was without even the lights of cities. The sky there seemed to breathe stars.
Most of those stars had worlds of some kind circling them, though they might be no more than bare balls of rock or ice or frozen gas habitable only after prohibitively expensive bioforming. Fewer than twenty percent had been mapped. Before the day of Drub McKumb's attack, Leia had never even heard of Belsavis.
Worlds were large.
And life appallingly short.
What they wanted was simple, they told me. My talents--unsuspected, I thought, by any--had led me to study the records of the old Jedi, to experiment with the mental effects attributable by them to the energy field referred to as the Force.
Talents? thought Leia, startled. Magrody was Force-strong?
It was something she hadn't known, something Cray had never mentioned, probably hadn't known either. Considering the Emperor's attitude toward the Jedi--in which he had never been alone--it was hardly surprising the man had kept it hidden.
I thought I had been successful in concealing, in my experiments, my own abilities to influence this energy field by means of thought wave concentratio
ns, an ability that I believe to be hereditary and not limited to the human species. Perhaps Roganda Ismaren, or the Emperor himself had deduced from my articles in the Journal of Energy Physics that I knew more about directed thought waves than I ought.
In any case, for my sins, I had reflected on the tradition, or legend, that the Jedi were unable to affect machinery or droids by means of the "Force." In the light of the nature of subelectronic synapses, I speculated about the possibility of an implanted subelectronic converter, to be surgically inserted in the brain of one who possessed such hereditary ability to concentrate thought waves, enabling him or her, with proper training, to influence artificial intelligences of varying complexities at the individual synaptic level.
This was what they wanted me to do.
Irek, thought Leia. Perhaps the boy actually was the Emperor's son, though given Palpatine's age at the probable time of Irek's conception--and given Roganda's coolly unscrupulous talents as a planner--the odds were good that he wasn't.
And if Roganda was his mother, there was no need for Palpatine's seed to guarantee that Irek would be himself strong in the Force.
Given the atmosphere of Palpatine's Court, the pervasive use of fear and threat, the infighting of factions and pretenders to power, Leia could only guess at what attempts might have been made on Roganda's life before Irek was born.
No wonder Roganda was a liar, a chameleon, an adept manipulator of emotions and situations and behind-the-scenes power. If she hadn't been she'd have been killed.
It was quite clear from the timing of events that Roganda, a child of the Jedi herself, had set out almost at once to better the hand she had been dealt at Irek's birth.
Irek had been implanted at the age of five, before the debris from Alderaan had even settled into its permanent, ragged orbit around what had been that planet's sun.
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