It took another minute for the implications of that to percolate through the mental fog filling his brain. More than an hour or two was well beyond the safe capabilities of any stun weapon he’d ever heard of. Clearly, after being shot, he’d been drugged.
Inwardly, he smiled. Karrde was probably expecting him to be incapacitated for a while longer; and Karrde was in for a surprise. Forcing his mind into focus, he ran through the Jedi technique for detoxifying poisons and then waited for the haze to clear.
It took him some time to realize that nothing was, in fact, happening.
Somewhere in there he fell asleep again; and when he next awoke, his mind had cleared completely. Blinking against the sunlight streaming across his face, he opened his eyes and lifted his head.
He was lying on a bed, still in his flight suit, in a small but comfortably furnished room. Directly across from him was an open window, the source of the aroma-laden breezes he’d already noted. Through the window, too, he could see the edge of a forest fifty meters or so away, above which a yellowish-orange sun hovered—rising or setting, he didn’t know which. The furnishings of the room itself didn’t look much like those of a prison cell—
“Finally awake, are you?” a woman’s voice said from the side.
Startled, Luke twisted his head toward the voice. His first, instantaneous thought was that he had somehow missed sensing whoever was over there; his second, following on the heels of the first, was that that was clearly ridiculous and that the voice must be coming instead from an intercom or comlink.
He finished his turn, to discover that the first thought had indeed been correct.
She was sitting in a high-backed chair, her arms draped loosely over the arms in a posture that seemed strangely familiar: a slender woman about Luke’s own age, with brilliant red-gold hair and equally brilliant green eyes. Her legs were casually crossed; a compact but wicked-looking blaster lay on her lap.
A genuine, living human being … and yet, impossibly, he couldn’t sense her.
The confusion must have shown in his face. “That’s right,” she said, favoring him with a smile. Not a friendly or even a polite smile, but one that seemed to be made up of equal parts bitterness and malicious amusement. “Welcome back to the world of mere mortals.” —and with a surge of adrenaline, Luke realized that the strange mental veiling wasn’t limited to just her. He couldn’t sense anything. Not people, not droids, not even the forest beyond his window.
It was like suddenly going blind.
“Don’t like it, do you?” the woman mocked. “It’s not easy to suddenly lose everything that once made you special, is it?”
Slowly, carefully, Luke eased his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, giving his body plenty of time to get used to moving again. The woman watched him, her right hand dropping to her lap to rest on top of the blaster. “If the purpose of all this activity is to impress me with your remarkable powers of recuperation,” she offered, “you don’t need to bother.”
“Nothing so devious,” Luke advised, breathing hard and trying not to wheeze. “The purpose of all this activity is to get me back on my feet.” He looked her hard in the eye, wondering if she would flinch away from his gaze. She didn’t even twitch. “Don’t tell me; let me guess. You’re Mara Jade.”
“That doesn’t impress me, either,” she said coldly. “Karrde already told me he’d mentioned my name to you.”
Luke nodded. “He also told me that you were the one who found my X-wing. Thank you.”
Her eyes flashed. “Save your gratitude,” she bit out. “As far as I’m concerned, the only question left is whether we turn you over to the Imperials or kill you ourselves.”
Abruptly she stood up, the blaster ready in her hand. “On your feet. Karrde wants to see you.”
Carefully, Luke stood up, and as he did so, he noticed for the first time that Mara had attached his lightsaber to her own belt. Was she, then, a Jedi herself? Powerful enough, perhaps, to smother Luke’s abilities? “I can’t say that either of those options sounds appealing,” he commented.
“There’s one other one.” She took half a step forward, moving close enough that he could have reached out and touched her. Lifting the blaster, she pointed it directly at his face. “You try to escape … and I kill you right here and now.”
For a long moment they stood there, frozen. The bitter hatred was blazing again in those eyes … but even as Luke gazed back at her, he saw something else along with the anger. Something that looked like a deep and lingering pain.
He stood quietly, not moving; and almost reluctantly, she lowered the weapon. “Move. Karrde’s waiting.”
Luke’s room was at the end of a long hallway with identical doors spaced at regular intervals along its length. A barracks of sorts, he decided, as they left it and started across a grassy clearing toward a large, high-roofed building. Several other structures clustered around the latter, including another barracks building, a handful that looked like storehouses, and one that was clearly a servicing hangar. Grouped around the hangar on both sides were over a dozen starships, including at least two bulk cruisers like the Wild Karrde and several smaller craft, some of them hidden a ways back into the forest that pressed closely in on the compound from all sides. Tucked away behind one of the bulk cruisers, he could just see the nose of his X-wing. For a moment he considered asking Mara what had happened to Artoo, decided he’d do better to save the question for Karrde.
They reached the large central building and Mara reached past Luke to slap the sensor plate beside the door. “He’s in the greatroom,” Mara said as the panel slid open in response. “Straight ahead.”
They walked down a long hallway, passing a pair of what seemed to be medium-sized dining and recreation rooms. Ahead, a large door at the end of the hallway slid open at their approach. Mara ushered him inside—
And into a scene straight out of ancient legend.
For a moment Luke just stood in the doorway, staring. The room was large and spacious, its high ceiling translucent and crisscrossed by a webwork of carved rafters. The walls were composed of a dark brown wood, much of it elaborately open-mesh carved, with a deep blue light glowing through the interstices.1 Other luxuries were scattered sparingly about: a small sculpture here, an unrecognizable alien artifact there. Chairs, couches, and large cushions were arranged in well-separated conversation circles, giving a distinctly relaxed, almost informal air to the place.
But all that was secondary, taken in peripherally or at a later time entirely. For that first astonishing moment Luke’s full attention was fixed solidly on the tree growing through the center of the room.
Not a small tree, either, like the delicate saplings that lined one of the hallways in the Imperial Palace. This one was huge, a meter in diameter at the base, extending from a section of plain dirt floor through the translucent ceiling and far beyond. Thick limbs starting perhaps two meters from the ground stretched their way across the room, some of them nearly touching the walls, almost like arms reaching out to encompass everything in sight.2
“Ah; Skywalker,” a voice called from in front of him. With an effort, Luke shifted his gaze downward, to find Karrde sitting comfortably in a chair at the base of the tree. On either side two long-legged quadrupeds crouched, their vaguely doglike muzzles pointing stiffly in Luke’s direction. “Come and join me.”
Swallowing, Luke started toward him. There were stories he remembered from his childhood about fortresses with trees growing up through them. Frightening stories, some of them, full of danger and helplessness and fear.
And in every one of those stories, such fortresses were the home of evil.