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Informationen zum Autor Barbara Hambly Klappentext In Children of the Jedi , Barbara Hambly introduces a new character: Callista, a brave Jedi warrior of long ago who gave her life to foil one of the Empire's darkest plans, a plot to destroy a stronghold that was sanctuary for the wives and children of the Jedi knights. Suddenly, the dreadnought is rearming itself, intent on destruction. Only Luke Skywalker can feel its evil presence as well as the mysterious influence of that powerful woman who should have died decades ago.Chapter 1 Poisoned rain speared from an acid sky. The hunter scuttled, stumbled a dozen yards before throwing himself under shelter again. A building, he thought—hoped—though for a second’s blinding terror the curved shape lifted, writhing, into a toothed maw of terror from which darkness flowed out like the vomited stench of rotting bones. Serpents—tentacles—twisting arms reached down for him with what he would have sworn were tiny cobalt-blue hands … but the burning rain was searing holes in his flesh, so he closed his eyes and flung himself among them. Then for a clear moment his mind registered that they were blue-flowered vines. Though the stink of his own flesh charring still choked his nostrils and the fire scorched his hands, when he looked down at them his hands were whole, untouched. Realities shuffled in his mind like cards in a deck. Should those hands be stripped away to bone? Or should they sport a half dozen rings of andurite stone and a thin scrim of engine grease around the nails? In what reality were those fingers limber, and where did he get the notion a moment later that they were twisted like blighted roots and adorned with hooked nails like a rancor’s claws? He didn’t know. The sane times were fewer and fewer; it was hard to remember from one to the next. Prey. Quarry. There was someone he had to find. He had been a hunter all those years in shrieking darkness. He had killed, torn, eaten of bleeding flesh. Now he had to find … He had to find … Why did he think the one he sought would be in this … this place that kept changing from toothed screaming rock mouths to graceful walls, curving buildings, vine-curtained towers—and then falling back again to nightmares, as all things always fell back? He fumbled in the pocket of his coverall and found the dirty sheet of yellow-green flimsiplast on which someone—himself?—had written: HAN SOLO ITHOR THE TIME OF MEETING “Have you seen it before?” Leaning one shoulder on the curved oval of the window, Han Solo shook his head. “I went to one of the Meetings out in deepspace, halfway from the Pits of Plooma to the Galactic Rim,” he said. “All I cared about was sneaking in under the Ithorians’ detection screens, handing off about a hundred kilos of rock ivory to Grambo the Worrt and getting out of there before the Imperials caught up with me, and it was still the most … I dunno.” He made a small gesture, slightly embarrassed, as if she’d caught him out in a sentimental deed of kindness. “ ‘Impressive’ isn’t the right word.” No. Leia Organa Solo rose from the comm terminal to join her husband, the white silk of her tabard billowing in her wake in a single flawless line. “Impressive” to the smuggler he’d been in those days, navigationally if nothing else: She’d seen the Ithorian star herds gather, the city-huge ships maneuvering among one another’s deflector fields with the living ease of a school of shining fish. Linking without any more hesitation than the fingers of the right hand have about linking with the fingers of the left. But this today was more than that. Watching the Meeting here, above the green jungles of Ithor itself, the only word that came to her mind was “Force-full”: alive with, drenched in, moving to the breath of the Force. And beautiful beyond word...
