Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn

by John Jackson Miller

  Chapter One

  5,000 years BBY

  “Heretic!”

  “Good to see you too, Mother,” Adari said. “Did the children behave?”

  The door hadn’t fully closed when the smaller child was in Adari’s arms, shoved there by Eulyn. Adari’s older boy bounded into the room, hobbling her. Under attack from four purple arms, Adari staggered toward the wall, looking for a spot to drop her nonliving cargo. The canvas bag thudded against the wooden floor.

  “Heretic! That’s what your uncle says they’re calling you,” Eulyn said. “He was here—and neighbor Wertram, the tailor. And his wife, too—she never leaves the hut for anything! Eight people have been by today!”

  “Well, don’t look outside,” Adari said. “More followed me home.” She shooed the gangly older child away and tried to rescue her silvery hair from her toddler’s mouth. Short hair wasn’t the fashion for Keshiri women, but for Adari, it was self-defense. Where her youngest was concerned, it’d never be short enough.

  “Is the stew on?”

  “Stew?” Eulyn yanked her little grandson back, only to see Adari dart into the kitchen. Flushed with aggravation, Eulyn’s skin took on a violet hue that almost matched her daughter’s. “You’re worried about dinner! You don’t have any idea what’s been going on around here, do you?”

  “It’s a dinner break. I was working.”

  “Working, nothing. I know where you were!”

  Adari stared into the clay crock full of boiling meat and vegetables and sighed. Of course her mother knew where she’d been. Everyone did. Adari Vaal, collector of rocks and stones; young widow of the valiant uvak-rider on whom so many hopes had rested. Adari Vaal, enemy of right and order; absent mother and misleader of other people’s children. Today had been her third day of testimony before the Neshtovar. It had gone as well as the other two.

  “What is that sound?”

  “They’re hitting the house with rocks,” Adari said, returning with a steaming bowl that she set on the table. Standing back, she swung the front door wide and watched as several gifts from the community bounced over the threshold. She slammed the door quickly. A peppery stone under the empty crèche drew her eye. She reached for it with a sinewy, scratched arm. “That’s a nice one,” she said. “Not from around here.” She was apparently drawing people from all over. She’d have to look around, later. Who needed expeditions when you had an angry mob to collect samples?

  Adari knelt and put the discovery in her pouch, already overflowing with stones of every shape and color. Above, the clatter grew louder. The younger child wailed. Eulyn’s huge dark eyes widened further with horror. “Adari, listen!” she said. “They’re hitting the roof now!”

  “That’s actually thunder.”

  “It’s proof, that’s what it is! The Skyborn have forsaken you.”

  “No, Mother, it’s proof that they’re protecting me,” Adari said, eating standing up. “If it rains, the mob can’t set our house on fire.”

  That wasn’t likely to happen—the widow of a Neshtovari was a protected person, unlikely to be killed in a riot. However, there was nothing wrong with making her life miserable, and since her sin was against the Neshtovar themselves, no authority would stop them. In fact, little displays like this were good for public order.

  Adari poked her head into the backyard. No rocks there. Just the uvak, doing what he had done all year: taking up most of the place and being unfragrant. Emerald reptilian eyes opened long enough to shoot her a bad look. His leathery wings shifted, raking against the sides of the pen. The beast didn’t mind the cooling rain, but the noise from the street had disturbed his royal slumber.

  Riderless uvak were all sloth and bad attitude, but Nink hadn’t liked his rider when he had one. He was Adari’s least favorite thing, but he came with the house. In a sense, the house was his.

  In olden times, when a Neshtovari—an uvak-rider—died, the community had slain the deceased’s family, as well. That practice had ended, perhaps the only time the Neshtovar had allowed practicality to overrule tradition. Uvak were precious, temperamental, and attached to their riders; stabling them with the dead rider’s survivors often kept the beasts sane enough to be useful for the breeding market. Not to mention, Adari mused, what it must have done for Neshtovar breeding. The riders hadn’t had great social lives when death was in the picture. But since the change, uvak-riders had become highly sought after as mates in Keshiri society.

  Adari hadn’t sought Zhari Vaal at all. She was interested in rocks; Zhari was their equal for conversational ability. In nine years he had given her two dim-witted children, a description that seemed less harsh to her than maternally charitable. She loved them well enough, but they were showing no signs of being any kinder or brighter than their father had been. Foolishness bred true. She, the fool for not running away; he, well, he was Zhari Vaal. The “valiant young rider of the Neshtovar on whom so many hopes rested”—that was the line from the wake—had mistreated Nink one too many times. One beautiful morning, the beast had flown Zhari far out over the sea and unceremoniously dropped him. Adari was sure she had seen a hint of satisfaction in the creature’s bright green eyes when he returned home. She’d never gotten along with Nink before, but at least now she paid him some respect. When it came to Zhari, the uvak had had more sense than she did.

  It wasn’t all her fault, she knew. The match had resulted from years of lobbying by Eulyn, seeking to lock in her family’s future position. Only males became riders, but Keshiri property descended matrilineally; now Adari and her mother had the uvak and the wooden house, while their neighbors still lived in huts of lashed-together hejarbo shoots. Eulyn was thrilled—and Adari was content to let the children be Eulyn’s domain, too. Adari had done her duty; the Keshiri had been advanced by another generation. Now she could concentrate on something important.

  If they’d let her.

  “I have to go back,” she said, lifting her younger son from his work destroying the dinner table. The afternoon hearing had gone long, and an unprecedented evening session loomed.

  “I knew you’d do something like this,” Eulyn said, her gaze piercing her daughter’s back. “I’ve always said all that digging around in the filth would do you no good. And arguing with the Neshtovar! Why do you always have to be right?”

  “I don’t know, Mother. But it’s something I’m going to have to live with,” Adari said, handing off the dripping toddler. A smeary imprint remained on her tunic—no time for a change. “Try to get Tona and Finn to actually sleep tonight. I’ll be back.”

  She opened the door carefully to find that the rain had driven off the crowd. Comfort trumped belief on Kesh. But the rocks remained, dozens of ironic little statements scattered all across the stoop. If the hearings lasted any longer, she wouldn’t have to do any more field research for the season—everything she needed would be on her doorstep.

  Perhaps she should offend the Skyborn every year.

  “We were talking about the flamestones,” Adari reminded the chief of the Neshtovar.

  “You were talking,” Izri Dazh said. “I accept no such term.” The aged rider and high councilor hobbled around the edge of the Circle Eternal, a plaza where a tall column served as a massive sundial. Adari looked around. Another gorgeous evening, for a place that had no other kind. It was the same every day, inland: a brief, determined afternoon rain followed by a cool breeze that blew straight through the night. But now half the village had forgone real entertainments to watch a bald, bloodless man harangue a young woman. “There are no flamestones,” he said, gesturing to a pair of crimson rocks on a pedestal beside the central
column. “I see here only normal stones of Kesh, as you might find on any hillside.”

  Adari coughed.

  “You have something to say?”

  “I’d better not.” Adari looked up from her seat in the sandy clearing—and then around at the glaring listeners. What was the point? No one would listen. Why keep making it worse …

  She took another look at Izri. This lavender wraith was the man who had eulogized Zhari. What did he know about anything? What business did the Neshtovar have telling anyone what to think, just for convincing a few lazy animals to take them for rides now and again?

  Fine, she thought, rising. These’ll be two fewer rocks they can throw. She took a stone from the pedestal. “I have—the scholars of Kesh have collected stones from every part of this continent. We record what we find. We compare. This rock came from the foot of the Sessal Spire, on the southern coast.”

  The crowd murmured. Everyone knew the smoking Spire, rumbling and bubbling at the edge of civilization. Someone must have been crazy to go out there collecting rocks!

  “The Spire created this stone, from the flames it holds inside. And this,” Adari said, picking up the other rock, “was found right here outside the village, buried in the riverbed.” The stones were identical. “Now, the mountains ringing our plateau aren’t smokers—what we call volcanoes—at least, not now. But this rock being here suggests they might once have been. This whole continent, in fact, might have been created by them.”

  “Heretic!”

  “Is my mother here?” Adari craned her neck, scanning the crowd. Someone tittered.

  Izri took the stones from her and rustled along the perimeter of the audience. “You say these stones came … from below,” he said, the horrible word dripping from his tongue. “And created all that is Kesh.”

  “Then, and now. The smokers are building more land all the time.”

  “But you know that all that is Kesh came from the Skyborn,” Izri said, jabbing his cane in her direction. “Nothing can be born of Kesh anew!”

  She knew; every child knew. The Skyborn were the great beings above, the closest thing the Kesh had to deities. Well, there was something closer: The Neshtovar, as the self-proclaimed Sons of the Skyborn, might as well have been the Skyborn as far as life on Kesh was concerned. Keshiri faith was vertical; high was mighty. The elevated were venerated. It was Izri’s uvak-riding group that, ages before, had brought down from the lofty oceanside peaks the wisdom of the great battle of creation. Riding colossal uvak of crystal, the Skyborn had fought the Otherside in the stars. The battle raged for eons, with the Otherside injuring the Skyborn before being defeated. Drops of Skyborn blood fell upon the roiling black seas, forming the land that birthed the Keshiri people.

  Adari wondered about the biology of a gigantic, sandy-blooded race—but the Neshtovar notion had something going for it: The Keshiri’s few maps of the land looked as if one of her kids had spilled something on them. Long ridged peninsulas spattered in all directions from a cluster of plateaus, forming enormous, often unwalkable coastlines and fjords enough for the Keshiri to harvest marine life forever. Farther up the many rivers to the plateaus, farmers drew even more from the rich soil. The Keshiri numbers were both vast and well fed.

  About the Otherside, Adari found the Neshtovar were incurious to a fault. “That which opposed the Skyborn” meant death, sickness, fire, rebellion—in no particular order—when it wasn’t taking mortal form in accordance with the storyteller’s needs. The Otherside came “from below,” another element in the message of vertical faith. And that was all there was to say. Given the elders’ devotion to the Skyborn, Adari was surprised they hadn’t hammered down who or what the Otherside was. But then, if they had, they’d have come up with a better name.

  Which wasn’t stopping Izri from invoking it repeatedly as he railed at her. “Your words glorify the Otherside, Adari Vaal. It’s why you are here. You are here for preaching—”

  “Teaching!”

  “—telling these lies about the Great Battle to your acolytes!”

  “Acolytes? They’re students!” She searched the crowd for familiar faces. Her students had ducked out the day before when things had gotten rough, but some of their parents were here. “You, Ori Garran! You sent your son to the scholars because he wasn’t any good at the mill. And Wertram, your daughter. Everyone here in Tahv—do you think the village is going to fall into a hole because I talked to your children about some rocks?”

  “It very well could!” Izri grabbed his cane from its spot by the pedestal and shook it. “This land was a part of the living Skyborn. Do you think they do not hear you? When the ground quakes, when the smokers burn—it’s their remnant acting in sympathy with their wishes. Their wishes that we honor them, and hate the Otherside!”

  This again. “I know that’s what you think,” Adari said, searching for slow, even tones. “I don’t pretend to know what forces work the world—”

  “That’s clear!”

  “—but if disagreeable words caused the world to shake, Kesh would rock every time husbands and wives quarreled!” She inhaled deeply. “Surely, the Skyborn have more important affairs than to police our own little disagreements. I know they do.”

  Silence. Adari looked around. Dark Keshiri eyes, once aimed at her, pointed down and away. She’d won a few, that time. Maybe not enough to let her keep her job, but enough that she could keep collecting—

  Krakka-boooom!

  Purple faces turned west, toward the Cetajan Mountains. Jutting out into the ocean beyond, the range provided the village of Tahv some of its finest sunsets—but now the flames were coming from the mountain peak itself. A pillar of fiery ash billowed from the summit.

  It made no sense. Adari helped Izri to his feet. “That—that’s a granite peak,” she said over the subsiding echo. “It’s not volcanic!”

  “It is now!”

  Chapter Two

  A rock was a simple thing, but as her grandfather had told her, “By simple things, we know the world.” Adari had never felt shame for all those hours she’d spent searching the creek beds, or for finding more of interest in the shards of a shattered stone than in her children’s first words. She was teaching them—but the rock was teaching her.

  Now, thanks to a simple rock, she was seeing more of the world than ever before—from high above, clinging to the broad back of Nink. It was an unlikely position for either of them, but she’d been in it for most of the night and part of a day. Her first uvak-flight. It wasn’t by choice.

  The hours after the explosion on the mountain hadn’t gone that badly, she thought. Audience members at the hearing had fled to their homes. She’d done the same after Dazh and his cohorts left together, quibbling over signs and portents.

  By the next morning, however, the mood of the town had changed. The faraway Cetajan peak was still smoking, but it had become clear that it posed no danger to Tahv or the villages farther down the watershed. It was safe for everyone to go outside—out to Adari’s front yard, to express their feelings about her faithless words and the smoldering addition to the skyline they had caused. The Skyborn did listen. What other proof was needed? If the Keshiri couldn’t silence Adari Vaal, they’d at least make sure their voices were louder than hers.

  They’d been doing a good job of it when Adari sent Eulyn and the kids out to take refuge at her uncle’s place. The growing crowd, still pelting the house with rocks, had parted to let the innocents leave. But the mob had stayed straight through the afternoon rain—and by sunset, the Neshtovar themselves were outside, their uvak tethered safely away from the throng. By the time Izri Dazh had hobbled up the steps to pound on her door, Adari had seen the first torches lit outside.

  That had been enough for her. The torches could’ve been for light—but they might have been for something worse. She’d clearly exceeded whatever protection a widow of an uvak-rider was afforded. The Keshiri weren’t big on violence, but they didn’t have a lot of variety in their social s
anctions, either. Judging that it didn’t look like a banishing kind of crowd, Adari had turned in desperation to her own backyard, and that least liked portion of her legacy: Nink.

  Her departure over the rooftop had surprised the people out front almost as much as the maneuver’s success had surprised her. The uvak was most surprised of all. With his rider gone, Nink could have expected never to be ridden again. Uvak took to new riders so seldom that they were promptly put out to stud. Awakening to Adari trying to clamber aboard his fleshy back, Nink could have done anything, gone anywhere.

  He went up.

  She had spent the rest of that night alternately screaming and dodging pursuit by Neshtovar fliers. The latter feat was made easier by Nink’s insistence on soaring far out over the ocean. Those had been the worst moments for Adari, who knew the animal’s past. But something on the uvak’s part, perhaps curiosity, kept him from sending her to Zhari’s grave. Just before dawn, Nink had finally found a seaside mountain roost, where Adari immediately collapsed with exhaustion. Amazingly, when she awoke, the uvak was still there, stuffing his beak with what little foliage there was. Home clearly wasn’t looking that attractive to Nink anymore, either.

  Now, on the second morning since the explosion, Adari saw that her directionless night flight had taken her near the source of anxiety. The Cetajan Range was a chain of craggy goliaths slivered from the mainland—a prominent part of the horizon when seen from the interior, but as inaccessible as places on the western shoreline got. An expedition of rock hunters had brought back what little Adari knew of the place—and that had required a sympathetic volunteer Neshtovari willing to fly a sample return mission. Seeing the mountain ahead of her, Adari was overtaken by the urge to see the truth up close. If the explosion wasn’t volcanic, it could set things right with her and the community. And if the mountain was suddenly volcanic, she was curious about that, too. What was the process involved?

  Or were the scholars wrong about the makeup of the range? Had the uvak-rider flubbed the sample?