“Sabers’ll do better when we recover some of the Lignan crystals to power them,” Gloyd said. Korsin presented a rock sample to Adari. Granite. The efforts were not for her, of course, but she’d always wondered what the mountains were made of. Now she knew.
“You were right after all,” Korsin said, watching her study the stone. She hadn’t mentioned her conflict with the Neshtovar, but she’d been anxious to confirm her theories with someone who knew. Volcanos did form new land. And the mountains of the Cetajan Range weren’t volcanoes—while granite did come from magma, they told her, it was formed far underground over the course of eons. That was why its rocks looked different from the flamestones. “I don’t understand half what my miners tell me,” Korsin said, “but they say you could easily help them—if you weren’t helping me.”
Korsin began speaking with Gloyd about their next project, a dig to find metals necessary to repair Omen. Adari started to interject when she saw Seelah orbiting. Adari shuddered as the woman passed from sight. What had Adari done to earn such hatred?
She’s not staring at me, Adari realized. She’s staring at Korsin.
“I saw you,” Adari blurted to Korsin.
“What?”
“I saw you a second time on the mountain, that day. You threw something over the side.”
Korsin turned from his work. He gestured—and Gloyd stepped away.
“I saw you throw something,” Adari said, swallowing. She looked down at the ocean, crashing against the cliffs. “I didn’t know what—until you sent me to return to the village.” Korsin stepped warily toward her. Adari couldn’t stop talking. “I flew down there, Korsin. I saw him below, on the rocks. He was a man,” she said, “like you.”
“Like me?” Korsin snorted. “Is … he still there?”
She shook her head. “I turned him over to look at him,” she said. “The tide swept him away.”
Korsin was her height, but as she shrank, he loomed. “You saw this—and yet you still brought the Neshtovar to find us.”
Adari froze, unable to answer. She looked at the rocks, far below, so like the ones farther up the range. Korsin reached for her as he had before …
… and drew back. His voice softened. “Your people turned on you to protect their society. You were a danger?”
How did he know? Adari looked up at Korsin. He looked less like Zhari all the time. “I believed something they didn’t.”
Korsin smiled and took her hand gently. “That’s a fight my people are familiar with. That man you saw—he was a danger to our society.”
“But he was your brother.”
Korsin’s grip tightened for a moment before he let go altogether. “You are a good listener,” he said, straightening. The fact wouldn’t have been hard to learn. “Yes, he was my brother. But he was a danger—and we had dangers enough when you found us,” he said. He looked deeply into her eyes. “And I think this is something you know something about, Adari. That same sea took someone from you, too. Didn’t it?”
Adari’s mouth opened. How? Zhari had died there, but the Neshtovar would never have told Korsin. Speaking of a rider’s fall broke their greatest taboo: falling was being claimed by the Otherside. No one had seen it happen, save for Nink—and the all-seeing Skyborn.
Korsin was either a mind reader, or he was who he said he was. Her words barely came out. “It—it’s not the same. You pushed that man. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to my—”
“Of course you didn’t. Accidents happen. But you didn’t mind that he died,” he said. “I can see it in you, Adari. He was a danger to you—to the person you’re becoming.” Korsin’s bushy eyebrows turned up. “You’re glad he’s gone.”
Adari closed her eyes. Putting his arm around her shoulder, Korsin turned her toward the sun. “It’s all right, Adari. Among the Sith, there is no shame in it. You would never be what you are today with him keeping you down. Just as you’d never be what you’re going to become with Izri Dazh keeping you down.”
At the name, Adari’s eyes opened. The sunlight dazzled her, but Korsin wouldn’t let her turn away. “You were afraid of us,” he said, “and afraid when you saw the body. You knew we’d die on the mountain if you didn’t bring help. Yet you brought the Neshtovar anyway—because you thought we could help you against them.”
He released her. Adari looked blankly at the sun for another moment before looking away. Behind her, Korsin spoke in the soothing tones he’d used when his voice had first reached her on the wind.
“Helping us interact with the Keshiri is not just about helping us, Adari. You will learn things about your world that you never imagined.” He turned over the rock in her hand. “I don’t know how long we’re going to be here, but I promise you will learn more in the next few months than you have in your entire lifetime. Than any Keshiri has.”
Adari shook. “What—what do you—”
“A simple thing. Forget what you saw that day.”
Korsin made good on his word. In her first months with the Skyborn, Adari had learned much about her home. But she had also learned some things about where they had come from, and who they were. She was a good listener. By simple things, we know the world.
Korsin’s Sith were the beings from above that she denied—but they weren’t the gods of Keshiri legend. Not exactly. They had amazing powers, and perhaps they lived in the stars. But they didn’t bleed sand, and they weren’t perfect. They argued. They envied. They killed.
The Sith did read minds, to a degree. Korsin had used that to call out to her for help after seeing her in the air. But they weren’t omniscient. She’d found that out with a simple, surreptitious experiment involving Ravilan. She’d suggested he visit a restaurant deep in Tahv’s busiest quarter. Off he went, getting lost in the same neighborhood she always got lost in. The Sith’s perceptive powers were amazing, but they still required accurate knowledge from others.
She sought to provide that, accompanying Korsin to many work sites, mostly employing jovial Keshiri laborers. The Skyborn were perfect enough for the Keshiri—and perfect enough for her. Yaru Korsin was as far beyond Zhari Vaal in intellect as she was above the rocks, and as long as she learned to avoid the eye of Seelah, another widow of a fallen man, she could expect to learn a great deal more.
At the same time her knowledge advanced, Izri’s faith was further glorified. Adari took little joy in that, apart from the occasional chuckle she got from having a more storied role in it than Izri had. She was the Discoverer, always to be remembered by Keshiri society. No one would remember Izri.
Watching another quarry being constructed, she wondered what that society would look like. She knew something the Sith didn’t: They’d be here for a long time. She’d mentioned it once to a miner, who promptly discounted it as advice from the local know-nothings.
But she knew. The metals the Sith sought weren’t in the soil of Kesh. Scholars had scoured every part of the continent. They had recorded what they’d found. If the substances Korsin’s people required hid farther beneath the surface, it would take time to find them—a lot more time.
Time, the Sith had.
What, she wondered, would the Keshiri have?
PARAGON
1
4985 BBY
The water was as warm as it was every day, streaming from the marble slot high on the wall down onto Seelah’s body. There had been no refresher, no modern conveniences for the Sith stranded on Kesh for fifteen standard years. But they had learned to live with what they had.
The glistening droplets of meltwater clinging to her brown skin had come from a glacier half a continent away. Keshiri uvak-fliers, their beasts laden with massive kegs, had ferried the water from that faraway place to the Sith’s mountain retreat. Rooftop attendants heated the water to her exact specifications, channeling it through a system thoroughly cleansed daily for mildew and other pollutants.
Below, Seelah meticulously raked at her wrist with pumice brought from the foot of th
e Sessal Spire, kilometers away. Keshiri artists had crafted the stones into pleasing shapes for her. The natives were more interested in appearance than function—but, in this, they had an ally. Seelah looked with her usual disdain at the stall, constructed for her personal use by her Sith brethren immediately after she’d moved into Captain Korsin’s chambers. The place was more a temple than a home.
Well, she couldn’t have everything. Not here.
Fifteen years. That’s what it was by the Keshiri calendar, too—although who could trust that? She stepped dripping from the shower, wondering where the time had gone. Not to her body, she saw in the colossal mirror—working glass was another thing the Keshiri were good at. Twice a mother and living on food suited for farm animals back home, and yet Seelah looked as fit as she ever had. It had taken work. But time was one thing she’d had.
“I know you’re here, Tilden,” Seelah said. Tilden Kaah, her Keshiri attendant, always stayed out of sight from the mirror, never remembering she could sense him through the Force. Now he stood by the doorway, averting his large opal eyes and presenting a robe in his shaking hands.
Fifteen years hasn’t changed him, either, Seelah thought with a silent chortle as she snatched the robe. But why shouldn’t he look? All that drab purple skin—to call it lavender was flattery. And white hair—the color of age and uselessness. If Keshiri had found other Keshiri beautiful before, it was only because they hadn’t yet seen the Sith.
And, besides, it was Tilden’s job to worship her. One of the younger high priests of the Keshiri faith—which recognized Seelah and her fellow Sith as ancient deities from the heavens—Tilden lived to follow her everywhere. She rather enjoyed torturing him like this in the mornings. She was the sacrilege that started his day.
“Your son is hunting with the riders until tonight,” he said. “Your daughter is in Tahv with the educators your people sent.”
“Fine, fine,” she said, discarding the gown he’d set out in favor of a brighter one. “Get to something important.”
“Milady is expected in the ward this afternoon for the reviewing,” he said, looking up from his parchment. Finding her fully dressed and standing before the great window, he smiled gently. “Otherwise, you are at your leisure.”
“And the Grand Lord?”
“His Eminence, our savior from above, has begun his meetings with his advisers. The usual people, born on high like milady. His giant friend is there, too.” He looked down at his notes. “Oh, and the crimson man has asked for an audience.”
“Crimson man?” Seelah’s gaze remained on the foaming ocean far below. “Ravilan?”
“Yes, milady.”
“Then I should go.” Seelah stretched mightily before turning abruptly to search for her shoes. Tilden had them. They were the only articles of clothing rescued from the crash of Omen that she continued to use. The Keshiri still hadn’t figured out decent footwear.
“I—I didn’t mean to turn this into a working day so early,” Tilden stammered, fastening her shoes. “Forgive me. Were you finished bathing? I could have the minders recycle the water.”
“Relax, Tilden—I want to go out,” she said, pinning back her dark hair with a sculpted bone clip, a gift from some local noble she couldn’t remember. She paused in the polished doorway. “But have the team step up the water deliveries—and have them bring it in from the far side of the mountain range. It’s better for the skin from over there.”
Seelah yawned. It wasn’t even high sun and the daily pantomime was already well under way. Captain Yaru Korsin, the Keshiri’s savior from above, sat in his old bridge chair, listening just as he used to on the command deck of Omen. But now the shattered wreck of the vessel lay behind him, sheltered in a part of the sturdy structure not used for habitation, and his battered chair was incongruously plopped in the middle of a marbled colonnade, stretching out hundreds of meters. Here, high in the open air of the Takara Mountains—recently renamed for his precious mother, wherever in blazes she was—Korsin held court.
The architecture and location made for a good show for the Keshiri townsfolk who occasionally flew up here. That was according to design. But it was also big enough to accommodate every foolish supplicant that Korsin wanted to cram into his day. Seelah saw Gloyd the gunner, Korsin’s “giant friend,” at the front of the line as usual.
The lumpy-headed Houk’s jowls quaked as he presented his latest crazed idea: using one of the surviving boring lasers that still had a charge to fire signals into space. Boring seemed the right word to Seelah—and Korsin didn’t appear enthralled, either. How long must Gloyd have been prattling before she arrived?
“It’ll work this time,” Gloyd said, mottled skin sweating. “All we’ve got to do is get the attention of a passing freighter. An observatory. Anything.” He wiped his forehead. Seelah never thought the genetic lottery had been kind to Houks to begin with. But now it looked as if age and sun were causing Gloyd’s hide to melt from his skull.
“The intensity will dissipate to the inverse of the square of the distance from Kesh,” came a human voice from behind Korsin. Parrah, Omen’s relief navigator and now their main science adviser, stepped forward. “It’d be just more cosmic background noise. Didn’t they teach you anything where you came from?”
Probably not, Seelah mused. Gloyd had been a castaway even before he joined the Omen crew. While other outsiders avoided the Stygian Caldera, Gloyd’s team of brigands had figured something truly amazing must be there. There was: the Sith Empire. Few of Gloyd’s companions had survived the discovery. But as gunner and foot soldier, he’d done combat with Jedi plenty of times in his earlier life, making him useful to Naga Sadow and, later, to Yaru Korsin.
But lately? Not so much. “I don’t think it’s going to work, old friend,” Korsin said, spying Seelah out of the corner of his eye and winking. “And we just can’t run the risk of burning out any more equipment. You know the score.”
They all did. Even as they built their stone shelter for Omen in the months after the crash, the crew had steadily brought out equipment. Some of it they expected to restore to life with a few fabricated parts; the rest was immediately usable. And used.
That had been a mistake. It turned out there wasn’t any metal to be found on Kesh. The Sith had ripped and clawed at the surface, expending most of their surviving munitions to no avail. Above, Kesh was pleasing to the eye—but below, it appeared to be little more than a dirtball. Much equipment running on internal power sputtered and died. Worse, something in Kesh’s electromagnetic field was playing hob with everything from radio waves to electrical generation. The lightsabers still worked—thank the Lignan crystals for that—but the castaways, intrepid as they were at cannibalizing, weren’t going to be able to reinvent everything. The tools simply weren’t here.
“I get that,” Gloyd said, seeming not so tall as before. “You know me. I’m built for battle. This peaceful paradise is getting to me—”
“I know something you can do battle with,” Seelah said, her caftan shimmering as she stepped up and put her arm around Korsin. “I think I saw them preparing lunch back in the main hall.” Korsin smiled.
Gloyd glared at the couple for a moment before letting loose with a churning laugh. “What can I say?” he said, patting his paunch and turning. “The lady knows me.”
Korsin looked past the retreating hulk to see another figure. “Ravilan! What’s your next grand plan to get us off this rock?”
“Nothing along those lines,” Ravilan said. The crimson man of Tilden’s description stepped forward and regarded his leader civilly. “Not today.”
“Really? Well, we’re all getting older. The mind forgets.”
“Not this one, Captain.” Ravilan ran his finger along his right cheek tendril—an expression of thoughtfulness among the Red Sith. It made Seelah’s skin crawl. She gripped Korsin tighter. Onetime quartermaster for Omen’s complement of Massassi warriors, Ravilan had been left without a mission after his charges died during their
first days on Kesh. Since then, he’d held a sequence of odd jobs. More important, he’d become the spokes-being for the Fifty-seven—the surviving crew members whose bloodlines to the red-skinned Sith species ran truest—and for those who, like Gloyd, were less interested in living on Kesh than leaving it.
But Ravilan’s lot had grown increasingly bleak. His people hadn’t numbered fifty-seven since their arrival. A dozen had fallen due to accident or professional incompetence—and none of the children of Ravilan’s people had lived a day. Kesh had not been kind in equal measure to all its guests. As motives for wanting to leave went, his were fairly strong.
But they did not bring him before Korsin today, apparently. “There’s something else,” Ravilan said, eyeing Seelah. “People in the service of your … your wife have been trying to document the ancestries of all our crew. They have grown quite insistent,” he added, cocking an eyebrow-stalk.
Feeling Seelah’s grip tighten further, Korsin rose. “Your people don’t have to worry about that, Rav. Human crew only.”
“Yes, but many of us have at least some human blood,” Ravilan said, walking along the colonnade with Korsin. The crowd parted; Seelah walked gingerly behind. “And many of your people have some of ours. The merger of the Dark Jedi line with that of my Sith forebears is an article of pride to my—to our people, Korsin. To have someone picking it apart—”
Korsin continued walking, enjoying the view of the ocean. Strands of silver in his hair glistening in the sun. Seelah stepped up her pace to get closer. “It’s still a foreign planet,” Korsin said. “We don’t know what killed your Massassi when we landed. We don’t know what’s been happening to—well, you know.”
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories Page 6
