“I certainly do,” Ravilan said, looking out at the ocean without seeming to see it. His coloring had faded to a somber maroon hue in his time on Kesh, and his earrings and other Sithly ornamentation only served to make the man beneath look more drab. “This is a world driven by tragedy, Korsin. For all of us. If you’d accept one of my people in the crèche as midwife, we might be better able to understand why our children have been—”
“No!” Seelah said, interposing herself between the two. “They’re not medical personnel, Korsin. In conditions like these, we’ve got to have some controls!”
Ravilan shrank back. “It was not a slight, Seelah. Your staff have done quite well since our mission turned … generational in nature. The Sith thrive.” His face, wrinkled with age and worry, softened. “It should be so for all of the Sith.”
Seelah looked urgently at Korsin, who waved his hand dismissively. Dismissing us both? she wondered. “We’ll talk about it later,” Korsin said. “Was there something else?”
Ravilan paused. “Yes—I will be in the south, as you requested, visiting the towns of the Ragnos Lakes.” Seelah knew the project: The Keshiri had been harvesting some kind of fluorescent algae, and Korsin had assigned Ravilan to check it out, for potential use in lighting the Sith structures. “There are eight villages on various bodies of water, all with different specimens to examine.”
“That’s a lot of territory,” Korsin said. “You alone?”
“As you requested,” Ravilan said. “I start in Tetsubal, farthest away.”
Seelah smiled. It was just the sort of mindless job that would drive the quartermaster to madness.
“Take your whole retinue,” Korsin said, slapping a firm hand on Ravilan’s shoulder. Korsin had grown no more physically imposing during his exile, but he still walked like a man Gloyd’s size. “It’s important—and it’ll go faster if you split up. And you could all stand to get off this mountain for a few days.”
He brought Ravilan closer and spoke into his sunken ear. “And, look—next time Seelah would like you to call me Grand Lord.”
“That’s just a name for the Keshiri.”
“And there are Keshiri here. It’s an order, Rav. Safe flight.”
Seelah watched as Ravilan limped off. He’d lost an argument with an uvak in their second year here. It was one of a series of losses—and she wasn’t about to let him win an argument now. She took Korsin aside. “Don’t you dare accept any of his people in my wards!”
“You’re pretty when you’re territorial.”
“Korsin!”
He looked at her with piercing eyes. “You’re not living on Rhelg anymore. How long before you let go of the past?”
Seelah let a smoldering look speak for her—but Korsin ignored it. Spotting someone behind her, he grinned and turned to address the waiting crowd. “Sorry to cut this short, all of you—but I see my lunch companion has arrived.”
Seelah turned.
Adari Vaal waited at the edge of the plaza.
2
The Sith Empire of Seelah’s youth was a nest of star systems linked by common heritage, ambition, and greed. It was also, in a sense, a black hole from which little escaped.
The Stygian Caldera’s limiting effects on hyperspace travel were disproportionate, making it far easier for unlucky outsiders to wander into Sith space than for the Sith Lords to venture out. Those who found their way in seldom returned, becoming slaves to one princeling or another. The arrivals frequently changed hands over the generations, forgetting their homes completely. They, too, were of the Sith now.
Some Sith Lords, such as Naga Sadow, saw value in the work of the human descendants of the original Tapani refugees. Where their tentacle-faced masters with lineages back to the Sith species were more interested in sorceries, Seelah’s people excelled at science. When allowed to practice, they did, forming the industrial and medical infrastructures for several Lords. Some even resolved problems of lightsaber-crystal fabrication and power generation that had eluded the Jedi of the Republic. Such feats were never heralded—no Sith Lord would share a new weapon. If failure was an orphan, success, for the Sith, was a secret love child.
The child Seelah had her own successes, serving on Rhelg with the rest of her family in the forces of Ludo Kressh, Sadow’s greatest rival. At thirteen, Seelah was already a talented healer, drawing both on the Force and the medical knowledge of her forebears. Devotion had already borne fruit.
“We are advancing in this movement,” her father had said. “You have done well, and it has been rewarded. Glory in the honor, Seelah—it is the greatest that can befall such as us.”
She had been charged with the care of Lord Kressh’s feet.
They were out all afternoon again, the two of them. Korsin and the Keshiri woman. Tilden had told Seelah that, and she had other confidants who provided regular reports. Her husband and his so-called “ambassador,” Adari, would stroll the pathways painstakingly carved out of the once treacherous mountainside, discussing—what? Not a blasted lot, as far as Seelah could tell.
Adari’s walks with Korsin dated from the beginning of Seelah’s own relationship with him. Back then, there had been a need. The Vaal woman had discovered the Sith on the mountain, and had acted as intermediary with the Keshiri. But as years progressed and the need for a single ambassador ebbed, the walks continued, ranging ever farther away. After the birth of Seelah and Korsin’s daughter, Nida, his walks with Adari had become daily—including the occasional uvak-flight.
Seelah knew enough from her sources not to suspect infidelity—as if she would care—but the native woman had taken steps to improve her plain appearance. Adari had recently begun turning up in vor’shandi face markings, a decoration unheard of for a Keshiri widow of an uvak-rider. But eavesdroppers confirmed for Seelah that the generally mindless substance of their discussions hadn’t changed. Where does the sun go at night, Korsin? Is air part of the Force, Korsin? Why are rocks not food, Korsin? If she was a spy, she was pretty useless at it—but she did have command of a huge chunk of the Grand Lord’s time. And more.
“She’s … really something, isn’t she?” he had asked in an unguarded moment after Adari flew back to Tahv one evening.
“I think your standards for playthings have plummeted,” Seelah had responded.
“Along with my ship.”
And my real husband, she had not said. Seelah thought back on that moment now as she stood outside the ward. Fifteen years with her beloved husband’s hated brother. Fifteen years with the man who had probably orphaned her son. Let the old purple wraith have him, she thought. The less seen of Yaru Korsin, the better.
Korsin’s seduction of Seelah had not taken long at all, once she’d convinced him he’d be met with something other than a dagger. It was an acceptable arrangement on both sides. By winning her approval, the commander had solidified his bonds with the restive miners his ship was carrying—and stripped away something that had belonged to his hated sibling. She even let him think it was his idea, though she bit her lip to ribbons that first year.
For her part, Seelah won power and influence in the new order—benefits going far beyond convenient morning ablutions. Little Jariad would be raised in the best lodgings wherever they were—first in the walled native city of Tahv, later in the mountain compound.
And she had a job. Administration of the Sith sick wards seemed like a worthless sinecure given the rude health of the Keshiri-pampered people. Certainly no one else wanted the assignment, not with a world to conquer and an interstellar escape to engineer. Most Sith injured in disagreements never reached a healer, anyway.
But Seelah got to know more about the Sith who were stranded on Kesh than anyone, including the Omen officer originally responsible for keeping the ranks. She knew who was born and when and to whom—and that was the balance of power. The others weren’t even looking. Their eyes were still on the sky, on getting out. Only Korsin seemed to understand that they might be settling into a permanent si
tuation—though he clearly worked to prevent anyone but Seelah from sensing it. She didn’t understand why he had been open with her about it.
Perhaps the wife of Yaru Korsin didn’t merit hope. No matter. She didn’t need it, anyway. She saw the future—here in the assembly yard behind the ward, as she walked through on her periodic reviews. Here, the youth of the Sith reported to see her. Or rather, to be seen.
“This is Ebya T’dell, daughter of the miner Nafjan and the bridge cadet Kanika.” Seelah’s willowy aide, Orlenda, stood behind a stern-faced pink child and read from a parchment. “Eight years old next month by our counting. No ailments.”
Seelah’s hand closed in a V around the young girl’s chin. Seelah looked left and right, inspecting the child like livestock. “High cheekbones,” she said, mashing her index finger against the youngling’s face. The child didn’t flinch. “I know your parents, girl. Are you a source of despair to them?”
“No, Lady Seelah.”
“This is good. And what is your duty?”
“To be like you, milady.”
“Not the answer I had in mind, but I won’t argue,” Seelah said, releasing the child and turning to Orlenda, her aide. “I don’t see any flaring of the skull, but I’m concerned about her coloring,” she said. “Too florid. Check the genealogy again. She might yet have a family, if we choose properly.”
With a pat on the rear from Orlenda, eight-year-old Ebya T’dell returned to play in the outer yard, momentarily safe in the knowledge that her life might not be a genetic dead end.
It was an important matter, Seelah thought as she watched the younglings duel with hejarbo staffs. Every child there had been born since the crash landing. Apart from the infusion of youth to the Sith population, it appeared that very little had changed. Every color from humanity’s spectrum had been represented in the original Omen crew, and that continued to be the case. None of the casual pairings with Keshiri had produced any offspring whatsoever—Seelah thanked the dark side for that—and, of course, there was the problem with Ravilan’s people. The number of relatively pure-blooded humans had been steadily increasing. So had the purity of that blood.
She had seen to that—with Korsin’s full approval. It was sensible. Kesh had killed the Massassi. If it had not killed humans yet, then the Sith needed more humans. Adapt or die, Korsin had said.
“There were several more younglings on the list for this week,” Orlenda said. “Did you want to see them today, Seelah?”
“I’m not in the mood. Is there anything else?”
Orlenda rolled up her parchment and shooed the remaining children to the exercise yard. “Well,” she said, “we’ll need a new Keshiri bearer for the wardroom.”
“What happened to the last one, Orlenda?” Seelah smirked. “Did you finally kill him with your kindnesses?”
“No—but he is dead.”
“The big one? Gosem?”
“Gorem,” Orlenda said with a sigh. “Yes, he died last week. We’d loaned him to Ravilan’s team breaking down one of the decks of Omen, looking for whatever it is they look for to use. Gorem was, well, you remember, so strong—”
“Get to it.”
“I guess he’d been moving heavy plates, and it’s hot up there under that roof. He keeled over right outside the ship.” Orlenda clicked her tongue.
“Hmm.” She’d thought the Keshiri were made of stronger stuff. Still, it was a good chance to rib her lusty friend. “I imagine you wept at the funeral pyre?”
“No, they tossed him over the cliff,” Orlenda said, straightening her flaxen hair. “It was that day with the high winds.”
Just before dusk, Seelah found Korsin again on the plaza. His Keshiri plaything was gone, and Korsin was looking at himself—or, rather, at a pretty bad replica. Crafters from Tahv had just delivered a four-meter-tall not-very-likeness of their savior, sculpted from an enormous slab of glass.
“It’s … a first pass,” Korsin said, sensing her arrival.
“Clearly.” Seelah thought it would befoul the killing fields of Ashas Ree. But her Keshiri aide thought it was marvelous. At a minimum.
“It’s positively stupendous, milady,” Tilden said. “Something truly worthy of the Skyborn—I mean, the Protectors.” He corrected himself quickly in the presence of the Grand Lord, but still seemed to swallow hard at the new word, so recently added to the religion of his birth.
Ravilan’s cousin, the cyborg Hestus, had worked for years with other linguists from the Omen to plumb the oral histories of the Keshiri. They’d sought any hint that anyone had ever happened by—anyone who might return to Kesh again, to provide them escape. They hadn’t found much. The Neshtovar, the uvak-riders who until recently had ruled the planet, had layered their religion of the Skyborn and the opposing Otherside over earlier tales of Protectors and Destructors. The Destructors periodically returned to rain disaster upon Kesh; the Protectors were destined to stop them, once and for all. Korsin, now at the focus of the Keshiri faith, had claimed a moment of revelation and decreed a return to the old names.
That, like much else over the years, had been Seelah’s idea. The Neshtovar had considered themselves the Sons of the Skyborn. But no living Keshiri could claim kinship to the distant Protectors. Whatever status any native previously enjoyed was gone. And now, Seelah saw, the Keshiri were showing their respect with bug-eyed slabs of glass.
They’d better learn to get our faces right before they “respect” me, Seelah thought. “It’s not that it looks bad,” she said, once Tilden had stepped away. “It’s that it doesn’t look right here.”
“Thinking again of moving us from the mountain?” Korsin smiled, wind-cracked wrinkles darkening in the shadows. “I think we wore out the Keshiri’s patience when we stayed in Tahv the first time.”
“And what difference does that make?”
“None.” He grabbed her hand, surprising her. “Listen, I want to tell you how much I appreciate the work you’ve been doing at the ward. It’s everything I hoped—everything I knew you were capable of.”
“Oh, I don’t think you know what I’m capable of.”
Korsin looked away and laughed. “Well, let’s not pursue that. Would dinner interest you instead?” His eyes shone. Seelah recognized the look. The man was capable, as ever, of keeping multiple sets of accounts.
Before she could answer, a shout came from above. Korsin and Seelah looked to the watchtower. No attacker threatened—the Sith had purged the range of predators years before. Instead, sentries simply sat in meditation, listening to the Force for messages from Sith traveling in the far-flung reaches of the land.
“It’s Ravilan,” called down a young red-faced sentry, only a child when Omen crashed. “Something has happened in Tetsubal. Something bad.”
Korsin looked up in aggravation. He could feel something in the Force, too—something chaotic—but he had no idea what. This was exactly why they shouldn’t have pirated their personal communicators in an earlier escape scheme.
Seelah looked up at the tower and mouthed, “Is … is Ravilan dying?”
“No,” the herald said, barely catching her words. “Everyone else is.”
3
The Sith were about glorification of self and the subjugation of others. That much made sense, as the young Seelah saw life in Ludo Kressh’s palace.
What did not make sense was why so many of her people—in her own family!—embraced the Sith teachings when they had no hope of advancement. Why would a Sith live as a slave?
It wasn’t that way for everyone. In the grand scheme, the Sith Empire had been at rest for many years, but an empire of Sith is an empire of small schemes. From Kressh’s command, newly adult Seelah had watched her master rage at the ventures of Naga Sadow. She had seen Sadow at several meetings in Kressh’s company, almost all of them ending in fury. The two leaders differed on everything, long before the discovery of a space lane into the heart of the Republic set them at odds over the future direction of the Sith Empire.
<
br /> Sadow was a visionary. He knew permanent isolation was a practical impossibility in an Empire comprising so many systems and so many potential hyperspace routes; the Stygian Caldera was a veil, not a wall, and he could see opportunity through it. And in Sadow’s entourage, Seelah had seen many humans and members of other species with apparent status. She even met Korsin’s captain father once.
For Sadow, contact with the new was a thing to be desired—and outsiders could be as Sith as any born in the Empire. For Kressh, who spent his days in battle and his nights toiling on a magical device to protect his young son from all harm, there could not be a worse fate than escape from the Sith’s cosmic cradle.
“Do you know why I do this?” Kressh had asked one night. His drunken rage had touched the entire household, Seelah included. “I have seen the holocrons—I know what waits beyond. My son looks like me—and so does the future of the Sith.
“But only as long as we’re here. Out there,” he’d spat, between bloody punches, “out there, the future looks like you.”
Adari Vaal had once told Korsin that the Keshiri did not have a number large enough to describe their own population. The Omen crew had tried to make estimates in their initial years on Kesh, only to find ever more villages over the horizon. Tetsubal, at eighteen thousand Keshiri residents, had been one of the last cities counted before the Sith finally gave up.
Now they had given up again. The walls of Tetsubal were filled with corpses, making a body count impossible. As they arrived on uvak-back that night, Seelah, Korsin, and their companions could see the dead Keshiri from the sky, littering the dirt roads like branches after a storm. Some had collapsed within the doorways of their hejarbo-shoot huts. It was the same inside, they soon saw.
What they didn’t see were survivors. If any existed, they were hiding well.
Eighteen thousand bodies was a good guess.
Whatever happened had happened suddenly. A nursing woman had fallen, locked together with her infant in a fatal embrace. Troughs laced through the streets, fed from the aqueduct; several Keshiri had fallen in and drowned right beside their floating woven pails.
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories Page 7
