Hilts had to rub his eyes. The language was theirs, if heavily accented. But what was speaking it? Aside from the Keshiri, there was no record of there being any other sentient species in the universe.
And certainly not one that gave orders to humans.
“For this mission, I dispatch to you one you have worked with before, Ravilan Wroth, and his Massassi warriors.”
The image changed—and if the visage of Naga Sadow startled the viewers, the appearance of the one called Ravilan and his escort evoked audible gasps. His skin fully crimson, Ravilan looked even less human than Sadow, with protruding eyebrow stalks to go along with even longer facial tendrils. And the lumbering blood-colored monstrosities standing behind Ravilan were grotesque beyond description.
The image flickered, and Naga Sadow reappeared.
“I have sent for your brother, Devore, to inform him that you will be in charge. But remember that you are all subject to my law and whim. You may have more freedom of action than other Sith allow their slaves—but the greatest thing your kind can aspire to is competence in my service. And that is what I demand of you. Your work will create my glory. Begin your preparations. Succeed in my name. Fail me—and die.”
The image vanished, leaving the atrium in near-darkness. Starlight filtered in through the broken windows above.
Finally, Iliana spoke. “What was that?”
“A message,” Hilts said, cautiously fingering the device. “An earlier message. I think that Korsin recorded over it—that we weren’t supposed to see it.” The gadget had been testy in recent activations. Maybe it had finally failed to do what Korsin intended. He exhaled and looked up to the skylights. “I think that was, as he said, Naga Sadow.”
The crowd erupted in disbelief, voiced loudest by Korsin Bentado. “Naga Sadow is just a name from folk tales—‘Korsin’s celestial ally.’ That—that thing acted like it owned the Omen. And the crew!”
“They weren’t conquerors,” Iliana said acidly. “They were diggers in the dirt. And the great Yaru Korsin was just a delivery boy!”
The gruesome outcasts of Force 57 seemed the most horrified of all, having seen the true face of Ravilan and his outcasts. “This—this is not Sith,” Neera said, almost in a whisper. “This is madness.”
Hilts was speechless. All the little mysteries from their history and all the redacted sections of texts suddenly made sense, if this could be called sense. Yaru Korsin and the entire founding pantheon had been slaves—to that thing?
“No wonder Seelah Korsin wanted us all to be pure specimens,” Iliana said, standing before the others. “She was sanctifying the race.”
Korsin Bentado was pacing. “No, it can’t be. It can’t be.” He glared at Hilts. “You! Caretaker! The Sisters got to you earlier. Did you tamper with that?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Hilts said. He lifted the projector from the floor and placed it back on its pedestal.
“Then … what does this mean?”
“It means we’re not just the Tribe,” Hilts said. “We’re a Lost Tribe.” He nearly spat the adjective. It was nothing to be proud of. “We’re missing. We didn’t come on our own; we were sent, and not sent here. But once we crashed, Korsin stayed—because he didn’t want to go back and face that.”
The murmurs grew louder. Who would blame Korsin? But that made them all something terrible indeed.
Runaway slaves.
In a flash, Iliana ignited her lightsaber and lunged. Hilts stumbled, certain she was coming for him. Instead, her weapon found its home in the recording device, bisecting it and the pedestal it sat upon.
Hilts fumbled toward the sparking halves of the gadget. “What did you do that for?”
“We can’t let anyone know,” Iliana said to the others, her voice grave. “They never wanted us to know. Seelah must have forbidden any records of what Ravilan’s people really were. It’s why Korsin recorded over the message. We have to keep this secret.”
Hilts looked up at her. “I don’t see how—”
“We can’t ever let the Keshiri know!” Korsin Bentado said, the stoic giant now Jaye’s equal for nervousness. “If they find out their Protectors could be ruled by creatures like that—”
“They won’t,” Neera hissed. “I’ll kill them all first.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Iliana said, grinding the fragments of the recorder with her boot. “It’s done.”
Hilts looked at the remains. It was.
It had gone predictably wrong. Twenty Sith couldn’t share a secret, not even for their own protection. Someone had told the tale. Perhaps one of the attendees, anguished and full of drink, had revealed all about the Lost Tribe’s origins. Certainly, many of the leaders’ comrades would have been anxious for news about what had transpired during the reading. And there, camped outside, were humans from all over Kesh, celebrating the Festival of Nida’s Rise. Humans with uvak, ready to fly and deliver the dire news.
They weren’t special.
The result was swiftly seen. The cities of Kesh had been crumbling. Now they burned. All of them, from what little word had come in from the rest of the continent. Today was the regularly scheduled Testament Day. It had taken only eight days for the cancerous truth to reach every place humans lived.
They weren’t anything.
Hilts peered out onto the nighttime streets from Jaye’s hejarbo-shoot hut. The dwelling had survived the first firestorm, but the arsonists were in motion again, and it likely wouldn’t be around for long. Everywhere, Keshiri watched from hiding, both fearing for their lives and fascinated by the convulsions their masters were putting themselves through. Anger flowed freely as an entire race tried to commit suicide.
They didn’t deserve to be anything.
“This is the end of times, Master Hilts,” Jaye said, huddling beside him in the doorway. The frightened Keshiri looked up at the cloud of crazed uvak, circling the flames.
Hilts simply nodded. He’d told his aide about the contents of the recording. It didn’t really matter, now. The human population of Kesh was already down to a few thousand from all the infighting. How many could be left? He hadn’t seen any of the faction leaders since the riots broke out—not even Iliana, who’d seemed confident the danger was past. How wrong she was. It wouldn’t be long now.
And yet …
… Korsin had said something else. “The true power is behind the throne,” he had said. It was a strange statement. Hilts had heard of a Keshiri idiom where that referred to the contributions of a spouse. But the husband of Seelah couldn’t mean that. He’d met Iliana, her spiritual descendant. Hilts wouldn’t have trusted her not to rob his corpse. No Sith trusted a lover—least of all one like Seelah.
Hilts stood in the doorway.
“Caretaker, the rioters will see you!”
The gray-haired human paid no mind, looking, instead, up toward the palace. They’d evacuated when the mob turned ugly. But it wasn’t what was there that was on his mind now. It was what had never been there.
A throne.
Cape billowing behind him, Hilts bolted into the street. Alarmed, Jaye followed, careful not to step on—or look at—any of his dead neighbors. “Caretaker, what is it?”
“It’s the throne, Jaye. The throne!”
The Keshiri knew the term. Elders in the Neshtovar used to fashion them for themselves. “But Korsin had no throne.”
“Not in the palace, my boy. Look!” Grabbing his aide’s shoulders, he pointed the Keshiri to the west—and the cloud-enshrouded peaks of the Takara Mountains. Suddenly rejuvenated, Hilts recited the lines he’d memorized decades earlier. “There are secrets you must always keep. The true power is behind the throne. Should disaster befall—remember that!” Squinting through the smoke, he looked at the forbidden place. “Korsin’s throne was his seat from Omen—and that’s up there!”
“I—I don’t understand,” Jaye stammered.
“We weren’t meant to see the message from Sadow—but that’s n
ot Yaru Korsin’s legacy. There’s something else—something he mentioned in the Testament. Something that might save the Tribe from itself!”
Hilts breathed deeply, as excited as he had been in years. For his entire life, he thought he’d known all the history there was, all that Korsin had to say. Could he really have left … a postscript?
“There’s only one thing to do,” Hilts said, cinching up his cape and walking confidently into the chaos. “We’re going to unseal the temple. We’re going aboard Omen!”
SECRETS
1
3000 BBY
Like all Sith on Kesh during the Time of the Rot, the Hilts family had ambition. It was just never very big on execution.
Varner Hilts’s father spent years earning the confidence of the leader of his local faction. He took great care in selecting the shikkar blade intended for his liege’s back. But the elder Hilts used somewhat less care in fastening the dagger’s sheath, and the glass blade fell from his belt and buried itself in his ankle. He was dead in a gangrenous month, a mercifully short time to have to endure the nickname “Slippery Hilts.”
Unfazed, the widow Hilts soldiered on, targeting the faction leader for seduction the very next week. Minions carefully delivered her to the leader’s private bedchambers in a massive ceremonial urn. Unfortunately, the lid was stubborn, and no one had told her the leader was spending the month campaigning in the high country. However, she did achieve her surprise, if the horror of the cleaning servants counted.
Varner Hilts had lived longer than either of them, rising quietly—if inoffensively—to a position of responsibility within the Tribe. He’d worked every day in the greatest palace on the mainland—and had viewed Yaru Korsin’s Testament not once, but twice. He’d ventured closer than anyone had in years to the Temple that held Omen, the ship that had brought Korsin and the Lost Tribe to Kesh.
And now he was about to be killed by a plant.
“Jaye! Jaye!” Hilts called, struggling upside down within a thorny web of vines. Every motion caused the bonds to tighten around the old man’s limbs. He spotted his assistant looking down at him from atop the green-tressed stonework. “Jaye, cut me down!”
Black eyes blinked. “With what, Caretaker?”
“With anything!”
“Oh!” The purple-faced Keshiri vanished for a moment before reappearing with his satchel. “The lightsaber you found!”
“Whoa, no!” Hilts flared the fingers of his free hand in panic. Predictably, Jaye was holding the weapon by the wrong end. “You’ll kill yourself turning it on!”
Jaye knelt closer to where Hilts was dangling. “Should I pass it down to you, then?”
“No. Look, go find a sharp rock,” Hilts said, settling as best he could in his knotty prison. “I’ll just … hang around here.”
Hilts listened to the Keshiri skitter off and cursed himself for his wild scheme. No one had dared approach the mountain Temple in centuries—and now a sixty-year-old archivist and his cowardly clerk would do it? During a week, no less, when every settlement on the continent of Keshtah roiled with riotous convulsions? Hilts shook his head, ignoring the scratches from the vine wrapped beneath his chin. He’d been mad to make the journey!
And the journey had been maddening. Hilts had returned first to his museum in the capital city of Tahv, where he’d long preserved the ancient maps of Omen’s Temple. But pillagers had struck the palace, burning every scrap of parchment in the archives. Everything breakable had been broken. The sight of the smashed Sandpipes had driven Jaye to tears.
Hilts had been prepared for that. The self-destructive rampage had been going nonstop since the Tribe’s discovery that their ancestors hadn’t been conquerors, but slaves to aliens. Nonetheless, the sight of so many human corpses lying in the streets had unnerved him. No Sith saw any single life as precious, but their species as a whole certainly was. The survivors of Omen had been so few in number in the beginning. How many generations’ increase had been lost? Could they ever recover?
The forbidden Temple might hold the solution—but Hilts had to get there first, avoiding the roving bands of Sith thugs on killing sprees. It was why he’d brought Jaye along. Keshiri families that once worshipped humans now feared them; none would have granted him shelter. But any Sith who would travel with meek Jaye Vuhld was probably not someone on a murderous rampage. They’d taken refuge in Keshiri shacks in daylight hours, making their way west at night.
The journey was long, but necessary: the Temple sat atop the Takara Mountains at the northern tip of a long peninsula running parallel to the mainland. It would have been a short hop over the inlet for an uvak—but nothing could get Hilts onto the back of one of the flying beasts. They’d taken the long way along the southern coast before turning up the hostile spit of land. There was no shelter here, nor sustenance; just as well, as Hilts had tasted only his own stomach acid since the riots began. Finally, they’d arrived at the base of The Blocks, massive granite barriers lodged in a narrow pass by Nida Korsin to prevent anyone from accessing the forbidden heights on foot. With each cube ten meters tall, they gave the impression of a staircase for the gods—a formidable obstacle, indeed. But sometime in the intervening centuries, a hardy foliage had taken root in the stones’ crevices—strong vines, providing a way up.
Or a way to hang upside down until you hemorrhage and die, Hilts thought. He looked up. Where was that blasted Keshiri?
A light flashed in the sky. Weary eyes focused. A reflection? But from what?
“Here, Caretaker!”
No sooner did Hilts hear the squeaky voice than he felt a violent tug, and then he was being dragged up the side of The Blocks by his legs. “Jaye! What are you doing?”
The Keshiri groaned, pulling on a clutch of vines wrapped around his spindly fingers. Hilts righted himself and clambered atop the barrier, where he spent a full minute gasping for breath. Rolling over, he saw Jaye had found a series of postholes in the stone surface. The base for some scaffold centuries earlier, each hole was large enough to accommodate a Keshiri foot, allowing the frail clerk some mechanical advantage as he hauled his master up the side.
“This … is the last barrier,” Jaye said, wiping blood from his palms and looking behind them. A modest scramble-down led to an open trail up the gorge—and to the Temple mountain, farther above.
But Hilts’s attention was higher still. “Look there!” In the eastern sky, an uvak beat its wings as it arced downward toward the Temple. Hilts squinted. There was a rider aboard. Another flash of light—a reflection, like before. On metal-poor Kesh, that usually meant one thing: the handle of a lightsaber.
Hilts frowned and looked toward the Temple. “We’d better get going.” Standing, he pulled the remaining shreds of vine from his portly frame. With renewed purpose, he took a step forward—
—directly into a posthole.
“Caretaker!”
The granite felt cool on Hilts’s face. “I’ve decided, Jaye … that first … we’re going to rest here … for a while …”
The Keshiri didn’t argue.
“You must finish the job of removing the Tribe from this mountain. Our destiny, for now, lies in ruling the part of Kesh that lives …”
So Yaru Korsin had instructed his daughter in the Testament, and his decree had been followed. Followed, and respected, by a people that respected nothing. Hilts marveled as he stepped from the rocky path onto the windswept stone of the site. Sith would look for any edge they could find in their squabbles, yet none had ever returned here, to his knowledge. It could have been superstition, but Hilts thought it more likely that they understood the futility of returning. What advantage could be found here that Korsin and the other passengers of Omen wouldn’t already have taken?
And yet, that was his quest. Thousands of meters below, all across the continent to the east, his civilization was in the process of expunging itself. Twenty warring factions had already destroyed the Sith state. But the revelation of their common—and lowly�
�origin had left every human soul detached and despondent. A thousand-year sclerosis could be survived, but not another week of self-mutilation.
What can I find here that no one else has? Hilts wondered anew as he looked to the twin spires flanking the royal residence far ahead. Vanity had led him to this, surely. But maybe it wasn’t such a crazy dream. Anyone else would have looked here for a weapon, some ancient technology from the stars. Hilts was looking for a message. Something Korsin had hinted at in his dying words, something that could lead the Tribe back onto a singular path. “The true power is behind the throne,” Korsin had said. “Should disaster befall—remember that …”
Jaye stepped fearfully onto the southern terrace of the holy place. Shabby stone buildings lined the sides, worn down by wind, sun, and neglect. “It’s bigger than I imagined, Caretaker.”
“That’s fine,” Hilts said, ignoring his sore ankle as he strode confidently ahead. “I know where we are.”
And he did. He didn’t have the maps now, but they’d been with him for years. He’d committed to memory this lower terrace, where the service personnel had lived. North past the uvak stables were the steps to the middle terrace, with its training academy, dormitories, storehouses, and wardroom. Up more stairs would be the outdoor colonnade where Yaru Korsin had held his public court. Then, finally, the quadrangle of the main plaza, formed by the royal residence to the west, the watchtower and guardhouse to the east, and the Temple dome to the north. Part of the upper plaza actually sat atop Omen’s honored place of rest; the structure had been built around and atop the damaged ship, to protect it.
Just thinking about Omen brought more spring to Hilts’s step. He didn’t even blanch when he saw the multitude of stairs to the middle terrace. Anyone looking at the edifice from afar would assume it had been built by a culture that loved climbing.
Indeed, it had been.
“Come on, my boy,” Hilts said. “Keep up the pace.”
* * *
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories Page 19
