Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith#3 - Paragon

by John Jackson Miller

  Seelah looked up. It should be about now.

  “Rider coming!”

  The herald sensed the uvak’s approach long before it appeared on the southern horizon. Waved directly onto the colonnade, the rider set the beast down and leapt to the stone surface. All eyes were on the new arrival. All save Seelah’s.

  “Grand Lord,” he said, short of breath. “It … has happened again … in Rabolow!”

  Seelah heard Korsin’s gasp—but she saw Ravilan’s yellow eyes bulge. It took but a second for the quartermaster to find his composure. “Rabolow?”

  “That’s on the Ragnos Lakes, isn’t it?” Seelah looked toward Ravilan and smiled primly. “That’s where your people were assigned to go yesterday, wasn’t it, Ravilan? Villages on the Ragnos Lakes.”

  He nodded. They’d all been there when it was being discussed. Ravilan cleared his throat, suddenly dry. “I—I should speak with my associate who just returned from there.” He hobbled past Seelah, turned, and bowed. “I—I really should meet them. Commander.”

  “You do that,” Seelah said. Korsin said nothing, still flabbergasted by the recent news and the coincidence. He watched Ravilan disappear from sight, heading for the stables.

  “Rider coming!”

  Korsin looked up. Seelah thought he almost looked afraid, afraid of the news the rider would bring.

  The news was of another city of death, on another of the Ragnos Lakes. A third rider told of a third. And a fourth. One hundred thousand Keshiri, dead.

  Korsin goggled. “Something to do with the lakes? That—what was it—algae of Ravilan’s?”

  Seelah crossed her arms and looked directly at Korsin, stooped over and nearly her same height. She was tempted to let the moment linger …

  … but there was work to be done. She called for Tilden Kaah.

  Her worried assistant appeared from the direction of the ward, holding a small container. She took it and dismissed him. “Do you know what this is, Korsin?”

  Korsin turned the empty vial over in his hand. “Cyanogen silicate?”

  It was from her medical stores on Omen—and also from the stores Ravilan kept for the creatures in his care. In its solid form, she explained, it was used as a cauterizing agent by healers working with the Massassi. She had seen it used again and again in Ludo Kressh’s service. Nothing weaker could do anything to those savages’ hides.

  “It’s bad enough on its own,” she said. “But if moisture gets into it, it breaks down—and intensifies a thousandfold. One particle per billion could do anything.”

  Korsin’s bushy eyebrows flared. “What—what could it do in a water table? Or an aqueduct?”

  Seelah held his hands firmly and looked directly into his eyes. “Tetsubal.”

  She explained the story behind the death of her ward’s bearer. Beefy Gorem had been seconded to Ravilan’s team to help reach what remained in crushed sections of Omen. He’d apparently touched a stained deck plate from the Massassi apothecary and died outside, not long after washing his hands. Death was not instantaneous, but the victim never got far.

  Ravilan must have seen Gorem’s death, she said, and realized he had a tool against the Keshiri. A weapon that could force Korsin and the rest of the humans to forget about building on this world—and recommit to leaving it.

  And now every city that members of the Fifty-seven had visited in the previous day had gone the same way as Tetsubal.

  Korsin spun and shattered his bridge chair against a marble column. He didn’t use the Force. He didn’t need to.

  “Why would they do this?” He grabbed Seelah. “Why would they do this, when it’s so obvious I’d trace it back to them? How stupid—how desperate would they have to be?”

  “Yes,” Seelah said, curling around him. “How desperate would they have to be?”

  Korsin looked into the sun, now beating down on the mountain. Releasing her, he looked into the faces of his other advisors, all waiting and wondering.

  “Bring all the others in,” he said. “Tell them it’s time.”

  Chapter Four

  Seelah had already set her mind on leaving Ludo Kressh before he executed her family. It was trivial; his ankle had been injured in a battle, and she had failed to stop the infection. He’d killed her father the first night, and his leverage lessened considerably after that. Seelah found her chance to go a few days later, when one of Sadow’s mining teams stopped on Rhelg to refuel. She didn’t have anybody left by then, anyway.

  Devore Korsin had been her escape. She saw his immaturity and recklessness, but she also saw something there to work with. He, too, strained against the invisible chains limiting his ambition. He could be her ally. And in Sadow’s service, at least, something could happen—as long as Devore didn’t foul it up.

  And if he did, well, there was always their son …

  Lightsabers flashed in the night on the mountain—but not on the main plaza. Seelah walked calmly along the darkened colonnade, now festooned with added decorations: the tentacled heads of the Fifty-seven, staked at even intervals.

  There was the young sentry from the tower, trapped and killed. He’d never abandoned his post. To the right was Hestus, the translator; Seelah had been involved personally in his takedown. Korsin said they’d come back to Hestus in the morning to remove the cybernetic implants. Who knew, there might be something they could use there.

  She could sense Korsin and his chief lieutenants beyond the outer wall now, driving the remnant to a last stand beside the precipice where Omen nearly met its end. No quarter would be offered; she could see Korsin hurling any who surrendered over the side.

  Well, he has experience with that.

  The stone silo of the stable master loomed before her. Uvak enclosures stretched out in all directions from this central hub, where Keshiri aides would wash the stinking beasts. The Keshiri were gone tonight, she saw as she entered the round room. At the center, watched only by a guard in the shadows, hung the limp but breathing body of Ravilan. Strong cords of Keshiri-woven fiber lashed his splayed arms to cornices high on either side of the structure. The arrangement was designed to keep uvak from bolting during their baths. Now it was doing the same for Ravilan, his feet dangling mere centimeters above the ground. Seelah stepped back as a rush of water poured from slots high in the tower, gagging the prisoner.

  The flow stopped after a minute, but it was longer before the weary Ravilan registered the presence of his visitor. “All gone,” he choked. “Right?”

  “All gone,” she said, stepping into his sight. “You are the last.” Ravilan had been caught early, his bad leg failing him once and for all.

  Ravilan shook his head. “We only did it one time,” he said, his throat a gravelly trail. “In Tetsubal. These other cities—I don’t know. We never planned—”

  “—for me,” Seelah said.

  It had been surprisingly easy, once she’d realized Ravilan’s ploy in Tetsubal. The only element was time. She’d returned to the mountain retreat in the night and summoned her most trusted aides from the ward. Soon after midnight, her minions were in the air, propelling their creatures toward the lake towns of the south that Ravilan’s people had been instructed to visit the day before. Her ward had held the only other surviving supply of cyanogen silicate; now it was in the wells and aqueducts of the lake cities—and in the bodies of dead Keshiri. Time was the key element—but she’d had help coordinating it all.

  “Y-you did this?” Ravilan coughed and managed a weak chuckle. “I guess that’s the first time you liked one of my ideas.”

  “It did the job.”

  Ravilan’s crumpled grin vanished. “What job? Genocide?”

  “You care about the Keshiri now?”

  “You know what I mean!” Ravilan strained at his bonds. “My people!”

  Seelah rolled her eyes. “Nothing’s going on here that wouldn’t have happened in the Empire eventually. You know how things were going. Whose movement were you in, anyway?”

  “
Naga Sadow didn’t want this,” Ravilan rasped. “Sadow valued power where he saw it. He valued the old and the new. He valued us—”

  She nodded to the guard—and another crushing barrage of water slammed Ravilan.

  It took longer for him to recover this time.

  “It could have worked,” he choked. “We could have worked … together, like the Sith and the fallen Jedi of old. If only our children—my children—had lived …”

  Ravilan looked up, water streaming from his sagging face. “You.”

  Seelah fixed her silent gaze on the chutes, still dripping, near the ceiling high above.

  “You,” he repeated, louder. “You ran the crèche. You and your people.” His face twisted into an agonized scream. The future of his people had already been smothered, long before. “What did you do? What did you do to us?”

  “Nothing you wouldn’t eventually have done to us.” She stepped toward the shadows, near the guard. “We are not your Sith. We are something new, a chance to do it right. A new tribe.”

  “Younglings—infants!” Wilted, Ravilan moaned. “What … what kind of mother are you?”

  “The mother of a people,” she said, looking toward the guard in the shadows. “Now, my son.”

  The guard stepped forward—and Ravilan saw the animal form of Jariad Korsin coming at him, blade drawn, the wild-eyed face of his father under jet-black hair. The teenager leapt at the prisoner, wielding a jagged vibroblade without remorse. At the last, he drew his lightsaber and cut Ravilan down in a violent flash of crimson.

  “You’ve changed the world today,” Seelah said, stepping close to her son and confederate. He’d been key to coordinating the previous night’s gambit, getting her accomplices where they needed to go. It was right that he should have part of this moment.

  The boy panted, looking down at his victim. “He’s not who I want to kill.”

  “Be patient,” Seelah said, stroking his hair. “I have been.”

  Tilden Kaah walked quietly along the darkened pathways of Tahv, only recently paved with stones. The Sith had dismissed the other Keshiri attendants earlier in the morning, when the excitement began; he had been one of the last to leave. The streets, usually peopled with merrymakers even at this hour, were alarmingly still. He only saw one middle-aged member of the Neshtovar standing station at a crossing; stripped of his uvak years before, the figure looked bored.

  Tilden nodded to the watchman and passed into a plaza near one of the many village aqueducts. Sheets of fresh mountain water tumbled in long crescents from flumes, a cooling presence in what had become a hot night. Arriving before a wall of water, Tilden donned the robe he was carrying, raised the hood, and stepped into the downpour.

  Or, rather, through it.

  Tilden walked, dripping, down the dark passage leading deep into the stone structure. He followed hushed voices to the end of a passage. There was no light—but there was life. Tilden heard agonized chatter as he approached: the horrible news from the south had begun to arrive. The superstitious Keshiri would probably be expected to absorb the horror quietly, a voice said from the shadows. The Destructors would probably be blamed.

  “It is done,” Tilden spoke to the darkness. “Seelah has rid the Skyborn of the Fifty-seven. Of the people not like them, only the bumpy man, Gloyd, remains.”

  “Seelah doesn’t suspect you?” returned a husky female voice from the blackness. “She doesn’t read your mind?”

  “She doesn’t think I’m worth it. And I speak of nothing but the old legends. She thinks me a fool.”

  “She can’t tell our great scholars from our fools,” said a male voice.

  “None of them can,” said another. “Good. Let’s keep it that way. Seelah has done us a favor, reducing their numbers. She may do more.” A blinding flash appeared as an old Keshiri man lit a lantern. There were several Keshiri there, huddled in the cramped space—their attentions not on Tilden, but on the figure stepping from the shadows behind him. Tilden turned to recognize the woman who had first addressed him.

  “Stay strong, Tilden Kaah. With your help—and with the help of all of us here—the Keshiri will finish the job.” Anger glistened in Adari Vaal’s eyes. “I brought this plague upon us. And I will end it.”

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Backlash

  by Aaron Allston

  Published by Del Rey Books

  The rainforest air was so dense, so moist that even roaring through it at speeder bike velocity didn’t bring Luke Skywalker any physical relief. His speed just caused the air to move across him faster, like a greasy scrub-rag wielded by an overzealous nanny-droid, drenching all the exposed surfaces of his body.

  Not that he cared. He couldn’t see her, but he could sense his quarry, not far ahead: the individual whose home he’d crossed so many light-years to find.

  He could sense much more than that. The forest teemed with life, life that poured its energy into the Force, too much to catalogue as he roared past. He could feel ancient trees and new vines, creeping predators and alert prey. He could feel his son Ben as the teenager drew up abreast of him on his own speeder bike, eyes shadowed under his helmet but a competitive grin on his lips, and then Ben was a few meters ahead of him, dodging leftward to avoid hitting a split-forked tree, the recklessness of youth giving him a momentary speed advantage over Luke’s superior piloting ability.

  Then there was more life, big life, close ahead, with malicious intent—

  From a thick nest of magenta-flowered underbrush twice the height of a man, just to the right of Luke’s path ahead, emerged an arm, striking with great speed and accuracy. It was humanlike, gnarly, gigantic, long enough to reach from the flowers to swat the forward tip of Luke’s speeder bike as he passed.

  Disaster takes only a fraction of a second. One instant Luke was racing along, intent on his distant prey and enjoying moments of competition; the next, he was headed straight for a tree whose trunk, four meters across, would bring a sudden stop to his travels and his life.

  He came free of the speeder bike as it rotated beneath him from the giant creature’s blow. He was still headed for the tree trunk. He gave himself an adrenaline-boosted shove in the Force and drifted another couple of meters to the left, allowing him to flash past the trunk instead of into it; he could feel its bark rip at the right shoulder of his tunic. A centimeter closer, and the contact would have given him a serious friction burn.

  He rolled into a ball and let senses other than sight guide him. A Force shove to the right kept him from smacking into a much thinner tree, one barely sturdy enough to break his spine and any bones that hit it. He needed no Force effort to shoot between the forks of a third tree. Contact with a veil of vines slowed him; they tore beneath the impact of his body but dropped his rate of speed painlessly. He went crashing through a mass of tendrils ending in big-petaled yellow flowers, some of which reflexively snapped at him as he plowed through them.

  Then he was bouncing across the ground, a dense layer of decaying leaves and other materials he really didn’t want to speculate about.

  Finally he rolled to a halt. He stretched out, momentarily stunned but unbroken, and stared up through the trees. He could see a single shaft of sunlight penetrating the forest canopy not far behind him; it illuminated a swirl of pollen from the stand of yellow flowers he’d just crashed through. In the distance, he could hear the roar of Ben’s speeder bike, hear its engine whine as the boy put it in a hard maneuver, trying to get back to Luke.

  Closer, there were footsteps. Heavy, ponderous footsteps.

  A moment later, their origin, the owner of that huge arm, loomed over Luke. It was a rancor, humanoid and bent.

  The rancors of this world had evolved to be smarter than those elsewhere. This one had clearly been trained as a guard and taught to tolerate protective gear. It wore a helmet, a rust-streaked cup of metal large enough to serve as a backwoods bathtub, with leather straps meeting under its chin. Strapped t
o its left forearm was a thick durasteel round shield that looked ridiculously tiny compared to the creature’s enormous proportions but was probably thick enough to stop one or two salvos from a military laser battery.

  The creature stared down at Luke. Its mouth opened and it offered a challenging growl.

  Luke glared at it. “Do you really want to make me angry right now? I don’t recommend it.”

  It reached for him.

  SEVERAL DAYS EARLIER

  Empty Space Near Kessel

  It was darkness surrounded by stars—one of them, the unlovely sun of Kessel, closer than the rest, but barely close enough to be a ball of illumination rather than a dot—and then it was occupied, suddenly inhabited by a space yacht of flowing, graceful lines and peeling paint. That was how it would have looked, a vessel dropping out of hyperspace, to those in the arrival zone, had there been any witnesses: nothing there, then something, an instantaneous transition.

  In the bridge sat the ancient yacht’s sole occupant, a teenage girl wearing a battered combat vac suit. She looked from sensor to sensor, uncertain and slow because of her unfamiliarity with this model of spacecraft. Too, there was something like shock in her eyes.

  Finally satisfied that no other ship had dropped out of hyperspace nearby, or was likely to creep up on her in this remote location, she sat back in her pilot’s seat and tried to get her thoughts in order.

  Her name was Vestara Khai, and she was a Sith of the Lost Tribe. She was a proud Sith, not one to hide under false identities and concealing robes until some decades-long grandiose plan neared completion, and now she had even more reason than usual to swell with pride. Mere hours before, she and her Sith Master, Lady Rhea, had confronted Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker. Lady Rhea and Vestara had fought the galaxy’s most experienced, most famous Jedi to a standstill. Vestara had even cut him, a graze to the cheek and chin that had spattered her with blood—blood she had later tasted, blood she wished she could take a sample of and keep forever as a souvenir.