“The sentinel’s in your thoughts again,” Edell said. “You have trouble hiding it.” He sniffed at the air. “I never married, of course.”
“There’s a shock,” she said. “Who could live with a Sith? I’m amazed there are any humans left on Kesh.”
Edell laughed, a dark hearty sound that startled her. “I wonder about that, too! I tend to prefer building things to the company of others.”
Maybe that’s how he got to be High Lord, she thought. He’s a shut-in. Maybe nobody who leaves the house ever reaches fifty over there.
Social graces aside, she couldn’t help but be impressed by his drive—even if it was toward a bad end. She’d wondered after the play why he hadn’t simply gone back to Mischance and departed with what he’d learned. Evidently, he didn’t feel that would be enough to keep him from losing face after being shot down. It was easy to imagine that he had rivals; the Chronicles described seven High Lords. Was his position at risk if he only brought back intelligence?
“I have to do something,” he’d said again and again. But what could he do?
Possibly quite a bit. The Force flowed around Edell and his human companions in a way it didn’t for anyone she’d ever known in Alanciar. The Alanciari had trainers in the use of the Force as they did for everything else, but at root was an understanding that was shallow at best; just what Adari Vaal had been able to describe from observing the talents of the Sith. But Edell came from a long tradition of Force-use. What secret powers did he know?
Several, she decided. That they’d gotten this far wasn’t due to her ability to bluff. Edell was doing something, surreptitiously deadening the reason of those who cast their eyes toward him. She saw him as he was. Others, if not literally seeing Edell as he wanted to appear, seemed unable to focus much attention on him without becoming distracted by something else.
That would be handy to learn, she thought. But whatever he was doing wouldn’t be enough to hide his appearance after today. Observance Day was over, and a traveling actor still in Sith costume wouldn’t do. She pointed up ahead. “As soon as we reach the crossing, we’ll find a cargo boat to ride in up the canal. Enjoy the air while you can—you’re going to be riding with the crates.”
“How long will that take?”
“It’s the straightest line to Sus’mintri. Should just be a day or two,” she said.
“A day!”
“You’re lucky it’s this close. The War Cabinet used to meet far in the interior, before Vaal Hall was built. They’d call me in for meetings and it would take forever to get there. It’s just a couple days’ ride from Uhrar now. But don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of time to get back to Mischance—and for you to live up to your side of the deal.”
He looked at one of the packet boats, slipping quickly down the channel without the aid of a muntok team. “They don’t look comfortable inside,” he said. “Surely you can do better.”
Quarra rolled her eyes. “We’re not going to find you a luxury cabin! If you wanted to travel your own way, you should’ve flown your airships higher and not gotten shot—”
Skreeeet!
The sound was back and all around: the alarm whistles, coming from the towers in the fields running up the hillside. Quarra pointed to the signal stations, fireglobes blinking nonstop. The color vocabulary was more limited in the daytime, but she could see from the nearest tower the same message that Jogan had first sent the continent. The Sith are back!
Grabbing her forearm with one hand, Edell ripped his goggles off with the other. Urgently, he scanned the low horizon to the northwest.
“They’re out there,” he said.
“I know,” she replied. The unease she’d experienced in the station belfry was back tenfold. And now the thoughtcriers were screaming warnings, too. Edell’s arrival nights earlier had been a sprinkling. Now a storm was coming.
And, astonishingly to her, the High Lord seemed even less happy about it than she was.
“Too soon! Too soon!” He waved his arms to the skies. “Too soon!”
10
They appeared as flecks of tar on the pastel sky, blisters of evil a thousand meters over the ground. An ominous chevron of airships, either end stretching beyond the horizon—and another, trailing group, higher still. The ships were larger than Edell’s nimble scout vessels, with twice the number of captive uvak driving them ahead. Painted designs turned the balloons into beasts, scowling at the farmlands. And the monsters had teeth beneath: each of the mighty vosso-wood-frame gondolas came to a spear’s point in front.
Bentado’s Ebon Fleet.
“They came too soon,” Edell repeated. The bulk of the force had been nearly ready when he’d cast off on his voyage, but he’d expected them to wait for his return. His own aerial transit had taken three days; to be here now, Edell realized that Bentado must have left almost immediately after getting Taymor’s message of success.
Impulsive fool! Why would Grand Lord Hilts allow it? Edell already knew his answer: the consort, Iliana, would be happy to see Bentado go. But politics didn’t matter now, not when the ships had already crossed the coast and were descending. They’d simply flown over the shoreline ballista batteries. Desperately, Edell looked for something to climb. Were the fortresses across the fields the only defense remaining?
He got his answer when one of the blimps blossomed brightly, and then another. He couldn’t make out what was shooting at the airships, but the fireballs were familiar enough. Thunder rolled across the farmland toward them, and a fog developed all along the western skyline.
“Blast!”
“How many are there?” Quarra asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re the enemy. I’m not going to tell you—”
“It’s not about the war,” she said, clutching at his slicker. “It’s about my family! Uhrar is just a few days inland. Those things could be there in hours!”
Before he could respond, a muntok-driven hay cart hurtled past them. It stopped just short of the canal bridge, where it discharged several Keshiri soldiers. While one detached the cart from the team, two others ripped the hay covering clear. They folded down the wooden walls of the vehicle, revealing a large-sized version of the weapon Quarra had wielded against him earlier.
Edell stood frozen. He’d thought it was only fog, out west. Looking more closely, he saw it was raining upward: Flaming javelins and shards of glass rocketed skyward from similar camouflaged mobile units, hidden throughout the fields. Nearby, the muntok squawked in surprise as the ballista team fired its weapon with a painful snap.
“Hurry!” Quarra yelled, dashing toward the canal station house. The signal tower atop it was ablaze with light and color, communicating the reports of spotters up and down the line. Willing his legs to move from the spot, Edell followed. There were more explosions, with flashes beyond the northern and southern horizons.
“Curse him!” Edell spat on the ground. “Too soon!”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Bentado,” he said. “Another High Lord. He wasn’t supposed to launch until I returned! Then he’d have known about your fire-weapons—and everything else!”
He cursed himself, too. He’d worried that Bentado would try some sort of assault in the coming weeks; would try this; it was why Edell had stayed, hoping to learn enough to forestall another defeat. But Bentado had moved immediately, and worse, he had sent most of the ready airships: a disaster beyond reckoning. From behind the canal house, he spied a trio of mighty airships still a couple of kilometers off. Both were losing altitude rapidly, their envelopes punctured. One erupted in flame; another lost all its lift at once and pitched over, sending its inhabitants screaming to the fields below.
The fortress across the fields to the northwest opened up, catapulting a shining cloud into the withering remains of the third airship. Diamonds again! The wreckage slammed into the field, where the launchers pummeled it mercilessly. Edell gawked. A calamity of historic proportions was under way, and if not
its engineer, he was its witness. At least nothing had struck too close—
“Look out!”
Ballista-fire from the cart whipped past, nearly striking the signal station. A second later something did hit it. An airship careened past, clipping the tower. Wrenched loose, its gondola plummeted toward the canal. Freed of its weight, the shredded balloon tumbled and bounced across the fields to the east.
Without warning, Quarra left his side, bolting northward across the canal bridge. Yelling her name, Edell followed—into a stampede. Severed from their canal-boat yokes, muntoks charged along the raised towpath, knocking the High Lord heels-over-head into the channel.
Edell punched through the brackish water and yelled again. “Quarra!”
He clambered over the slick walls and ran up the steps to a canal-side cargo platform. The clear sky was gone now, replaced by ebon smoke. Everywhere across the terraced farmlands sweeping out to the ocean, the remains of airships blazed in heaps on the ground, with still more angry pillars rising from beyond the horizon. And there were figures on the ground near some of the downed vessels. Some unmoving; others running, gleaming lightsabers in hand.
On the attack or under attack? He couldn’t see, but he could feel the same emotion from both sides through the Force. Pure pandemonium. The rout was on!
“Die, Sith!”
Edell’s neck jerked back at the familiar voice—but the threat wasn’t to him. Meters away from the concrete berm on the northern bank, a black-suited Sith warrior battled an unseen enemy. Not recognizing the male human, Edell leapt from the platform. Lighting behind the warrior, Edell saw the man’s foe: Quarra! Standing over the body of a fallen Keshiri, Quarra fired round after round from the soldier’s repeating hand-ballista at the Sith invader. The warrior parried the projectiles easily with his lightsaber.
“Tyro!” Edell yelled, pulling off his hood. “Over here!”
Quarra stopped firing. She looked at him, startled—but the Sith warrior was more surprised. “High Lord Vrai!”
“That’s right,” Edell said, speaking loudly to be heard over the surrounding din. He stepped toward the pair. “What are you doing here? You were all supposed to await my return—when the rest of the fleet was finished!”
“High Lord Bentado ordered—”
Before he could finish, the young warrior spied Quarra raising her weapon and lunged, bisecting the wooden device. He spun for another stroke—and Edell and Quarra both lashed out through the Force, hurling the astonished warrior and his lightsaber separately into the nearby field.
Edell turned toward her, holding the remains of the split weapon. “What are you doing shooting at him?”
“My job,” she yelled, kneeling to cradle the fallen Keshiri whose weapon she’d taken. The lavender-skinned warrior was no more than a youngling, Edell saw. “I made a deal with you, Sith Lord. No one else!”
Edell took a step toward her, only to be rocked from his feet by another explosion, much closer. Looking up, he saw a massive airship, the largest of all the Ebon Fleet, soaring past. Tattooed with Korsin Bentado’s sneering emblem, the flagship Yaru careened toward the eastern highlands, its gondola smoking from javelins impaled in its underside.
He blinked. Yes, that was the Yaru, all right, vanishing over the eastern horizon. Seconds later, a flash of light and a clap of thunder announced its arrival—or not—atop the plateau.
Edell grabbed at Quarra’s arm. “Quick, let’s follow!”
She jerked away from him. “I’m not going!”
“They went east—which is where we were going anyway!”
“The plan has changed,” she said, standing. Her face twisted in hurt as she looked at the chaos across the fields. “The war’s on! I’ve got to see that my people are safe—that my children are safe!” She ran through the smoke toward the bridge, heading back the way they’d come.
Edell pulled the hood back over his head and gave chase. “I saw your district on the map on the boat! It’s southeast of the capital—two days from it, you said. And it must be at least three days from here. It’s out of our way!”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve got to get home!”
“What about your precious Jogan?”
Hearing the name, she stopped beneath the signal station and looked up. “I don’t know what to do about that,” she said, her voice cracking as she saw the lights. “I can’t do everything. But I’ve got to do this.”
Edell swallowed. All across the terraced fields, Sith were being blown to bits or riddled with glass from Keshiri gunners. Alanciar hadn’t been a good place to be alone and human before. It certainly wouldn’t be now. He pulled the hood more tightly around his head and approached her.
“We’ve got to get out of here regardless,” he said. He clapped his hand on her shoulder. “Fine. We do it your way. But then, we do it my way!”
11
The second round of alarms hadn’t stopped in three and a half days; they seemed to scream louder than ever. Quarra had gotten used to the headache. Half the population’s boiling water for the whistles, she thought, and the other half’s making earshells for the deaf!
But these were her whistles, Uhrar’s whistles. Standing at midnight in the darkened streets of the industrial town, she felt pride that they’d worked exactly as intended. There had been drills for years, but there had always been some question as to whether the great glass pipes would last through an actual invasion. That question had been answered.
All of Alanciar seemed to have held up well, from what she’d seen. She and Edell had escaped the conflict by doubling back, but the battle’s outcome was readily apparent. The crescent of Sith airships had been wide indeed, sixty vessels striking across a wide swath of territory. All but the two northernmost of the Six Claws had been bypassed, leaving the fighting limited to the Western Shield—a name that had proven more than topographic. The fortresses and ballisteers amid the farmlands had destroyed most of the Sith invaders in midair. Others had been driven to ground, where they confronted overwhelming numbers. The thoughtcriers reported various Sith still on the loose, and signal towers continued flashing madly. Whether the fugitive Sith were real or phantoms, however, wasn’t her problem. She had to get home. She’d flashed her credentials to commandeer a muntok cart and team. No one was going to interfere with a wardmaster racing to her home district. Edell had ridden in the back, out of sight. After three days and nights’ ride, she’d arrived just after sunset.
Touring Uhrar that evening made her feel much better. She’d found her children, asleep, in the community’s protective shelter—the first place she’d looked, and exactly where they were supposed to be. Her staff had done a marvelous job rounding everyone up; the family had, in fact, been there since Edell’s force struck more than a week earlier.
The deputy wardmaster had seemed almost disappointed to see her. Her absence had been his time to shine. She couldn’t worry about that now. Nor did she need to see Brue; with their children safe and so much glass ammunition being used, he’d probably been ordered back to the factory for a late shift.
Stepping out of her office, she looked up at the flashing lights of the signal station and took a deep breath. The cart with Edell inside sat nearby in the darkness. She found him sitting in the back, eating the food she’d snuck out.
“Your family is safe,” he said. “Are you satisfied?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Liar.” He tossed a bone outside. “Let’s go. This detour may have been good for you, but it was costly for me. To Sus’mintri.”
She climbed onto the driver’s seat and took the reins. Edell slipped back into the darkness of the wagon, his back to hers, his face out of sight in the shadows.
Rumbling across the stone path, she looked off into the darkness. While aerial attacks were a danger, the blackout—for all but the signal stations—would continue. Finally, she spoke. “What did you mean when you said I had more in common with the Sith than I thought?”
&n
bsp; After contemplation, Edell spoke. “I mean you’re moved by a desire to improve yourself—and that you despair of weakness in others. I wasn’t joking. You’re never satisfied. I expect that it has made you a good warmaster—”
“Wardmaster.”
“—a good organizer of others. You see what needs to be done, and you expect it done. You see a lack of ambition as a lack of respect not just for self, but for others. And you.”
She didn’t respond.
“This husband of yours—I can almost see his face when you think of him. He’s a nothing. He never was, and never wanted to be, more than he is. He’s slowing you down. I take it that drove you to that sentinel, that Jogan. But while he may have marginally more to offer than your husband, he’s just along for the ride, too.” The High Lord took a sip from a bottle. “I studied him, you know, while he was my prisoner. He may have a uniform, but he’s a watcher, not an actor. You could have him, yes, but you’d soon tire of him.”
Quarra stared into the blackness. “There’s more to him than that.”
“Maybe, but there’s so much more to you. You’d outgrow him—and he’d weigh you down, like the uvak on my airships. And you’d have to cut him loose.”
“Yeah, I saw what you did with yours,” she said, remembering the massive corpse that had fallen from the sky onto Jogan. “Forget it. I’m not going to make a choice like that.”
“That’s the good news,” Edell said. “Because as with airships, the larger you become, the more you can carry. Power isn’t just having choices. Power is being able to decide whether you must choose at all. You can have your husband and little family—and your lover in the tower. And you can extend your authority, and have your word obeyed.”
Quarra blinked. “What, in service to you?”
“Yes,” he replied. “But also in service to yourself. You could be Sith, Quarra. It’s just a matter of belief. You’ll never truly be Sith as long as you wear the chains of anyone else—but casting off these lesser ties is the first step.”
Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories Page 29