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 situation—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 wooden 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. He’s 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. The Keshiri woman 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.”
Chapter Three
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.
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 them all 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 wooden pails.
Alive and alone here stood Ravilan, rattled and clinging inside the still-locked city gate. He had held his position in Tetsubal throughout the evening, looking much the worse for it. Korsin approached him as soon as he dismounted.
“It started after I met with my contacts here,” Ravilan said. “People started collapsing in restaurants, in the markets. Then the panic began.”
“And where were you during all this?”
Ravilan pointed to the town circle, a plaza with a large sundial much like the one in Tahv. It was the tallest structure in the city, apart from the uvak-driven pulley system that fed the aqueduct. “I couldn’t find the aide I’d brought with me. I leapt up there to call for her—and to survey what was going on.”
“Surveying,” Seelah snarled. “Really!”
Ravilan exhaled angrily. “Yes, I was trying to get clear! Who knows what plague these people might be carrying? I was up there for hours, watching people drop. I called for my uvak, but it was dead, too.”
“Tether ours outside the walls,” Korsin ordered. He looked flustered in the torchlight. He pulled a cloth from his tunic and placed it over his mouth, not seeming to realize he was the last in the party to do so. He looked at Seelah. “Biological agent?”
“I—I can’t say,” she said. Her work had been with the Sith, never the Keshiri. Who knew what they might be susceptible to?
Korsin tugged at Gloyd. “My daughter’s in Tahv. Make sure she gets back to the mountain,” he said. “Go!”
The Houk, uncharacteristically shaken, bolted for his mount.
“It could be airborne,” Seelah said, walking dazed through the corpses. That would explain how it had hit so many, so quickly. “But we haven’t been affected—”
A cry came from up ahead. There, Seelah saw what their scout had found beneath another body: Ravilan’s missing assistant. The woman was in her forties, like Seelah. Human—and dead.
Seelah clutched the gauze over her face. Fool, fool—I’m a fool! Is it already too late?
“It’s late enough,” Ravilan said, catching her unguarded thought. He confronted Korsin. “You know what you have to do.”
Korsin spoke in a monotone. “We’ll burn the city. Of course, we’ll burn it.”
“It’s not enough, Commander. We have to shut them out!”
“Shut who out?” Seelah snapped.
“The Keshiri!” Ravilan gestured to the bodies around them. “There is something killing them and it can kill us! We’ve got to remove them from our lives once and for all!”
Korsin looked completely taken aback.
Seelah grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t listen to this. How will we live without them?”
“Like Sith!” Ravilan exclaimed. “This is not our way, Seelah. You have—we have become too dependent upon these creatures. They are not Sith.”
“Neither are we, by your people’s lights.”
“Don’t get political,” Ravilan said. “Look around, Seelah! Whatever this is should have killed us by now. If it hasn’t, we should take it for what it is. This is a warning from the dark side.”
Behind the cloth, Seelah’s jaw dropped. Korsin snapped back to reality. “Wait,” he said, taking Ravilan’s arm. “Let’s talk about this …”
Korsin and Ravilan began walking toward the gate, which even now was being opened by their attendants. The village itself seemed to exhale, wretched air passing through the opening. Seelah didn’t move, spellbound by the bodies around her. The dead Keshiri looked all the same to her, purple faces and blue tongues, faces twisted in choking agony.
Her footing faltered, and she saw Ravilan’s assistant. What was her name? Yilanna? Illyana? Seelah had known the woman’s whole family tree the day before. Why couldn’t she remember her name now, when the woman was on the ground, choked on her tongue, bloated and blue—
Seelah stopped.
She knelt beside the corpse, careful not to touch it. She drew her shikkar—the glass blade the Keshiri had fashioned for her—and carefully worked open the woman’s mouth. There it was, the tongue a mad azure, blood vessels engorged and bursting. She’d seen it before in humans, at the edge of her memory …
“I need to go back,” Seelah said, erupting from the village gates. “I need to go back home—to the ward.”
Korsin, directing his henchmen building a bonfire, looked puzzled. “Seelah, forget about any survivors. We’re the survivors. We hope.”
Ravilan, lucklessly trying to calm the collected uvak Korsin had tethered outside the village wall, looked back in alarm. “If you think of bringing this disease into our sanctum—”
“No,” she said. “I’m going alone. If we here are infected, nothing matters anyway.” She took the bridle of an uvak from Ravilan and flashed him an unenthusiastic smile. “But if we’re not infected, it’s like you said. It’s a warning.”
Korsin watched her leave and turned to the task of burning the village. Seelah didn’t look back, soaring into the night. There wasn’t much time. She’d need to meet with her entire staff at the ward, her most loyal aides.
And she’d need to see her son.
When dawn broke over the Takara Mountains, Seelah was not found
in the shower by Tilden Kaah—as much as she now felt like she needed one. Seelah hadn’t slept at all. With Korsin and Ravilan’s return in the dead of night, the retreat had become a crisis center.
Communications were the real problem. The deaths of nameless Keshiri had stirred the Force little for those who didn’t care about them anyway. But the aftermath had stirred such confusion in the minds of the Sith that even the most experienced heralds were having trouble fielding messages. Korsin had been careful in calling for the return of his people from the Keshiri towns and villages; so far, Tahv and the rest of the major cities had not heard of the disaster in Tetsubal, and he didn’t want a mass withdrawal putting the natives on their guard. Sith abroad were instructed to casually remove themselves from public contact and make their way home.
What had befallen Tetsubal had not yet struck the major cities—but reconnaissance fliers were still out, checking on the surrounding areas. By the time word came in from the hinterlands, all of the Sith would be safely in their redoubt.
Seelah saw Korsin several times in the morning as she passed through. He wanted her staff to set up quarantines for reentry to the compound. None of the Sith who had torched Tetsubal were showing any symptoms of distress, but the stakes were high. Seelah had assignments of her own in the ward, and in fact few of her medical staffers appeared in public. “We’re working on the problem,” she had told him.
Reentering at noon, Seelah saw Ravilan standing with Korsin, monitoring reports. Korsin seemed haggard from lack of sleep—his little purple fluff wouldn’t be coming for lunch today! But Ravilan, despite his harrowing experiences of the day before, seemed rejuvenated; his bald head was a robust magenta.
“It goes better than we feared, Korsin,” Ravilan said. No Grand Lord now, Seelah noticed. Not even Commander.
Korsin grunted. “All your people are back?”
“I am informed they have all just arrived back at the stables. Not much of a vacation,” Ravilan said, his facial tendrils curling slightly, “but then there is much work to be done. On our new priorities.”
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith#3 - Paragon Page 2