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

  Chapter One

  4985 BBY

  The water was as warm as it was every day, streaming from the marble slot high on the wall down onto Seelah’s body. There had been no refresher, no modern conveniences for the Sith stranded on Kesh for fifteen standard years. But they had learned to live with what they had.

  The glistening droplets of meltwater clinging to her brown skin had come from a glacier half a continent away. Keshiri uvak-fliers, their beasts laden with massive kegs, had ferried the water from that faraway place to the Sith’s mountain retreat. Rooftop attendants heated the water to her exact specifications, channeling it through a system thoroughly cleansed daily for mildew and other pollutants.

  Below, Seelah meticulously raked at her wrist with pumice brought from the foot of the Sessal Spire, kilometers away. Keshiri artists had crafted the stones into pleasing shapes for her. The natives were more interested in appearance than function—but, in this, they had an ally. Seelah looked with her usual disdain at the stall, constructed for her personal use by her Sith brethren immediately after she’d moved into Commander Korsin’s chambers. The place was more a temple than a home.

  Well, she couldn’t have everything. Not here.

  Fifteen years. That’s what it was by the Keshiri calendar, too—although who could trust that? She stepped dripping from the shower, wondering where the time had gone. Not to her body, she saw in the colossal mirror—working glass was another thing the Keshiri were good at. Twice a mother and living on food suited for farm animals back home, and yet Seelah looked as fit as she ever had. It had taken work. But time was one thing she’d had.

  “I know you’re here, Tilden,” Seelah said. Tilden Kaah, her Keshiri attendant, always stayed out of sight from the mirror, never remembering she could sense him through the Force. Now he stood by the doorway, averting his large opal eyes and presenting a robe in his shaking hands.

  Fifteen years hasn’t changed him, either, Seelah thought with a silent chortle as she snatched the robe. But why shouldn’t he look? All that drab purple skin—to call it lavender was flattery. And white hair—the color of age and uselessness. If Keshiri had found other Keshiri beautiful before, it was only because they hadn’t yet seen the Sith.

  And, besides, it was Tilden’s job to worship her. One of the younger high priests of the Keshiri faith—which recognized Seelah and her fellow Sith as ancient deities from the heavens—Tilden lived to follow her everywhere. She rather enjoyed torturing him like this in the mornings. She was the sacrilege that started his day.

  “Your son is hunting with the riders until tonight,” he said. “Your daughter is in Tahv with the educators your people sent.”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, discarding the gown he’d set out in favor of a brighter one. “Get to something important.”

  “Milady is expected in the ward this afternoon for the reviewing,” he said, looking up from his parchment. Finding her fully dressed and standing before the great window, he smiled gently. “Otherwise, you are at your leisure.”

  “And the Grand Lord?”

  “His Eminence, our savior from above, has begun his meetings with his advisers. The usual people, born on high like milady. His giant friend is there, too.” He looked down at his notes. “Oh, and the crimson man has asked for an audience.”

  “Crimson man?” Seelah’s gaze remained on the foaming ocean far below. “Ravilan?”

  “Yes, milady.”

  “Then I should go.” Seelah stretched mightily before turning abruptly to search for her shoes. Tilden had them. They were the only articles of clothing rescued from the crash of Omen that she continued to use. The Keshiri still hadn’t figured out decent footwear.

  “I—I didn’t mean to turn this into a working day so early,” Tilden stammered, fastening her shoes. “Forgive me. Were you finished bathing? I could have the minders recycle the water.”

  “Relax, Tilden—I want to go out,” she said, pinning back her dark hair with a sculpted bone clip, a gift from some local noble she couldn’t remember. She paused in the polished doorway. “But have the team step up the water deliveries—and have them bring it in from the far side of the mountain range. It’s better for the skin from over there.”

  Seelah yawned. It wasn’t even high sun and the daily pantomime was already well under way. Commander Yaru Korsin, the Keshiri’s savior from above, sat in his old bridge chair, listening just as he used to on the command deck of Omen. But now the shattered wreck of the vessel lay behind him, sheltered in a part of the sturdy structure not used for habitation, and his battered chair was incongruously plopped in the middle of a marbled colonnade, stretching out hundreds of meters. Here, high in the open air of the Takara Mountains—recently renamed for his precious mother, wherever in blazes she was—Korsin held court.

  The architecture and location made for a good show for the Keshiri townsfolk who occasionally flew up here. That was according to design. But it was also big enough to accommodate every foolish supplicant that Korsin wanted to cram into his day. Seelah saw Gloyd the gunner, Korsin’s “giant friend,” at the front of the line as usual.

  The lumpy-headed Houk’s jowls quaked as he presented his latest crazed idea: using one of the surviving boring lasers that still had a charge to fire signals into space. Boring seemed the right word to Seelah—and Korsin didn’t appear enthralled, either. How long must Gloyd have been prattling before she arrived?

  “It’ll work this time,” Gloyd said, mottled skin sweating. “All we’ve got to do is get the attention of a passing freighter. An observatory. Anything.” He wiped his forehead. Seelah never thought the genetic lottery had been kind to Houks to begin with, but now it looked as if age and sun were causing Gloyd’s hide to melt from his skull.

  “The intensity will dissipate to the inverse of the square of the distance from Kesh,” came a human voice from behind Korsin. Parrah, Omen’s relief navigator and now their main science adviser, stepped forward. “It’d be just more cosmic background noise. Didn’t they teach you anything where you came from?”

  Probably not, Seelah mused. Gloyd had been a castaway even before he joined the Omen crew. While other outsiders avoided the Stygian Caldera, Gloyd’s team of brigands had figured something truly amazing must be there. There was: the Sith Empire. Few of Gloyd’s companions had survived the discovery. But as gunner and foot soldier, he’d done combat with Jedi plenty of times in his earlier life, making him useful to Naga Sadow and, later, to Yaru Korsin.

  But lately? Not so much. “I don’t think it’s going to work, old friend,” Korsin said, spying Seelah out of the corner of his eye and winking. “And we just can’t run the risk of burning out any more equipment. You know the score.”

  They all did. Even as they built their stone shelter for Omen in the months after the crash, the crew had steadily brought out equipment. Some of it they expected to restore to life with a few fabricated parts; the rest was immediately usable. And used.

  That had been a mistake. It turned out there wasn’t any metal to be found on Kesh. The Sith had ripped and clawed at the surface, expending most of their surviving munitions to no avail. Above, Kesh was pleasing to the eye—but below, it appeared to be little more than a dirtball. Much equipment running on internal power sputtered and died. Worse, something in Kesh’s electromagnetic field was playing hob with everything from radio waves to electrical generation. The lightsabers still worked—thank the Lignan crystals for that—but the castaways, intrepid as they were at cannibalizing, weren’t going to be able to reinvent everything. The tools simply weren’t here.

  “I get that,” Gloyd said, seeming not so tall as
before. “You know me. I’m built for battle. This peaceful paradise is getting to me—”

  “I know something you can do battle with,” Seelah said, her caftan shimmering as she stepped up and put her arm around Korsin. “I think I saw them preparing lunch back in the main hall.” Korsin smiled.

  Gloyd glared at the couple for a moment before letting loose with a churning laugh. “What can I say?” he said, patting his paunch and turning. “The lady knows me.”

  Korsin looked past the retreating hulk to see another figure. “Ravilan! What’s your next grand plan to get us off this rock?”

  “Nothing along those lines,” Ravilan said. The crimson man of Tilden’s description stepped forward and regarded his leader civilly. “Not today.”

  “Really? Well, we’re all getting older. The mind forgets.”

  “Not this one, Commander.” Ravilan ran his finger along his right cheek tendril—an expression of thoughtfulness among the Red Sith. It made Seelah’s skin crawl. She gripped Korsin tighter. Onetime quartermaster for Omen’s complement of Massassi warriors, Ravilan had been left without a mission after his charges died during their first days on Kesh. Since then, he’d held a sequence of odd jobs. More importantly, he’d become the spokes-being for the Fifty-seven—the surviving crew members whose bloodlines to the red-skinned Sith species ran truest—and for those who, like Gloyd, were less interested in living on Kesh than leaving it.

  But Ravilan’s lot had grown increasingly bleak. His people hadn’t numbered fifty-seven since their arrival. A dozen had fallen due to accident or professional incompetence—and none of the children of Ravilan’s people had lived a day. Kesh had not been kind in equal measure to all its guests. As motives for wanting to leave went, his were fairly strong.

  But he did not bring him before Korsin today, apparently. “There’s something else,” Ravilan said, eyeing Seelah. “People in the service of your … your wife have been trying to document the ancestries of all our crew. They have grown quite insistent,” he added, cocking an eyebrow-stalk.

  Feeling Seelah’s grip tighten further, Korsin rose. “Your people don’t have to worry about that, Rav. Human crew only.”

  “Yes, but many of us have at least some human blood,” Ravilan said, walking along the colonnade with Korsin. The crowd parted; Seelah walked gingerly behind. “And many of your people have some of ours. The merger of the Dark Jedi line with that of my Sith forebears is an article of pride to my—to our people, Korsin. To have someone picking it apart—”

  Korsin continued walking, enjoying the view of the ocean, strands of silver in his hair glistened in the sun. Seelah stepped up her pace to get closer. “It’s still a foreign planet,” Korsin said. “We don’t know what killed your Massassi when we landed. We don’t know what’s been happening to—well, you know.”

  “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—”

  “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 something 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.

  Chapter Two

  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 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. Tilden had told her that, and Seelah had other confidants who provided regular reports. Korsin and the Keshiri woman would stroll the pathways painstakingly carved out of the once treacherous mountainside, discussing—what? Not a blasted lot, as far as she could tell.

  Their walks dated from the beginning of Seelah’s own relationship with Korsin. Back then, there had been a need. The Vaal woman had discovered the Sith on the mountain, and had acted as interme
diary 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, the walks 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. She’d recently begun turning up in vor’shandi face markings, a decoration unheard of for a Keshiri widow of an uvak-rider. But eavesdroppers confirmed 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.