Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #8: Secrets Read online

  By John Jackson Miller

  Star Wars: Knight Errant

  STAR WARS: LOST TRIBE OF THE SITH

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Secrets

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Pantheon

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Sentinel

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Purgatory

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Savior

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Paragon

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Skyborn

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: Precipice

  Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #8: Secrets is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  2012 Del Rey eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2012 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

  Excerpt from Star Wars®: Fate of the Jedi: Apocalypse copyright © 2012 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Apocalypse by Troy Denning. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-51945-0

  www.starwars.com

  www.delreybooks.com

  Cover art: David Stevenson and Scott Biel

  Series design: David Stevenson

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Apocalpyse

  Chapter One

  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 the local faction in Beray. 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.”

  * * *

  The body was freshly killed. One quick, inartful slash to the throat had been the end of the uvak. Hilts studied the smelly beast baking in the noon sun. It surely was the creature he’d seen approaching—slain here, right in the middle of the terrace.

  “I guess the stables didn’t suit our visitor,” Hilts said.

  Jaye cowered behind him. “Do … do you want the weapon?”

  Hilts looked around, feeling through the Force. Something was here. “Yes,” he said. “Give it to me.”

  Jaye fumbled through the knapsack and produced the lightsaber. Hilts hadn’t owned one as Caretaker—what was the point?—but on their way out of Tahv, he’d pilfered one from the corpse of a massive warrior. He never knew what he might need.

  “Do you know how to use it?” Jaye asked.

  “Sure. Just get them to stand right in front of me, and I’ll turn it on.”

  Levity didn’t lift the unease. Hilts wasn’t practiced in the use of the Force for defense, either. He’d had the same training as a boy that other Tribe members had, but apart from deflecting chunks of falling aqueduct, he’d had little use for the Force’s physical manifestations in recent decades.

  Still, he knew a bad feeling when he felt it—and this wasn’t more acid in his throat. In fact, he recognized this particular sting …

  “The wardroom,” Hilts said, sensing the source of the twinge up ahead. “Stay outside. If you hear trouble, run and never return.”

  There may have been no statues of Seelah Korsin in the palace in Tahv, but the figure in the bas-relief carved outside the hospital was unmistakable. As Yaru Korsin’s wife, Seelah was the Mother of the Tribe; but before that, she’d been Devore Korsin’s wife, and the mother of a traitor. Hilts had never seen Seelah in any depictions, but looking at the smooth skin, the coiffed hair, and the perfect figure in the marble, he knew he’d seen her twin—and recently.

  “Iliana Merko,” he called, stepping through the doorway. “It’s Caretaker Hilts. I know you’re here. I think we should talk.”

  Chapter Two

  “Iliana? Iliana?”

  Hilts gaped as he saw the figure in the shadows. The last two weeks had been hard on everyone on Kesh, but he barely recognized the leader of the Sisters of Seelah. Iliana sat huddled in the cold corner of the dark storeroom, gently caressing a skull.

  She sobbed gently, not registering his presence. Hilts looked back nervously to the outer room and its rows of marbled surgical tables—and then down to the lightsaber in his hand. He clipped it back to his belt. Iliana Merko was a dangerous faction leader, but the figure before him was something else. Her once-bright hair was dirty and tangled; her once-flawless skin was smudged with ash and blood—and amazingly, with something he’d never thought he’d see on her face: tears.

  “She died here,” Iliana said, bringing the skull to her forehead. “Alone.”

  Hilts looked down. Here in the cool darkness, some portion of a skeleton had survived, clumped in a corner. Realizing who Iliana thought the skull belonged to, he spoke cautiously. “How do you know it’s Seelah?”

  “I know,” Iliana whispered. Opening her gloved hand, she revealed a ring bearing the Korsin family seal. A Tapani commitment band.

  “They just left her here,” Hilts said, kneeling to look at the remains. The femurs appeared whole, but only tiny shards remained of the bones beneath. Time hadn’t done this, he thought—and as he noticed the cane nearby, history fell into place. He’d known that Seelah’s betrayal had been exposed, and that Nida Korsin had punished her mother. But the records never said whether it was exile or death. Now The Blocks down below made sense. The barrier would keep a crippled Seelah here as much as it kept others out. “Exile,” he said quietly.

  “She was betrayed!” Iliana angrily blinked back tears. “She deserved better than this!”

  “And she’d still be dead, whatever memorial she had.” Watching the woman gently return the skull to the floor, Hilts rose and stepped back. “You’re alone here. What happened to …”

  “The Sisters of Seelah?” Iliana kept her face to the wall as she
composed herself. “We fought hard when the factions fell upon one another. But then we fell apart—just like everyone else.” She shook her head and looked back with golden eyes shot with red. “We had nothing to follow. Seelah was born a slave!”

  “I guess so.”

  “I know it,” she said, balling her gloved fists in anger. “As a girl, I once had a Force vision of Seelah. She asked me to avenge her.”

  Hilts thought about the bas-relief outside. “So that’s how you knew how she wore her hair.”

  “But what I never told anyone is what she was doing in the vision,” she said. “There was this monster, this red monster, looking just like that Ravilan in the message. And she was washing its feet!” She lashed out with the Force, shattering the precious bones against the wall. “Its stinking, disgusting feet!”

  Hilts nodded. Yes, he’d want to be avenged for something like that.

  Iliana pushed past him and stomped into the wardroom. “Apparently some of the other Sisters had had similar visions.” She rubbed her eye clean of a lingering tear, and then flicked it away, as if it were only grit. “We couldn’t stand together long after that.”

  Among the marble biers, Iliana paused. In a flash, her hand went to her lightsaber. “There’s someone out there,” she snapped, eyes on the doorway. “They’re here!”

  Hilts hurried into the room, past her. “It’s okay. He’s with me.” He called out for his assistant. Jaye timidly appeared from outside.

  Iliana lowered her lightsaber and rolled her eyes. “The figurer? The world’s coming to an end and you’re still keeping pets!”

  “I’ve got to have something to take care of,” Hilts said. “It’s my job, after all.” He interposed himself between the woman and Jaye. “But what did you mean, ‘They’re here’?”