Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn Page 3

“That ended when they levitated me,” Izri rasped, under his breath. He turned back to see the villagers cheering—not for his proclamation, but for Yaru Korsin, Grand Lord of the Skyborn, who had just physically leapt the distance to the top of the column.

  When the cheering finally died down, Korsin spoke in the Keshiri words that his interlocutor, the honored Adari Vaal, Daughter of the Skyborn, had taught him that morning. “We have come from above, as you say,” he said, deep voice carrying to all. “We have come to visit the land that was a piece of us, and the people of that land. And Kesh has welcomed us.”

  More cheering. “We will found … a temple atop the mountain of discovery,” he continued. “We will be many months in labors there, tending to the vessel that brought us and communing with the heavens. And in that time, we will make our home here in Tahv, with our children—aided by the Neshtovar, who were such good stewards here in our absence. They will leave here today, taking wing to all corners of Kesh, to spread the word of our arrival, and find the artisans we require.” He spoke over the applause. “We are the Skyborn—and we will return to the stars!”

  Happy chaos. Adari’s younger son, Tona, squirmed against her. She spied her mother and Finn at an honored place just outside the Circle, beaming happily. Adari looked up at Korsin—and swallowed hard.

  It was all so perfect.

  And all so wrong.

  Chapter Four

  The rapturous mood of the Kesh lasted straight through Moving Day. The Skyborn had been quartered in the fine homes of the Neshtovar while the riders spread the word. As the Neshtovar returned one by one, their guests uniformly declared their preference to remain in the relatively sumptuous accommodations. After the sixth rider appealed to Izri, the elder declared that all riders should move their families to humbler homes, that the Skyborn might know their devotion. Korsin and Seelah had been living in Izri’s own house since the first day.

  Everyone moved but Adari. For her service to the Skyborn, she’d been allowed to remain in Zhari’s house. It also kept her near Korsin, whom she saw daily in her informal role as ambassador and aide. She saw all the prominent Skyborn daily: gruff but amiable Gloyd, who was something called a Houk; Hestus, busily indexing the Keshiri vocabulary; and rust-colored Ravilan, who often seemed lost, a minority within a minority. She also saw Seelah, who had installed herself in Korsin’s lavish lodgings. Seelah’s child was Korsin’s nephew, Adari learned.

  Seelah always glowered at Adari when she was around Korsin. Including today, as Adari stood with him at a dig on the edge of the Cetajan Range, in sight of the ocean she fled to a month before. The Skyborn needed structures to stabilize and protect Omen, but first they needed a clear land passage onto the peninsula. A route was taking shape with the Skyborn, whose number included many miners, hewing huge chunks of strata with their lightsabers.

  “Sabers’ll do better when we recover some of the Lignan crystals to power them,” Gloyd said. Korsin presented a rock sample to Adari. Granite. The efforts were not for her, of course, but she’d always wondered what was below. Now she knew.

  “You were right after all,” Korsin said, watching her study the stone. She hadn’t mentioned her conflict with the Neshtovar, but she’d been anxious to confirm her theories with someone who knew. Volcanos did form new land. And the mountains of the Cetajan Range weren’t volcanoes—while granite did come from magma, they told her, it was formed far underground over the course of eons. That was why its rocks looked different from the flamestones. “I don’t understand half what my miners tell me,” Korsin said, “but they say you could easily help them—if you weren’t helping me.”

  Korsin began speaking with Gloyd about their next project, a dig to find metals necessary to repair Omen. Adari started to interject when she saw Seelah orbiting. Adari shuddered as the woman passed from sight. What had Adari done to earn such hatred?

  She’s not staring at me, Adari realized. She’s staring at Korsin.

  “I saw you,” Adari blurted to Korsin.

  “What?”

  “I saw you a second time on the mountain, that day. You threw something over the side.”

  Korsin turned from his work. He gestured—and Gloyd stepped away.

  “I saw you throw something,” Adari said, swallowing. She looked down at the ocean, crashing against the cliffs. “I didn’t know what—until you sent me to return to the village.” Korsin stepped warily toward her. Adari couldn’t stop talking. “I flew down there, Korsin. I saw him below, on the rocks. He was a man,” she said, “like you.”

  “Like me?” Korsin snorted. “Is … he still there?”

  She shook her head. “I turned him over to look at him,” she said. “The tide swept him away.”

  Korsin was her height, but as she shrank, he loomed. “You saw this—and yet you still brought the Neshtovar to find us.”

  Adari froze, unable to answer. She looked at the rocks, far below, so like the ones farther up the range. Korsin reached for her as he had before …

  … and drew back. His voice softened. “Your people turned on you to protect their society. You were a danger?”

  How did he know? Adari looked up at Korsin. He looked less like Zhari all the time. “I believed something they didn’t.”

  Korsin smiled and took her hand gently. “That’s a fight my people are familiar with. That man you saw—he was a danger to our society.”

  “But he was your brother.”

  Korsin’s grip tightened for a moment before he let go altogether. “You are a good listener,” he said, straightening. The fact wouldn’t have been hard to learn. “Yes, he was my brother. But he was a danger—and we had dangers enough when you found us,” he said. He looked deeply into her eyes. “And I think this is something you know something about, Adari. That same sea took someone from you, too. Didn’t it?”

  Adari’s mouth opened. How? Zhari had died there, but the Neshtovar would never have told Korsin. Speaking of a rider’s fall broke their greatest taboo: falling was being claimed by the Otherside. No one had seen it happen, save for Nink—and the all-seeing Skyborn.

  Korsin was either a mind reader, or he was who he said he was. Her words barely came out. “It—it’s not the same. You pushed that man. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to my—”

  “Of course you didn’t. Accidents happen. But you didn’t mind that he died,” he said. “I can see it in you, Adari. He was a danger to you—to the person you’re becoming.” Korsin’s bushy eyebrows turned up. “You’re glad he’s gone.”

  Adari closed her eyes. Putting his arm around her shoulder, Korsin turned her toward the sun. “It’s all right, Adari. Among the Sith, there is no shame in it. You would never be what you are today with him keeping you down. Just as you’d never be what you’re going to become with Izri Dazh keeping you down.”

  At the name, Adari’s eyes opened. The sunlight dazzled her, but Korsin wouldn’t let her turn away. “You were afraid of us,” he said, “and afraid when you saw the body. You knew we’d die on the mountain if you didn’t bring help. Yet you brought the Neshtovar anyway—because you thought we could help you against them.”

  He released her. Adari looked blankly at the sun for another moment before looking away. Behind her, Korsin spoke in the soothing tones he’d used when his voice had first reached her on the wind.

  “Helping us interact with the Keshiri is not just about helping us, Adari. You will learn things about your world that you never imagined.” He turned over the rock in her hand. “I don’t know how long we’re going to be here, but I promise you will learn more in the next few months than you have in your entire lifetime. Than any Keshiri has.”

  Adari shook. “What—what do you—”

  “A simple thing. Forget what you saw that day.”

  Korsin made good on his word. In her first months with the Skyborn, Adari had learned much about her home. But she had also learned some things about where they had come from, and who they were. She was a good lis
tener. By simple things, we know the world.

  Korsin’s Sith were the beings from above that she denied—but they weren’t the gods of Keshiri legend. Not exactly. They had amazing powers, and perhaps they lived in the stars. But they didn’t bleed sand, and they weren’t perfect. They argued. They envied. They killed.

  The Sith did read minds, to a degree. Korsin had used that to call out to her for help after seeing her in the air. But they weren’t omniscient. She’d found that out with a simple, surreptitious experiment involving Ravilan. She’d suggested he visit a restaurant deep in Tahv’s busiest quarter. Off he went, getting lost in the same neighborhood she always got lost in. The Sith’s perceptive powers were amazing, but they still required accurate knowledge from others.

  She sought to provide that, accompanying Korsin to many work sites, mostly employing jovial Keshiri laborers. The Skyborn were perfect enough for the Keshiri—and perfect enough for her. Yaru Korsin was as far beyond Zhari Vaal in intellect as she was above the rocks, and as long as she learned to avoid the eye of Seelah, another widow of a fallen man, she could expect to learn a great deal more.

  At the same time her knowledge advanced, Izri’s faith was further glorified. She took little joy in that, apart from the occasional chuckle she got from having a more storied role in it than he had. She was the Discoverer, always to be remembered by Keshiri society. No one would remember Izri.

  Watching another quarry being constructed, she wondered what that society would look like. She knew something the Sith didn’t: They’d be here for a long time. She’d mentioned it once to a miner, who promptly discounted it as advice from the local know-nothings.

  But she knew. The metals the Sith sought weren’t in the soil of Kesh. Scholars had scoured every part of the continent. They had recorded what they’d found. If the substances Korsin’s people required hid farther beneath the surface, it would take time to find them—a lot more time.

  Time, the Sith had.

  What, she wondered, would the Keshiri have?

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Abyss

  by Troy Denning

  Published by Del Rey Books

  In the Jade Shadow’s forward canopy hung twin black holes, their perfect darkness surrounded by fiery whorls of accretion gas. Because the Shadow was approaching at an angle, the two holes had the oblong appearance of a pair of fire-rimmed eyes—and Ben Skywalker was half tempted to believe that’s what they were. He had begun to feel like he was being watched the instant he and his father had entered the Maw cluster, and the deeper they advanced, the stronger the sensation grew. Now, at the very heart of the concentration of black holes, the feeling was a constant chill at the base of his skull.

  “I sense it, too,” his father said. He was sitting behind Ben in the copilot’s seat, up on the primary flight deck. “We’re not alone in here.”

  No longer surprised that the Grand Master of the Jedi Order always seemed to know his thoughts, Ben glanced at an activation reticle in the front of the cockpit. A small section of canopy opaqued into a mirror, and he saw his father’s reflection staring out the side of the canopy. Luke Skywalker looked more alone and pensive than Ben ever remembered seeing him—thoughtful, but not sad or frightened, as though he were merely trying to understand what had brought him to such a dark and isolated place, banished from an Order he had founded, and exiled from a society he had spent his life fighting to defend.

  Trying not to dwell on the injustice of the situation, Ben said, “So maybe we’re closing in. Not that I’m all that eager to meet a bunch of beings called the Mind Drinkers.”

  His father thought for a moment, then said, “Well, I am.”

  He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t need to. Ben and his father were on a mission to retrace Jacen Solo’s five-year odyssey of Force exploration. At their last stop, they had learned from an Aing-Tii monk that Jacen had been bound for the Maw when he departed the Kathol Rift. Since one purpose of their journey was to determine whether Jacen had been nudged toward the dark side by something on his voyage, it only made sense that Luke would want to investigate a mysterious Maw-dwelling group known as the Mind Drinkers.

  What impressed Ben, however, was how calm his father seemed about it all. Ben was privately terrified of falling victim to the same darkness that had claimed his cousin. Yet his father seemed eager to step into its depth and strike a flame. And why shouldn’t he be? After everything that Luke Skywalker had suffered and achieved in his lifetime, there was no power in the galaxy that could draw him into darkness. It was a strength that both awed Ben and inspired him, one that he wondered if he would ever find himself.

  Luke’s eyes shifted toward the mirrored canopy section, and he caught Ben’s gaze. “Is this what bothered you when you were at Shelter?” He was referring to a time that was ancient history to Ben—the last part of the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, when the Jedi had been forced to hide their young at a secret base deep inside the Maw.

  “Did you feel like someone was watching you?”

  “How should I know?” Ben asked, suddenly uneasy—and unsure why. By all accounts, he had been an unruly, withdrawn toddler while he was at Shelter, and he recalled being afraid of the Force for years afterward. But he had no clear memories of Shelter itself, or what it had felt like to be there. “I was two.”

  “You did have feelings when you were two,” his father said mildly. “You did have a mind.”

  Ben sighed, knowing what his father wanted, then said, “You’d better take the ship.”

  “I have the ship,” Luke confirmed, reaching for the copilot’s yoke. “Just close your eyes. Let the Force carry your thoughts back to Shelter.”

  “I know how to meditate.” Almost instantly, Ben felt bad for grumbling and added, “But thanks for the advice.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Luke said in a good-natured way. “That’s what fathers do—offer unwanted advice.”

  Ben closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and deliberately. Each time he inhaled, he drew the Force into himself, and each time he exhaled, he sent it flowing throughout his body. He had no conscious memories of Shelter that were his own, so he envisioned a holograph of the facility that he had seen in the Jedi Archives. The image showed a handful of habitation modules clinging to the surface of an asteroid fragment, their domes clustered around the looming cylinder of a power core. In his mind’s eye, Ben descended into the gaudy yellow docking bay at the edge of the facility … and then he was two years old again, a frightened little boy holding a stranger’s hand as his parents departed in the Jade Shadow.

  An unwarranted sense of relief welled up inside Ben as he grew lost in a time when life had seemed so much easier. The last fourteen years began to feel like a long, terrible nightmare. Jacen’s fall to the dark side had never happened, Ben had not been molded into an adolescent assassin, and his mother had not died fighting Jacen. All those sad memories were still just bad dreams, the unhappy imaginings of a frightened young mind.

  Then the Shadow slipped through the containment field and ignited her engines. In the blink of an eye she dwindled from a trio of blue ion circles into a pinpoint of light to nothing at all, and suddenly Ben was alone in the darkest place in the galaxy, one child among dozens entrusted to a small group of worried adults who—despite their cheerful voices and reassuring presences—had very clammy palms and scary, anxious eyes.

  Two-year-old Ben reached toward the Shadow with his free hand and his heart, and he sensed his mother and father reaching back. Though he was too young to know he was being touched through the Force, he stopped being afraid … until a dark tentacle of need began to slither up into the aching tear of his abandonment. He thought for an instant that he was just sad about being left behind, but the tentacle grew as real as his breath, and he began to sense in it an alien loneliness as desperate and profound as his own. It wanted to draw him close and keep him safe, to take the place of his parents and never let him be alo
ne again.

  Terrified and confused, young Ben pulled away, simultaneously drawing in on himself and yanking his hand from the grasp of the silver-haired lady who was holding it.

  Then suddenly he was back in the cockpit of the Jade Shadow, staring into the fire-rimmed voids ahead. Scattered around their perimeter were the smaller whorls of half a dozen more distant rings, their fiery light burning bright and steady against the starless murk of the deep Maw.

  “Well?” his father asked. “Anything feel familiar?”

  Ben swallowed. He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself wanting to withdraw from the Force all over again. “Are we sure we need to find these guys?”

  Luke raised a brow. “So it is familiar.”

  “Maybe.” Ben couldn’t say whether the two feelings were related, and at the moment he didn’t care. There was something hungry in the Maw, something that would still be there waiting for him. “I mean, the Aing-Tii call them Mind Drinkers. That can’t be good.”

  “Ben, you’re changing the subject.” Luke’s tone was more interested than disapproving, as though Ben’s behavior were only one part of a much larger puzzle. “Is there something you don’t want to talk about?”

  “I wish.” Ben told his father about the dark tentacle that had reached out to him after the Shadow departed Shelter so many years ago. “I guess what we’re feeling now might be related. There was definitely some … thing keeping tabs on me at Shelter.”

  Luke considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You were pretty attached to your mother. Maybe you were just feeling abandoned and made up a ‘friend’ to take her place.”

  “A tentacle friend?”

  “You said it was a dark tentacle,” Luke continued thoughtfully, “and guilt is a dark emotion. Maybe you were feeling guilty about replacing us with an imaginary friend.”

  “And maybe you don’t want to believe the tentacle was real because it would mean you left your two-year-old son someplace really dangerous,” Ben countered. He caught his father’s eye in the mirrored section again. “I hope you’re not going to try to psychoanalyze this away, because there’s a big hole in your theory.”