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, momen-tarily 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 Omencrew, 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 ward-room.”

“What happened to the last one, Orlenda?” Seelah smirked. “Did you finally kill him with your kindnesses?”

“No. He’s dead.”

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Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith:Paragon 15

“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 Omento plumb the oral histories of the Keshiri. They’d sought any hint mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

16

John Jackson Miller

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.

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Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith:Paragon 17

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 Omencrashed. “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.”

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Chapter Three

The Sith were about glorification of self and the sub-jugation 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 membersmill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5