Текст книги "Paragon "

Автор книги: John J. Miller

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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 isolationwas a practical impossibility in an Empire comprisingso many systems and so many potential hyperspaceroutes; the Stygian Caldera was a veil, not a wall, andhe could see opportunity through it. And in Sadow’sentourage, Seelah had seen many humans and membersmill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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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 house-hold, 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’dspat, between bloody punches, “out there, the futurelooks likeyou. ”

Adari Vaal had once told Korsin that the Keshiri did not have a number large enough to describe their own population. The Omencrew had tried to make esti-mates 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 nurs-

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ing 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 youduring 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.

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“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 whoout?” 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– wehave become too depen-dent 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 . . . ”

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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, spell-bound 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’rethe 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 unenthu-siastic 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 mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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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 quaran-tines 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.

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Reentering at noon, Seelah saw Ravilan standing with Korsin, monitoring reports. Korsin seemed hag-gard 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 reju-venated; 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.”

Seelah looked up. It should be about now.

“Rider coming!”

The herald sensed the uvak’s approach long before it appeared on the southern horizon. Waved directly onto the colonnade, the rider set the beast down and leapt to the stone surface. All eyes were on the new arrival. All save Seelah’s.

“Grand Lord,” he said, short of breath. “It . . .has happened again . . . in Rabolow!”

Seelah heard Korsin’s gasp—but she saw Ravilan’s yellow eyes bulge. It took but a second for the quartermaster to find his composure. “Rabolow?”

“That’s on the Ragnos Lakes, isn’t it?” Seelah looked toward Ravilan and smiled primly. “That’s where your people were assigned to go yesterday, wasn’t it, Ravilan? Villages on the Ragnos Lakes.”

He nodded. They’d all been there when it was being discussed. Ravilan cleared his throat, suddenly dry.

“I—I should speak then with my associate who just returned from there.” He hobbled past Seelah, turned, and bowed. “I—I really should meet them. Commander.”

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“You do that,” Seelah said. Korsin said nothing, still flabbergasted by the recent news and the coincidence.

He watched Ravilan disappear from sight, heading for the stables.

“Rider coming!”

Korsin looked up. Seelah thought he almost looked afraid, afraid of the news the rider would bring.

The news was of another city of death, on another of the Ragnos Lakes. A third rider told of a third. And a fourth. One hundred thousand Keshiri, dead.

Korsin goggled. “Something to do with the lakes?

That—what was it—algae of Ravilan’s?”

Seelah crossed her arms and looked directly at Korsin, stooped over and nearly her same height. She was tempted to let the moment linger . . .

. . . but there was work to be done. She called for Tilden Kaah.

Her worried assistant appeared from the direction of the ward, holding a small container. She took it and dismissed him. “Do you know what this is, Korsin?”

Korsin turned the empty vial over in his hand.

“Cyanogen silicate?”

It was from her medical stores on Omen—and also from the stores Ravilan kept for the creatures in his care. In its solid form, she explained, it was used as a cauterizing agent by healers working with the Massassi.

She had seen it used again and again in Ludo Kressh’s service. Nothing weaker could do anything to those savages’ hides.

“It’s bad enough on its own,” she said. “But if mois-ture gets into it, it breaks down—and intensifies a thou-sandfold. One particle per billion could do anything.”

Korsin’s bushy eyebrows flared. “What—what could it do in a water table? Or an aqueduct?”

Seelah held his hands firmly and looked directly into his eyes. “Tetsubal.”

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She explained the story behind the death of her ward’s bearer. Beefy Gorem had been seconded to Ravilan’s team to help reach what remained in crushed sections of Omen.He’d apparently touched a stained deck plate from the Massassi apothecary and died outside, not long after washing his hands. Death was not instantaneous, but the victim never got far.

Ravilan must have seen Gorem’s death, she said, and realized he had a tool against the Keshiri. A weapon that could force Korsin and the rest of the humans to forget about building on this world—and recommit to leaving it.

And now every city that members of the Fifty-seven had visited in the previous day had gone the same way as Tetsubal.

Korsin spun and shattered his bridge chair against a marble column. He didn’t use the Force. He didn’t need to.

“Why would they do this?”He grabbed Seelah.

“Why would they do this, when it’s so obvious I’d trace it back to them? How stupid—how desperatewould they have to be?”

“Yes,” Seelah said, curling around him. “How desperate wouldthey have to be?”

Korsin looked into the sun, now beating down on the mountain. Releasing her, he looked into the faces of his other advisors, all waiting and wondering.

“Bring all the others in,” he said. “Tell them it’s time.”

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Chapter F our

Seelah had already set her mind on leaving Ludo Kressh before he executed her family. It was trivial; his ankle had been injured in a battle, and she had failed to stop the infection. He’d killed her father the first night, and his leverage lessened considerably after that. Seelah found her chance to go a few days later, when one of Sadow’s mining teams stopped on Rhelg to refuel. She didn’t have anybody left by then, anyway.

Devore Korsin had been her escape. She saw his immaturity and recklessness, but she also saw something there to work with. He, too, strained against the invisible chains limiting his ambition. He could be her ally. And in Sadow’s service, at least, something could happen—as long as Devore didn’t foul it up.

And if he did, well, there was always their son . . .

Lightsabers flashed in the night on the mountain—but not on the main plaza. Seelah walked calmly along the darkened colonnade, now festooned with added decorations: the tentacled heads of the Fifty-seven, staked at even intervals.

There was the young sentry from the tower, trapped and killed. He’d never abandoned his post. To the right was Hestus, the translator; Seelah had been involved mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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personally in his takedown. Korsin said they’d come back to Hestus in the morning to remove the cybernet-ic implants. Who knew, there might be something they could use there.

She could sense Korsin and his chief lieutenants beyond the outer wall now, driving the remnant to a last stand beside the precipice where Omennearly met its end. No quarter would be offered; she could see Korsin hurling any who surrendered over the side.

Well, he has experience with that.

The stone silo of the stable master loomed before her.

Uvak enclosures stretched out in all directions from this central hub, where Keshiri aides would wash the stinking beasts. The Keshiri were gone tonight, she saw as she entered the round room. At the center, watched only by a guard in the shadows, hung the limp but breathing body of Ravilan. Strong cords of Keshiri-woven fiber lashed his splayed arms to cornices high on either side of the structure. The arrangement was designed to keep uvak from bolting during their baths.

Now it was doing the same for Ravilan, his feet dan-gling mere centimeters above the ground. Seelah stepped back as a rush of water poured from slots high in the tower, gagging the prisoner.

The flow stopped after a minute, but it was longer before the weary Ravilan registered the presence of his visitor. “All gone,” he choked. “Right?”

“All gone,” she said, stepping into his sight. “You are the last.” Ravilan had been caught early, his bad leg failing him once and for all.

Ravilan shook his head. “We only did it one time,”

he said, his throat a gravelly trail. “In Tetsubal. These other cities—I don’t know. We never planned—”

“—for me,” Seelah said.

It had been surprisingly easy, once she’d realized Ravilan’s ploy in Tetsubal. The only element was time.

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She’d returned to the mountain retreat in the night and summoned her most trusted aides from the ward. Soon after midnight, her minions were in the air, propelling their creatures toward the lake towns of the south that Ravilan’s people had been instructed to visit the day before. Her ward had held the only other surviving supply of cyanogen silicate; now it was in the wells and aqueducts of the lake cities—and in the bodies of dead Keshiri. Time was the key element—but she’d had help coordinating it all.

“Y-you did this?” Ravilan coughed and managed a weak chuckle. “I guess that’s the first time you liked one of my ideas.”

“It did the job.”

Ravilan’s crumpled grin vanished. “What job?

Genocide?”

“You care about the Keshiri now?”

“You know what I mean!” Ravilan strained at his bonds. “My people!”

Seelah rolled her eyes. “Nothing’s going on here that wouldn’t have happened in the Empire eventually. You know how things were going. Whose movement were you in, anyway?”

“Naga Sadow didn’t want this,” Ravilan rasped.

“Sadow valued power where he saw it. He valued the old and the new. He valued us—”

She nodded to the guard—and another crushing bar-rage of water slammed Ravilan.

It took longer for him to recover this time.

“It could have worked,” he choked. “ Wecould have worked . . . together, like the Sith and the fallen Jedi of old. If only our children– mychildren—had lived . . . ”

Ravilan looked up, water streaming from his sagging face. “You.”

Seelah fixed her silent gaze on the chutes, still dripping, near the ceiling high above.

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“You,”he repeated, louder. “You ran the crèche. You and your people.” His face twisted into an agonized scream. The future of his people had already been smothered, long before. “What did you do? What did you do to us?”

“Nothing you wouldn’t eventually have done to us.”

She stepped toward the shadows, near the guard. “We are not your Sith. We are something new, a chance to do it right. A new tribe.”

“Younglings—infants!” Wilted, Ravilan moaned.

“What . . . what kind of mother areyou?”

“The mother of a people,” she said, looking toward the guard in the shadows. “Now, my son.”

The guard stepped forward—and Ravilan saw the animal form of Jariad Korsin coming at him, blade drawn, the wild-eyed face of his father under jet-black hair. The teenager leapt at the prisoner, wielding a jagged vibroblade without remorse. At the last, he drew his lightsaber and cut Ravilan down in a violent flash of crimson.

“You’ve changed the world today,” Seelah said, stepping close to her son and confederate. He’d been key to coordinating the previous night’s gambit, getting her accomplices where they needed to go. It was right that he should have part of this moment.

The boy panted, looking down at his victim. “He’s not who I want to kill.”

“Be patient,” Seelah said, stroking his hair. “I have been.”

Tilden Kaah walked quietly along the darkened pathways of Tahv, only recently paved with stones. The Sith had dismissed the other Keshiri attendants earlier in the morning, when the excitement began; he had been one of the last to leave. The streets, usually peopled with merrymakers even at this hour, were alarmingly still.

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He only saw one middle-aged member of the Neshtovar standing station at a crossing; stripped of his uvak years before, the figure looked bored.

Tilden nodded to the watchman and passed into a plaza near one of the many village aqueducts. Sheets of fresh mountain water tumbled in long crescents from flumes, a cooling presence in what had become a hot night. Arriving before a wall of water, Tilden donned the robe he was carrying, raised the hood, and stepped into the downpour.

Or, rather, through it.

Tilden walked, dripping, down the dark passage leading deep into the stone structure. He followed hushed voices to the end of a passage. There was no light—but there was life. Tilden heard agonized chatter as he approached: the horrible news from the south had begun to arrive. The superstitious Keshiri would probably be expected to absorb the horror quietly, a voice said from the shadows. The Destructors would probably be blamed.

“It is done,” Tilden spoke to the darkness. “Seelah has rid the Skyborn of the Fifty-seven. Of the people not like them, only the bumpy man, Gloyd, remains.”

“Seelah doesn’t suspect you?” returned a husky fe-male voice from the blackness. “She doesn’t read your mind?”

“She doesn’t think I’m worth it. And I speak of nothing but the old legends. She thinks me a fool.”

“She can’t tell our great scholars from our fools,”

said a male voice.

“None of them can,” said another. “Good. Let’s keep it that way. Seelah has done us a favor, reducing their numbers. She may do more.” A blinding flash appeared as an old Keshiri man lit a lantern. There were several Keshiri there, huddled in the cramped space—their attentions not on Tilden, but on the figure stepping mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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from the shadows behind him. Tilden turned to recognize the woman who had first addressed him.

“Stay strong, Tilden Kaah. With your help—and with the help of all of us here—the Keshiri will finish the job.” Anger glistened in Adari Vaal’s eyes. “I brought this plague upon us. And I will end it.”

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Read on for an excerpt from

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi:Backlash by Aaron Allston

Published by Del Rey Books

The rainforest air was so dense, so moist that even roaring through it at speeder– bike velocity didn’t bring Luke Skywalker any physical relief. His speed just caused the air to move across him faster, like a greasy scrub– rag wielded by an overzealous nanny– droid,

drenching all the exposed surfaces of his body.

Not that he cared. He couldn’t see her, but he could sense his quarry, not far ahead: the individual whose home he’d crossed so many light– years to find.

He could sense much more than that. The forest teemed with life, life that poured its energy into the Force, too much to catalogue as he roared past. He could feel ancient trees and new vines, creeping predators and alert prey. He could feel his son Ben as the teenager drew up abreast of him on his own speeder-bike, eyes shadowed under his helmet but a competitive grin on his lips, and then Ben was a few meters ahead of him, dodging leftward to avoid hitting a split– forked tree, the recklessness of youth giving him a momentary speed advantage over Luke’s superior piloting ability.

Then there was more life, biglife, close ahead, with malicious intent—

From a thick nest of magenta– flowered underbrush twice the height of a man, just to the right of Luke’s mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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path ahead, emerged an arm, striking with great speed and accuracy. It was humanlike, gnarly, gigantic, long enough to reach from the flowers to swat the forward tip of Luke’s speeder bike as he passed.

Disaster takes only a fraction of a second. One instant Luke was racing along, intent on his distant prey and enjoying moments of competition; the next, he was headed straight for a tree whose trunk, four meters across, would bring a sudden stop to his travels and his life.

He came free of the speeder– bike as it rotated beneath him from the giant creature’s blow. He was still headed for the tree trunk. He gave himself an adrenaline-boosted shove in the Force and drifted another couple of meters to the left, allowing him to flash past the trunk instead of into it; he could feel its bark rip at the right shoulder of his tunic. A centimeter closer, and the contact would have given him a serious friction burn.

He rolled into a ball and let senses other than sight guide him. A Force shove to the right kept him from smacking into a much thinner tree, one barely sturdy enough to break his spine and any bones that hit it. He needed no Force effort to shoot between the forks of a third tree. Contact with a veil of vines slowed him; they tore beneath the impact of his body but dropped his rate of speed painlessly. He went crashing through a mass of tendrils ending in big– petaled yellow flowers, some of which reflexively snapped at him as he plowed through them.

Then he was bouncing across the ground, a dense layer of decaying leaves and other materials he really didn’t want to speculate about.

Finally he rolled to a halt. He stretched out, momen-tarily stunned but unbroken, and stared up through the trees. He could see a single shaft of sunlight penetrating the forest canopy not far behind him; it illuminated a mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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swirl of pollen from the stand of yellow flowers he’d just crashed through. In the distance, he could hear the roar of Ben’s speeder bike, hear its engine whine as the boy put it in a hard maneuver, trying to get back to Luke.

Closer, there were footsteps. Heavy, ponderous footsteps.

A moment later, their origin, the owner of that huge arm, loomed over Luke. It was a rancor, humanoid and bent.

The rancors of this world had evolved to be smarter than those elsewhere. This one had clearly been trained as a guard and taught to tolerate protective gear. It wore a helmet, a

rust– streaked cup of metal large

enough to serve as a backwoods bathtub, with leather straps meeting under its chin. Strapped to its left fore-arm was a thick durasteel round shield that looked ridiculously tiny compared to the creature’s enormous proportions but was probably thick enough to stop one or two salvos from a military laser battery.

The creature stared down at Luke. Its mouth opened and it offered a challenging growl.

Luke glared at it. “Do you really want to make me angry right now? I don’t recommend it.”

It reached for him.