Текст книги "Skyborn"

Автор книги: John J. Miller

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A hand appeared on the mother’s shoulder from behind, drawing her back. The din faded from Adari’s mind. She looked up to see– Zhari Vaal?

No, she realized, as her teary eyes focused. Another of the strangely clad figures, but short and stocky like her husband. She had once imagined Zhari at the bottom of the sea, his rich mauve color drained. This man was paler still, but his dark shock of hair and reddish brown eyes gave him a confident, compelling look. She had seen him before, on the mountain. She had heard him before, on the wind.

“Korsin,”he said, simultaneously in her mind and with a voice as soothing as her grandfather’s. He gestured to himself. “I am called Korsin.”

Blackness closed around her.

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Chapter Three

On her third day among the newcomers, Adari learned to talk.

She’d spent the first full day after the terrifying encounter asleep, if that was the right term for a fever-ish, nightmare slumber interrupted by brief patches of delirium. Several times, she’d opened her eyes only to shut them quickly on seeing the strangers hovering around her.

But they were tending to her, not harassing her—as she’d found the second morning, awakening between an impossibly soft blanket and the rough ground. The newcomers had found a secluded dry spot for her, with several figures sitting vigil. Adari had drunk the water they offered, but it didn’t restore her voice. Her head still rang, her mind bruised by the earlier assault. None of her vocabulary came when called. She had forgotten how to speak.

Korsin was sitting with her when she finally remembered. He’d called over Hestus, a rust-colored figure with a shining mask covering part of his acid-scarred face. It almost looked like it was part ofhis face—various bits hiding under his skin. Adari had flinched in fear, but Hestus had simply sat calmly, listening as Korsin tried to talk with her.

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And they talked. Awkwardly, at first, with Hestus piping in occasionally to repeat a new Keshiri word she had said, followed by his own language’s equivalent.

Adari had marveled. The Keshiri words Hestus spoke sounded exactly like what she’d said—in her own voice, even. Korsin had explained that Hestus’s “special ear” gave him that talent, helping to speed along the exchange of information.

Adari was interested in that exchange, but most of the information had gone the other way. She gathered that the people Korsin led had indeed come from the silver shell, and that it had somehow fallen from the sky. It was also clear that, powerful as they were, they had no means of leaving the mountain now, isolated as it was by water and forbidding terrain. Korsin had listened with interest as she spoke about Kesh and the Keshiri, of uvak and villages on the mainland. She’d mentioned the Skyborn only once, before stopping in near embarrassment. She didn’t know who the newcomers were, but she felt abashed bringing it up.

Now, on the third afternoon since her arrival, Adari was speaking comfortably with the newcomers—and had even picked up some words in their language herself. They were something called “Sith,” and Korsin was “human.” She repeated the words. “You’re a good listener,” Korsin said, encouraged. He said others had worked with her as she slept—he did not say how—to try to improve communications. Now they were pro-gressing quickly, and it was not all their doing. Even overwrought, Adari remained sharp.

“Our immediate concern, Adari Vaal,” Korsin said, emptying a glistening pouch of powder into a cup for her, “must be to reach the mainland.” There wasn’t food or shelter enough for his people here, and the mountain had sheer drop-offs to the sea below. Her uvak might have provided an exit for someone, but mill_9780345519399_2p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 6/4/09 10:1

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Nink, as fearful of the newcomers as he was of the mountain’s native wildlife, had spent the last few days far out of reach, above.

Drinking the broth—it was filling, not unlike her mother’s stew, she thought—Adari wrestled with the problem.

Nink mightcome when she called, but only if she was standing in the open, alone. She could fly to land and return with help. “I couldn’t take any riders, though.”

Nink might not appear if she was accompanied, and a novice rider could never carry a passenger in any event.

“I’d have to go alone. But I’d return as soon as I could.”

“She will not!”

Adari knew the voice before she even looked up. The screamer.The mother of the small child charged toward the smoldering campfire. “She will abandon us!”

Korsin rose and took the woman aside. Adari heard heated words exchanged, unfamiliar ones. But in bidding the woman away, he spoke words Adari did recognize: “We are her deliverance, and she is ours.”

Adari watched the woman, still glaring at her from afar. “She doesn’t like me.”

“Seelah?” Korsin shrugged. “She’s concerned over her mate—lost from the crash site. And with a child, she’s anxious to leave this mountain.” He smiled, offering to help Adari stand. “As a mother, I’m sure you understand.”

Adari gulped. She hadn’t mentioned her children.

She’d barely even thought about them since she arrived among the newcomers, she realized. Shaking her head in guilt, she revealed something else: that the Keshiri might not listen to her.

Korsin seemed unsurprised—and unruffled. “You’re smart, Adari. You’ll make them listen.” He gently wrapped her shoulders with the azure blanket she’d slept beneath. “Keep this,” he said. “The sun’s setting soon. It could be a cold ride.”

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Adari looked around. Seelah stood in silent fury, unmoved from before. The others Korsin had intro-duced eyed their leader nervously; red tentacle-jowled Ravilan exchanged a worried look with Hestus. Even the hulking Gloyd, who, despite his brutish appearance, was clearly Korsin’s greatest ally here, shifted uncomfortably. But no one barred her from leaving their campsite.

When a strong hand did stop her at the edge of the clearing, she was surprised to see whose it was: Korsin’s. “About the Keshiri,” Korsin said. “You told us about Tahv, your town—it sounds a good size. But how many are the Keshiri? How many Keshiri are there in all, I mean?”

Adari answered immediately. “We’re numberless.”

“Ah,” Korsin said, his posture softening. “You mean they have never been counted.”

“No,” Adari said. “I mean, we don’t have a number that large.”

Korsin froze, his grip on her arm tightening. His dark eyes, slightly smaller than a Keshiri’s, focused on the wilderness beyond. She’d never seen him unnerved. If this was it, it lasted less than a second before he stepped back.

“Before you leave,” he said, finding a tree to lean against, “tell me what you know about the Skyborn.”

Korsin had called the vessel he arrived in Omen.The word not only existed in the Keshiri tongue, but was a long-held favorite of the Neshtovar. Watching what was happening now on the plaza known as the Circle Eternal, Adari guessed even the uvak-riding chiefs were realizing the irony.

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attract the uvak-riders there; as soon as the patrols spotted her and Nink, they followed the whole way to the Cetajan Range. The place had been the scene for several surprises in recent times, but none trumped the moment when the Neshtovar came upon Adari standing defiantly amid 240 supportive visitors from above, almost every one signaling his or her presence with a glowing ruby lightsaber. She didn’t have one of the strange devices, but she glowed just the same from within. Adari Vaal, collector of rocks and enemy of order was now Adari Vaal, discoverer and rescuer; answerer of the mountain’s call.

Add “prophet” to that, she thought as she watched the dozen score visitors—some hobbling from their ordeal—enter the Circle Eternal. They passed between gawking, silent crowds of Keshiri, many of the same people from her door the week before. Ahead in the Circle, all the Neshtovar in the region were present, more than she’d ever seen. Three days of aerial rescue operations had brought the newcomers off the mountain, days in which the word had gone out far into the hinterlands.

The Skyborn had arrived on Kesh.

No lesser reason could explain why the riders com-pliantly took their positions not in the Circle Eternal itself, but along the raised perimeter. The villagers had watched Adari’s hearing from here; now the Neshtovar were watching her in the Circle, marching along behind Korsin. Behind them, the visitors filed in, forming their own inner perimeter over which the Neshtovar strained to see.

Izri Dazh looked small, standing beneath the column three times his height that served as the sundial’s gnomon. Normally, it made him seem larger. Not today. He limped forward and greeted Korsin and company with mawkish words of praise before turn-

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ing to the audience. Straining to see over the line of visitors, Izri made the declaration official. These werethe Skyborn, he said, come down from the very mountain from which their servants had brought back the law centuries earlier. It wasn’t the same mountain, Adari knew; perhaps the texts would be changed later. But Izri ignored that detail for now.

The visitors had established their identities to the satisfaction of all of the Neshtovar, he said.

“You didn’t believe them when they levitated your cane,” Adari whispered, unable to resist.

“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 havecome 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 templeatop 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 willreturn to the stars!”

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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.

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Chapter F our

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 allriders 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.

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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 didform 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 staringat 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.

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“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 oursociety.”

“But he was your brother.”

Korsin’s grip tightened for a moment before he let go altogether. “You area good listener,” he said, straight-ening. 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.

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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. Youpushed 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 Dazhkeeping 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 anyKeshiri has.”

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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 theyhad come from, and who they were. She was a good listener. 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 percep-tive powers were amazing, but they still required accu-rate 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 mill_9780345519399_2p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 6/4/09 10:1

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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 lotmore time.

Time, the Sith had.

What, she wondered, would the Keshiri have?

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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 Shadowwas 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 mill_9780345519399_2p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 6/4/09 10:1

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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?”

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“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 after-ward. But he had no clear memories of Shelter itself, or what it had felt like to be there. “I was two.”

“You didhave feelings when you were two,” his father said mildly. “You didhave 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 holo-graph 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 mill_9780345519399_2p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 6/4/09 10:1

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never happened, Ben had not been molded into an ado-lescent 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 Shadowslipped 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 Shadowwith 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 alone 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?”

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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 isfamiliar.”

“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 Shadowdeparted Shelter so many years ago. “I guess what we’re feeling now might be related. There was definitely some . . . thingkeeping 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 tentaclefriend?”

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

“And maybe youdon’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.”

Luke frowned. “And that would be?”

“I was two,” Ben reminded him. “And by all accounts, I didn’t feel guilty about anythingat that age.”

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Luke grinned. “Good point, but I still don’t think we should worry too much about this tentacle monster of yours.”

“It’s not mytentacle monster,” Ben retorted, miffed at having his concerns mocked. “You’re the one who made me dredge it up.”

Luke’s expression hardened into admonishment.

“But you’rethe one who’s still afraid of it.”

The observation struck home. Whether or not the dark presence he remembered was real, he had emerged from Shelter wary of abandonment and frightened of the Force. And it had been those fears that had allowed Jacen to lead him into darkness.