Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 03 - Paragon Read Free Page B

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.
    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
Omen
crashed. “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.”

Chapter Three
    The Sith were about glorification of self and the subjugation 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 members
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