Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn (2 page)

“It very well could!”
Izri grabbed his cane from its spot by the pedestal and shook it. “This land was a part of the living Skyborn. Do you think they do not hear you? When the ground quakes, when the smokers burn—it’s their remnant acting in sympathy with their wishes. Their wishes that we honor them, and hate the Otherside!”

This again. “I know that’s what you think,” Adari said, searching for slow, even tones. “I don’t pretend to know what forces work the world—”

“That’s clear!”

“—but if disagreeable words caused the world to shake, Kesh would rock every time husbands and wives quarreled!” She inhaled deeply. “Surely, the Skyborn have more important affairs than to police our own little disagreements. I know they do.”

Silence. Adari looked around. Dark Keshiri eyes,
once aimed at her, pointed down and away. She’d won a few, that time. Maybe not enough to let her keep her job, but enough that she could keep collecting—

Krakka-boooom!

Purple faces turned west, toward the Cetajan Mountains. Jutting out into the ocean beyond, the range provided the village of Tahv some of its finest sunsets—but now the flames were coming from the mountain peak itself. A pillar of fiery ash billowed from the summit.

It made no sense. Adari helped Izri to his feet. “That—that’s a granite peak,” she said over the subsiding echo. “It’s not volcanic!”

“It is now!”

A rock was a simple thing, but as her grandfather had told her, “By simple things, we know the world.” Adari had never felt shame for all those hours she’d spent searching the creek beds, or for finding more of interest in the shards of a shattered stone than in her children’s first words. She was teaching them—but the rock was teaching
her
.

Now, thanks to a simple rock, she was seeing more of the world than ever before—from high above, clinging to the broad back of Nink. It was an unlikely position for either of them, but she’d been in it for most of the night and part of a day. Her first uvak-flight. It wasn’t by choice.

The hours after the explosion on the mountain hadn’t gone that badly, she thought. Audience members at the hearing had fled to their homes. She’d done the same after Dazh and his cohorts left together, quibbling over signs and portents.

By the next morning, however, the mood of the town had changed. The faraway Cetajan peak was still smoking, but it had become clear that it posed no danger to Tahv or the villages farther down the watershed. It was safe for everyone to go outside—out to Adari’s front yard, to express their feelings about her faithless
words and the smoldering addition to the skyline they had caused. The Skyborn
did
listen. What other proof was needed? If the Keshiri couldn’t silence Adari Vaal, they’d at least make sure their voices were louder than hers.

They’d been doing a good job of it when Adari sent Eulyn and the kids out to take refuge at her uncle’s place. The growing crowd, still pelting the house with rocks, had parted to let the innocents leave. But the mob had stayed straight through the afternoon rain—and by sunset, the Neshtovar themselves were outside, their uvak tethered safely away from the throng. By the time Izri Dazh had hobbled up the steps to pound on her door, Adari had seen the first torches lit outside.

That had been enough for her. The torches could’ve been for light—but they might have been for something worse. She’d clearly exceeded whatever protection a widow of an uvak-rider was afforded. The Keshiri weren’t big on violence, but they didn’t have a lot of variety in their social sanctions, either. Judging that it didn’t look like a banishing kind of crowd, Adari had turned in desperation to her own backyard, and that least liked portion of her legacy: Nink.

Her departure over the rooftop had surprised the people out front almost as much as the maneuver’s success had surprised her. The uvak was most surprised of all. With his rider gone, Nink could have expected never to be ridden again. Uvak took to new riders so seldom that they were promptly put out to stud. Awakening to Adari trying to clamber aboard his fleshy back, Nink could have done anything, gone anywhere.

He went up.

She had spent the rest of that night alternately screaming and dodging pursuit by Neshtovar fliers. The latter feat was made easier by Nink’s insistence on soaring far out over the ocean. Those had been the worst
moments for Adari, who knew the animal’s past. But something on the uvak’s part, perhaps curiosity, kept him from sending her to Zhari’s grave. Just before dawn, Nink had finally found a seaside mountain roost, where Adari immediately collapsed with exhaustion. Amazingly, when she awoke, the uvak was still there, stuffing his beak with what little foliage there was. Home clearly wasn’t looking that attractive to Nink anymore, either.

Now, on the second morning since the explosion, Adari saw that her directionless night flight had taken her near the source of anxiety. The Cetajan Range was a chain of craggy goliaths slivered from the mainland—a prominent part of the horizon when seen from the interior, but as inaccessible as places on the western shoreline got. An expedition of rock hunters had brought back what little Adari knew of the place—and that had required a sympathetic volunteer Neshtovari willing to fly a sample return mission. Seeing the mountain ahead of her, Adari was overtaken by the urge to see the truth up close. If the explosion wasn’t volcanic, it could set things right with her and the community. And if the mountain was suddenly volcanic, she was curious about that, too. What was the process involved?

Or were the scholars wrong about the makeup of the range? Had the uvak-rider flubbed the sample?

That was probably it
. Adari’s anger rose as Nink did, the uvak comfortably clearing the chain in preparation for an oceanside approach. It would be poetic, Adari thought, if the one project the scholars had entrusted to a Neshtovar had resulted in wrong information.
Cetajan Range samples, nothing
, she thought.
The idiot probably brought us rocks from his front path!
She shuddered, and not just from the chilly air. Why should she be made to suffer for their colossal—

Suddenly the source of the smoke column came into view. Adari nearly fell off Nink right then. She’d half expected to see an open caldera, steaming like the smokers—
smoke
really was a misnomer—she’d seen in the south. Instead, a massive shining
shell
sat in an indentation on the seaward side of the mountain. That was the word that entered her mind, even if the scale was completely wrong: its sharp, corrugated ridges resembled the ancient conchs she’d seen returned from the seabed. But this shell was the size of the Circle Eternal!

And this shell had smoke—not steam—billowing from several ruptures. Tremendous grooves gouged behind the body showed it had struck downward at an angle. The fires inside were now nearly spent, but she could tell from the melted mangle that they must have been far larger once. The explosion producing the plume visible from the inland side must have happened right when it landed, she thought.

Landed?

Before Adari could contemplate this, movement caught her eye. One of the apertures in the shell disgorged something, something that struck the gravel below and disappeared in a slide of dust. She nudged the uvak nearer. A flash of crimson light appeared in the small cloud—and at its end …

… a man
.

The man looked up at her. He was pale of face, lighter than the sickest Keshiri she had ever seen. And in his left hand was a shaft of brilliant red light the size of Izri’s cane.

Was it in his hand—or was it part of his hand?
Adari panicked, and Nink agreed, swooping out of the way. A violent but welcome updraft yanked them both back out over the sea.

Adari shook her head violently and closed her eyes as
Nink found smoother air. What had she seen? It had the shape of a man, yes. Hair, darker than any Keshiri—but then that red light.
What was that light?
And there was something else moving on the mountain, too, something she’d seen out of the corner of her eye. Was the shell a nest of some kind?

She swallowed hard, her throat raw from the wind and elevation. It was all too macabre. Sample return missions, Neshtovar inquests—none of her past concerns stood for anything against what she’d seen. Opening her eyes, she brought Nink around on a looping approach parallel to the jagged beach. The giant shell perched near the end of a sheer drop-off, far above. She’d approach from below, this time, rising carefully until she could get a closer look.

Adari soon realized that her plan, while reasonable, was wholly unsuited for a novice rider. Nink strained against her, taking her on a spiraling route to the top that wrenched her stomach. Dizzy, she fought to keep her eye on the cliff top. The figure from before was there, without the bright red light. But holding something else—

Something whizzed past, hurtling downward at such speed that Nink withdrew his wings in fear. Adari slipped for real this time, tumbling backward. Flailing, she caught the uvak’s clawed foot with one arm on the way down—and desperately wrapped her other arm around it.
“Nink!”

She strained to look up, but Nink was on the move, sailing away from the crest and its strange goings-on as fast as his reptile wings could carry them. Dangling, she saw that Nink was making for the safety of their earlier roost, farther up the chain. He’d obviously had enough surprises for one day.

So had she. But at least she was getting used to them.

Or so she thought.

* * *

Shortly before the sun slipped behind the western ocean, she watched the last wisps of smoke disappear from the mountaintop. Adari didn’t think Nink could be coaxed up there again before her water-pouch ran out. The dried brekka beets were already gone. She’d left so quickly she hadn’t restocked her expedition pack.

Now, sitting on a ledge and watching the sunset, she drew an invisible continent on her knee, wondering how far she would have to fly to reach any settlement that had not heard of her plight. There probably wasn’t such a place. The Neshtovar weren’t just the peacekeepers and lawgivers, they were the communications system that made far-flung Kesh one world. Circuit riders would have already spread the word from Tahv to the elder riders in each village. She had escaped, but freedom was no deliverance for her.

Deliverance
.

The word reached her on the wind. It wasn’t even a word, really—not one she had heard before. A strange, melodic combination of syllables that meant nothing to her ear. Yet her mind recognized it as a familiar concept:
deliverance
.

Instinctively, she looked back toward the mysterious peak, drowning in shadow. Lights winked in the darkness near its massive base. Fires—but not the uncontrolled fires that must have been present at the mountaintop. These fires had been set.

Adari sprang to her feet, losing her water-pouch over the edge. The Neshtovar! They’d hunted her here, and they’d camped, and in the morning, they’d find her! They wouldn’t wait to find out what she’d seen atop the mountain, not when she’d compounded her crime by daring to fly Nink.

A breeze was blowing to the sea from the direction of
the mountain. Cool, calming.
Deliverance
, came the word again. Another feeling followed, complex and emphatic:
We are yours—and you are ours
.

Adari blinked back bewildered tears and stepped toward the sleeping uvak. The wind rose again.

Come to us
.

She’d been wrong to come here. The sky had told her to, but it didn’t seem like any kind of deliverance Adari knew.

Her nose crinkled at the stench. The gully was dark, but it was clear something awful had been burned there. Even the sulfurous pits of the south weren’t this bad. She looked back at Nink, yawning in the woods and unwilling to follow her farther.
Wise animal
.

The active fires were ahead, through trees over the hill. Air caressed her as she crept up. Whatever they were burning, it wasn’t what was in the gully.

In the clearing below, Adari saw them: people. As many people as had been at her final hearing, only gathered around multiple campfires. She again thought of the Neshtovar lying in wait for her. If so, then her arriving on foot was probably for the best. She strained to make out their voices as she approached. She recognized one, but not his words. She crept closer—

—and left her feet entirely, hurtling toward a tree. Flailing, Adari slammed hard against it, collapsing breathlessly at its base. Figures rushed at her from the shadows. Scrambling, she saw them—their bodies illuminated not by the fires, but from stalks of magenta energy emanating from their hands, just like she had seen before. She tripped over a root.
“No!”

She never hit the ground. An unseen force yanked her through the maze of figures, depositing her abruptly before the largest bonfire. Rising, her back to the flames, she looked at the advancing wraiths. They were
people, but not like her. Not purple, but beige, brown, red, and more—every color but what they were supposed to be. And some faces weren’t like hers at all. Tiny tentacles wiggled on red jowls. A fat, leprous figure, twice as bulky as the rest and with a hide like Nink’s, stood behind them all, grunting gutturally.

Adari screamed—but they weren’t listening. They were all around her now, man, woman, and monster, shouting gibberish. She mashed her hands to her ears. It did no good. The words were digging past her ears. Digging at her mind.

Mental pinpricks became knives. Adari reeled. The strangers surged forward physically and ethereally—pushing, scraping, searching. Waves of images flashed before her, of her sons, her house, her people—every-thing that was Adari, everything that was Kesh. She still saw mouths moving, but the cacophony now boomed inside her head. Words, meaningless words …

… that somehow began connecting with familiar impressions. As with the breeze before, the voices were alien, but she could feel the sounds coalescing around rational thoughts.

“You are here.”