章 19: PARAGON - Chapter 19
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 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 household, 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'd spat, between bloody punches, "out there, the future looks like you."
Adari Vaal had once told Korsin that the Keshiri did not have a number large enough to describe their own population. The Omen crew had tried to make estimates 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 the dead Keshiri 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 nursing 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 woven 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 you during 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.
"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, Captain. We have to shut them out!"
"Shut who out?" 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—we have become too dependent 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 …"
Korsin and Ravilan began walking toward the gate, 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, spellbound 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.
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