Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 03 - Paragon Read Online Free PDF

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.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 barrage of water slammed Ravilan.
    It took longer for him to recover this time.
    “It could have worked,” he choked. “
We
could have worked … together, like the Sith and the fallen Jedi of old. If only our children—
my
children—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.
    “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
are
you?”
    “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.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