Lost Tribe of the Sith 05 - Star Wars Purgatory

complete that he had devoted his life to preventing their return.
    He had gone too far, alienating the conservative leaders who ran the Jedi Order. Expelled, he had sought to continue his vigil, working with an underground movement of Jedi Knights devoted to preventing the return of the Sith. For four years, he’d worked in the shadows of the galaxy, making sure the masters of evil were indeed a memory.
    Things had gone wrong again. On assignment in a remote region three years earlier, he’d learned of the collapseof the Jedi Covenant. Fearful of returning, he’d headed for the uncharted regions, sure that nothing could ever restore his name and place with the Order.
    On Kesh, he had found something that might—wrapped up in his worst nightmare come true. He’d been caught in one of Kesh’s colossal meteor showers, crashing in the remote jungle as just one more falling star. Unable to raise help through Kesh’s bizarre magnetic field, he’d ventured down toward the lights he’d seen on the horizon.
    The light of a civilization, steeped in darkness.
    Still meters from the bank, he leapt from the boat. “Ori! Ori, I’m back! Are you—”
    Jelph stopped when he saw the trellises, cut down. Taking in the damage, he dashed toward the barn.
    The door was open. There, exposed in the evening twilight, sat the damaged starfighter he’d painstakingly floated down from the jungle, a piece at a time. He found something else, beside it: a metal shovel, discarded. “Ori?”
    Stepping into the shadows of the barn, he saw the corpse of the uvak, food for the small carrion birds. Behind the building, he found the traps he’d sent her to check, abandoned on the ground. She had been here—and gone.
    In front of the hut, he found other tracks. Wide Sith boots and more uvak prints. Ori’s smaller prints were here, too, heading past the hedge up the cart path that led to Tahv.
    Jelph reached inside his vest for the bundle he always carried on trips. Blue light flashed in his hand. He was a lone Jedi on an entire planet full of Sith. His existence threatened them—but their existence threatened everything. He had to stop her.
    No matter what.
    He dashed up the path into the darkness.

Read on for an excerpt from

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Vortex
by Troy Denning
    Published by Del Rey Books
    B EYOND THE FORWARD VIEWPORT HUNG THE GOSSAMER VEIL of Ashteri’s Cloud, a vast drift of ionized tuderium gas floating along one edge of the Kessel Sector. Speckled with the blue halos of a thousand distant suns, its milky filaments were a sure sign that the
Rockhound
had finally escaped the sunless gloom of the Deep Maw. And, after the jaw-clenching horror of jumping blind through a labyrinth of uncharted hyperspace lanes and hungry black holes, even that pale light was a welcome relief to Jaina Solo.
    Or, rather, it
would
have been, had the cloud been in the right place.
    The
Rockhound
was bound for Coruscant, not Kessel, and
that
meant Ashteri’s Cloud should have been forty degrees to port as they exited the Maw. It
should
have been a barely discernible smudge of light, shifted so far into the red that it looked like a tiny flicker of flame. Jaina could not quite grasp how they had gone astray.
    She glanced over at the pilot’s station—a mobile levchair surrounded by brass control panels and drop-down display screens—but found no answers in Lando Calrissian’s furrowed brow. Dressed immaculately in a white shimmersilk tunic and lavender trousers, he wasperched on the edge of his huge nerf-leather seat, with his chin propped on his knuckles and his gaze fixed on the alabaster radiance outside.
    In the three decades Jaina had known Lando, it was one of the rare moments when his life of long-odds gambles and all-or-nothing stakes actually seemed to have taken a toll on his con-artist good looks. It was also a testament to the strain and fear of the past few days—and, perhaps, to the hectic pace. Lando was as impeccably groomed as always, but even he had not found time to touch up the dye that kept his mustache and curly hair their usual deep, rich black.
    After a few moments, Lando finally sighed and leaned back into his chair. “Go ahead, say it.”
    “Say what?” Jaina asked, wondering exactly what Lando expected her to say. After all,
he
was the one who had made the bad jump. “It’s not my fault?”
    A glimmer of irritation shot through Lando’s weary eyes, but then he seemed to realize Jaina was only trying to