Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 03 - Paragon

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, Commander. 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.
    She knelt beside the corpse, careful not to touch it. She drew her
shikkar
—the glass blade the Keshiri had fashioned for her—and carefully worked open the woman’s mouth. There it was, the tongue a mad azure, blood vessels engorged and bursting. She’d seen it before in humans, at the edge of her memory …
    “I need to go back,” Seelah said, erupting from the village gates. “I need to go back home—to the ward.”
    Korsin, directing his henchmen building a bonfire, looked puzzled. “Seelah, forget about any survivors.
We’re
the survivors. We hope.”
    Ravilan, lucklessly trying to calm the collected uvak Korsin had tethered outside the village wall, looked back in alarm. “If you think of bringing this disease into our sanctum—”
    “No,” she said. “I’m going alone. If we here are infected, nothing matters anyway.” She took the bridle of an uvak from Ravilan and flashed him an unenthusiastic smile. “But if we’re not infected, it’s like you said. It’s a warning.”
    Korsin watched her leave and turned to the task of burning the village. Seelah didn’t look back, soaring into the night. There wasn’t much time. She’d need tomeet with her entire staff at the ward, her most loyal aides.
    And she’d need to see her son.
    When dawn broke over the Takara Mountains, Seelah was not found in the shower by Tilden Kaah—as much as she now felt like she needed one. Seelah hadn’t slept at all. With Korsin and Ravilan’s return in the dead of night, the retreat had become a crisis center.
    Communications were the real problem. The deaths of nameless Keshiri had stirred the Force little for those who didn’t care about them anyway. But the aftermath had stirred such confusion in the minds of the Sith that even the most experienced heralds were having trouble fielding messages. Korsin had been careful in calling for the return of his people from the Keshiri towns and villages; so far, Tahv and the rest of the major cities had not heard of the disaster in Tetsubal, and he didn’t want a mass withdrawal putting the natives on their guard. Sith abroad were instructed to casually remove themselves from public contact and make their way home.
    What had befallen Tetsubal had not yet struck the major cities—but reconnaissance fliers were still out, checking on the surrounding