JOHN JACKSON MILLER
Lost Tribe of the Sith #7
Pantheon
Chapter One
3000 BBY
Time is a lover, the old saying went: a Sith lover. She tempts you with forever — and then cuts you and leaves you for dead.
Staring into the reflecting pool, Varner Hilts studied the latest scar from time, his one and only long-term relationship. No, he couldn’t blame this on a trick of the light, or the polluted water. It was real. A fresh crack ran straight from his left eye to his temple. Turning his head and looking more closely, he swore. Why wasn’t there at least a matching wrinkle on the other side? Time wasn’t big on symmetry.
Hilts was well on his way to becoming the most worthless construct in all creation: an elder in a Sith society. It was the great irony of the Tribe on Kesh. A man without enemies lived long, but had no future. By virtue of his unique calling, Hilts had managed to survive decades of tumult — but for what? So he could spend thirty more years walking past the same basin, observing his decline every day on his way to work?
Well,traditions are important, Hilts thought. Kneeling over the reflection, he brought his hand to his face and squinted. Slowly, his finger traced the new crevasse…
CRACK!
Ancient stone shattered. Startled, Hilts looked up. High above, a section of Tahv’s suspended aqueduct heaved and gave way, shearing loose from its towering support.
«Caretaker!»
Before Hilts could fully stand, a purple blur appeared from the alley. The Keshiri male dived headlong into Hilts’s paunch, knocking the human backward. Giant slabs of stonework smashed to the street, pulverizing the rim of the basin where Hilts had knelt moments before.
Flat on his back on the pavement, Hilts reached through the Force and deflected chunks of debris from himself and his rescuer. But no power could stop the crush of brackish water cascading down from the shattered sluice. The Keshiri shielded Hilts as best he could until the shower of water and rocks subsided.
Coughing, Hilts recognized his savior. «Trying to score points with the boss, Jaye?» As he spoke, he rose, shaking grimy water from his sparse silvery hair.
«I–I’m sorry for pushing you, Master Hilts,» the Keshiri stammered. «I was passing this way—»
«Calm down.» Hilts knew it was a useless instruction, even though Jaye was officially his to command. The moon-faced native had no more chance of relaxing than Hilts had of becoming Grand Lord. «Just a normal day in ‘the Crown of Kesh.’»
«It’s the conjunction,» Jaye said, wiping his superior’s cape. Nervous black eyes scanned the now-broken skyline of the capital city. «The omen I’ve been telling you about!»
«And telling me. And telling me.» Hilts spied a crowd of humans quarreling near the fallen aqueduct section. Pinning blame, it seemed, was Tahv’s only growth industry. He pulled his aide’s sleeve. «Let’s get to the office before someone decides we brought it down by breathing heavily!»
In an earlier day, Sith on Kesh bided their time to achieve power, temporarily following others in order to one day claim the prize. For most in that simpler era, Yaru Korsin’s power structure of High Lords, Lords, and Sabers worked as a means to an end. The hierarchy survived because it served the purposes of enough people — people with the power to defend the system against those who would destroy it. For more than a thousand years after the founder’s death, the Tribe had thrived.
But the Second Millennium brought unrelenting tribulations. Grand Lord Lillia Venn had vanished more than nine hundred years earlier on what the Keshiri locals remembered, rather ineloquently, as the Night of the Upside-Down Meteor. It had certainly presaged doom for Omen’s grandchildren. Learning of her disappearance, Venn’s rivals attacked her supporters first — and then one another. Defeated combatants quit the capital city and took to the hinterlands, where many found common cause with disenfranchised human slaves. Increasing numbers of Sith pressed peace-loving Keshiri into their forces. For centuries, factions united long enough to conquer Tahv and slay the ruling Grand Lord — only to immediately begin fighting among themselves. One rebel force became two, which became twenty. Power in the Tribe poisoned whoever tasted it.
A quarter century earlier, Hilts had famously coined the term for the age, but it hadn’t required much imagination. «The Time of the Rot» was visible everywhere. Under successive sieges, the rich streets of Tahv decayed. Left untended, towering aqueducts clogged and overflowed; the morning’s calamity was an all-too-familiar occurrence. Far to the south, the Sessal Spire raged as it never had in Keshiri memory, unleashing an explosion so thunderous that one face of the great arena, the Korsinata, collapsed. It was as if the planet itself were fighting back against its émigrés from beyond.
But nestled in a small corner of the eroding marble of the capital building, one place had remained free of neglect: the office of the Caretaker. Amid all the battles between Grand Lords and Antilords, only it had remained untouched.
It wasn’t because the Sith had any fear of sacrilege. Varner Hilts’s office, outside the traditional power structure, had been established in Nida Korsin’s time to provide the Tribe with accurate timekeeping and a historical archive. It was a lifetime appointment, in part because so few candidates were interested. No one desired the Caretaker’s lot; his only followers were a roomful of Keshiri clerks, unsuited for service in any- one’s army. Not that Hilts was ever actually in demand. A historical polymath, he had been told early on that with his lightsaber skills, he need never worry about a treacherous ally. No one would dare stand near him, for fear of accidental dismemberment.
Stepping from the anteroom into the beaders’ hall, Hilts again heard the clickety-clack that had greeted him for half his life. Seated on their knees in a semicircle, brown-clad Keshiri worked at handheld counting frames constructed from seashells and young hejarbo shoots. Hilts discarded his dripping cape and strode through the room, barely wondering what they were working on today. Jaye kept the figurers busy, most of the time, calculating dates to go along with the bits of trivia Hilts scraped from the archives. He’d often marveled at their precision. For a species that lacked basic mathematics when Omen crashed, the Keshiri had embraced calculation as vigorously as they had all their other arts.
Grabbing an abacus from a co-worker, Jaye followed Hilts into the sunlit atrium. Centuries before, the first Grand Lord, Yaru Korsin, had watched his nephew Jariad dueling here — knowing even then, Hilts suspect- ed, that Jariad was planning to betray him. Now the Sandpipes dominated the room. Silently tended by watchful tan-clad Keshiri girls, the towering network of powder-filled glass vials kept time for the Tribe. As if time could be bottled up, Hilts thought, scratching the side of his face.
«I want to be able to see my reflection in those pipes,» he ordered. «I don’t have to tell you what a big day we have coming up.»
He didn’t. The workers shined the massive device more urgently, careful not to interfere with its functioning. For the first time in their young lives, visitors were coming to their place of work. No Grand Lord or pretender had lived in the palace for six hundred years; Korsin’s architects had designed for beauty, not defense. Testament Day was the only time the building saw visitors.
Every twenty-five years, on the anniversary of Korsin’s death, listeners heard his final testament again. Fifty years earlier, Hilts had been a boy, not allowed into the palace — but the idea of communing with the past had captured his imagination. Through study and toil, he had made certain that, when the next Testament Day arrived, he would be the one to manage the event. Now, like a comet, the day had come around yet again. But the palace today was a much shabbier place, beyond his resources to repair. Glancing at the cracks in the smoked-glass windows in the ceiling, Hilts just couldn’t get excited.