Free Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #2: Skyborn by John Jackson Miller Page B

crimson rocks on a pedestal beside the central column. “I see here only normal stones of Kesh, as you might find on any hillside.”
    Adari coughed.
    “You have something to say?”
    “I’d better not.” Adari looked up from her seat in thesandy clearing—and then around at the glaring listeners. What was the point? No one would listen. Why keep making it worse …
    She took another look at Izri. This lavender wraith was the man who had eulogized Zhari. What did he know about anything? What business did the Neshtovar have telling
anyone
what to think, just for convincing a few lazy animals to take them for rides now and again?
    Fine
, she thought, rising.
These’ll be two fewer rocks they can throw
. She took a stone from the pedestal. “I have—the scholars of Kesh have collected stones from every part of this continent. We record what we find. We compare. This rock came from the foot of the Sessal Spire, on the southern coast.”
    The crowd murmured. Everyone knew the smoking Spire, rumbling and bubbling at the edge of civilization. Someone
must
have been crazy to go out there collecting rocks!
    “The Spire created this stone, from the flames it holds inside. And this,” Adari said, picking up the other rock, “was found right here outside the village, buried in the riverbed.” The stones were identical. “Now, the mountains ringing our plateau aren’t smokers—what we call volcanoes—at least, not now. But this rock being here suggests they might once have been. This whole continent, in fact, might have been created by them.”
    “Heretic!”
    “Is my mother here?” Adari craned her neck, scanning the crowd. Someone tittered.
    Izri took the stones from her and rustled along the perimeter of the audience. “You say these stones came … from
below
,” he said, the horrible word dripping from his tongue. “And created all that is Kesh.”
    “Then, and now. The smokers are building more land all the time.”
    “But you know that all that is Kesh came from the
Skyborn
,” Izri said, jabbing his cane in her direction. “Nothing can be born of Kesh anew!”
    She knew; every child knew. The Skyborn were the great beings above, the closest thing the Kesh had to deities. Well, there was something closer: The Neshtovar, as the self-proclaimed Sons of the Skyborn, might as well have
been
the Skyborn as far as life on Kesh was concerned. Keshiri faith was vertical; high was mighty. The elevated were venerated. It was Izri’s uvak-riding group that, ages before, had brought down from the lofty oceanside peaks the wisdom of the great battle of creation. Riding colossal uvak of crystal, the Skyborn had fought the Otherside in the stars. The battle raged for eons, with the Otherside injuring the Skyborn before being defeated. Drops of Skyborn blood fell upon the roiling black seas, forming the land that birthed the Keshiri people.
    Adari wondered about the biology of a gigantic, sandy-blooded race—but the Neshtovar notion had something going for it: The Keshiri’s few maps of the land looked as if one of her kids had spilled something on them. Long ridged peninsulas spattered in all directions from a cluster of plateaus, forming enormous, often unwalkable coastlines and fjords enough for the Keshiri to harvest marine life forever. Farther up the many rivers to the plateaus, farmers drew even more from the rich soil. The Keshiri numbers were both vast and well fed.
    About the Otherside, Adari found the Neshtovar were incurious to a fault. “That which opposed the Skyborn” meant death, sickness, fire, rebellion—in no particular order—when it wasn’t taking mortal form in accordance with the storyteller’s needs. The Otherside came “from below,” another element in the message of vertical faith. And that was all there was to say. Given the elders’ devotion to the Skyborn, Adari was surprisedthey hadn’t hammered down who or what the Otherside was. But then, if they had, they’d have come up with