"What . . . what kind of mother are are you?" 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 havebeen." "I havebeen."

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 pa.s.sed 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 hot night. Arriving before a wall of water, Tilden donned the robe he was carrying, raised the hood, and stepped into the downpour.

Or, rather, through it.

Tilden walked, dripping, down the dark pa.s.sage leading deep into the stone structure. He followed hushed voices to the end of a pa.s.sage. There was no light-but there was life. Tilden heard agonized chatter as he approached: the horrible news from the south had begun to arrive. The superst.i.tious Keshiri would probably be expected to absorb the horror quietly, a voice said from the shadows. The Destructors would probably be blamed.

"It is done," Tilden spoke to the darkness. "Seelah has rid the Skyborn of the Fifty-seven. Of the people not like them, only the b.u.mpy man, Gloyd, remains."

"Seelah doesn't suspect you?" returned a husky fe-male voice from the blackness. "She doesn't read yourmind read yourmind?"

"She doesn't think I'm worth it. And I speak of nothing but the old legends. She thinks me a fool."

"She can't tell our great scholars from our fools,"

said a male voice.

"None of them can," said another. "Good. Let's keep it that way. Seelah has done us a favor, reducing their numbers. She may do more." A blinding flash appeared as an old Keshiri man lit a lantern. There were several Keshiri there, huddled in the cramped s.p.a.ce-their attentions not on Tilden, but on the figure stepping from the shadows behind him. Tilden turned to recognize the woman who had first addressed him.

"Stay strong, Tilden Kaah. With your help-and with the help of all of us here-the Keshiri will finish the job." Anger glistened in Adari Vaal's eyes. "I brought this plague upon us. And I will end it. And I will end it. " "

Read on for an excerpt from

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Backlash

by Aaron Allston Published by Del Rey Books

The rainforest air was so dense, so moist that even roaring through it at speeder- bike velocity didn't bring Luke Skywalker any physical relief. His speed just caused the air to move across him faster, like a greasy scrub- rag wielded by an overzealous nanny- droid, drenching all the exposed surfaces of his body.

Not that he cared. He couldn't see her, but he could sense his quarry, not far ahead: the individual whose home he'd crossed so many light- years to find.

He could sense much more than that. The forest teemed with life, life that poured its energy into the Force, too much to catalogue as he roared past. He could feel ancient trees and new vines, creeping predators and alert prey. He could feel his son Ben as the teenager drew up abreast of him on his own speeder-bike, eyes shadowed under his helmet but a compet.i.tive grin on his lips, and then Ben was a few meters ahead of him, dodging leftward to avoid hitting a split- forked tree, the recklessness of youth giving him a momentary speed advantage over Luke's superior piloting ability.

Then there was more life, big big life, close ahead, with malicious intent- life, close ahead, with malicious intent- From a thick nest of magenta- flowered underbrush twice the height of a man, just to the right of Luke's path ahead, emerged an arm, striking with great speed and accuracy. It was humanlike, gnarly, gigantic, long enough to reach from the flowers to swat the forward tip of Luke's speeder bike as he pa.s.sed.

Disaster takes only a fraction of a second. One instant Luke was racing along, intent on his distant prey and enjoying moments of compet.i.tion; the next, he was headed straight for a tree whose trunk, four meters across, would bring a sudden stop to his travels and his life.

He came free of the speeder- bike as it rotated beneath him from the giant creature's blow. He was still headed for the tree trunk. He gave himself an adrenaline-boosted shove in the Force and drifted another couple of meters to the left, allowing him to flash past the trunk instead of into it; he could feel its bark rip at the right shoulder of his tunic. A centimeter closer, and the contact would have given him a serious friction burn.

He rolled into a ball and let senses other than sight guide him. A Force shove to the right kept him from smacking into a much thinner tree, one barely st.u.r.dy enough to break his spine and any bones that hit it. He needed no Force effort to shoot between the forks of a third tree. Contact with a veil of vines slowed him; they tore beneath the impact of his body but dropped his rate of speed painlessly. He went crashing through a ma.s.s of tendrils ending in big- petaled yellow flowers, some of which reflexively snapped at him as he plowed through them.

Then he was bouncing across the ground, a dense layer of decaying leaves and other materials he really didn't want to speculate about.

Finally he rolled to a halt. He stretched out, momen-tarily stunned but unbroken, and stared up through the trees. He could see a single shaft of sunlight penetrating the forest canopy not far behind him; it illuminated a swirl of pollen from the stand of yellow flowers he'd just crashed through. In the distance, he could hear the roar of Ben's speeder bike, hear its engine whine as the boy put it in a hard maneuver, trying to get back to Luke.

Closer, there were footsteps. Heavy, ponderous footsteps.

A moment later, their origin, the owner of that huge arm, loomed over Luke. It was a rancor, humanoid and bent.

The rancors of this world had evolved to be smarter than those elsewhere. This one had clearly been trained as a guard and taught to tolerate protective gear. It wore a helmet, a rust- streaked cup of metal large enough to serve as a backwoods bathtub, with leather straps meeting under its chin. Strapped to its left fore-arm was a thick durasteel round shield that looked ridiculously tiny compared to the creature's enormous proportions but was probably thick enough to stop one or two salvos from a military laser battery.

The creature stared down at Luke. Its mouth opened and it offered a challenging growl.

Luke glared at it. "Do you really want to make me angry right now? I don't recommend it."

It reached for him.

SEVERAL DAYS EARLIER.

Empty s.p.a.ce Near Kessel It was darkness surrounded by stars-one of them, the unlovely sun of Kessel, closer than the rest, but barely close enough to be a ball of illumination rather than a dot-and then it was occupied, suddenly inhabited by a s.p.a.ce yacht of flowing, graceful lines and peeling paint. That was how it would have looked, a vessel dropping out of hypers.p.a.ce, to those in the arrival zone, had there been any witnesses: nothing there, then something, an instantaneous transition.

In the bridge sat the ancient yacht's sole occupant, a teenage girl wearing a battered combat vac suit. She looked from sensor to sensor, uncertain and slow because of her unfamiliarity with this model of s.p.a.ce-craft. Too, there was something like shock in her eyes.

Finally satisfied that no other ship had dropped out of hypers.p.a.ce nearby, or was likely to creep up on her in this remote location, she sat back in her pilot's seat and tried to get her thoughts in order.

Her name was Vestara Khai, and she was a Sith of the Lost Tribe. She was a proud Sith, not one to hide under false ident.i.ties and concealing robes until some decades- long grandiose plan neared completion, and now she had even more reason than usual to swell with pride. Mere hours before, she and her Sith Master, Lady Rhea, had confronted Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker. Lady Rhea and Vestara had fought the galaxy's most experienced, most famous Jedi to a standstill. Vestara had even cut cut him, a graze to the cheek and chin that had spattered her with blood-blood she had later tasted, blood she wished she could take a sample of and keep forever as a sou-venir. him, a graze to the cheek and chin that had spattered her with blood-blood she had later tasted, blood she wished she could take a sample of and keep forever as a sou-venir.

But then Skywalker had shown why he carried that reputation. A moment's distraction, and suddenly Lady Rhea was in four pieces, each drifting in a separate direction, and Vestara was hopelessly outmatched. She had saluted and fled.

Now, having taken a s.p.a.ce yacht that had doubtless been old when her great- great- great-grandsires were newborn, but which, to her everlasting grat.i.tude, held in its still- functioning computer the navigational secrets of the ma.s.s of black holes that was the Maw, she was free. And the impossible weight of her reality and her responsibility were settling upon her.

Lady Rhea was dead. Vestara was alone, and her pride at Lady Rhea's accomplishment, at her own near success in the duel with the Jedi, was not enough to wash away the sense of loss.

Then there was the question of what to do next, of where to go. She needed to be able to communicate with her people, to report on the incidents in the Maw.

But this creaking, slowly deteriorating SoroSuub StarTracker s.p.a.ce yacht did not carry a hypercomm unit. She'd have to put in to some civilized planet to make contact. That meant arriving unseen, or arriving and departing so swiftly that the Jedi could not detect her in time to catch her. It also meant acquiring suffi-cient credits to fund a secret, no- way- to- trace- it hypercomm message. All of these plans would take time to bring to reality.

Vestara knew, deep in her heart, and within the warning currents of the Force, that Luke Skywalker intended to track her to her homeworld of Kesh. How he planned to do it, she didn't know, but her sense of paranoia, trained at the hands of Lady Rhea, burned within her as though her blood itself were acid. She had to find some way to outwit a Force user several times her age, renowned for his skills.

She needed to go someplace where Force users were relatively commonplace. Otherwise, any use by her of the Force would stand out like a signal beacon to experienced Jedi in the vicinity. There weren't many such places. Coruscant was the logical answer. But if her trail began to lead toward the government seat of the Galactic Alliance, Skywalker could warn the Jedi there and Vestara would face a nearly impossible- to-bypa.s.s network of Force users between her and her destination.

The current location of the Jedi school was not known. Hapes was ruled by an ex- Jedi and was rumored to harbor more Force sensitives, but it was such a security- conscious civilization that Vestara doubted she could accomplish her mission there in secrecy.

Then the answer came to her, so obvious and so per-fect that she laughed out loud.

But the destination she'd thought of wouldn't be on a galactic map as old as the one in the antique yacht she commanded. She'd have to go somewhere and get a map update. She nodded, her pride, sense of loss, and paranoia all fading as she focused on her new task.

TRANSITORY MISTS.

Jedi Knight Leia Organa Solo sat at the MillenniumFalcon MillenniumFalcon's communications console. She frowned, her lips pursed as though she were solving an elaborate mathematical equation, as she read and re- read the text message the Falcon Falcon had just received via hypercomm. had just received via hypercomm.

The silence that had settled around her eventually drew her husband, Han Solo, to her side; his boyish, often insensitive persona was in part a fabrication, and he well knew and could sense his wife's moods. The chill and silence of her complete concentration usually meant trouble. He waved a hand between her eyes and the console monitor. "Hey."

She barely reacted to his presence. "Hm."

"New message?"

"From Ben."

"Another letter filled with teenage talk, I a.s.sume.

Girls, speeders, allowance woes-"

Leia ignored his joking. "Sith," she said.

"And Sith, of course." Han sat in the chair next to hers but did not a.s.sume his customary slouch; the news kept his spine rigid. "They found a new Sith Lord?"

"Worse, I think." Finally some animation returned to Leia's voice. "They've found an ancient installation at the Maw and were attacked by a gang of Sith. A whole strike team. With the possibility of more out there."

"I thought Sith ran in packs of two. Vape both of 'em and their menace is ended for all time, at least for a few years, until two more show up." Han tried to keep his voice calm, but the last Sith to bring trouble to the galaxy had been Jacen Solo, his and Leia's eldest son.

Though Jacen had been dead for more than two years, the ripples of the evil he had done were still causing damage and heartache throughout the settled galaxy.

And both his acts and his death had torn a hole in Han's heart that felt like it would last forever.

"Yeah, well, no. Apparently not anymore. Ben also says-and we're not to let Luke know that he did-that Luke is exhausted. Really exhausted, like he's had the life squeezed out of him. Ben would like us to sort of drift near and lend Luke some support."

"Of course." But then Han grimaced. "Back to the Maw. The only place gloomy enough to make its next door neighbor, Kessel, seem like a garden spot."

Leia shook her head. "They're tracking a Sith girl who's on the run. So it probably won't be the Maw. It may be a planet full of Sith."

"Ah, good." Han rubbed his hands together as if antic.i.p.ating a fine meal or a fight. "Well, why not. We can't go back to Coruscant until we're ready to mount a legal defense. Daala's bound to be angry that we stole all the Jedi she wanted to deep- freeze."

Finally Leia smiled and looked at Han. "One good thing about the Solos and Skywalkers. We never run out of things to do."

CORUSCANT.

JediTemple

Master Cilghal, Mon Calamari and most proficient medical doctor among the current generation of Jedi, paused before hitting the console b.u.t.ton that would erase the message she had just spent some time decrypting. It had been a video transmission from Ben Skywalker, a message carefully rerouted through several hypercomm nodes and carefully staged so as not to mention that it was for Cilghal's tympanic membranes or, in fact, for anyone on Coruscant.

But its main content was meant for the Jedi, and Cilghal repeated it as a one- word summation, making the word sound like a vicious curse: "Sith." "Sith."

The message had to be communicated throughout the Jedi Order. And on review, there was nothing in it that suggested she couldn't preserve the recording, couldn't claim that it had been forwarded to her by a civilian friend of the Skywalkers. Luke Skywalker was not sup-posed to be in contact with the Jedi Temple, but this recording was manifestly free of any proof that the exiled Grand Master exerted any influence over the Order. She could distribute it.

And she would do so, right now.

DEEPs.p.a.cE NEAR KESSEL.

Jade Shadow, one- time vehicle of Mara Jade Skywalker, now full- time transport and home to her widower and son, dropped from hypers.p.a.ce into the empty blackness well outside the Kessel system. It hung suspended there for several minutes, long enough for one of its occupants to gather from the Force a sense of his own life's blood that had been in the vicinity, then it turned on a course toward Kessel and vanished again into hypers.p.a.ce. one- time vehicle of Mara Jade Skywalker, now full- time transport and home to her widower and son, dropped from hypers.p.a.ce into the empty blackness well outside the Kessel system. It hung suspended there for several minutes, long enough for one of its occupants to gather from the Force a sense of his own life's blood that had been in the vicinity, then it turned on a course toward Kessel and vanished again into hypers.p.a.ce.