Fate of the Jedi: Backlash (26 page)

Of course, if he could, so could the Nightsisters. They would be angry at having been driven off, angrier at having lost two of their own. They would retaliate, and soon. If they waited very long, the tribal unification they opposed would take place.

None of which was Ben’s concern right now. He wanted to catch a
murderer. For Sha’s killer was assuredly a Nightsister, and if he could identify her, it could lead him to other Nightsisters.

That morning, while more athletic events were conducted and funeral rites for the victims of the kodashi viper bites were planned, he wandered the campsite and asked questions.
Was Sha among you yesterday? How did she act? What did she say? Do you know who she spoke to before coming to you? Do you know where she went after leaving you?

He got some answers. She was asking about the children of the Raining Leaves.
Asking what, specifically?
Just their names and ages.

Frustrated, at midday he returned to the offworlders’ camp. He was not the first there; Dyon was already on hand, cooking their midday meal. Dyon, turning lizard cutlets wrapped in transparisteel foil atop bare ashes, grinned up at him. “You’re a very dull boy, Ben. You know that, don’t you? There are lots of Force-using girls around here who have still not paired up.”

“Oh, be quiet.” Ben sat, his back to a large rock. “No, don’t be quiet. Tell me what you know about Tribeless Sha.”

“Huh.” Dyon frowned, thinking back. “Her name was Sha’natrac Tsu. She was originally of the Blue Coral Divers. But the clan put a death mark on her.”

“Why?”

“The Blue Corals had a feud going with the Scissorfists, who were named for a kind of big, lumbering crustacean. The Blue Coral Divers were one of the new breed of clans, women and men ruling jointly, and the Scissorfists were former escaped slaves from a variety of clans and some women who’d joined them. Both clans lived near the sea. It was one of those feuds that went on for years; a handful of clan members on either side were lost every year to ambush, or just disappeared.”

“Got it. Two clans not smart enough not to kill each other.”

“That’s basically it. Anyway, in one of those rare fits of sense that the Dathomiri clans sometimes have, the feuding groups had a diplomatic meeting to try to work out their differences, and Sha was part of the party, and she fell in love with a Scissorfist.”

“Oh, no, not a love story.”

“And one with a sad ending, too. The peace talks went badly, the two clans went back to warring, and Sha and her mate, who hadn’t
made any secret of their relationship, were suddenly traitors because they wouldn’t agree to kill each other. They ran off together and were exiled. They ended up moving to a site not all that far from the spaceport, well out of the hunting ranges of their former clans. This would have been about seven years ago.”

“So? Tragic ending?”

“So about five years ago, she starts hiring herself out to patrons at the spaceport, as a guide. She accepts courier jobs, hunting jobs, spying jobs, and seems to prefer the ones that take her farther and farther away from her home grounds, especially if they give her the opportunity to meet clans she hasn’t run into before. When people ask about her husband, she says he’s dead and she’s going to kill whoever killed him. She doesn’t say more than that, though.”

Ben glared at him. “That’s it? That’s the whole story?”

“That’s the whole story as far as anybody but Sha knew it, yes.”

“You really know how to make these epics come alive, Dyon. How is it that you didn’t become a historian?”

Dyon waved him away. “Don’t be sarcastic to the man cooking your food.”

“Actually, that’s good advice.” Ben fell silent. Dyon’s story did suggest that perhaps Sha had stumbled across the killer of her husband. Still, the tale raised more questions than it settled. Who had killed her husband, and why? And how would the specific questions she was asking lead her to that person?

Something nagged at Ben, something Sha had said when they’d first met.

That was it, words about the Nightsisters.
They hide, they heal, they return. If their numbers are few, they come for your children
. And she’d looked so sorrowful, but only for an instant.

Ben stared at Dyon. “That’s it. They took her daughter.”

“What daughter?”

“Yes, what daughter?” That was Luke, settling into a cross-legged sitting pose beside the fire.

“I think Sha had a daughter, and the Nightsisters stole her.” He explained his thinking.

Luke accepted a mug of caf from Dyon and shook his head. “That’s pretty tenuous, Ben.”

“I’m trusting my instincts. Yeah, it’s tenuous, but it explains a lot if it’s true. She and her Scissorfist husband are living away from their persecutors but also away from the protection a clan normally offers. They have a baby, everything’s good. Then one night the Nightsisters come. Suddenly her baby’s gone and her husband’s dead. She hires herself out on missions that finance her while she searches for her kid.” Ben looked around, visually scanning the Raining Leaves camp. “And she found something. Maybe one of the Raining Leaves told her,
There was a baby like that. But I don’t want to talk out here in the open. Someone might hear. Let’s take a short walk into the Trees of Imminent Doom.”

Luke frowned. “You’re being awfully flip about a woman’s death.”

“Sorry. Investigator humor. I heard a lot of it when I was with the Galactic Alliance Guard. Anyway, it would help if I could pin down the dates a little more precisely.”

“I might be able to help with that.” Dyon went fumbling through his many vest pockets and eventually brought out a scuffed, sturdy-looking datapad. “Luke, can you take over the fire for a few minutes?”

“Of course.”

Dyon began tapping commands and queries into his ’pad. “It’s nice to have comm repeaters and satellites. I can access the records at the spaceport. I mean, you’re used to that sort of thing on Coruscant, but here … Um, Sha Tsu and Vagan Kolvy are first recorded as visiting the spaceport seven years, one month ago. The husband has no more visits after five years, ten months back. Five years, eight months ago, Sha lists herself as available for scouting, guiding, hunting activities.”

Ben thought about it. “So in all probability, they took her baby—”

Luke shot him an admonishing glance. “Her
theoretical baby.”

“They raided her theoretical campsite, murdered her theoretical husband, and took her theoretical baby just over five years, eight months ago.” He scanned the campsite again. “It would be pretty hard to introduce a new child into a clan like this, wouldn’t it?”

Dyon snapped his datapad shut. “No, but it would be hard to do it unobtrusively. These people lead a hard, low-calorie existence, so nobody has a pregnancy that goes undetected because of extra weight. There’s some exchanges of members among clans, so it’s possible, say, for you to have a cousin over in the clan next door, and that cousin
dies and you adopt her child. But everybody knows that the child originally came from another clan.”

“Huh.” Ben accepted a piece of foil-wrapped meat from his father and tossed it from hand to hand to keep it from burning his fingers. “After lunch, I think I’m going to start asking new questions.”

His father grinned. “And when someone asks you to talk to her among the Trees of Imminent Doom?”

“I say yes, and close my eyes and pucker up for a big kiss?”

“There, that’s the Skywalker survival instinct at work.”

Ben was true to his plan. After the midday meal, he wandered the camp again, asking new questions.
Is this your child? How old is she? Daughter of one of the Broken Columns, I take it? Does she have any friends her own age?

It was nightfall before he came across any answers that interested him.

With a special wrestling event, honoring those that had fallen to the snakes, loud in the distance, Ben stared down at a little black-haired girl, who stared solemnly back up at him. “This is your daughter?”

Halliava, winner of the short footrace for those with the Arts and other competitions, gave him a wide smile, a proud smile. “Yes. This is Ara. Ara, this is Ben. He’s from far away, and he’s a boy-Witch. Give him proper greetings.”

The girl raised a chubby hand, palm toward Ben. “Welcome to our fire. We have bread and meat and water.”

Halliava’s prompt came as a whisper: “I am called …”

“I am called Aradasa Vurse.”

Ben returned the salute. “I am called Ben Skywalker.”

“Are you really a boy-Witch?”

He nodded. “But we call ourselves Jedi. Some Jedi are boys and some are girls, and the Arts we know are a little different from yours.”

“Oh.” Suddenly shy, Ara grabbed and clung to her mother’s thigh, but she did not turn away from Ben.

Ben gave Halliava a friendly smile. “She’s, what, four?”

“Five and a season. She’s small for her age.” Halliava shrugged.
“You can never tell how fast they’ll grow. I’m tall, and her father was very tall. We used to jest that he was half rancor.”

“
Was
tall?”

“He died before Ara was born. He was a warrior of the Broken Columns. We wed at the annual conclave six or so years ago, and parted at conclave’s end. When next I heard word of him, he had died in a fall, climbing tall trees to plunder nests of their eggs.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged again.

“I heard the circumstances of her birth were difficult, too.”

Halliava gave him a little quizzical frown. “Who said that?”

“I forget. My father was telling stories around a campfire. Before I was born, my mother carried me around from battle to planetary disaster and back again, and one of your Raining Leaves wanted to top that story.”

“Oh. Well, yes. I was saddened by Dasan’s death and had told no one I was expecting his child. I went on one last long scouting expedition for the clan, knowing that soon after my return I would begin to show … but when I was at the farthest point on my trip from home, I slid into a ravine and broke my leg. I nearly starved, which I think is what has left Ara so small. It was not until after she was born that I was able to return to the Raining Leaves.”

“Clearly, you’re a strong woman.”

She gave him another smile. There was no guilt or duplicity evident in it. “There are no weaklings among the Raining Leaves.”

He waved at Ara. “Nice meeting you, Ara.”

The little girl gave him another salute, but turned it into a wave halfway through.

Ben turned and, with a last cordial nod to Halliava, moved on to the next campfire. There he’d continue the deception that he was meeting as many clan members as possible, the better to understand their ways.

Halliava’s story was unlikely but possible. Dasan of the Broken Columns had indeed died a month after the clan conclave six and a half years before, though no one could remember him wedding Halliava; still, not all such unions were officiated or remembered.

Halliava had indeed departed on a lengthy scouting mission three months after that conclave and had not returned for months, now with the baby Ara in her arms.

Blast it
. Ben didn’t want his suspicions to be correct. He rather liked Halliava. And maybe he
was
wrong. He’d have a better sense of whether he was right if something befell him to end his investigation—a plausible accident or a murder attempt.

He reminded himself that he did need to survive if he was to achieve his goals: justice for a dead woman and the uncovering of a nest of Nightsisters. Nightsisters, and perhaps Sith in collaboration with them.

T
AHIRI
V
EILA STARED OUT THE TINY VIEWPORT OF HER DETENTION
cell, staring at the late-afternoon traffic streaming past at a slightly lower altitude. Thousands and thousands of people swept by in their airspeeders every hour. And if they knew that Tahiri Veila, murderer of Admiral Gilad Pellaeon—an officer and leader remembered as affectionately by the Galactic Alliance as by the Empire—stood behind this viewport, some would probably try to put a blaster bolt though the transparisteel.

She knew she did not look like a killer. Tall and blond-haired, attractive though she did not enhance her looks with makeup or glamorous clothes, bearing curious faint scars on her forehead from events a lifetime ago, she looked like the sort of athlete who’d won championships early and then retired to a life of endorsing breakfast foods while smiling at the holocams. But it had been a long time since she’d smiled.

She turned to her visitor, who was seated at the end of the bunk that—aside from an unpartitioned refresher unit—was the only furniture in the tiny room she now called home.

The visitor gave her an understanding nod. “It’s difficult to understand because it’s based on logic that is alien to all rational minds. It’s attorney logic, legal logic.”

His name was Mardek Mool. A Bith, he had the elongated cranium and epidermal cheek-folds of his species, and huge dark eyes that watched Tahiri as though he expected her to fly into a rage and use a Force-choke on him. It did not bode well for her case, she knew, that her own public defender seemed to believe her capable of a senseless, cold-blooded murder just because she was frustrated. Still, Mool was competent, dedicated, and good-hearted, and he seemed determined to do the best job he could for her. Given that the courts had denied her the services of Nawara Ven, on the grounds that his relationship to the Jedi Order posed a conflict of interest, Tahiri supposed she ought to be glad to have Mool.