Read Online Lords of the Sith by Paul S. Kemp - Free Book Online Page B

useless to Cham if she didn’t, too sloppy, too angry. She needed release.
    She knew how she appeared to others, with her pacing, her curtness, always on the verge of an explosion. Servitude had made her that way. If she was a monster, the Empire had spawned her.
    Her reflection stared back her from the tiny mirror mounted on thewall. She’d donned a headband of the kind they loved, makeup to accent her high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and full lips. It was the mask she wore when she hunted.
    It wasn’t her in the mask. It was the her she’d been, but made monstrous.
    The pale-blue expanse of her skin looked like still water. How often had she heard those words out of the lips of some Imperial? Too often. She imagined them thinking that if they were nice, if they dressed oppression up in fine words, they were then somehow giving her a choice. But they weren’t. They were just lying to themselves about what they took from her and why she was forced to give it. She’d never had a choice, not a real one, not until she’d strangled that corporal with a headband and fled to the resistance.
    But she carried the scars; she’d always carry them, not on her skin but on her soul, and she picked them open when she needed a reminder of pain or needed to add fuel to her anger. Servitude and its degradations had broken her. She knew she’d never put herself back together, not completely, but she didn’t care. The break had made her jagged, and now she used her edges and points to cut them. They’d made her into something—a slave, a possession, a
thing
—but after she’d escaped them, the making had continued. She’d gone on hammering the metal of her spirit until she’d made herself into something new: a warrior and, often enough, a killer. And Cham Syndulla had given her a place, and she loved him for that. For him it was a cause, but not for her. For her, it was just the vector she used to vent her anger against the Empire.
    She tried out a smile in the mirror as she hung a necklace around her neck, found the smile serviceable, despite the sharpened eyeteeth. She wore fitted pants and a shirt that showed her bare midriff. She threw a sheer, shimmering robe over the whole, knowing the robe hugged her curves as she moved. She hid a blaster in a holster at the small of her back and her vibroblade in the leg wraps around her left calf.
    She hesitated for a moment, recalling Cham’s words about principles. She knew he would disapprove of what she did—of what she’d done adozen times—and that his disapproval wouldn’t be solely based in the risk she took, but also on principle. Principle. She paraphrased for herself her response to him, and it freed her to move.
    “We do what we must to win, Cham. They’re filth, and they deserve what they get.”
    She found she only half believed herself—Cham must have been influencing her more than she’d realized—but half was enough with the need on her.
    She headed out and up the stairs, past a drunk sleeping in a heap against the wall, and onto the street. The thoroughfare filled her senses: the sounds of traffic and the hum of passersby; the smell of cooking fires, spice pipes, and the sweaty, dry stink of a typical Ryloth night. The wind painted her robe against her form and she felt eyes on her, gazes lingering on her sleek figure, but she ignored them.
    She hailed a servicecar with a raised arm, and her curves and makeup drew one quickly. She told the driver to take her to the Octagon, one of the main plazas in Lessu, bordered on all eight sides by cantinas and clubs frequented by Imperials and working girls and men. She’d not hunted there before.
    The Octagon sat about halfway up Lessu’s spire, dug deeply into the stone. The bottom level of the plaza was thirty meters down, and a series of carved stone stairways, tunnels, and balconies, all torchlit, led up to ever higher tiers and more stairways, creating a mazelike warren that eventually descended back to street