Maul and two other Zabraks stood near the airlock as the ship came into Dathomir airspace. To Yujan's knowledge, no one knew that the Rebel ship had arrived. The planet's atmosphere was dark red and rusty, a bloody mist wafting along even the ground. One of the other Zabraks was Talon, the man Maul had been introduced to before, but Draz was either going with the women's group or not at all, and Maul did not bother to ask which. The third person in the group was a tan-skinned Zabrak with short, black hair and Iridonian horns. His tattoos were three green slashes on each side of his face, like the reverse of Nautolan gills, along the top of his cheeks. Maul hadn't encountered him much over the course of the flight, but he seemed sociable, and smiled at the other two as they waited for the door to open. He introduced himself as Bao-tan, and spelled it.

"Good luck, delegates," Yujan said over the comm. Draz had called them something less formal and more affectionate earlier - bait, pretty boys, sacrificial lambs.

The airlock opened, letting in humid, clammy wind. Maul just saw treetops. The three Zabraks gripped the emergency handholds on the walls of the airlock as the ship lurched suddenly downward, and then there was a clearing, and grayish brown dirt under the fog, and Bao-tan shrugged and jumped out of the ship.

The other two followed. Maul landed lightly on his feet. Talon was flat-footed and heavy but did not stumble, and Bao-tan seemed to have a childish energy, but also not so much independence that it got in the way. He looked back at the others after he had progressed a few steps through the clearing, making sure they were keeping up. For the first time, Maul felt like an old man next to him. Bao-Tan had to be little older than twenty. Talon was younger than him too, Maul was sure, although he didn't think of himself as over fifty.

Behind him, the wind whipped and the engine roared as the ship waited for them to get a little farther away. The Zabraks followed a clear path through the forest.

The Nightbrothers' architecture was all blocky and cold stone. They patrolled themselves: or at least, two yellow-skinned men wearing woven shirts and long, leather wraps like kilts met them at the first gate they came too. The guards were armed with spears.

As soon as he saw them, Bao-Tan walked more slowly so that Maul and Talon caught up with him and he could speak quietly to them. "Do we say 'take me to your leader' now, or...?"

Their leaders may not be alive, Maul thought. And there was a good chance that the Nightbrothers could hear the whispers.

Talon shook his head. "We'll feel the area out. Take what we find."

Maul nodded. Bao-Tan said, "Okay," and shrugged. Maul had the feeling that the younger Zabrak's tendency to run his mouth was going to be a problem along the way. He almost looked forward to leaving the kid to the wolves.

They arrived at the gate within a few moments.

The men at the gate did not level the spears. Instead they simply looked calmly at the newcomers.

"Who are you?" One of the guards asked. He looked like Savage, Maul thought. The guardsman had wide shoulders and a wide face, with round brown eyes. He wore a black fur cloak that almost hid his sleeveless shirt. Maul did not think that the weather would affect him much if it usually stayed like this, balmy and wet but not raining. Maul did not know what storms lashed Dathomir.

"Representatives from the galaxy," Talon said.

"We know the galaxy." The guardsmen looked at each other.

"And...?"

Talon waited for them to say more, but they were more patient than he was, and simply blinked. There was an awkward silence, backed by the acknowledgement that there was some kinship shared here, some mutual good-will between words.

"Take us to your leader?" Bao-Tan tried.

"What clan are you from?" asked the second guard, tipping his head quizzically.

Talon and Bao-Tan looked at each other.

Maul said, "Surin."

The burlier guard nodded at his companion. "Take them in. Bring them to Mufsat and Hadokar Surin."

Maul could not be sure whether Mufsat was supposed to be a a single name or also to go with Surin. The fact that he would find his parents here hadn't really fazed him, but now it was like a heavy rock falling into still water. The ripples kept expanding.

The gates opened in front of the four Zabraks, the thick stone scraping at the ground. The four of them walked through the village. Everyone there seemed to be working at something. The first man they saw was turning a gear that opened the gate. Others were practicing staff fighting, or tilling small, almost comically small gardens. Maul couldn't be sure how anyone could feed a village from even many of those small patches of greenery, only a few feet square.

Mufsat met them almost immediately. He was orange-skinned, with radiating tattoos like tiger stripes. His arms were tattooed too, the same sort of stripes ringing his forearms and becoming smaller, tighter circles until arrows crawled onto the back of his hands. He had a bald head with small, Iridonian horns but a thick, foot-long ponytail lashed with a leather thong at the back of his head, and a five-o'clock shadow. He scowled as soon as he saw the newcomers.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Delegates from the galaxy," Talon said.

"What part of the galaxy?" Mufsat demanded.

Talon glanced at Maul. "Our last stop was Glee Anselm. We're here to make people aware of the Empire's speciesism."

"What Empire is this? The Lowland Country? The Red Birds?"

"The Galactic Empire," Talon said. It sounded like he was losing patience. Meanwhile, Mufsat was holding in a smirk. Maul knew that there was something of a politician in the other man since he was making an effort to hold it in at all, but he wasn't very good at it. Other Zabrak men were gathering around them, talking loudly and gesturing without any effort to hide their curiosity. Beside them, Mufsat was a statue in comparison. Maul thought about how many of them he could kill before he had to grab a weapon.

"Coruscant has nothing to do with us," Mufsat said. "I know you might not understand that, so let me explain the scale of it to you. A native born-Dathomiri hasn't left this planet in generations. We have our own wars and our own universities. We have libraries no one from another planet has ever seen...or so the Nightsisters tell us. And we have enough of our own problems, delegates."

"A native has left," Maul said.

Mufsat flicked his gaze to him. He had large, alert eyes, brown specked with a gold that was so light and reflective it was almost white.

Bao-Tan cocked a thumb at Maul. "He's a Surin."

As savvy as they were, the Nightbrothers had a near obsession with family. A man who had been lost and then returned to the fold was practically a savior without having done anything to earn or prove the title. He had gone out into the world of women, survived, and wanted to come back. He must hold some arcane knowledge.

Maul feared they they would want him to somehow prove that. He wouldn't even be able to answer any questions. He turned the name of his relative over in his head - Hadokar. It did not mean anything to him.

Talon jumped on the opportunity. "You said that only the Nightsisters know about the library. That's part of what we want to solve," he said. "Your people are oppressed too. If you come with us, you could help us bring other people out of that kind of oppression."

Someone handed Mufsat a cigarette. He took it from a jet-black hand, and only after Mufsat had gently taken a lighter from out of one of the pouches at his belt did Maul look up to see the person who had handed it to him. This man was a blotchy-skinned Zabrak. Yellow and red swirled around his skin underneath a complicated full-face tattoo. He had placid brown eyes that blinked slowly as Maul looked up at him.

Mufsat said, "Thank you, Hadokar," and lifted the burning cigarette to his own lips. Hadokar was holding one as well but did not light it.

So this was the Surin. When Maul looked at him, Hadokar did not particularly acknowledge his stare, instead looking evenly between the three Zabraks.

"What do you actually want? How many men?" Mufsat asked.

"As many as you can send."

"You know that the Nightsisters won't allow it."

"We have another delegation talking to them," Talon said. Now that he had gotten attached to that word "delegate" he seemed to really like it.

The Dathomirian Zabraks looked from one to another, perhaps skeptically. Maul could not read their expressions. Hadokar's Force presence was hard to read also, because he was very calm. Perhaps his emotions would show only when he was in the very thick of them. That might have been a trait that Maul had inherited, Maul thought quietly.

But then the Sith scoffed at himself, without making a sound. He did not know that Hadokar was the father of Savage and the third brother. If this society was as oppressive as it seemed, Hadokar might not even know the names of the mothers of his children. They would have simply arrived, done what they had came to do, and left, off to make marks in their books of genetics and family lineages.

"If that even makes a difference," Mufsat said, sounding more regal and dismissive than he had before, "it will take them time to come to a decision anyway. Meanwhile..."

Then, Hadokar Surin finally spoke. "He must prove himself to us," he said.

He was staring straight at Maul. Bao-Tan nudged Maul's upper arm with his own elbow, and Maul snarled and snapped at him. This simply made Hadokar smile in something like fondness or amusement. Whatever it was, there was a tinge of arrogance in it too.

Maul's first thought was of what the Rebel so-called delegates would do if he decided at this moment that he didn't care enough to undergo a trial in order to help them.

Except that he did care. He wanted to know what this man knew about Savage. He wanted to show him that his son was stronger than he was, and that his son was dead.

Maul said, "How?"