Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (4 page)

Despite his own peril, Malakili’s main concern now was for finding the rancor.

If he had lost the monster, Jabba would find a long series of imaginative and unspeakably painful tortures for him. It would be better to just lie down and bake to death in the desert sun.

But he couldn’t believe that the rancor would abandon him so blithely.

They had been through too much together.

He picked his way over the ancient riverbed for about an hour, looking for the rancor’s tracks, but he saw nothing, heard nothing, only a few pattering rocks from high above.

At last, up ahead, came a surprisingly soft skitter of stones underfoot.

A large lumbering shadow disappeared into a small split in the wall, a miniature canyon with sharp overhangs and time-smmoothed rock faces.

Malakili picked up speed, hoping to find the rancor so that at least they could face the future together.

“Hello!” he said. His feet crunched on the dry pebbles as he waddled forward. “Here, boy!”

But as he rounded the corner, a screaming demon leaped out in front of him—man-sized, but with a face wrapped in bandages, mouth covered by sand filter, and eyes peering through a pair of gleaming metal tubes.

Sand People! Tusken Raiders.

The demon held a long, sharp gaffing stick in his hands like a quarter staff. Its hooked end bounced up and down as the Raider bellowed a challenge.

Malakili staggered back and then recognized two other Sand People astride enormous woolly banthas, mammoth-sized beasts with curved tusks around their ears. The two mounted Tuskens squawked, and the banthas responded as if telepathically, charging toward him.

The unmounted Tusken leaped down from the rock and swung at Malakili with his hooked gaffing stick.

Malakili was unarmed. He lumbered backward, but knew he could not escape. He reached down, grabbed a rock, and threw it at his attacker, but the projectile went wide.

Huffing and snorting, the banthas stampeded toward him. Malakili fell onto the sharp rocks, and he knew the monsters were going to trample him. He would be crushed to a pulp within seconds.

Then, with an echoing roar that split loose rocks from the cliff face, the rancor leaped down from an overhang high above. Reaching out with its claws, the monster crashed into the lead bantha, tackling it to the ground.

The bantha snorted and reared, but it didn’t understand what had just happened. The rancor used his powerful claws and durasteel-strong muscles to grab the tusks on both sides of the bantha’s head, twisting it as if turning a wheel on a bulkhead door. The bantha’s head wrenched sideways, and its spine gave a hollow, wet crack as its neck snapped.

In a single follow-through motion, the rancor swept its claws sideways and tore open the Tusken Raider that had been knocked from the bantha.

The second rider wailed a challenge, thrashed his own gaffing stick in the air, and charged directly at the rancor. The bantha kept its head down, curved tusks forward like a battering ram—but the rancor flitted sideways with deceptively easy speed and snatched the Tusken from the bantha’s back. It raised the victim to its cavernous mouth and stuffed the Tusken in, chomping down with vise jaws of razor fangs, swallowing the attacker in only two gulps.

With its rider gone, the bantha went wild, as if crazed. The rancor scooped up an enormous broken sandstone boulder that had fallen from the cliffs above in ages past.

Malakili staggered to his feet. The first Tusken Raider had turned his bandaged face to stare at the battle between rancor and bantha, forgetting his human victim. Watching the rancor, Malakili felt the fury from his pet monster. He saw the Tusken who had attacked him, who had swung a gaffing stick at him.

Malakili picked up a much smaller boulder, but one still deadly enough.

The bantha reared up and tried to butt the rancor, but the rancor hefted the sandstone boulder. It brought the stone crashing down on the mammoth beast’s shaggy head, snapping the tusks like brittle straws and caving in the creature’s thick skull. The bantha grunted.

Momentum carried it forward until it slumped in a tumbled heap to the canyon floor.

As the last Tusken Raider heard a sound beside him, he whirled, bringing his gaffing stick up just as Malakili struck with the smaller boulder, crushing his attacker’s swathed head. The Tusken Raider fell to the rocks, thick bandages soaking up the spreading flower of bright blood.

Malakili’s heart pounded as he looked at the carnage.

The rancor let out a ululating bellow of triumph and looked at Malakili with something like contented satisfaction. Then the monster squatted over the bloody carcass of the slain bantha and began to feed.

Later, Malakili clung to the dry knobby skin of the rancor’s neck as the monster trotted across the sands in the desert twilight. It knew where its home was and arrowed straight toward the underbelly of Jabba’s palace.

As it ran hunched over, puffs of sand drifted into the purpling night.

The rancor had gorged itself, and blood spattered the monster’s chest.

It seemed to consider Malakili strange for not devouring the Tusken Raider he had killed, but Malakili had no appetite.

Already he was wondering how he would explain everything to Jabba the Hutt.

Lunchtime Beneath the Jaws

It turned out that Jabba didn’t particularly care that Malakili had taken the rancor out for a romp in the wastelands—he was furious, however, that he had missed its titanic battle with the two banthas.

Malakili beamed with a paternal pride as he extolled his monster’s bravery and viciousness, but Bib Fortuna whispered a different suggestion into Jabba’s ear. The Hutt lurched upright on his dais with a belch of delight. Wouldn’t it make a magnificent duel to pit the rancor against a krayt dragon?

The legendary desert dragons of Tatooine were huge and rare and instilled more fear than any other creature in this sector of the galaxy. None had ever been captured alive before, but Jabba’s incentive—one hundred thousand credits guaranteed to anyone who could bring in a live, unharmed specimen—was enough to ensure the most ambitious efforts. Even the great bounty hunter Boba Fett vowed to remain at Jabba’s palace as he considered the best way to tackle the challenge.

Malakili was convinced that someone would succeed, and he looked upon the threatened battle with great dread. Though he was proud of his rancor’s abiLities, he knew how awesome the krayt dragons were.

Jabba planned to build a special amphitheater out in the bowl of desert sands visible from his tallest towers, where the krayt dragon and the rancor would face off and tear each other apart. Even if the rancor managed to defeat the incredible dragon, Malakili suspected the battle itself would wound the rancor grievously, perhaps mortally.

He couldn’t allow that.

Down in the lower levels of the dungeons, Malakili wheeled a heavily laden cart stacked high with dripping stacks of meat, sawed bones, and leftovers from the slaughterhouse connected to Jabba’s kitchens.

Porcellus, Jabba’s chef, had set aside choice morsels as treats for the rancor, as well as a sandwich of sliced, marinated meat for Malakili’s own lunch.

Malakili got along well with the skittish cook, passing along whatever gossip he managed to hear in the lower levels, though he had to listen to the chef’s ever-increasing fears thatJabba would soon tire of his culinary abilities and feed him to the rancor.

With a sigh, Malakili pushed the cart to the barred gate of the rancor pit. The wheels squeaked like a terrified bristling rodent in the dungeon levels. He swung open the gate, pulled the cart through, and fastened the door behind him.

The rancor stood up and watched him bring the mound of meat closer, running a stubby purplish tongue across the edges of its packed rows of teeth.

Malakili nudged the meat in front of the rancor after removing his own white-wrapped sandwich from the top of the pile. The rancor used a hooked claw to sort through the lunch offerings until it selected a curved dewback rib studded with lumps of gristly meat.

Malakili unwrapped his sandwich and hunkered down on the rancor’s bench-sized toe. Above him, the monster chewed on the long’ rib bone, gnawing and slurping. Malakili’s black headdress protected him from the splattering gobbets of dripping juices that fell from the rancor’s mouth, showering him and running down his own bare back.

As he ate, munching absently on his delicious sandwich, Malakili thought about his possibilities, the options-and his future.

It had been clear from the start that Jabba’s main goal was to challenge the rancor until some greater opponent killed it. Jabba cared nothing for the monster, and neither did any of the others. Even greasy-haired Gonar was terrified of the monster, wanting to be around the rancor only for the prestige and the power it offered. The other spectators who hung around the dungeons had no attachment to the beast either—not the hairy Whiphid guard who poked his tusks against the bars of the cage, watching the bestial power of the rancor as if it reminded him of something from his home planet; not Lorindan, the nozzle-nosed spy who had no motives other than to find information he might sell to someone else.

No, Malakili was alone on Tatooine. He alone loved the monster, and it was up to him to see that his pet was protected. He would find some way to help the rancor escape—and himself along with it.

Malakili continued to chew on his sandwich, swallowing in a dry throat as plans began to form in his mind. Jabba was a powerful crimelord, yes, but he was not the only power on Tatooine. Jabba had many enemies, and Malakili had much information.

Perhaps he could find some way to buy freedom for his pet.

!n the monster’s Lair

Near the center of the grubby city of Mos Eisley, a battered cargo hauler gathered dust. After landing one time too many, the Lucky Despot could no longer pass a single safety test, and so the hulk had remained where it sat, abandoned, until a group of misguided Arconan investors decided to convert it into a luxury hotel, hoping to take advantage of the extensive tourist trade on Tatooine.

Shortly after the entrepreneurs went bankrupt, the Lucky Despot hotel and casino was taken over by a new crimelord on Tatooine, an upstart rival to Jabba who had great dreams, modest capital, and a mean streak wider than her yawning, tooth-filled mouth.

The Lady Valarian lounged back in her contorted chair, relaxing in her plush office. She looked as suave as was possible for a horse-faced, tusk-mouthed, bristle-haired Whiphid female. As she spoke her smooth syllables, it seemed as if she were trying to purr—but to Malakili, it sounded like an overgorged gun dark gargling with its own bodily fluids.

“I know you are from Jabba’s palace,” Lady Valarian said with a grunt deep in her throat. Her peg-like tusks shoved forward from her underjaw as she leaned closer. She batted long eyelashes at him.

Malakili whiffed her heavy perfume that attempted to mask the rank, musky smell of Whiphid fur; he thought this was a worse odor than anything he had smelled in the cages at the Circus Horrificus.

“Yes, I am from Jabba’s palace,” Malakili said, stroking his black headdress, “but Jabba can’t always provide everything I need. So I’ve come to you, Lady Valarian.”

She hunched her shoulders and lifted her brutally ugly face. Her body trembled in what Malakili took to be an expression of mirth. “And how do you expect to pay for this favor you ask of me?”

“I know that Jabba is your enemy, Lady Valarian,” Malakili said.

“I know that you might wish to have full schematics of the palace. The B’omarr monks who built it have kept the layout secret. You might wish to learn some of the hidden entrances to the lower levels. You might wish to know some of Jabba’s habits and weaknesses.”

Lady Valarian snorted. “Don’t you think I have my own operatives inside Jabba’s palace?”

Malakili showed no expression, although he was terrified.

“I said nothing about your operatives. I merely offered my own services. If you intend to challenge Jabba the Hutt, you must be very careful, indeed.”

He hoped he had said the right words. He, who had spent seven seasons taming the wildest creatures in the Circus Horrificus, now felt completely out of his depth in a plush room with a perfumed female who could squash him with a snap of her fingers.

“I’m not saying that I have any personal interest in doing harm to Jabba, ” she said. “In fact, he and I have a limited partnership. He owns a token percentage of the Lucky Despot. But, information is sometimes incalculably valuable, difficult to estimate its worth. It is unwise to dismiss an opportunity to increase one’s knowledge.” She raised a bristly eyebrow.

“Would you care for a drink? Then you may tell me about this favor I can grant you.”

Malakili nodded dumbly as she brought him one of Tatooine’s most expensive beverages in a frosted glass: clear, chilled water with two ice cubes floating in it.

Malakili sipped his drink, licked his lips as the cold liquid danced down his throat.

“I’ll need a ship—a cargo ship with a specially reinforced cage chamber. “

Lady Valarian widened her nostrils with a hefty sniff Of curiosity. “A cage? What are you going to transport?”

“A live animal,” Malakili said. “And myself. I intend to take Jabba’s pet rancor with me. I need to find a deserted world, preferably lush, a jungle moon perhaps a backwater forested planet where a resourceful person could eke out a living, and where a large creature could have his freedom and enough prey to hunt to his own satisfaction.”

Lady Valarian growled in stuttering low bursts, which Malakili interpreted as delighted laughter.

“You want to steal Jabba’s rancor? That would be hilarious!

Oh, this is too good to miss. Yes, yes, I will provide the ship you need. We can set the time and the date.”

“As soon as possible,” Malakili said.

Calmly, Lady Valarian waved a clawed hand across the glowing sheen of her antique desktop. “Yes, yes, as soon as possible. The most important thing, I think, will be to install a tiny spycam in Jabba’s throne room - - just so I can watch the expression on his bloated face when he finds out what’s happened!”