Star Wars: Tales from Jabba's Palace Page 3

  Malakili stood there for a long, long time before he finally, quietly left.

  A Game of Fetch

  Malakili didn’t bother to ask if he could take the rancor outside of the palace, where the monster could romp in the desert vastness, stretch its sinewy legs, and enjoy the freedom of open air. He figured no one would argue with him if he was accompanied by multiple tons of fangs and claws.

  Malakili had been around vicious animals enough to know that the thing they wanted most in life, the thing simmering behind their small, ultrafocused minds as they paced in the pens they had grown to hate was the simple wish to get out, get out, Get Out!

  Malakili waited until the hottest part of a Tatooine afternoon, after both suns had reached their peaks. At this time Jabba and his pandering minions took a siesta as their only defense against the smothering heat.

  From the main garage levels, he took a one-person sandskimmer and parked it outside one of the huge weighted doors at the base of the citadel. This door had been opened exactly once, when Bidlo Kwerve and Bib Fortuna had hauled the stunned rancor into its pen and then sealed the door again with locks from the inside and outside. But Malakili used small explosive charges to blow the locks off the outside. The metal locks vaporized into silver steam. The echoing thump of the charges sent small scuttling things dashing to hide in shadowy cracks.

  Malakili stood listening as a drowsy hot silence fell back over the palace, then he slipped inside to the dungeon levels. He stood outside the rancor cage, holding a small but powerful vibroblade specifically tuned to metal frequencies. The blade could chop through the thick locks inside the external door; it would take longer than small charges, but he didn’t want the explosions to upset the rancor.

  Gonar, the scrawny, high-strung human clinger, appeared out of the shadows. Malakili didn’t like the way the young man always pestered him, watched him, followed him. “What are you going to do?” Gonar said. His greasy curls of red hair looked as if they had been anointed with fresh oil and his sallow face looked like spoiled milk.

  “We’re going to go out for a jaunt,” Malakili said. “A game of fetch.”

  Gonar’s eyes ratcheted open like huge cargo doors. “You’re crazy. You’re letting the rancor loose?”

  Malakili chuckled. He was feeling very good about this entire excursion. He patted his rounded paunch. “I think we could both use the exercise, him and me.”

  He opened the cage door and ducked inside, clattering it shut behind him. Gonar gripped the bars and stared, but the young man would never dream of following Malakili into the monster’s den while the rancor remained awake.

  With the disturbance of its new visitor, the rancor rose to its feet and rumbled a low, liquid growl—but Malakili paid no attention. The rancor continued to look at him with cold and glittering eyes that showed an icy intelligence. But the monster had grown to tolerate Malakili’s presence. In fact, the rancor seemed to enjoy the keeper’s visits. Malakili had come to count on that.

  In a blatant show of trust, Malakili waddled across the bone-littered floor of the den and walked directly between the rancor’s knobby legs to get to the opposite wall where the slime-encrusted door had been sealed.

  He bent down with his vibroblade and tuned the frequency and energy density higher as he chopped at the metal locks. Sparks and droplets of molten durasteel flew, but Malakili kept battering away until the locks lay severed.

  The controls had been disconnected, but Malakili attached a new battery pack and hot-wired the circuit. With a screeching, ponderous sound, the heavy metal door labored upward, splitting open at the bottom and spilling a knifeblade of buttery sunlight into the dank pen. Hot breezes whipped in, stealing the cool dampness, until the door had groaned completely to the top, an open window to the freedom of the desert.

  The rancor stood up, blinking its impenetrable eyes. It opened its arms, stretching out its heavily clawed hands as if worshiping the suns and the fresh air. The monster stood in amazement and confusion, glancing down at Malakili, not certain what was going on. Malakili motioned for it to go through the opening.

  “It’s okay,” Malakili said in a soothing voice. “Go on, it’s all right. We’ll come back in a little while.”

  The rancor stepped out into the sunlight, flinched from the glare. Its shoulders hunched. Its shovel hands swung from side to side, scraping the floor of the pit—and then it stood up, strode out into the full light and heat, and bellowed a cry of sheer joy. Its fangs glittered in the double sunlight.

  As if suddenly released from chains, the rancor broke into a loping run, stretching its legs, flailing its heavy hands from side to side to keep balance. The mottled green-tan hide seemed to vanish into the desert rocks.

  Malakili watched the creature romp for several seconds, feeling his own delight, then he hopped onto the sandskimmer, fired up the popping, stuttering engine, and drifted after his pet monster.

  The rancor sprang to the top of an outcropping of blistered lava rock. It tilted its head up and roared at the sky, raising huge claws, and then it jumped down again, picking its way along the rough, sloping cliff face.

  Above, in the towers of Jabba’s palace, emergency beacons flashed on. Malakili heard the distant, squeaking sounds of faraway guards shouting in alarm; but at the moment he didn’t care. He would come back with the rancor. He would show that everything was all right.

  When he flew too close to the rancor in the droning sandskimmer, the monster reflexively lashed sideways with its bony claws, as if Malakili were a bothersome insect. But Malakili swung around and flitted in front of the monster so that the rancor could identify him. The monster backed away, hung its head as if abashed at what it had tried to do, then continued out into the open sands.

  The rancor loped across the hot, cracked ground, leaping over outcroppings in ecstasy. It ran far from Jabba’s palace, but it was not fleeing—it just loved its freedom.

  Malakili’s chest swelled with joy, though he was ashamed at his own emotional weakness. Tears traced cool patterns on his cheeks. This was probably one of the most remarkable days in his life.

  The rancor sprinted for a line of red-tan crags striped with strata that showed the rugged geological past of Tatooine. The broken mountains fanned out, cracked with numerous canyons like razor-blade jaws, rocky narrows cut sharply by ancient torrents of forgotten water. Seeing the shade and the rugged stairlike rocks to climb, the rancor put on a burst of speed toward the shadowy canyons.

  Malakili punched the accelerator of the sandskimmer—but instead of providing additional speed, the small vehicle popped and coughed like a sick man spitting up a bubble of blood. The sandskimmer dropped under Malakili’s weight. He clutched the handles, and his hands were suddenly greasy with sweat.

  Jabba’s palace loomed behind him in the distance, a brooding citadel like a stern father watching over those who had disobeyed.

  Oblivious, the rancor dashed into one of the near canyons and vanished into the shadows.

  “Wait!” Malakili shouted, his voice sucked dry like moisture in the desert sun. He wrestled with the sandskimmer as it angled toward the powdery sands and sharp knuckles of rock. Somehow, the vehicle remained aloft, puttering and staggering through the air until it reached the rocky wall of the ridge. He concentrated so heavily on keeping the skimmer in the air that he had lost track of which of the numerous side canyons the rancor had entered.

  Malakili moaned as the skimmer finally crashed to the ground, tumbling him into sharp broken scree. He picked himself up from the stinging rocks and gazed toward the welcoming shade of the side canyons. The desert heat from the double suns screamed down at him.

  He staggered across the broken ground, leaving the sandskimmer behind. He finally made his way into the dusty alluvial fan at the canyon’s mouth, stepping over flattened clay and into the darker shade. Every step sent a crisp tinkling sound of broken rock as dry pebbles skittered against each other. Otherwise the world was incredibly silent.

&n
bsp; He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t walk all the way back to Jabba’s palace, although he might try it in the dimness of the night. 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-smoothed 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 gaffi 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 gaffi 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 gaffi 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 gaffi 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 gaffi 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 that Jabba 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.

  In 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.