Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (3 page)

Malakili wanted to react, wanted to rush in and help the rancor in its pain—but he didn’t dare. The monster was in such a blind frenzy that it would not know the difference between friend and enemy.

Malakili bit down on his knuckle, trying to decide what to do as the rancor stood bleeding and thrashing.

Suddenly, with a hollow thumping sound, four grenade canisters dropped down into the pit, spewing heavily drugged gas into the chamber.

Impenetrable metal sheets dropped over the windows, sealing the ventilation shafts to keep the knockout gas inside until the rancor could be sufficiently stunned.

He heard a step behind him and turned to see Gonar, one of the other skulking humans who seemed at a loss whether to spend more time hanging around Malakili and watching the rancor or remaining upstairs in the throne room so he could earn points with Jabba.

“Jabba wants to get the shells of those combat arachnids,” Gonar said, nodding like a marionette.

His nose was turned up and flat, like a Gamorrean’s, and his hair hung in greasy reddish curls as if he styled it with fresh blood.

Dazed, Malakili held a hand to his paunch, about to be sick.

“What?”

“The carapaces,” Gonar said. “Very hard and jewel-like.

Combat arachnids are raised for their chitin as well as their fighting abilities. Didn’t you know?”

Finally, after the rancor had slumped into unconsciousness, the sleeping gas was pumped out and the large access doors raised up, their bottoms jagged like teeth, as Jabba’s crew of Gamorrean guards stumped in to haul away the broken remains of the arachnids.

Malakili pushed past them and rushed forward to the grunting, snoring hulk of his pet monster. The Gamorrean guards used a hydraulic winch.

?????? to open the rancor’s gigantic jaws, prying the fang-filled maw apart so they could remove the armored carcass of the combat arachnid.

The guards were not terribly bright, in Malakili’s opinion, and they did not think before they acted.

They exercised no care whatsoever as they tore free the dead insectlike creature, ripping the gashes in the rancor’s mouth even wider.

Malakili shouted at them, charging forward and looking even more fearsome than his pet monster.

The Gamorreans snorted in alarm, without a clue as to what they had done wrong; but Gamorrean guards were accustomed to not understanding, so they did not argue as they grabbed the jeweled carcasses and hauled them away.

Malakili ordered Gonar to fetch several large drums of a medicated salve kept in the infirmary of Jabba’s palace, and soon the red-haired human came inside rolling one of the drums. Gonar popped it open, letting a vile chemical smell rise into the confined chamber of the rancor pen.

Malakili already felt dizzy, not just from the chemical smell, but from residual sleeping gas that clung to the dank air, as well as nausea from his disgust at seeing what had happened to the rancor.

Taking handfuls of the wet, stringy goop, Malakili slathered the raw wounds in the rancor’s hide. He looked around and found the flat, gnawed scapula of one of the rancor’s previous meals and used the shoulder blade as a trowel to lay the disinfectant substance lovingly across the gashes.

Gonar assisted him reluctantly, afraid to come too close to the monster and yet wanting to. With the major exterior injuries tended to, Malakili turned to the ruined mess of the monster’s mouth. He sent Gonar running for a pair of tongs, which he used to grasp the shards of diamond-hard chitin still wedged like broken glass between the rancor’s fangs. He stood directly inside the rancor’s mouth, yanking and tugging as he extricated the jammed pieces.

Gonar trembled watching him, but Malakili had no time to worry about such things. The rancor was in pain. If these shards remained stuck in its jaws, the wounds would become infected, and the monster would be even more ornery.

A foul stench rose from the rancor’s throat as its stuttering snores grew quieter. Malakili found the shattered stumps of two rotten teeth that must have snapped off in some other battle. Malakili grasped these too and tugged them out. The stumps came loose more easily than he expected, but the rancor’s mouth was so full of fangs that it seemed to grow two for every one it lost.

The monster stirred, and its beady black eyes blinked. Its nostrils flared as it heaved in a deep breath. Malakili leaped out of the way just as the jaws snapped shut.

“It’s awake!” Gonar shrieked, and fled through the low door. The dose of the sleeping gas had worn off with alarming swiftness.

Malakili fell backward as the rancor lurched to its feet. It swayed unsteadily for a moment. Malakili considered that this might be his last chance to bolt for.the door.

The rancor reared up and spread its claw-laden hands. It snorted and glared down at him, still in obvious agony.

Malakili froze, looking up at the monster. If he ran, that would draw its attention, and he would instantly be eaten. A part of him prayed that the rancor would recognize him and not kill him.

The rancor grunted again, then bent low to sniff the medicinal salve on its torn legs. It raised its humongous hand to its flattened nostrils and sniffed again, looking at where the wounds from the combat arachnid’s spines had been salved and bandaged. The rancor grunted at Malakili, then looked around the floor of its den as if searching for something.

Malakili continued to stare, frozen in awe and terror.

Sweat poured off his grimy skin. His heart hammered like colliding starships in his chest.

But then the rancor found what it was looking for: the long femur from a food beast. Still looking sidelong at the human in its pen, the rancor picked up the bloody bone and squatted down in its cage, gnawing nonchalantly, though his mouth must still have been in great pain.

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 stair-like rocks to climb, the rancor put on a burst of speed toward the shadowy canyons.

Malakili punched the accelerator of the sandskim-merwbut 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 kittered against each other. Otherwise the world was incredibly silent.

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.