Tales from Jabba's Palace by Kevin J. Anderson Read Free Book Online

the monster down to the floor and smashing open his skull, splitting his hide.
    The rancor snorted and whimpered once in stunned pain, as if calling out for Malakili, and then it died.
    Malakili stood like a statue. His jaw dropped openas his ears filled with a roaring white noise of disbelief and utter anguish. “No!” he wailed.
    The rancor was dead! The pet he had tended and cared for … the creature that had rescued him from the Tusken Raiders … who had allowed him to sit on its knobby foot as Malakili ate his lunch.
    Other guards opened the cage as angry shouting came from above. They whisked the young struggling human away, but Malakili was too much in shock even to notice.
    Moving like a droid, unable to stop himself, Malakili staggered into the cage where he stood in front of the carcass of the dead monster. Most of the other hopefuls, the ones who had wanted to take care of the rancor, melted away, seeing their chances for advancement erased. Only one man, tall and swarthy with dark hair, followed him in.
    Malakili watched the ichor ooze across the slimy flagstone floor. The rancor lay still, as if sleeping. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Malakili let loose his tears like a flashflood on Tatooine. He wailed in grief, ready to faint, not knowing what he was supposed to do now.
    The man next to him—Malakili could not remember his name, no matter how hard he tried—put a grimy hand on Malakili’s shoulder, patted him and tried to comfort him, but he stumbled away through a blur of tears. All he could see were his own memories of wonderful days with the rancor.
    He heard Jabba’s angry pronouncement echo through the grille, ordering that the human captive be taken out to the Great Pit of Carkoon and fed to the Sarlacc. Jabba didn’t care that the rancor was dead: he was merely disappointed that his anticipated great battle with the krayt dragon could not now take place.
    The tears continued to flow down Malakili’s chubbycheeks, tracing clean rivers across his grimy skin. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, trying to strangle further sobs.
    Malakili thought only of how much he hated Jabba, how the crimelord had ruined everything. Even before the grief began to fade, Malakili found ways to replace it, vowing that he would get even with Jabba the Hutt. He would find some way to make the sluglike gangster pay.
    Outside in the blistering heat of afternoon, Lady Valarian’s rescue ship circled, and waited, and waited, and finally slipped back toward Mos Eisley, empty.
    Valarian did not care. She already had the information she wanted.

Taster’s Choice: The Tale of Jabba’s Chef
by Barbara Hambly
    I t started the day Jabba the Hutt acquired his two new droids.
    Not that the arrival of new slaves in the isolated desert palace of the Bloated One made a great deal of difference to Porcellus, the crimelord’s harassed chef; his only question, when informed of the new additions by Malakili, keeper of the Hutt’s rancor, was, “What do they eat?”
    “They’re droids,” said Malakili. He was perched on the end of the long and massive kitchen worktable at the time, picking through two cubic meters of dewback offal and eating a beignet. Minor religions had been built around Porcellus’s beignets in Mos Eisley—scarcely the oddest objects of veneration in that port, it should be added. Porcellus had a huge pot of them going on one of his four stoves, and the heat in the long, low-vaulted kitchen was tremendous.
    “Good,” said Porcellus. It wasn’t that he objected to real people coming around his kitchen to cadge snacks. It was just that most of the people in the court of the Tatooine crimelord who did come around his kitchen made him extremely nervous.
    “Quite polite, too,” added Malakili. “High-class social programming.”
    “That’ll be a switch.” Porcellus gently tonged the last beignets from the boiling oil at their exact moment of apotheosis, set them on the paper toweling on