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

it would need, thought Porcellus despairingly, would be for her to drop dead.
    Jubnuk, who had licked all the spattered sandmaggot kidneys off his armor and the surrounding walls, showed no ill effects. Porcellus took what comfort he could from that.
    Luke Skywalker, last of the Jedi Knights, entered the palace with the first light of dawn.
    The first Porcellus knew of it was when he pickedhis way on tiptoe among the sleeping bodies in the audience hall with a cup of vine-coffee and a freshly made jelly doughnut for Leia—also sleeping on the dais at the Hutt’s side—and saw Bib Fortuna enter, followed by a medium-sized, slender, and self-effacing young man in black.
    “I told you not to admit him,” rumbled Jabba, when his majordomo had wakened him to see the young man before him.
    Porcellus stepped hastily back, concealing himself behind the bemused and hungover crowd of Jabba’s retainers, one of whom—a dark-skinned newcomer in a helmet of gondar tusks—relieved him of the vine-coffee and the doughnut.
    “I must be allowed to speak to your master,” said Skywalker in his soft voice.
    Bib Fortuna turned immediately to the crimelord. “He must be allowed to speak to—”
    “You weak-minded fool.” Jabba pushed Fortuna aside. “That old Jedi mind trick will not work on me.”
    Skywalker inclined his head in a respectful bow. “You will bring Captain Solo and the Wookiee to me,” he said, and Porcellus felt an immediate urge to run to the dungeon, get the key from Captain Ortogg, and do just that.
    “Look out!” piped up C-3PO, who—if Porcellus remembered correctly—had been Skywalker’s gift to Jabba. “You’re standing on—”
    “Your mind powers will not work on me,” said Jabba, perhaps deliberately drowning out the droid’s warning that Skywalker was, in fact, standing precisely on the rancor’s trapdoor.
    “Nevertheless,” said Skywalker gently, “I am taking Captain Solo. You can either profit by this, or be destroyed.”
    Jabba smiled evilly and his eyes seemed to grow redderas the pupils narrowed. “I shall enjoy watching you die.”
    Porcellus had already seen how Skywalker’s eyes had met those of the woman Leia when first he had entered. Now she cried “Luke!” as the guards closed in. Skywalker flung out his hand, and somehow the blaster that had been in the holster of a guard four meters away was in it. He had time to fire one shot as they closed around him, Jubnuk the guard reaching to grab. Then the trapdoor beneath his feet fell open, and both Skywalker and Jubnuk plunged into the pit below.
    “Luke!” screamed Leia again, dragging fruitlessly against the chains, and the whole court rushed forward—pushing Porcellus along with them—to watch the show in the pit.
    It was quick, horrible, the nightmare form of the rancor bursting forth from its den as the bars were raised. Brownish, slimy, hideous beyond belief, it lunged first at the Jedi, who managed to wedge himself in a crack of the rock, then turned and caught Jubnuk as the Gamorrean tried to force apart the barred judas window in the side of the pit. Porcellus was standing among the other Gamorreans as the rancor seized Jubnuk neatly around the waist—Captain Ortogg and his cohorts bellowed with laughter as the monster gulped Jubnuk down in three bites, the noise of their mirth almost drowning his agonized screams. The chef felt faint, feeling those teeth around his own waist, seeing his own arm disappearing like a final fillip of noodle into that round, fanged mouth …
    Not me , he thought desperately, not me …
    Skywalker saw his chance, and took it. He fled under the rancor’s feet, into the smaller den where the beast slept, and from there, as the thing pursued him, hurled a skull at the mechanism which controlled the den’s sharpened portcullis of bars. Whether he usedsome Jedi power to slam the missile home, or whether he simply had the unerring eye of a trained warrior, Porcellus couldn’t be sure.