Tales from Jabba's Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 stampededtoward 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,