Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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-smmoothed 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 gaffing 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 gaffing 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 gaffing 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 gaffing 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