Star Wars - Tales Of The Bounty Hunters
Page 14
At the sight of that, Dengar began to wonder if all the rumors about Boba Fett's paranoia might not be true. If so, then in the past his sickness had served him well. People paid Boba Fett to be paranoid. Working with him would be interesting.
Only when Dengar saw that Boba Fett had safely drunk the liquor, did he also take a drink. It was a dry drink, with a piquant bouquet and a slightly sweet nose. Dengar found it quite appealing.
Down by the throne, the musicians struck up a danc-ing tune. Dengar found that his hands were shaking as he shared Manaroo's fear, and he knew he needed to steady his nerves in case he had to open fire on Jabba. He swallowed half a glass.
"Watch out there," Boba Fett said, "not so fast. This is more potent than you imagine."
Dengar nodded absently. Down on the dance floor, Manaroo swirled across the room, playing a golden flute as she leapt, and Jabba leaned forward and stud-ied her hungrily, as if she were one of the squirming insects on his food tray. The Hutt opened his mouth, just barely, and licked his lips with his horrible tongue.
Dengar leaned closer, his heart pounding. On the dance floor, Manaroo was swirling, playing her pipe in deliberate frenzy, and Dengar felt the room begin to spin around him. He put both hands on the table to keep from toppling forward, and found that his eyelids felt enormously heavy. He strained to keep his eyes open, and each time they closed, he saw the room as Manaroo did, spinning around, the leering faces study-ing her.
"Are you all right?" Boba Fett asked, his voice sound-ing distant and tinny.
"Got. to get Manaroo out," Dengar muttered, and he tried to stand. His legs felt as if they were tied to the chair, and he wondered how he could feel so weak. "Liquor. poison. ?" He reached for his blaster. His eyelids closed by themselves, and he saw the room spinning, heard the pipe shrilling unnaturally as Manaroo played.
When he opened his eyes, Boba Fett was there at his side, holding Dengar upright, helping him pull the blaster from his holster. Dengar's hands felt too heavy, too big and uncoordinated for such a delicate task, and he was grateful for Boba Fett's help getting the blaster free from its holster.
"Not poison," Boba Fett said, and Dengar had to concentrate to hear him above the noise of the great hall, the shrilling of the pipe. "Just drugged-on the rim of your glass. Jabba has something special in mind for you. You are to feel the Teeth of Tatooine." Dengar lurched up, knocking his own table over. Around the throne room, the music stopped, and everyone turned to watch him. Jabba himself laughed merrily, his eyes gleaming as Dengar struggled forward, hoping to strike one blow at the monster.
Someone stuck a foot out to trip Dengar, and he landed on the floor, rolled to his back. There was a shout and applause, and one of Jabba's henchmen raised a glass in salute to Dengar, and people cheered. The annoying little rodent-like Salacious Crumb had climbed up on the lip of the overturned table and was laughing uproariously at Dengar.
"Payback!" Manaroo shouted from the dance floor. Dengar was sure that he heard her cry so loud only because he wore the Attanni.
He saw through her eyes as she tried to rush to him through the crowd, but one of Jabba's Gamorrean guards grabbed her arms and shoved her back down to the dance floor with a growl. Manaroo's heart ham-mered in panic.
Then Dengar's eyes closed of their own accord, and everything went black.
Four: The Teeth of Tatooine
Dengar woke under Tatooine's blistering suns just past dawn. The ground was heating. Dengar could feel that some small desert creature with a hard shell had crawled under his body, seeking refuge from the com-ing day there among the shadows and the rocks.
Dengar opened his eyes, looked around, still dazed. He was in a wide canyon, lying on the desert pan, a sterile plain of greenish-white rock, eroded-perhaps even polished-by the wind. Each of his hands and feet was bound by three cords, all pulled tight and bolted into the rock, so that he could not move. The leathery cords were slightly moist, designed to shrink in the heat of the sun, pulling him tighter.
There was no sign of a craft nearby, no guards or even a droid to record Dengar's death. There was no singing of insects or call of wild animals, only the steady soughing of the wind over rock.
Dengar licked his lips. It seemed that Jabba intended to let him die of dehydration, a death that was neither particularly appealing nor particularly unpleasant-as far as deaths go. Painful, but not extraordinary.
Dengar wondered at that. He recalled Boba Fett's pronouncement-the Teeth of Tatooine. But what were a planet's teeth? Its mountain peaks? That would seem logical, but Dengar was far from the mountains.
So it had to be an animal. There were tales of drag-ons in the desert, creatures large and vicious. Dengar watched the horizon, both on land and air, for sign of such beasts, and he slowly tested his bonds. Dengar was stronger than most people gave him credit for. But the straps that held him were more than adequate. He in-haled deeply, tasting mineral salts in the air, and began working vigorously to free himself.
Dengar closed his eyes after thoroughly testing each bond, and considered. It was just past dawn, and if Jabba had kept his promise, then Han Solo and his companions were already gone, dying interminably as they were ingested by the mighty Sarlacc at the Pit of Carkoon. Dengar felt hollow at the thought. The Em-pire had cut away most of Dengar's feelings. They'd left him with few companions-his rage, his hope, his lone-liness.
At the thought of Han dying, Dengar felt somehow cast adrift, more alone than ever in the great void. For ages now, catching Han had been his only goal, his only purpose for being. Without Han, there seemed to be no reason left to exist. Except Manaroo. And he was no longer sure that she was alive. He remembered her terror, in that last moment before he'd lost conscious-ness. She had been sure that Jabba intended to kill her.
Dengar mourned her. In the moments when he had touched Manaroo's mind, Dengar had almost known what it was to be human again. He'd almost known what it was to be whole. Someday, he imagined, that with her help, he might have learned to love and laugh again.
But if she was not dead already, she was languishing in one of Jabba's cells, doomed to an early death.
Dengar began working harder.
In moments he had built up a fine sweat, and he managed to rub the skin off his left wrist so that blood began to flow from it. Still, the ropes had not begun to weaken.
Dengar stopped worrying the wrist, began working on his left foot. The ropes there were tied over his armored boots, providing some protection for his legs. The Imperial surgeons had boosted Dengar's reflexes, given him greater strength. But he couldn't pull his leg back to kick much, and even after an hour he had not succeeded in breaking a rope or pulling a single line free from the bolt that held it into the rock.
Indeed, all his work only succeeded in chafing his wrists, so that the blood came more profusely.
A strong morning wind began gusting, blowing sand through the broad plain. Dust clouds formed in the distance down below Dengar's feet-dirty gray streaks that filled the sky like thunderheads or fog. They were kilometers away, but he could see them rolling toward him, menacing.
He closed his eyes for a bit, trying to keep the grit from blowing into them, and he remembered one of Jabba's henchmen mentioning a place not far from the palace, a place called the Valley of the Wind.
He had no doubt that that was where he was now. A
comforting thought, for at least he knew he was near Jabba's Palace, perhaps within walking distance of wa-ter, if he could only get free.
Out across the pan, Dengar heard a bleating roar. He turned to his side and saw a shaggy bantha running hard, heading toward him. Three Sand People rode on its back, up behind its curling horns, and in moments the Sand People were at his side.
Two of them leapt down and stalked toward him, weapons ready, while the other stayed on the bantha, watching for signs of ambush.
Dengar had heard tales of the Sand People, how they fell upon travelers and killed them, only to harvest the water from their dead bodies. Ind
eed, the two that hovered over Dengar were making odd slurping sounds, hissing in their own tongue, and Dengar was reminded of darker tales, where it was hinted that the Sand People, to show their contempt for captives, would bind their prisoners and insert long metallic tubes into their bodies, then drink from their prisoners while they yet lived.
But Dengar had done nothing to earn such disre-spect from these Sand People, and so he was not sur-prised when they simply sat next to him at his head, watching him die.
For a long hour they sat as the winds blew steadily stronger. Dengar watched them, and after a while he renewed his struggle. The Sand People merely stared in morbid curiosity, as if this were their form of entertain-ment.
But he knew that they were waiting for him to die so that they could harvest him.
Dengar looked at their wrapped faces, at the spikes sewn into their clothing, and they reminded him of teeth. He wondered if the Sand People would kill him, if this was what Boba Fett had meant by "the Teeth of Tatooine."
But the morning grew hotter, and the winds grew dry and blew more fiercely, and heavy sands began to blow. And suddenly Dengar remembered something more about the Valley of the Winds. Something about "sand tides." It was unusual for Dengar to forget anything. The mnemiotic drugs that the Empire had forced into him made certain of that. Dengar only had difficulty recalling what had been said because it was part of a conversation between two other people, and his atten-tion had been directed elsewhere at the time, but now he remembered. The Valley of the Winds was located between two deserts, one high and cool, the other lower and hotter. Each day, the winds would blow up the slopes as the hot air rose from one desert, and at night the cool air would come blowing back with great force.
In each desert there were dunes of sand deposits, which would blow, scouring the stone, only to be rede-posited each morning and night.
The wind picked up and blew more fiercely. Dengar was sweating, and his mouth had become dry. He could feel a burning fever coming on. The sand was blowing through the valley with such force that he could no longer keep his eyes open. To do so, even for a mo-ment, left them searing and gritty.
After one devastating gust of wind, where small rocks pelted the Sand People, the bantha roared out in pain and struggled back onto its feet, then turned away as if to leave the area, and the Sand People made to follow it hesitantly, as if it were their leader giving an undesir-able command.
One of the Sand People paused by Dengar, pulled out a long knife and sawed at one of the ropes that held Dengar to the ground. The other two had mounted up, and one of them growled at his companion, question-ing him.
The creature who was sawing the ropes stood and began hissing some reply, making stabbing motions at
Dengar, as if to say, "Why should we wait for him to die? Let's kill him now and be done with it."
But the mounted one pointed off in the distance beyond Dengar's feet and jabbed a finger in the air, hissing something. Dengar understood only one word of his retort: Jabba* If you kill him now, Jabba will be angry.
The Sand Person with the knife bristled at the words, stood over Dengar for a moment. The bantha roared again, and the Sand Person thrust the long knife in its sheath and leapt onto its back. Soon they were gone.
The wind kept building. The blowing sand covered the world like a dirty gray shroud. It was whistling, keening, talking in its own voice.
Dengar looked at the one cord that had been cut at. It was one of the cords tied to his right hand. Dengar wrapped his fingers around it and began pulling on that cord, hoping to snap it, but in a few moments, he fell back, exhausted.
Then the wind gusted, churning over the land with a scream, and the sand cut him savagely. A small sharp flake of rock whistled through the air, slashing across the bridge of Dengar's nose like a bit of glass. Another flake lodged in his boot. A third flake struck one of the cords on his right wrist so that it twanged, and then Dengar realized what was happening.
The Teeth of Tatooine. Flakes of stone and pieces of sand began screaming through the air. Dengar strug-gled to turn his head away from the shrieking wind. The sky above him was going dark under the weight of the sand storm. The suns hung in the sky like two globes of light, piercing bright.
And Dengar remembered something, a memory that seemed ages old, crusted over.
He remembered the operating room where the Im-perial surgeons had worked on him. His eyes had been covered with gauze, but there had been two bright lights shining in his face, and he remembered the doc-tors inserting probes into his brain.
He remembered feeling pity, a profound sense of pity, and someone saying, "Pity? You want that?"
"Of course not," another doctor had replied. "We don't want that. Burn it."
There had been a moment of silence, a hissing noise, and the smell of charred flesh as the doctors burned away that portion of his hypothalamus.
Then came love, a swelling in his heart that made him want to rise up into the air. "Love?"
"He won't need it." The hissing, the scent of charred flesh.
Anger welled up in him. "Rage?"
"Leave it."
Almost immediately, he'd felt a profound sense of relief. "Relief?"
"Oh, I don't know. What do you think?" Dengar had wanted to say something, he'd wanted to tell them to leave him alone, but his mouth was not working. He'd only been able to see the twin globes through the gauze.
"Burn it," both doctors said in unison, then laughed, as if it were a game.
The memory faded, and Dengar lay alone on the sand. He recalled the promises that his Imperial Of-ficers had given him. When he'd proven his value to the Empire, they said that they would restore him, give him back his ability to feel. It had been a promise that had never made sense, and yet Dengar had always hoped that they could do it, had always been held im-prisoned by his hope.
But now he realized that they'd left him with the ability to feel hope, only so that they could control him, keep him on his tether.
Dengar struggled against the cords that held him bound. Some of the flaking rocks were hitting the ropes, causing them to twang, cutting into them, and Dengar hoped only that they might slice a cord or two before they slashed him to ribbons.
A nasty pebble struck him above the left eye, and Dengar cried out in pain. But he was alone on the desert, his voice swallowed in the roaring wind.
Then the roaring reverberated louder. There was a thundering overhead of subspace engines, and Dengar looked up in time to see two ships blasting off through the haze of dust and wind, heading out low over the valley.
One of them was the Millennium Falcon.
Dengar's heart began beating harder. So you did it, Han, Dengar thought. You escaped again. Now I must follow.
And Dengar had only three things to work with. His rage, his hope, and his loneliness. He flailed about, looking both ways across the desert for signs of help, but there was none, and the aching loneliness flayed him. He wondered how he would ever vent his rage and frustration, when the object of his wrath was flying away. Han, like the Empire, was untouchable, unbeat-able, and Dengar cried out in anger against them.
And as he did so, he imagined Manaroo, imagined huddling in her arms as the tech-empath shared her emotions, making him human once again.
With a scream like one damned, Dengar jerked his right hand with all his might, not caring if he pulled it off at the wrist. The Empire had destroyed him, but in the process it had given him strength. Almost immedi-ately one of the cords snapped with a twang, followed quickly by the snapping sound of another, while the bolt that held the third cord pulled from the rock.
Dengar screamed again and began kicking with his left leg, till it also tore bolts free from the ground, then he pulled out the ropes that held his right leg and untied his left hand.
The Teeth of Tatooine had him now as the storm built to its crescendo. The skies were going dark under whirling clouds of sand, and Dengar knew that there was no shelter. He'd seen nothing th
at could hide him for miles. Still, Jabba's men had tied Dengar to the ground while Dengar wore his battle armor. Dengar's legs and chest had ample protection, but at the mo-ment, it was his head and hands that were being chewed away.
Dengar turned his back to the wind and began stum-bling in the general direction of Jabba's palace. Boba Fett had betrayed him twice. But he had left Dengar wearing his armor, and Dengar vowed silently that Boba Fett would pay for that mistake with his life.
For long he walked, head hunched, hands curled up protectively against his chest. He was stumbling blindly, unable to see, suffering from fevered dreams. The dry wind was having its way with him, and still after two hours he had not begun to find his way off the pan, nor had he found so much as a single boulder in this sand-blasted desert that he could hide behind.
At last, when he could walk no farther and his rage and hope languished under the weight of fatigue, Den-gar curled in a ball and lay down to die.