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Tessek reached Jabba’s stronghold at nightfall, when the lights normally shone from the guard towers and the worrts in the pools around the palace croaked out in terrible song.

The palace was dark, empty, and Tessek feared that he would be left stranded outside to die in the darkness. Yet as his swoop drew near, whining across the still-hot sand like some flying insect, Tessek noticed burning torches at the front gate. “I’d better alert them that Jabba’s dead and I’m now in command.” After he delivered his dire news, though, he fled the chaos to someplace dark, quiet, safe. He took the swoop around back to the motor pool. As he approached, the plasteel door slid open.

Barada. Good, faithful Barada, Tessek thought. He glided into the motor pool, and immediately knew that something was wrong. At the very least, maintenance droids should have been working, lighting the bay with their glowing eyes.

But the motor pool was silent, dark as a tomb. The doors slid closed behind him, and Tessek let himself drop from the swoop, too weary and ill to walk. “Barada? Barada? Bring me water, please …” he cried. Then he remembered. Barada was dead, killed on the sail barge. He wouldn’t bring water, and it couldn’t have been he who opened the doors.

Tessek looked about the dark, empty rooms, wondering who had let him in.

Tessek hated his body, his frail body that could not take the desert heat of Tatooine, that constantly threatened to blow away like sand. He cursed silently when no one answered his call.

He crawled to a nearby sink in Barada’s quarters, watered his skin and drank heartily, then staggered into the palace to tell the others that Jabba was dead.

His news caused no small stir, and Tessek hurried to his upper rooms to pack water and food while he plotted how to remove as much of Jabba’s wealth as possible. The corridors of the palace were dark, cloistered, with all of Jabba’s soldiers gone. In some ways, the place seemed darker, more sinister, than at any time when Jabba had reigned here.

After he had thrown together his belongings, Tessek left his quarters, realizing with relief that he would never have to come back.

He heard a snickety sound from the far wall of the corridor, and the clicking sound of an approaching droid as it scrabbled across the dark floor, its footsteps echoing dully.

Tessek looked down the hall. A great black spiderlike brain walker crawled toward him, twin lights shining like dull eyes in the darkness. Behind it marched another, and another—coming toward him through the hallways in all directions. The B’omarr monks.

“Greetings, Acolyte Tessek,” the first of the monks whispered.

“Go away,” Tessek pleaded, and in his weakened state, he leaned his back against a wall and slid down, collapsing in fear and weariness. Then he heard the squeaking of the cart’s wheels, and saw the laser scalpels neatly laid out upon it.

Six months later, Tessek left Jabba’s palace for the first time. He felt rested and secure as his spidery mechanical body climbed up to the highest turrets atop the towers with ease.

There, Tessek sat out on a parapet, looked down at the evening suns setting crimson and purple above the yawning white desert. A gust of wind blew across the desert, raising a cloud of dust. Whether the wind was hot or cool, wet or dry, Tessek no longer cared.

It was the first time in six months that he’d left his brain jar, using his newly developed powers to psychically will one of the mechanical bodies to himself.

There was wealth still heaped below him in the palace, free for the taking, if anyone dared to enter. But after the first few meager attempts by cutthroats and thieves from Mos Eisley, volunteers for the job were somehow lacking.

Tessek set his brains on the ledge of a wall, splayed his spider legs out wide. At one time, he would have been afraid of falling. At one time, he would have felt as if he were perched on the top of the world.

But now, Tessek shut down his eyes and explored the world with his mind. Below him, in the deepest cells of Jabba’s haunted palace, the