Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [127]
Comes a body now, though yet living for the moment, approaching from out of the pallor, the dank and splendid squalor of Jabba’s infamous palace. It is a Weequay, he of pale, leathery flesh, reptilian features, and a warrior’s single tail of hair bound back from shaven skull. I have met his like before in prior dealings with Jabba. A vicious, brutal race; their soup teems with cruel intent. It is thin, sour soup, too acid in its flavor, but his will do. Now. Here. This moment. It will do, indeed.
—pain/pleasure—
—pleasure/pain—
A macabre dance, when one is the victim: an embrace, wholly inescapable, with alien hands clamped to one’s skull and the eyes fixed and bestial, dilated in the darkness. And then prehensile proboscii are extruded from fleshy cheek-pockets beside my nose, to linger coyly, languid and loverlike, at his nostrils—until, no longer patient, they thrust themselves within.
Unloverlike.
To punch through to the brain beyond, seeking the soup of his life.
It is my dance, and so I lead. To me it is neither macabre nor lacking in grace, but is instead ineffably beautiful; the means by which I survive.
He dances, does the Weequay, like all the others dance, attempting to escape as I give him leave to try, for the dance must be quickened so the soup is sweeter. But even dancing, he is trapped, wholly unable to break free. And he knows, is afraid; whimpers and hisses and rattles within his throat. Makes no further sound with his mouth, in his throat, but only with—and in—his eyes. Screaming. Knowing. Dying. And all of it done in silence.
—heat—
In Mos Eisley, incandescent, purely immolation. But not so hot to me as to scald my skin, or bake my bones; the heat is of the soup, of the essence, of the body, regardless of entity.
He sags. Is done. Is discarded near the kitchens, where he is sure to be found.
Proboscii quiver as, sated, they coil themselves, unbidden, back into cheek-pockets. Upon my lips is a trace of sugared sweetness. He has eaten before the dance, some folly of appetite, a childish desire for plundered food. But none made by another’s hands can surpass the sweetest flavor of what the brain excretes.
I shoot the cuffs beneath my sleeves, smooth my jacket into neatness. There will be, in Jabba’s palace, a surfeit of soup.
“Anzat,” they will whisper. “Anzat, of the Anzati.”
It was a personal thing, this story, to begin, innocent of intent beyond a wholly discriminating appetite. A need for soup it was—without it I expire—but also a need for his soup, his soup specifically, the soup of all soups: the essence of a humanoid who knows fear but absolves himself of it; who faces it, defeats it, does not laugh in its face so much as prove himself fragile in flesh but strong in spirit. And who, by overcoming it, manufactures the soup of all soups, sweet and hot and pure.
Han Solo’s soup.
A professional thing, this story, of betrayal and perfidy. Jabba wanted him caught. The Hutt cared little for soup; if he knew of it, he never said. Likely, with his sources, his resources, he did know; but it mattered not in the least. He knew I was inviolable, because I am I, and best. And for the best, the best.
—Han Solo’s soup—
Mine, when captured. Mine to take, to drink. Mine to sip, to savor: hot, and sweet, and pure.
Until Jabba stole it from me. Until I was betrayed.
By Fett. By Calrissian. By Jabba the Hutt himself, goading all of them. Buying all of them.
Buying me, as well. Promising singularity to the best of the best, forever and ever, amen: Dannik Jerriko, assassin’s assassin.
For this, Jabba will die. And the others as well: three in Mos Eisley; more yet, like the Weequay, in Jabba’s palace.
Han Solo, also. And his woman, royal-bred. And the boy of worthless pedigree, yet who promises, unaccountably, to be strong in what was Kenobi’s power.
It is a power I have known as long as I have lived, and that longer than most; we Anzati know many of the secrets of the multiplicity