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Jabba smiled evilly and his eyes seemed to grow redder as the pupils narrowed. “I shall enjoy watching you die.”

Porcellus had already seen how Skywalker’s eyes had met those of the woman Leia when first he had entered. Now she cried “Luke!” as the guards closed in. Skywalker flung out his hand, and somehow the blaster that had been in the holster of a guard four meters away was in it. He had time to fire one shot as they closed around him, Jubnuk the guard reaching to grab. Then the trapdoor beneath his feet fell open, and both Skywalker and Jubnuk plunged into the pit below.

“Luke!” screamed Leia again, dragging fruitlessly against the chains, and the whole court rushed forward—pushing Porcellus along with them—to watch the show in the pit.

It was quick, horrible, the nightmare form of the rancor bursting forth from its den as the bars were raised. Brownish, slimy, hideous beyond belief, it lunged first at the Jedi, who managed to wedge himself in a crack of the rock, then turned and caught Jubnuk as the Gamorrean tried to force apart the barred judas window in the side of the pit. Porcellus was standing among the other Gamorreans as the rancor seized Jubnuk neatly around the waist—Captain Ortogg and his cohorts bellowed with laughter as the monster gulped Jubnuk down in three bites, the noise of their mirth almost drowning his agonized screams. The chef felt faint, feeling those teeth around his own waist, seeing his own arm disappearing like a final fillip of noodle into that round, fanged mouth …

Not me, he thought desperately, not me …

Skywalker saw his chance, and took it. He fled under the rancor’s feet, into the smaller den where the beast slept, and from there, as the thing pursued him, hurled a skull at the mechanism which controlled the den’s sharpened portcullis of bars. Whether he used some Jedi power to slam the missile home, or whether he simply had the unerring eye of a trained warrior, Porcellus couldn’t be sure. But the bars dropped like a guillotine, their pointed ends driving like spears through the rancor’s skull.

The beast made a dreadful sound, and fell limp.

In the startled silence of the criminals around him, Porcellus could hear, from the deeps of the pit, Malakili’s frantic wail, “NOOOOO …!!!”

Porcellus was safe.

He straightened up, feeling oddly light-headed. For five years Jabba had threatened to throw him to the rancor … and now the rancor was dead. He felt bad for Malakili, hurting with the echoes of that terrible cry, but in the first dizzying flush of relief it was hard to sympathize with his bereft friend. The rancor was dead …

Guards were dragging the smuggler Solo, the giant Wookiee behind him, into the audience hall. Solo was still blind from hibernation sickness, but noticeably stronger—Porcellus hoped desperately nobody would ask who’d been feeding him. They were thrust before the dais of the Bloated One.

“His High Exaltedness has decreed you are to be terminated,” said the translator droid C-3PO, rather shakily. He looked a little the worse for his few days in Jabba’s palace, stained with the Bloated One’s slimy green exudations and fragments of sandmaggot kidney. “You are to be taken to the Dune Sea, and cast into the Pit of Carkoon, the abode of the Sarlacc. In his belly you will find new definitions of pain and suffering as you are digested over the course of a thousand years.”

“You should have bargained, Jabba,” said Skywalker quietly. The guards shoved him, Solo, and the Wookiee toward the door; Leia, on the dais, half started up with anguish in her face, but the Hutt dragged her back by her chain. “That’s the last mistake you’ll ever make …”

Porcellus leaned against the archway in which he stood, knees trembling with reaction and relief. Whatever else happened, the rancor was dead. The threat which had hovered over him for all those years …

“And you!” Jabba turned suddenly on his dais, his copper-red eyes seeming to skewer Porcellus where he stood. Drool dripped from his enormous mouth and he pointed one finger. “You also are