• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ree-Yees was so badly startled he would have fallen if he were not already on his knees. All three of his eyes froze on the stocky figure in the doorway—Gartogg.

Doellin’s triple teats! What a stroke of luck! This particular Gamorrean was so stupid he couldn’t even learn to play Snot, let alone realize when he was being cheated.

“Urggh-snuffle-snort?”

Ree-Yees scrambled to his feet and shoved the cook aside. “You’re just in time! I found him—like this—down the hall—near the tunnel to Ephant Mon’s quarters! I brought him here to—to—to perform resus—suspiration!”

“Hunh?”

“You know—emergency culinary resuspiration! The smell of food so—so—so ripe it can bring the dead back to life! An ancient art, one I learned from my great-uncle, Swee-beeps. We call it—er—garbage inhalation of the last resort. But alas”—Ree-Yees’s eyestalks drooped mournfully—“I was too late.” He sighed loudly.

Gartogg shuffled over to the body, attempted to squat, gave it up, tilted his body from the hips at an angle Ree-Yees would have sworn was anatomically impossible, and sniffed.

“So you see,” Ree-Yees rushed on, “someone must take over now. Someone with authority. To investigate, put together clues, solve this crime. Jabba will be impressed—and grateful.”

“Snort-snuffle-snuffle!” The Gamorrean picked up the scullion by one ankle and dangled the body in front of his snout. Ree-Yees glanced from Gartogg’s tusked face to Phlegmin’s, with its beaklike nose congested with blood. Once he was home on Kinyen, he’d never have to look at another two-eyes again.

Gartogg slung the body over his massive shoulders and ambled away, snorting unintelligibly.

“Don’t forget!” Ree-Yees yelled after him. “I found him near Ephant Mon’s quarters!”

Once the guard had gone, Ree-Yees gulped down the entire contents of his tankard, pausing only when forced to breathe. Burning spread from his first stomach along every fiber of his body. His eyestalks quivered, his knees threatened to collapse, and then a blessed numbness settled over him. A strange roaring sound filled his skull. In it, he could almost make out voices, one particular voice, the grating rumble that was Jabba’s. He had heard it before, a nightmarish memory, on the ragged edge of sleep.

The cook had disappeared, the first sensible thing he’d done. As Ree-Yees stumbled from the kitchen, he hardly noticed which way he was headed through the grime-covered tunnels.

But where was that cursed detonation link? The passageway wound downward, often turning, until Ree-Yees began to realize it was leading him not to his own chamber nor back to Jabba’s audience hall, but deeper and deeper into the labyrinth beneath the palace.

Ree-Yees halted at an unfamiliar branching, his breath gurgling in his throat, his head spinning. His eyestalks swiveled frantically. Here, far from the inhabited upper regions, patches of luminescent slime dripped from the wet stone walls. The air smelled dank and faintly metallic.

Which way? Cursing in two languages, Ree-Yees shambled off down the next passageway, which seemed to be headed in the right direction. Down he went, stumbling through pools of acrid-smelling water, grazing his elbows on the rough stone walls. Images flashed through his mind like drunken dreams. In his memory, he felt a pressure deep in his middle, hard like metal, caught a glimpse of sudden, engulfing flame. Suddenly a wall of fire exploded in front of him, flames leaped out at him, seized him …

He shook his head. The visions kept coming, stronger and brighter with every step …

The flames rose up, more vivid and terrifying than before. His skin crisped in their blazing heat, his eyeballs sizzled on their stalks and burst—

He found himself looking down on a vast, whitened plain, blown with snow and glittering ice particles, saw crevasses of frozen blue and great war machines ponderously advancing …

He blinked, and the picture shifted to the lush chaos of a swamp, a battered X-wing fighter sinking beneath the ooze, trees and vines a tangle of green, flowers like bits