• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

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 struggled 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 Imperial 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 doctors 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 Officers 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 imprisoned 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