Since many of the delicacies which had gone into the Hutt's omelettes,
roulades, and gtouffges over the past years were inedible by any lesser
species, the search hadn't been an easy one--the chef was still
wondering about the goatgrass he'd used the previous evening as a
stuffing for the gamwidge, and the small unmarked red canister of
unidentifiable paste whose contents had been used to top yesterday's
chocolate ladybabies, The Twi'leks small eyes narrowed still further; in
the kitchen's mephitic light they had the appearance of dirty glass.
"You know how solicitous our master is about his health."
Neither of them was going to speak the word "poison," of course.
"Absolutely," groveled Porcellus, reflecting that between Jabba's
wholesale consumption of triglycerides, cholesterol, and alcohol--never
mind substances less identifiable--and indescribable sexual practices,
the Hutt would scarcely need poison. Porcellus was still trying to deal
with the concept that a Hutt could be poisoned. "I scarcely need to
assure you that throughout my term of service here I've accepted nothing
but the finest, the most healthful, the tastiest ingredients to lay
before His Excellency's discriminating palate. I am at a loss to
understand this most distressing development."
Arms folded, Fortuna drummed his long nails gently on his own biceps.
"Should the situation continue," he said in his soft voice,
"explanations for it could be devised."
"Here!" Porcellus whirled, lashed out indignantly with the dishtowel in
his hand. "That's the master's!"
Ak-Buz, commander of Jabba's sail barge, backed quickly away from the
little electric fence around the beignets, dropping the pair of
long-nosed nonconductive machinist's pliers he'd used to poke through
the current. A snarl contorted his leathery face--the only expression,
as far as Porcellus had ever been able to ascertain, of which Weequays
were capable--and he ran out of the kitchen into the hot sunlight of the
receiving bay, shoving the stolen beignet into his lipless mouth as he
went.
"They seem to think this place is a charity kitchen."
Porcellus mopped nervously at the last traces of spilled sugar.
"Shall I suggest to Jabba that the Weequay be punished?"
Fortuna's voice was a dangerous purr.
"Thrown to the rancor? A little quick, perhaps, though Jabba is fond of
the spectacle . . . Lowered into the pit of the brachno-jags, perhaps?
They're small in themselves, but a hundred can strip a being's bones in,
oh, five or six hours. One alone---if that being is tied up quite
firmly-can take four or five days."
He smiled evilly. "Would that be a fitting punishment for one who
tampers with His Excellency's food?"
"Er . . ." said Porcellus. "I don't think that's necessary."
To his own great distress, his words turned out to be prophetic, as he
discovered some hours later when he tripped over the barge captain's
dead body in the corridor leading to the lower regions of the servants'
quarters . . .
Panic had had its effect. After searching the kiichen for another half
hour, dogged by the sullen Phlegmin ("How come you let Ak-Buz take a
beignet and not me? There's nuthin' in that box... What you lookin'
for, anyway, boss?"), Porcellus had discovered, to his horror, that
though the time was approaching to begin preparing that night's feast,
he hadn't the smallest inspiration about what to prepare. Poached ice
fish imported from Ediorung on a bed of Ramorean capanata? What ifJabba
should choke on a bone? A ragout of Besnian sausage with orange-Madeira
sauce? If the spices should disagree with his already irritated
digestion, what would his immediate assumption be? Vegetable broth,
thought Porcellus, vegetable broth and unspiced rice pudding .
. . He reflected upon the crimelord's probable reaction to such a menu,
and the images conjured to mind were not pleasant ones.
In quest of inspiration for the first time in his life, he retreated to
his room to consult his cookbooks, take a nap in the relative cool, and
And there was Ak-Buz's body, sprawled in the corridor halfway to his
room, arms outflung and eyes glaring fixedly in the sunken stare of
death.
Porcellus knelt beside the corpse. Still warm. Shreds of sugar topping
speckled the Weequay's quilted vest.
Maybe after consuming seventy-five kilos of dewback offal the rancor
won't be terribly hungry tonight . . . ?
Snuffle, snort, demanded a deep, gluey voice.
"What happened here?"
The chef leaped to his feet in a panic of shock and horror, to find
himself facing one of Jabba's Gamor-rean guards.
Porcellus had always hated the Gamorreans. They were among the worst of
the food-cadgers, and he was forever cleaning up drool, dirt, and
miscellaneous vermin in their wake. Last week five of them had come to
blows in his kitchen over who was going to lick out the bowl from a
Chantilly crime, with the result that the bowl ended up broken, two
rather delicate processors were smashed, and Porcellus was nearly
beheaded by an ill-aimed vibro-ax. The Chantilly crgme had suffered,
tOO.
"Going on?" squeaked Porcellus. "Nothing's going on."
The guard's porcine brow furrowed in a long moment of thought.
Then he gestured with his spike-gloved hand at the barge captain's body.
"He's dead?"
"He isn't dead," said Porcellus. "He's asleep. He's resting. He said
he was tired and he was going back to his quarters to take a nap.
He must have . . . he must have fallen asleep right here in the hall."
Ak-Buz's sightless eyes continued to stare at the ceiling: The guard
frowned, turning the information laboriously over in his mind.
"Looks dead."
Porcellus could feel the rancor's claws closing around his body.
"Have you ever seen a Weequay asleep?"
"Uh . . . No."
"Well, there you are." Porcellus bent down and heaved the body to its
feet, draping an arm around his shoulders. For a horrible moment he
wondered what he'd do if rigor mortis had begun to set in, but in that
heat there was little chance of it. The glaring head with its filthy
braids lolled against his cheek. "Now I'm going to get him to his
quarters--before he wakes up."
The guard nodded. "Want help?"
"Thank you," smiled the chef. "I'm fine."
He concealed Ak-Buz's body in the scrap pile in the machine yard, a
heartstoppingly tricky operation because he had to lug it through the
dungeons and then out past the barracks where the Weequays lived. The
Weequays--silent, deadly, vicious enforcerswere part of Ak-Buz's
sail-barge crew, and though they showed little loyalty to anyone,
Porcellus had the impression that being found in possession of the body
of their commander wouldn't be such a good idea. But they weren't
anywhere in sight--probably in my kitchen stealing the beignets, thought
Porcellus gloomily--and neither was the sail barge's mechanic, Barada.
With luck nobody would look
under the monumental pile of rusting speeder
parts in the yard's corner until decomposition was sufficiently
advanced, something which shouldn't take too long in this heat.
Ordinarily, on Tatooine, one would have to worry about Jawas raiding the
scrap heap for metal, but the pieces of the last Jawa caught doing so
were still fairly fresh, nailed to the gate.
Porcellus hastened back to his kitchen, wondering what he was going to
do about the banquet tonight and bereft of the smallest crumb of
inspiration.
"You call this food?" The Hutt crimelord's huge cop-per-red eyes
swiveled slowly, the pupils contracting slightly with anger as they
fixed their gaze upon his unfortunate servant.
Porcellus had never understood Huttese very well, but when Jabba raised
one of the exquisite vegetable crepes in a hand surprisingly small and
delicate in comparison with the rest of his yellowish, gelid bulk and
squeezed it so that the contents plopped thickly to the floor, it was
entirely unnecessary for his new translator droid, C-3PO, to explain,
"His Excellency is most displeased with the food you have been serving
of late."
Porcellus, standing before the Hutt's dais on the ornamental trapdoor
that covered the rancor's pit, managed to make a small sound, but that
was all. Eight meters below his boot soles, the rancor snuffled softly
in the dark.
The horrible eyes narrowed. "You seek maybe to do me ill?".
"Never!" Porcellus dropped to his knees--causing the rancor in the pit
below to rear up to its full height and sniff at the grille--and clasped
his hands pleadingly.
"How can I prove my goodwill?"
Jabba chuckled, a sound like a bantha being gutted --slowly.
"We'll let my little one prove," he said, and dragged on the chain he
held. From the dais beside him rose the lovely Twi'lek dancer Oola,
Jabba's newest pet. Her delicate face showed apprehension, as well it
might.
Porcellus had never learned exactly what Jabba did with his
"pets"musually female but always young, lithe, and beautiful but he knew
they seldom lasted long and he'd heard some truly horrible tales from
his friend and fellow slave Yarna the Askajian.
At the moment, however, all the Hutt did was scoop up a fingerful of the
vegetable-crepe stuffing and hold it out to her, and after a moment,
with visible distaste, Oola licked the subtly flavored concoction from
his slimy hand.
"Now bring me real food," gurgled the Hutt, turning back to Porcellus.
"Fresh--live--untouched."
By the time Porcellus returned to the palace hall with a glass bowl of
live Klatooine paddy frogs--in flavored brandy to prevent them from
attacking and killing each other, as was the wont of the ill-tempered
little creatures--Oola, far from suffering any ill effects from the
vegetable crepes, was dancing, swinging her long head-tails in sensual
invitation, the chain still around her neck. Her performance, Porcellus
thought, should lay aside Jabba's suspicions offierfek-- of
poisoning--for good.
Ordinarily, Porcellus stayed as far away from Jabba's court as was
possible within the confines of the palace, for the vicious and violent
rabble of bounty hunters, mercenaries, and intergalactic scum terrified
him. But tonight he leaned his shoulders against the arch of a doorway,
thin and graying and nervous-looking in his unspeakably stained cook's
whites, listening to the jizz-wailers--he'd always been fond of good
wailing--and watching the dancing and hoping desperately the beautiful
Oola wouldn't drop dead of some unknown cause as Ak-Buz had.
It crossed his mind to wonder what had killed the sail barge captain,
but in this awful place, who could tell?
Jabba, laughing horribly, hauled on the dancer's chain. Oola shrank
back, unable to control the revulsion on her face--it was quite clear
that what he intended was not to feed her more vegetable crepes--and for
a time the Hutt amused himself, playing her like a fish before
triggering the trapdoor and dropping her into the rancor's pit below.
She gave one hideous scream and everyone rushed to the grille to see the
show; Porcellus shrank back into the archway, shaking like a weed stern
in a windstorm. The casualness, the offhanded quality of her murder
terrified him . . . The Hutt had killed her with as little reflection
as he expended on the next paddy frog he gulped.
Just so, thought Porcellus, pale and almost sick with shock, would he
kill his chef, if the slightest rumblings of indigestion brought the
word fierfek back to his mind.
That was the night the bounty hunter brought in the Wookiee.
It was a mop-up operation, really. The Wookiee--well over two meters of
shaggy hair and ill temper--was partner to a Corellian smuggler named
Solo whose inanimate body, frozen in carbonite, had been decorating
Jabba's wall for months. At one time Porcellus had toyed with the
notion of unfreezing the man and bargaining for assistance in an escape,
but at the last minute he'd lost his nerve. There was no way of knowing
how cooperative he'd be even if Porcellus could keep him hidden long
enough for him to shake off the blind weakness of hibernation sickness,
and the thought of what Jabba would do to him if he was caught in an
escape attempt had brought him into a sweat.
Jabba had advertised bounty on the Wookiee at fifty thousand credits,
and was prepared to actually pay half that. After protracted
negotiation with the bounty hunter--a ratlike scrap of a creature in a
leather breathing mask--which included the hunter's threat to set off
the thermal detonator it conveniently had in its pocket, they'd settled
on thirty-five. At that point Porcellus retreated to his kitchen,
reflecting that he was unsuited for financial dealings of that sort and
wondering how he would manage if this particular bounty hunter came to
the kitchen demanding beignets or Chantilly crime.
The kitchen boy, Phlegmin, was stone dead in the middle of the
receiving-room floor.
Darkness seemed to tunnel in around Porcellus's vision--darkness that
smelled of rancor. The next moment a huge hand shoved him aside and
Ree-Yees, a sleazy Gran swindler and minor member of Jabba's court,
barged into the receiving room, three eyes bulging on their short stalks
as he stared down at the kitchen boy in disbelief.
"I had nothing to do with it!" shrieked Porcellus.
"He never ate a thing in this kitchen! He never so much as touched a
dish!"
Ree-Yees, on his knees: pawing through the goat-grass in the open
packing box beside Phlegmin's body, took no notice.
"Hey," snuffled a basso rumble from the doorway.
"He sleeping?"
It was a Gamorrean guard. The same Gamorrean guard, Porcellus realized,
who'd found him with Ak-Buz's corpse in the passageway.
His life flashed before his eyes in a kaleidoscope of croquettes and
Coruscant sauce supreme. "I didn't do it!"
"You're just in time!" Ree-Yees sprang to his feet. "I just found
him--um--j
ust like thisdown the hall--near the tunnel to Ephant Mon's
quarters! And I brought him here to perform--uh--emergency culinary
resussusperation! Garbage inhalation of the last resort!
It's an emergency technique I learned from . . ."
With great presence of mind, Porcellus slipped out of the receiving room
and concealed himself in the very darkest corner of the kitchen. From
there, a few minutes later, he watched the Gamorrean guard plod
dutifully out, carrying the kitchen boy's corpse slung over his
shoulder. He was followed in fairly short order by Ree-Yees himself,
staggering as though his brain had been set on auto-pickle and reeking
of Sul-lustan gin.
There was very definitely something going on in the palace.
"A plot," rumbled Gartogg, the Gamorrean guard, who returned to the
kitchen the next morning, Phlegmin's corpse still slung over his
shoulder and much unimproved by the day's rising heat. "Clues." A long
pause, while he considered, as if carefully matching the contents of one
of his brain cells with the contents of the other. "All tied together."
He helped himself to a handful of the packing material which had come
around a jar of candied rennet, and snuffled noisily.
"Girl. She, um. . ."
"What girl?" demanded Porcellus. "And get that disgusting thing out of
here!"
"Mercenary girl. Brought in Wookiee. Last night."
Gartogg licked a fragment of plastiform from his lower lip.