"Darksaber (Kevin Anderson)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J)

the baked sulfurous sand and mud was like duracrete underfoot as the mounts
trotted toward the lower entrance of Jabba's palace.

Once they were out of sight, Luke let out a heavy sigh and slumped
against his saddle. "We made it!" he said. "They shouldn't remember us at all.
"

"Yeah," Han said, "and we got all the way from Anchorhead without anybody
noticing us-no spies, no witnesses, no records. Now we can check out these
rumors and get back home."

A harsh wind whistled down the canyon, moaning through the minarets of
Jabba's palace. The high observation towers had open black windows, like gaps
in a grinning skull. Han looked up and saw blaster scoring on the fused
bricks. A few scuttling lizards ran from a pocket of shade to some other cool,
dark crack.

Han could not see enough through the round eyetubes of the Tusken face
wrapping. In disgust he peeled the bandages off and removed the metal eye
coverings, tossing them to the ground. He drew a deep breath of the dusty air
and coughed. "Boy, I'm glad to get rid of that."

Luke's face looked monstrous swathed in his Tusken disguise; but he
carefully unwrapped himself, stuffing the rags inside his tattered desert
robes.

Han shook his head as he looked at the ruins. Jabba had not been the
first inhabitant of the huge palace. It had been built centuries before the
Hutt crimelord was born, or hatched... or however it was that baby Hutts came
to life.

Long ago, exiled monks of the B'omarr Order had found an isolated spot on
the backwater world Tatooine and built their towering monastery, remaining
mysterious and aloof from the planet's other inhabitants. Sometime later the
bandit Alkhara had broken into the monastery and used parts of it as his
hideout as he preyed upon moisture farmers. The B'omarr monks didn't seem to
care about Alkhara's presence, though-utterly ignoring him.

Since that time, a succession of undesirables had located their
headquarters in portions of the B'omarr monastery, the latest of whom had been
Jabba the Hutt. After Jabba's death at the Great Pit of Carkoon, a civil war
had broken out among Jabba's minions as each scrambled to steal the Hutt
crimelord's possessions, ransacking the palace.

With Jabba's crime empire in ruins, the silent and mysterious monks had
taken the opportunity to reclaim what had been theirs, destroying those among
Jabba's followers who did not flee fast enough. The palace had since remained
a haunted edifice, to be avoided by all but the most daring.

Recently, though, some of what Leia called his "scruffy" old friends had