The instrumental music fades out and Cobb gives up on his boneless sprawl, draws his limbs close and rearranges himself into somewhat of a sitting position, doing his best to ignore the persistent twinge in his lower right back.
He has greeted any potential listeners and now he needs to get up and move and it's not just stiff joints and the restlessness of a lifelong desert prowler driving him to action; there is work that needs doing and he hopes to get most of it done before both suns are up and bake the land into lethargy and a gilded deadly trap for those caught outside.
"And we'll be picking up the pace; now that everyone's hopefully awake I wouldn't want you to fall asleep on me again. Here's –," Cobb squints at the screen of his pad trying to make out the name of the band or song, but it's not in aurebesh or huttese or any other language he recognizes. Cobb isn't even sure the symbols are meant to represent letters and the more he looks at the maybe-writing the more it resembles the squiggly paths of worm-holes.
"An old favourite," Cobb glosses over smoothly and lets the song play, then queues up the playlist for the day. He curates them ahead of time, never sure whether his duties will allow him to man the station or not – or not being the case more frequently than he would like.
This time of the day, Cobb prefers to stick to short comments on the songs and melodies, many of which do not contain vocals at all, as no one wants to be talked at first thing in the morning anyhow and Cobb's not feeling particularly chatty either. It'll take at least another cup of caf for that particular trait to kick in.
It's the evenings that are for sitting and speaking to the modest setup on his desk and to whoever tunes in to the frequency of his station. Once the day's labour is finished – the kind arises from need and isn't an indulgence; manual chores that require elbow grease and will leave a fresh sunburn on the bridge of his nose and the back of his neck and wring his body of the last drop of sweat – that's when he's happy to park his weary, aching ass in the surprisingly comfortable seat that he's fairly sure the Jawas uninstalled from a crashed spaceship and which only cost him a handful of bolts and two sweaty hours spent fixing a bad belt in the guts of their sandcrawler.
Radio taken care of, Cobb slings his feet off his desk, gathers his mug and empty water canteen and stands, pretending the resounding pop is the creak of the seat and not a noise his hips just managed to produce.
The horizon is a pale streak of the day's first colour against the shapeless grey of dawn as Cobb trudges over to the cantina for a refill on caf and something more substantial.
Freetown has already come to life around him, the villagers making the most of a time when it's still sensible to be outside. Cobb yawns into the crook of his arm and waves at the people he passes; Bart who runs the garage where they do most of their heavy-duty repairs, Mona, their resident medic and Jo, Esper, Farah, Becks and Jared, all in their miner's getup and sitting lined up on the walkways and decks between buildings, waiting for Thom to pick them up.
Zarl has the morning shift at the cantina and is whistling a merry tune as he mans the stove.
o
The Nikto came to Freetown once it already bore its new name, nigh on two years ago. There weren't many people moving to Freetown back then, there still aren't now, and it was enough of an oddity to draw some onlookers, faces lined with curiosity and distrust.
Cobb made notice of the stranger's thick leather jacket that showed a couple of bare, discoloured spots where he suspected gang patches had previously been sewn on and his uneasy stance and restless gaze. The speeder he had arrived on was a fine piece of machinery that had been blasted down to naked steel on one side.
"Where you from?" Cobb had asked.
The Nikto had shifted and shrugged, studying the toes of his boots with an attention that the dusty, scoffed things hardly warranted. "Anchorhead, mostly. Heard this place was called Freetown. Wondered if the name's the game."
Cobb had rested his hands on his hips, fingers drumming a rapid staccato against his belt. Wasn't every day he had to decide someone's fate like this. "Man's past is his own, but you drag it into the present you'll find me a lot less hospitable."
A nod. "Understood, boss."
"I'm no one's boss," Cobb corrected, "I'm the marshal here." He held out his off-hand. "Your weapon."
The strangers eyes met his own, a flicker of defiance sparking to life in them. "It's for protection."
"You won't be needing it. I'm protecting this town."
He'd hesitated, but handed over the shock stick with no more fuss and Cobb made a judgment call.
"Long as you won't cause us no trouble and do your share of work, you can stay."
The Nikto has scrapped one boot against the sand, a little swish to the left and right. Probably wondering how he came to end up here. Freetown was hardly anyone's first choice for disappearing from the radar.
"Be warned," Cobb had said. "Food's rare. Water's on rationing." They had had a draught, and it had been a bad one. It didn't elicit much of a reaction.
"Used to worse, marshal, m' used to worse."
o
"Mornin', marshal," Zarl greets and flips a dust crepe in its pan with practiced ease.
Cobb slips into a free seat at the bar, and kicks one heel up at the footrest. "Something smells delicious in here."
"Breakfast, probably," Zarl says with a grin and puts together a plate that he slides over to Cobb before he pours more dough into the pan.
Breakfast consists of a piece of lamta biscuit, some bantha yoghurt and a toasty golden crepe with a drop of pica jelly to give it a sweet kick. Cobb digs in with gusto and clears out when he's done, his place immediately taken by the next hungry mouth. The morning and evening hours are the busiest and already a small queue has formed in front of the cantina.
Cobb next checks in with Scott whom he finds dozing over some official documents in the marshal's office. Freetown is mostly self-sufficient, but they are still part of Tatooine and there is always paperwork piling up these days. More so now that Cobb is also running the radio station. Cobb crosses his arms over his chest and his feet at the ankle and cocks his hip against the doorway.
"Kinda hard to read with your eyes closed, deputy."
Scott jerks awake and grumbles something that might be a derivative of Basic as he rubs a hand over his eyes. He likes the blaster and the stripes well enough, but gunslinging ain't all being a lawman is about. Cobb wants to see the forms filled out by the time he's back and Scott looks like he's just had a scurrier crawl up his ass and die a miserable death up there, but he does pick up the pad and starts typing.
Satisfied, Cobb makes his way over to the garage that houses his speeder. He makes sure that it's topped up on fuel and coolant and that the small built-in storage compartment is well-stocked. There isn't much one needs to survive in the desert and all the equipment is no good without water. Cobb always carries a canister of it, as well as extra fuel. The carefully measured space also holds his tarp, duster, poncho, mask, binoculars as well as some dry rations and a medical kit. Nothing fancy in there, but it does contain dressings, a portable medscanner, bacta and stim shots, replenishers as well as a vacuum-insulated box filled to the brim with ice. It's a rare and precious commodity, but it's a quick way to cool down someone suffering from heat sickness.
It's more than the bare necessities of survival and he has made do with less in the past, a past he would be loath to relive. Cobb shoves his tool box into the small gap beside his helmet and closes the lid and latch. He pats the hood of the speeder with the same fondness others reserve for trusty mounts of the four legged sort.
It feels like a good day to ride, clear and with no hint of a storm in the air. There's a light breeze rustling the wind indicators atop the vaporators and carrying a memory of the morning's cool air. It calls for speed and distance the seeming emptiness of endless sandy flats.
Every now and then, Cobb needs to remind himself of the vastness of the desert and the planet around him. To leave Freetown and its squat buildings and narrow streets behind and be one with that wind, see where it will take him.
"What'd ya think, old girl?" he asks the machine. "Round o' the Wastes, just the two of us?"
He grabs his rifle and engages the repulsors so he can push the speeder out into the street where Korah herds a gaggle of five laughing children of various ages ranging from thigh to chest-high through the streets. There is a bundle of slings hanging over her shoulder, traps that they will set for small animals that cannot be hunted with blaster or rifle because it fouls their meat. It's a good lesson for the kids and they'll be allowed to play outside while it's safe for them to do so.
One of the youngsters is carrying Borgo the Huttlet. The children always have a blast rolling him off dunes, and Borgo seems to like tumbling about.
Everyone enjoys doing something they're good at, Cobb figures.
Borgo has all the charm of a worrt and looks like something that happened by accident after a slug fucked a tuber, but that's just the unfortunate nature of being born a Hutt. He does make for great alarm though and no one's come to lay claim in to him so now Freetown has. Malakili's done some fair bit of work with him before he traded beast-wrangling for a cooking career in Mos Eisley. Funny how the galaxy works, sometimes. Then again beasts and crowds alike can be tamed with food, it seems.
Cobb mounts up and starts up the speeder. It comes to life with a deep rumble like the purr of some giant beast just stirred from sleep. The turbines spin lazily, propelling the speeder at no more than the speed of a leisurely jog as Cobb rolls out of town, following the main road north. He can see a dust trail left by the old Imperial troop transport that serves as a ride for all the miners that commute between the town and the mines. It's some fourty minutes to the cliffs and the silicax mines, Freetown's most precious export now that there's no more slaves in the entirety of the former Mos Pelgo territories.
Cobb catches up to the transport in no time and offers a two fingered salute to Jo, who waves at him, half-hanging out of the transport. Then, he slips on the sand goggles and pulls up his scarf over his face and opens up the throttle. The engine roars a furious bellow and the bus comes to a standstill, or that's what it looks like as the former podracer surges ahead.
Cobb is pressed into his seat, his heart kicking a wild beat as everything around him becomes a blur and the wind digs greedy claws into his hair, tearing at his clothes with a never-ending scream. Cobb keeps his eyes on the horizon, where its blue touches the gold of the sands and accelerates further until he's moving faster than anything on the planet, save for those who possess a spaceship of their own.
Cob drives fast and hard and skims low over the dunes, a spray of sand in his wake and a wild grin on his face as Freetown and its troubles fall away behind him and the desert opens up before him. There is only him and the delicate balancing act of steering the bike and the animal bite of fear at the possibility of crashing to a gruesome death of becoming a red smear on the ground.
Cobb savours the sting of it and laughs at everyone who had told him he was mad for converting a space-worthy engine into a speeder.
He heads north first and then veers east, towards the distant mountains. The sharp, crumbling peaks of the Jundland Wastes glow a deep spice-red in the early morning light, their ridges slowly growing as he races towards them. The Wastes are a cheerless badland with deep craggy canyons cutting through the stone and no population of its own and Cobb stays well clear of the crags and valleys and heads for the foothills. Here, the winds are funneled over the top of the cliff and hold good moisture and the vaporators are the most effective.
He lets off the gas and allows his speeder's momentum to carry him towards the specks of white that stand in stark contrast against the rust-coloured rock. As the speed drops, the world comes back into focus and the howl in his ears dies down. The desert becomes quiet all of a sudden, or maybe Cobb's gone deaf but he still has the thud of his heartbeat in his throat and feels truly alive for it.
It takes a long time for sound to filter back in; the soft whine of the engine that was never meant for leisurely cruising and his own harsh breathing. The exhilaration dies down, but Cobb's limbs remain giddy with the rush of adrenaline.
It's standstill that feels disorienting in the wake of moving with such speed. Cobb gets up too fast, sways and has to hold on to the speeder and allows his body to find its center once more. It catches up to him a moment later, running at his heels like a faithful massif. Cobb retrieves his toolbox, dusts off a wide-brimmed hat against his thigh and slaps it over his head, taking the last meters on foot.
The vaporators are lined up on top of a small rocky plateau that rises out of the dunes and Cobb makes note of how the gritty crunch of sand under his boots gives away to the dry rustle of his soles against stone.
Servicing vaporators is sweaty work, hours spent on the hard ground with the sun beating down on him as he bolts them apart and inspects their guts, fixing what he can on site and keeping a tally on all the parts they will have to replace. There is a meditative monotony to it; however it requires a concentration and an attention to detail that are hard to muster in the heat and overlooking small issues can lead to the vaporator failing which is not something they can afford.
It's satisfying in its own way though, and vital to the town prospering.
Cobb tugs his fingerless gloves off and stuffs them behind his belt. Grease is easier to clean off skin than leather. He sets the toolbox down beside him and gets to work, immediately feeling sweat beading along the column of his spine, underneath the armour he rarely ventures out without anymore.
Once every few days they use the transport to empty out the cisterns and if the harvest is bountiful, the town will decide on what to do with the water. Everyone gets their fair share and if their storages are full, the excess may enable them to build a new greenhouse or it will be sold in one of the cities for credits.
Cobb opens the first vaporator and already he has to fight against a stuck bolt. It gives way from a hard kick to the spanner and Cobb kneels down again to survey its state. The vaporators are built to withstand the harsh desert climate, but they do tend to fill up with dust, especially after the storms. Grease gets lumpy with sand, gaskets turn brittle from the heat and break, scurries can get trapped inside and short-circuit the vaporator if they gnaw on the wiring.
The vats are less prone to failure, but they do need to get cleaned regularly. Every now and then they take them apart and let the sonic have a go at the parts. But that is a job for more than one man and today Cobb does what he can, brushes out sand, cleans out the dry, clotted grease and applies fresh one and checks the wires and pipes, makes sure it's all in working order. Then, he closes the vaporator again and moves on to the next one.
They have a list in the marshal's office that has all the maintenance schedules, and all the replacement pars they need to acquire. Cobb knows most of it by heart.
The suns must be smiling down on him, because there are no unfortunate creatures that managed to fry the circuits and themselves in the process for Cobb to scrape out and no other major setbacks. Vap 08 doesn't seal as tightly as it should and there is a pressure drop in vap 14 which is probably down to bad piping. Cobb puts it on his mental tally, wipes the sweat off his brow with his forearm and continues down the line.
By the time he is done, the second sun has risen and Cobb feels the burn of it even as his tacky shirt begins to dry on his back. What water there is in his body evaporates quicker than he can sweat it out.
He calls it a day and heads back to his speeder, scooping up sand on his way. He uses it to get rid of any traces of dirt and grime, rubbing his hands together until they are clean again before he stores away the toolbox and hat and heads out looking for shelter.
Cobb finds it in the middle of a circle of boulders that stand high and close enough to one another to block out the suns. He hides the speeder and himself under the folded tarp the colour of dry dirt and has a meager meal of dry rations that he washes down with water from his canteen. It's warm and has an unpleasant metallic aftertaste, but he savours every drop that eases the dry, swollen ache of his parched throat.
Then, Cobb does what an every sensible Tatooine native does when both suns are high in the sky; rolls himself up in his duster and naps the noon away in the deepest shadow available to him.
o
It's afternoon when he rides on, the passage of time marked only by the path Tatoo I had taken over the cloudless sky. The first sun is low enough to kiss the distant horizon while the second one remains at the zenith.
When both suns turn their merciless glare on the land, that's when the worst of the droughts happen. This time of the year the suns move out of sync and it is the time of plenty, when there's enough water for everyone and they can store the surplus underground in the mines where it will stay cool and fresh. They might even see some rains, come a few cycles.
Despite sunset there are many hours of daylight left yet and Cobb cuts west again, all the way to the edge of the Dune Sea. The sands are shimmering with a heat-haze, deceptive to anyone who does not call them their home. Cobb has never seen a body of water that he couldn't step across, so it's not in him to be fooled into thinking there's any out here.
You find water by looking for plants, thick-skinned, hardy things much like the folk that live in these lands and even so, whatever moisture there is, it's usually deep in the ground. No use digging for it with one's bare hands. There are places where it pools though, oasis and waterholes. He knows quite a few in the area and one of them is also the homestead of a moisture farmer by the name of Lem.
It's a single hut with thick walls and a domed roof in the style of all humble Tatooine dwellings and it all but disappears against the backdrop of the dunes until one's right upon it.
Alerted by the noise of the speeder, Lem greets Cobb by aiming a shotgun in his face. When he recognizes the podracer and the man upon it he hoists the gun over his shoulder and offers Cobb his hand instead.
"Marshal. Good to see you."
"And you."
They exchange news. Not much on Lem's part, so Cobb does most of the talking. He offers his services too, but Lem is prompt to wave him off.
"Nothing I can't fix myself," he says and then, almost as if in apology for refusing the help, "Tuskens came by, right after sunrise."
"Any trouble?" Cobb asks, unable to keep the unease out of his voice. The peace had held ever since the Sand People had pitched in to fight off the Red Key Raiders and both Freetown and the Tuskens have been better off for it. The last thing they need is some easily avoidable misunderstanding to destroy the fragile truce.
"None. Didn't take a drop beyond what was agreed upon."
"Good." Cobb breathes out long and slow, allows the tension in his gut to uncoil. Good. He nods at the well. "Mind if I top up?"
"Not at all." Lem accompanies Cobb, strongly favouring his left leg. He has been walking with a limp ever since he's been roughed up bad by a Nikto biker gang sometime past year. Cobb offered him to stay closer to town but Lem refused. He has carved out his home in this place and he intends to be laid to rest here, one day.
Cobb can relate.
"Where you bound, then?"
Cobb fills up his canteen to the brim and takes a swig of the cold water. Holds it in his mouth, swirls it around and then swallows, slowly in bits. The cold of it settles in the pit of his stomach. He wonders, not for the first time, what it would feel like running over his overheated skin and instead drinks some more. Well-water has a different taste than the one sourced from vaporators. It's not flat but richer, a hint of salt in it and a faint aftertaste of the earth. He sucks the moisture off his lips and sighs.
"A little out west and then back north, I think. Been a while since I looked that way."
Lem nods, shielding his eyes with his hand as he gazes over flowing dunes. "Good day for ridin?" he asks.
"It's a good day," Cobb agrees.
o
Finding an irregular set of tracks in the sand does nothing to change it. Cobb studies their pattern and thinks they might belong to a sand-beast. They're highly territorial and don't usually come out during the day, not unless disturbed and out here it's far enough away from Freetown not to be a cause for worry.
Later, Cobb's path takes him past an old Tusken encampment. He stops the speeder when he notices the signs of human presence and treads carefully, rifle in hand and at the ready until it becomes clear that no one has been here for weeks. What footsteps the tribe had left have long been carried away on the wind or buried beneath the sand, but Cobb knows how to read the desert. He finds the place where they had built a camp fire and the charred lumps of burned bantha dung it had been made of. A splinter of a pole still has a bushel of soft brown hair clinging to it. It had been driven deep into the sand and abandoned after the bantha tied to it had snapped it.
A little further there is a pile of bones, broken and cleaned out of marrow. Cobb traces a set of furrows in its otherwise smooth surface with the tips of his fingers and recognizes them for the chew marks of a beast with jaws and teeth more powerful than any human's. Another swipe of the encampment yields no more clues and any leftover tension drips from his limbs like the sweat from his brow.
He does not expect trouble from the Sand People. The peace holds, and if it does so around water holes, it will out here as well.
Cobb commits the camp's location to memory and continues onwards.
The dunes are low and flat out here, rocking the speeder gently in an up and down motion like the waves of an ocean that had once, many thousands of years ago, stretched where the Dune Sea lies now. Cobb has only seen an ocean on the holonet yet it's enough to fill his mind with visions of faraway planets and water and to scatter his attention like grains of sand in the wake of his speeder's passing.
Until the sand dips low and steadily downwards and Cobb abandons all such fantasies and swerves hard to the right and back up towards the edge. He had not been steering for the Great Pit of Carkoon, but here it lies before him; a sinkhole yawning blackness and a monster born of hunger lurking within.
For a while, the skeleton of Jabba's barge marked the spot where the sarlacc dwells but it had not taken long for scavengers to pick it clean and now only the largest, most cumbersome pieces of its hull remain, half-buried on a drift like the bones of some long-dead beast. In time, they too will disappear and with it one more trace of the late Hutt.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, Cobb thinks and halts the speeder at the edge of the pit.
Once, this had been Jabba's favourite place to get rid of his enemies, apart from feeding them to his menagerie. Until he was killed, maybe even in this very spot where Cobb now stands. Strangled by one of his slaves, the story goes. And it's a good one, good enough that Cobb doesn't much care to find out whether it's true or not. He wants to believe it, had raised a toast to a nameless girl and laughed at the irony of the former daimyo and the most feared crime lord in the history of the planet being ended by a slave.
Word is, she had choked Jabba to death with the very chain he had used to imprison her. It is poetic, the kind of story that never gets old but rather more embellished with every retelling around nightly campfires and which Cobb falls in love with anew every time he listens to it like it were the first time.
"Anyone home?" Cobb calls into the enormous sinkhole and revs the engine of his speeder.
That never failed to draw the sarlacc out, seeing as for the entirety of Jabba's rule the noise of vehicles meant the roar would be followed by food.
He doesn't particularly want to see sarlacc, a creature that lives unbothered by and uncaring for all the rest of Tatooine.
He wants to see the sarlacc, revulsion and fascination boiling inside of him.
As if to spite him, the sarlacc does not show itself.
"Hello, you ugly bastard!"
Cobb's voice chases down the slopes of the pit like a pair of startled skitters, echoing in the way it tends to in vast, empty spaces.
The pit remains ominously silent.
o
It's dusk by the time Cobb makes it back to town, crisp and tight-skinned and with a fine film of dust clinging to him. He's got sand in all body creases and a salt line rimming his shirt, and exhaustion sits deep in his bones, making them feel heavier than usual.
It's good to leave Freetown, now and again.
It's even better to come back.
He puts his speeder in the garage and heads home. Out on the porch, he strips down to his smalls and shakes all the sand out of his clothing. He uses more of it to whisk away the moisture and the accumulated grime of a day and then runs a soft cloth over his skin to brush off the leftover grit. A proper dust bath, desert-style.
The sonic comes after. It's a wheezing anemic thing that's on its last legs but water is for washing one's face at the end of the day, for one's hands and private parts and beyond that, Cobb makes do with some soap, the kind that space travelling folk favours because it does not require washing out and only costs a few credits a galleon.
There had been a time when he'd not even had that much, when sand and some bantha fat to soothe the abraded skin was all there was, followed by a vigorous rubdown with a rough cloth. These days, Cobb's glad for the few comforts he has. For someone who had lived on sheer stubbornness back when he hadn't owned – hadn't been allowed to own – anything material and had resorted to hoarding hope and spite like a treasure instead, it's about enough.
The cantina is busy serving the evening crowd and Cobb joins Issa and Scott at a table and doesn't have to ask to be served. He can feel his pulse in his temples and rubs at the pressure lines his goggles have left in his skin and pours himself a spotchka. Knocks it back and runs his tongue over his teeth to get the last residue of it before he tears into his food.
"You ever know a sarlacc to leave?" Cobb asks halfway into his meal.
Issa's brows draw up, the ends of her lekku twitching, betraying surprise. "Leave? How?"
Cobb shrugs. Digs his teeth into the meat on his plate. It's lizard again, but out here one can't be picky and the seasoning makes it actually tasty. They can't afford to slaughter animals often. Too difficult to preserve meat other than drying it into jerky or dehydrating it into rations and not all the parts are suitable for that.
Issa leans back and crosses her arms. "Did it pack its bags and go looking for a more upstate establishment?"
"Something like that," Cobb says and sucks grease off the bone and his fingers, after.
"Sarlaccs don't leave their pits," Scott says all unhelpful-like.
Cobb tosses his clean bone to the half-feral tooka that has burrowed under Jo's house and has claimed the cantina as a second home, especially in the evening-time when morsels are most likely to come flying in its direction. It pounces on the bone and disappears under one of the tables, only the twitching of its bushy tail betraying its presence.
"This one did."
They look first at each other and then at him as if preoccupied that the suns had boiled his brains. A reasonable worry, all things considered.
"If I see one up an' about when on patrol, I'll let you know," Scott says around the wide-rimmed glass of his whisky.
"See that you get on patrol, then," Cobb bites back and Scott looks happier with the directive than he did this morning.
o
Cobb barely musters the energy to fire up the rig in his studio this evening and when he does, his heart's not really in it. He is a creature of habit though, and he gives it his best although it's hard to focus on speaking about things of no consequence when his thoughts circle the empty sarlacc pit like a predator sniffing around a cadaver.
Because despite their differences, Scott was right. Sarlaccs are not known to leave their dwellings. Ever.
And Cobb doesn't like that this one did, doesn't like it one bit.
"Storm's coming," one of the miners two tables over had said to his wife evoking a half-hearted chorus of assents and some opposing murmurs from the late night cantina crowd. It had raised Cobb's hackles.
Now he stands on the deck before his home, having finally given up after a good two hours of trying to man the radio.
The darkness feels laden and Cobb can feel the fine hairs on his arms stand on end which, for once, has nothing to do with the night's chill. All around him, the desert is quiet. There are no skettos hunting in the light of the few lanterns and no yips of womp rats fighting over scraps in the town's garbage. The air itself is thick and the stars are sharp pinpricks in the sky and for sure there's a storm brewing, but it's not one of wind and dust.
Whatever is coming their way, it'll fall to him to deal with it. Cobb drums his fingers on the grip of his blaster, worn smooth from use. Bandits, smugglers, even slavers and syndicate men; those he can fight off but Tatooine is a dangerous place and he is only one man.
He sleeps poorly that night, tossing and turning from dreams of something lurking in the pitch black of empty pits and the earth boiling, a faint rumbling in the distance.
o
Cobb's next venture takes him to the Whispering Canyon.
Old Tatooine legend says that if you listen real close, you'll be able to hear the whispers and, if the moons are right and you're lucky – or not, depending on your predisposition towards such things – you might even understand them. The voices of course belong to the ghosts of those who perished in the Dune Sea. They get lost in the winding paths between the cliffs and cry out their lament into the silence of the desert.
Cobb knows the noise is made by the wind howling through narrow gaps in the rock.
And the ghosts.
Everyone knows about the ghosts.
But the canyon's a good place to escape the scorching heat of the day, provided you spare a drop of water so the lost ones won't thirst for your soul. Passage bought, he continues onwards, cuts through a whole swathe of land that he would have travel around otherwise and emerges on the edge of the Dune Sea.
There is another sarlacc here, although this one does not dwell in a pit in the ground, but an in enormous cave in the side of a mountain. Perhaps, in an age before Cobb, before Mos Pelgo even, there had been another mine here. If so, then the rock had long since been plundered and the mine abandoned and wiped off all charts.
But the locals know of the cave and to stay clear of it.
"Where are you?" Cobb mutters from his perch on some sloping rocks that give him an unobstructed view of the entrance from a safe distance away. He gives up on the binoculars and lowers his helmet's rangefinder because it can pick up heat signatures better. The cave is dark and he can see nothing.
There is, simply put, nothing there to see.
o
"Is it sarlacc migration season?"
No preamble, no explanation given. Taanti eyes flick up from where is doing the ledger. He's old school, uses flimsi and a pen that currently rests tucked behind one ear. Credits seldom pass from hand to hand between townsfolk. Freetown will never be wealthy but when everybody contributes, everyone gets to profit. As long as the numbers come out in the black with a sufficient margin for restocking in one of the larger cities, they will make do.
"What are you saying, Cobb?"
"I'm sayin'," Cobb says, tapping the bar top like he was making a point, "that it looks like we have not one but two missing sarlaccs."
"Is this a joke?" Taanti asks, leaning on the stone surface as if it were the only thing holding him up with the extra weight of Cobb unloading his worries on his shoulders.
Cobb pours himself a snort of spotchka. It goes down like iron filings.
He grimaces, and it's not at the tang of brine. "If it is, it's in very poor taste."