It was not a question, really. It was a command. Spoken in such a tone that even the fool Guo answered without hesitation.
“Then, listen to me, Guo. Listen carefully, and never doubt what I say. This—”
A quick gesture encompassed the battlefield.
“—is how it is for one reason. And one reason only. It is not so because of the flails of your warriors, nor the power of your own mace. You fought well. Very well. But you would now be nothing but meat in the bellies of the Utuku—”
Guo began to protest, but the demon’s voice overrode even hers.
“Except for one thing, battlemother! Except that our mother told us a secret. A terrible secret. A secret which destroyed an army.”
The blue in Guo’s mantle faded, replaced by dappled ochre, pink and orange.
“It is true, then?” the battlemother asked uncertainly. “She is the one we have heard of? The one who knows the secrets?”
The demon hesitated. Kopporu saw something change in the monster’s shape. She was not sure what it was. Something in the way its—tentacles?—attached to its upper body. The attachments seemed to move downward somehow, and the demon suddenly looked smaller.
“Yes,” it said softly. “She is the one. The one who knows the secrets—and what comes with them.”
It pointed again to the battlefield.
“This resulted from one of her secrets. But there was another result as well. This—also caused my mother a great and terrible anguish. I know it is so. I have been told by those of my warriors who saw her leave.”
All softness vanished. The demon’s next words could have forged the bronze blades of a flail.
“I will not visit further grief upon my mother, nor allow others to do so. Do you understand, battlemother? I hope so. I have heard much said of the Kiktu, and all of it good. I would welcome you as friends—and perhaps more. And so—I know this to be true—would my mother. But that is for the possible future. For the present, the matter is simple. If you do not stop the killing—”
The last words struck like the flail itself.
“—then the only gukuy who will survive this field of battle will be the Pilgrims and the new Utuku. You, and all your people, will join the other corpses.”
Kopporu had turned on Guo, then. She herself knew the tones of authority, and she explained to Guo in the simplest of terms that, Great Mother or no, Guo was still nothing more than a warrior under her command. Did she understand?
Even Guo, even the young fool Guo, who had forced the black demon to declare his authority over them, had finally understood. The battlemother had remained silent, while Aktako and the rest of Kopporu’s guard carried the word to the warriors.
The warriors had obeyed. Reluctantly, true. But Aktako and her cohorts knew how to enforce commands, and the slaughter of the new Utuku stopped. Or, at least, the slaughter of those Utuku whose cowl-scars were very fresh. “New” Utuku, after all, is a term which can be interpreted in different ways; and the warriors were in no mood for any but the most literal interpretation.
Kopporu suspected that the young demonlord knew how often the Kiktu warriors were violating the spirit of the command, but the monster said nothing. After a time, Kopporu decided that the demon was not, in truth, seeking a confrontation. Simply a lessened pain in his mother’s heart.
Do demons have hearts, I wonder?
The Mother of Demons would never know how many Utuku could have been spared. But she would see captives—several eighties of them, in the end—and would perhaps be satisfied.
I hope so. I hope so.
And now the moment had come. At the head of her army, Kopporu entered a clearing in the center of a small—village, she thought. On three sides of the clearing stood oddly-built, square yurts. On the fourth side was a grove of those plants which the Old Ones called “oruc.”
And in the grove itself, to Kopporu’s amazement, were several owoc. Feeding on the leaves. Their mantles rippling with green.
The tension in her body eased, slightly.