Metal! But what kind of metal shines gray?
The stinger plunged deeply into the camp guard’s head, right between the eyes and into the brain. The guard died instantly, without a sound.
The demon planted a—a ped? wondered Nukurren; was that long and skinny thing a ped?—onto the dead guard’s head and wrenched the stinger loose with its two tentacles.
Except they’re not tentacles. They’re like sticks tied together. And that stinger’s a weapon of some kind.
That last thought restored her courage. They might be demons, but if they needed weapons they had to be vulnerable. Somehow.
She had no more time for thought. From the corner of her eye she caught a flickering motion. Then the gleam of a weapon coming straight toward her.
She was totally unprepared for a straight-thrusting weapon. No gukuy could deliver such a blow. But she instantly raised the shield protecting her palp on the crossbar of the fork, in the reflex of a fighter fending off blowpipe darts.
The weapon glanced off the shield and drove along her mantle, gashing a long but shallow wound. Nukurren ignored the pain. Her mantle was already criss-crossed with battle scars, and no mantle-wound was serious so long as the mantle itself wasn’t penetrated. But she found time to regret the absence of her armor.
Nukurren whipped her flail around and struck a terrible blow on the lower portion of the demon’s ped. The flail-tips did not penetrate. There was some sort of armor there. But she heard a strange cracking noise, and the demon collapsed to the ground, wailing horribly.
She drew back her flail for the death-stroke, but turned away. Her duty was elsewhere. The demon seemed incapacitated, and she was responsible for the safety of the caravan master.
She raced toward Kjakukun’s yurt. On the way, she caught glimpses of the chaos around her. The guards and slavers were no longer attempting to fight. They were fleeing every which way in utter terror. But the demons which swarmed everywhere moved much faster than gukuy. Right before her, she watched as a fleeing slaver was overtaken by two demons. Pitilessly, the monsters drove their weapons into the slaver’s peds, pinning it to the ground. A third demon flickered around to the front of the shrieking slaver, and drove its weapon straight into her brain.
How do they do that? wondered Nukurren. She recognized the utterly deadly nature of the blow. No part of a gukuy’s body was more vulnerable than the soft spot between the eyes, behind which the brain lay unprotected. But the very nature of a gukuy’s tentacles made such a direct blow impossible. The dart from a blowpipe could strike there, but very few pipers could drive a dart hard enough to penetrate through the flesh into the brain. Eyes were a piper’s target.
She heard a loud hooting from the cages holding the hunnakaku.
Are the demons slaughtering the pitiful things?
But when she risked a glance, she saw that the demons were smashing the locks of the cage. They were releasing the sub-gukuy! And now she recognized that the hoots carried no trace of fear.
Just ahead of her was Kjakukun’s yurt. She was almost there. She saw the caravan master step out through the hides, carrying a flail.
Get back inside, you idiot! I can’t protect you out here!
It was too late. From somewhere, a demon flickered into view. It drew back the stinger in one of its strange tentacles, and then jerked it forward in a blur. Astonished, Nukurren watched the stinger fly through the air, like a gigantic dart from a blowpipe. It struck Kjakukun right between the eyes. The caravan master was dead before her body could fall.
More than anything else she had seen, in that dawn of terror and chaos, the sight of the flying stinger shocked Nukurren. Except for blowpipes, gukuy almost never used missile weapons. Some of the primitive tribes to the far southwest used slings. The Anshac had experimented with the awkward devices, before concluding they were well-nigh useless. To be sure, the stones struck with considerable impact. But gukuy could withstand a great deal in the way of blunt impacts, and no gukuy had the tentacular dexterity to use the slings with accuracy. Even the southwestern primitives used them rarely.