A youngling calls out at the sound of scrabbling from beneath the floor of the ruined holy site: "Tio! Tio?" Then a hook lodges in the edge of the hole in the floor, and the youngling falls silent. A powerful hand follows, then the high brow and short snout of Archididelphis invicta rise into view. The creature hauls itself up, only to drop to all fours, or three. The youngling toddles over, almost level with the warrior's piercing eyes. "Tio?" it says. The warrior only shakes his head, and as he rises to his knees, the youngling begins to cry. Only then does No-Hands throw back his head and drop his jaw, and a bloodcurdling yet infinitely mournful scream rings up and down the eroded passages of the plateau.
It was the hook No-Hands bore in place of his right hand that saved his life. As his foe slammed into him, he snared the attacker's upper jaw like a fish, pulling a pair of long fangs back from his throat. It bought time enough to drop his empty broomhandle pistol and draw a revolver in its place. He fired twice, and the enemy that had left him with a boot and a sawed off shotgun in place of his right leg tore free with a backward leap and a spray of blood. He fired twice more at the creature as it bounded toward daylight, and in all likelihood a drop of several hundred meters. Then it was gone, leaving only a trail of blood behind.
No-Hands reloaded the chambers of his revolver as he approached the end of the pipe. A quick and cautious glance confirmed that it opened onto empty air. He raised the revolver and leaned forward. That was when his foe swung down from above and kicked him in the chest with both feet. The force was enough to knock the gun from his hand as he went sprawling back. He raised his head to see the silhouette of his foe drawing a crossbow as it dropped down. At the same moment, No-Hands' hook reached the drawstring that ran down to the shotgun. Two simultaneous blasts ripped through the sole of the boot, sending No-Hands sliding back, and the foe flipped from vertical to horizontal before slamming down on the surface of the pipe.
No-Hands had to use the hook for leverage to pull himself to his feet. He hobbled toward the body of the foe, certainly no longer a threat. A glance told him all he needed to know. . It had been not much more than a juvenile, undoubtedly the other reason No-Hands had survived. The teeth, the snout, the absent tail, and what remained of the brow... all a match for his own, even more than the skull in the crypt. The foe he hunted is another male Archididelphis invicta.
"While A. invicta is certainly long gone from any civilized lands, enough known and likely mentions of their race persist among the lore of the lower orders that it remains possible, even likely, that a few yet survive in the deepest wastes and wildernesses of the world. None can envy their fate, however, as despite their clearly considerable intellect, they are solitary by nature and hostile to intrusion under almost all circumstances, perhaps even more so to their own kind than to other races..."
No-Hands read the passage once more, written by the first learned creature to describe his race. He dropped it into the fire in the sanctum of the holy place, to join the rest of the sheaf of papers he saved from the wreck of his vehicle. The quarry remained in the chamber beneath the holy place, next to the bones of what was undoubtedly his mother.
It took the night and another day to make his way back to his basecamp, only slightly hindered by the tiny youngling he carried. Only one matter remained, and he waited until well after nightfall to do it. In two more days, he would be in the foothills of the mountains to the west, where a petty governor begged for help against a bandit chief that terrorized the villages under his charge from a mountain fortress that had once been a pillbox of the vanished Giants.
As the sun rose on the third day, the back door of the shack at the edge of the town opened slowly and carefully. There lay the youngling, curled up in sleep, and beside it, an untouched pot of 30 silver coins.
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