Read Online Star Born by Andre Norton - Free Book Online

it somehow understood that as long as it remained in its present position it was safe.
    “The small ones-“
    Dalgard needed no prompting. He picked off easily enough the two half-grown ones. The infants were another problem. Far less sluggish than their huge elders they sensed that they were in danger and fled. One took refuge in the pouch of its now-dead parent, and the others moved so fast that Dalgard found them difficult targets. He killed one which had almost reached an archway and at length nicked the second in the foot, knowing that, while the poison would be slower in acting, it would be as sure.
    Through all of this the third adult devil continued to lie motionless, only its wicked eyes giving any indication that it was alive. Dalgard watched it impatiently. Unless it would move, allow him a chance to aim at the soft underparts, there was little chance of killing it.
    What followed startled both hunters, versed as they were in the usual mechanics of killing snake-devils. It had been an accepted premise, through the years since the colonists had known of the monsters, that the creatures were relatively brainless, mere machines which fought, ate, and killed, incapable of any intelligent reasoning, and therefore only dangerous when one was surprised by them or when the hunter was forced to face them inadequately armed.
    This snake-devil was different, as it became increasingly plain to the two behind the grille. It had remained safe during the slaughter of its companions because it had not moved, almost as if it had wit enough not to move. And now, when it did change position, its maneuvers, simple as they were, underlined the fact that this one creature appeared to have thought out a solution to its situation-as rational a solution as Dalgard might have produced had it been his problem.
    Still keeping its soft underparts. covered, it edged about in the sand until its back, with the impenetrable armor plates, was facing the grille behind which the hunters stood. Retracting its neck between its shoulders and hunching its powerful back limbs under it, it rushed from that point of danger straight for one of the archways.
    Dalgard sent an arrow after it. Only to see the shaft scrape along the heavy scales and bounce to the sand. Then the snake-devil was gone.
    “Banded-“ The word reached Dalgard. Sssuri had been cool enough to note that while the human hunter had been only bewildered by the untypical actions of his quarry.
    ‘ It must be intelligent.” The scout’s statement was more than half protest.
    “Where they are concerned, one may expect many evil wonders.”
    “We’ve got to get that devil!” Dalgard was determined on that. Though to run down, through this maze of deserted city, an enraged snake-devil-above all, a snake-devil which appeared to have some reasoning powers-was not a prospect to arouse any emotion except grim devotion to duty.
    “It goes for help.”
    Dalgard, startled, stared at his companion. Sssuri was still by the grille, watching that archway through which the devil had disappeared.
    “What kind of help?” For a moment Dalgard pictured the monster returning at the head of a regiment of its kind, able to tear out this grille and get at their soft-fleshed enemies behind it.
    “Safety-protection,” Sssuri told him. “And I think that the place to which it now flees is one we should know.”
    “Those Others?” The sun had not clouded, it still streamed down in the torrid heat of early afternoon, warm on their heads and shoulders. Yet Dalgard felt as chill as if some autumn wind had laid its lash across the small of his back.
    “They are not here. But they have been-and it is possible that they return. The devil goes to where it expects to find them.”
    Sssuri was already on his way, running about the arena’s curve to reach the point above the archway through which the snake-devil had raced. Dalgard padded after him, bow, in hand. He trusted Sssuri implicitly when it came to