Slig

A male slig is a lean seven-foot giant of over 300 pounds, unable to store fat and so always rangy. Skin ranges from sickly white to deep brown, and shaggy auburn or red locks cover its head, forearms, thighs and sometimes back and rump. It moves hunched, using its mighty arms to help it along. Its hands bear three elongated fingers plus a thumb, all with blunt black claws. The skull narrows to a point above an enormously wide jaw full of broken yellow teeth bared in a permanent mad grin, and black-to-silver eyes peer from under heavy, almost reptilian brow ridges. Females stand about 5 feet, always braid their hair and are pale white or tan. All wear hides and leather, with dress marking war-band rank, and carry gear in pouches.

Their spoken tongue covers only the basics of slig life and has no written form. Humans can learn it, but no slig has ever learned a human language. Males share an instinctive telepathy limited strictly to hunting and formation fighting; it carries no other kind of message.

Any slig met in the wild belongs to an all-male war band; females and young stay in the lair, and females flee with their children rather than fight. One slig is tough but beatable. A band is dangerous because its members coordinate perfectly and love inventing new ways to trap prey. Their weapons are bone swords and spears with chitin or bone heads, either dealing 1d8+1 thanks to slig strength, and unarmed they bite for 1-3 with their wide front teeth.

Sligs instinctively form five-warrior units: two swordsmen shoulder to shoulder in front and three spearmen behind, the outer two reaching past the swordsmen's flanks and the middle one thrusting between them. Telepathy keeps the unit moving as one and the weapons in a rhythm that never tangles. Any creature either swordsman can reach can be attacked by all five. When one falls, another steps in and attacks that same round without penalty. Units can combine against one target, or other formations and lone warriors can guard the flanks of the fighting group.

Sligs pride themselves on inventing tactics; these are only examples. For baiting, sligs race ahead of travelers and plant tempting caches of treasure, metal, food or water in a ditch or ravine, then surround the spot from the high ground. Bait ranges from a half-buried crate to a staged caravan massacre with dead beasts and smoking wagons.

For kidnapping, they slip into a camp, grab valuables or even a sleeping captive, and flee leaving an obvious trail that leads pursuers into badlands or deep gullies where the terrain favors the sligs. Captives die unless rescued fast. For track ambushes, each slig digs a hole just big enough for itself and its weapon, which comrades cover with a hide on a frame disguised under sand, stones and scrub. At a silent telepathic signal they all burst out at once. Such ambushes on the road between two rival city-states prompted local merchant houses to post a bounty, yet after a fortune paid out the sand wastes still crawl with sligs.

A war band has no chief and no ranks; telepathy gives it more unity than any leader could, and plans form and execute collectively in an instant. Warriors record big kills as ritual scars on forearms and calves, and hunting success earns mating rights, not command.

Unusually for the wastes, sligs build permanent, defensible homes from local features: mortarless but sturdy stone piles under badland overhangs, or enlarged caves near mountains, dug with metal tools taken from victims. Communities do not cooperate, and a slig almost never finds acceptance in a community not its own. Between hunts, males shape weapons from stone or bone and use every hide for harnesses, pouches, shelters and bedding. Their crude craft makes loot precious; most warriors carry something made by a more advanced race. They abandon nothing valuable at a kill unless forced to retreat.

Females take a new mate three times a year, choosing the male with the best recent hunting record. Each pregnancy lasts three months and usually produces one child, with twins and triplets about as common as among humans. Children eat voraciously, are self-sufficient within the community at six months and fully grown at a year; the rare survivors who have seen a slig village coined the phrase 'sligging down' a meal.

Lacking fat reserves, sligs hunt three times daily, at dawn, midday and midnight, rushing kills home so females and children can eat before the hunters. Three days without food kills a slig. They recycle body fluids so well that they need surprisingly little water. Alchemists, intrigued by their pseudopsionic telepathy, believe slig blood or marrow stimulates psionic power. That is only folklore, but their attempts to prove it have pushed the price of a live slig as high as 20 cp in some city-states.