Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “We’re all Hulkrites now, brother,” said Pleckoo. “And I can outdrink you or anyone else.”

  When the servants returned with new bowls from a different cask, Pleckoo made a show of taking a long, loud slurp from a darker, even stronger liquor. After an eye-stinging, chili-scented burp, he looked straight at Kraznoy and drank a second slug.

  “Slow down, good Hulkrite,” Kraznoy said, both impressed and irritated. “Let us leave some for rest of us.”

  “They can bring us plenty more,” Pleckoo said, but even as he sat up straight and did his best to look lively, he felt as if the scorpions he had eaten had reassembled inside him and were trying to get out. The others resumed drinking from the new batch, which they found more palatable. The music quieted and the Brothel Mistress appeared at the top of the steps wearing a new arrangement of her precious beads. Pleckoo had looked forward to this moment when the women would begin their descent with the new beauties saved for the end of the procession. But as he stood to join the others, a sharp, radiant pain stabbed at his gut and spread through his limbs. His mouth began to water excessively.

  Pleckoo stepped quietly back from the others as the music started up again. He was dry heaving and afraid someone might see he was sick from drink. He backed into a dark corner of the chamber near a flap portal for the servants and slipped out. He stumbled in the darkness of the tunnel crowded with ants, falling on his knees to vomit. He hoped some passing ant minims would remove the evidence of his weakness, but their antennae sensed poisons in the acrid mess and they scampered off. A large foraging ghost crawled towards Pleckoo to antennate him, but he had left his antennae in his chambers. The ant sniffed him and found the colony odor, but knocked him over in the process. Once Pleckoo had fallen, he passed out and slept at the edges of the tunnel floor.

  Anand stood looking at the ceiling, waiting for the moment of the Brothel Mistress’s return. The music had ended and in the quiet, Anand’s mind was racing in a noisy spiral as he reviewed his plans. Tahn, as usual, had been among the first to pass out and his captains took it as permission to follow him into slumber. It seemed to Anand an aching eon before the Brothel Mistress returned to herd her workers back to their quarters in the weeds. Some of them were asleep on the mattresses, but most were sitting at the bottom of the steps, blankly chewing on stems of toasted cannabis.

  When the guards were brought their dinner, Anand forced himself to eat, laugh, and make conversation as he swatted at the doubts that overwhelmed him. It was likely his plan would fail, that he would be attacked and subdued by great numbers who would kill him in an instant. I have no choice, he told himself, whatever the odds, I must succeed. Madricanth will help me. The servant girls returned to roll up the leaf platters and their remains. “Will you be needing anything else?” asked the one whose arm had been twisted from its socket, keeping her distance.

  “No,” said Toothless and the servants were dismissed. Toothless went to his backsack and brought out his top, which signaled the men to take out their purses and set out the first wagers. Anand took out his purse, too.

  “Oh, planning on losing some money, Quegdoth?” said Toothless.

  “No, planning on taking all of yours,” Anand said.

  “Take the first spin and make the first bet,” Toothless said.

  “Termite,” Anand said, referring to the drawings carved into the top’s sides. He spun the top but “beetle” came up and he lost the first of his flecks of pyrite. As the game stretched on, Anand waited for the moment that the guards grew sleepy. When Toothless yawned, it set off a chain reaction. Anand yawned himself, then stood and stretched. “Let me get some more kwondle,” he said and went to his backsack. In the most casual way possible, he pulled out his blowgun and straightened the magazine.

  The men with their backs to Anand went suddenly still, then fell forward while the top was spinning.

  “What’s this? Wake up, men!” Toothless shouted, scolding them. He looked over their slumped bodies to see Anand with the pipe in his mouth. A dart ripped through Toothless’s armor and he fell backwards, his legs popping up and jerking before going still.

  With great care, Anand tiptoed through the sleeping bodies of Tahn’s captains and targeted every man. A few jerked at the initial pain but could not cry out. Anand saved Tahn for last and was ready to shoot him when he rolled over and onto Anand’s feet. Tahn woke. He smiled to see his young favorite, then realized something was amiss.

  “What are you doing, Quegdoth? What’s that in your hand?”

  Anand hesitated. He looked in Tahn’s eyes and saw fear in them for the first time. Anand set the gun in his mouth, blew and missed when Tahn jerked away. Through the haze of his intoxication, Tahn rose, tripping over the paralyzed as he lunged for Anand.

  “Surrender that weapon!” Tahn shouted, extending his palm.

  Like some great infection throbbing to release its pus, Anand’s hatred gushed from him. He stepped back as he raised the blowgun to his lips. This time the dart landed between Tahn’s eyes. He fell on his back, his four limbs twitching, before he went still.

  Anand leaned over Tahn’s unblinking face. “I know you can see and hear me, Commander. Your body cannot move, but your mind is alive. My name is Anand, son of Corra of the Entrevean Clan of Britasytes, a woman killed by your warriors at Palzhad. I have come to free my people. I know you are praying to Hulkro to help you, but your Termite God is as deaf as a termite is blind. You will kill, rape, and plunder no more, Tahn. I piss on you, and I piss on your powerless Hulkro.”

  Anand looked at the small plug of wood Tahn wore around his neck, a bit that had come from a termite colony and stank of its scent. The plug was considered holy, a dwelling place of Tahn’s deity. Anand set the plug in Tahn’s mouth before pulling out his own penis and pissing on the prophet’s unblinking face.

  Immersed in a lake of fury, Anand felt like some other being, as if he were outside of himself and watching his actions. He removed his dagger, tipped back Tahn’s head and slowly sawed at his throat. Blood surged in little waves and bubbled over the slit. Placing his ear against Tahn’s chest, Anand waited until his heart beat no more.

  Spinning around the chamber, Anand slit the throats of all the men—everyone that might succeed Tahn. Recently hatched ghost minims squeezed through the service portal to lick at the growing pond of red. Something gnawed at Anand, and forced him to return to Tahn’s corpse—he could not risk even the slightest chance that this so-called prophet could rise again. He jerked his dagger up Tahn’s rib cage, then cut out his heart. Anand impaled it on his dagger, then threw it down to the ground and crushed it to a pulp under his boots. Tahn could never be resurrected now. Never.

  Anand heaved with exhaustion. Emerging from his trance, he staggered under the deepest anguish before falling to his knees in a faint.

  He floated through the blackness of the Realm of Death for what seemed like forever and no time at all. When he eventually came to, he wondered if he was better off in the empty blackness. Looking around, he took in the gory spread of corpses leaking blood, remembering each of these men as a living human like himself. He alone had killed these men, and with their deaths, he questioned what had driven him. As he went about his murderous business, he remembered his resolve, then surprised himself when he burst into tears.

  He thought of Dwan and Belja and Hopkut in their distant, civilized land. Would they see him as a murderer, or a hero who had dispatched the worst kind of monsters? The unknown answer almost crippled him, but he shook himself free of the thought. It was pointless to ponder it now. Daveena and the Pleps must be freed.

  Anand entered the tunnel and hitched a ride on an exiting ant. His boots smeared blood on the ant’s head. He passed Hulkrish guards who were helping a man up from the tunnel floor, a messy drunkard whose hair fell over his face. Anand worried the guards would see the blood on his person but they were too busy to notice.

  After reaching his chambers, Anand cleaned himself and touched up
his white paint. As the paint dried, he reloaded the blowgun and stuffed a rope ladder into his backsack. He placed an obsidian handsaw in the inside pocket of his cape before he exited into the tunnel where he saw and smelled ants with gullets full of predigested crickets. He grabbed a wall-torch and climbed on a ghost as she waded into a stream of her sisters pulsing towards the queen’s chamber.

  When his ant reached the great egg-layer, Anand waited for her to shut her cave of a mouth, then shot a multitude of darts in her head. The queen’s great mass resisted the potion, but slowly her legs gave out from under her. She dropped on her belly, crushing the little ants that groomed her from below. A hundred of her daughters crawled over her, and some looked as if they were propping up her antennae which wilted and made no response.

  Anand prodded his ant’s “forward” segments on its feelers, but the ant would not obey. He abandoned it and was forced to slip and slide over the crush of ants until he found a stream of them exiting. His heart pounded in excitement as he pondered his next destination. At last he would be with Daveena. Her image was blazing before him now, as if she were ringed by sunlight. She would sit in back of him with her warm arms around his waist as he rode their roach out of this place of infinite darkness.

  Mounted guards were patrolling the mound’s exterior. When they saw the termite carving on Anand’s helmet, they slapped their chests in respect as he passed. No one dared to ask where one of the Prophet’s favored was going—why would they? He looked at the sparse beard of one of them, younger than himself, and imagined the moment this boy had bravely taken up with the Hulkrites to defy his abusers. Anand was almost feeling bad for him, wondering if he would be punished for letting him escape when he realized something: Who was left to punish him?

  The thought added to Anand’s confidence and he rode a touch higher as he forced the ant off the trunk-trail, then down to the pits and cages of the slaves. The blood pumping in his ears deafened him to the rest of the world. Tomorrow the servant girls would be the first to find the carnage, but they would not find “Vof Quegdoth.” Once more he wondered, who would the servants run and tell?

  In that moment, a painful heat flashed through Anand as thoughts of jagged nostrils and brown skin filled his head. Pleckoo’s scowling face had come alive and burned in Anand’s mind. Where was he? Anand could recall the face of every man he had slaughtered. Pleckoo was not among them! The heat that flashed through Anand’s body turned to a sudden wave of cold.

  Somewhere on the mound, Pleckoo was alive.

  CHAPTER 40

  AN AFTERTHOUGHT

  As Anand steered the ant to the pit of the Britasytes, he looked behind him to make sure he wasn’t followed and got a full view of Zarren-dozh. From a distance it was beautiful in the moonlight, like an enormous pile of black bee-velvet. The trains of illuminated ghost ants marching around it were like a living sapphire necklace. As he passed the cages and cages of miserable slaves, he was sharply reminded of his mission. The last cage he passed had a crude sign with a mushroom painted on it to designate it as the quarters of the Slopeites and their humiliated queen. Anand felt a strange moment of pity for them that lasted until he neared the roach pit. When the ant he was riding was repelled by roach scent and halted, he dropped to his feet and ran.

  As usual, the roach pit was unguarded. Anand heard the scurrying of the roaches as they crawled upside-down on the grate’s underside, stimulated by moonlight. Anand looked all ways to make sure no one was watching.

  “Wanderers,” he shouted down the pit in Britasyte. “The time has come. Are you ready?”

  A moment of silence passed. “We are,” Zedral shouted back at him and in a moment, Anand heard the Britasytes scurrying from the sleds, gathering their possessions. He saw that the roaches clinging to the gate’s undersides were large and lively and fitted with reins and saddles. Anand removed his handsaw from his cape and cut through the ropes that bound the grate’s twigs before rolling them away. He took out the rope ladder from his backsack, tied it to a plank, and let it unroll to the pit’s bottom.

  “One at a time,” he shouted.

  The children were the first to crawl out, children who were as thin and bug-eyed as damselflies. The women were next to struggle out, including his Auntie Gleg, who ran to hug him. She stank like a demon and her face was like a berry left to wrinkle in the sun, but he couldn’t have been happier as they worked together to help the other matrons out.

  Next were Zedral and the old men, all of whom had long and scraggly beards. The young women climbed out next, and as each one popped up, Anand’s heart beat louder in anticipation of Daveena.

  His heart was shredded when the young men emerged too soon.

  “Zedral, where is Daveena?”

  The old man hung his head. “She is below. Someone will have to carry her. None of us are strong enough.”

  As soon as the last of the men were up, Anand dropped down the rope ladder to the pit’s bottom.

  “Daveena! Daveena!”

  He looked about the foul place where the Britasytes’ glorious sleds were covered in dust. The roaches were aware of Anand and converging for an attack when he remembered he was without their scent. He leapt onto the rope ladder and unsheathed his sword.

  “Daveena, come here now!” he shouted.

  Cloaked in a poncho, she stepped from a sled, sniffling as she came. He could just make out her wet and lovely eyes in the darkness. Her mouth was concealed by her shawl, which she wrapped tight around her head.

  “Can’t you climb?”

  “I can barely stand,” she said.

  She opened the poncho and Anand tried not to react. She was thin from malnutrition, having eaten little but sparse roach eggs for moons. She dropped the shawl from her head and he saw her hair was falling out. The shock of her appearance kept him from noticing when a roach probed him from the wall, lashing his face with its antennae, ready to attack. As it lunged, Anand’s sword flashed, snipping the antennae and sending it to writhe upside down on the pit’s floor.

  “We’ve got to climb,” he said running to her. “Grab me tight and clutch my waist with your legs.” She complied and Anand strained as he took the rungs, yet his burden felt all too light. The two reached the opening and were pulled out as the roaches gnashed below them.

  “I need roach-scent, Auntie,” Anand said, “and antennae.” Glegina handed him her filthy jacket, which Anand pulled over his armor as his aunt set her antennae on his head. He sawed at more ropes to make an opening large enough to release the roaches for mounting. The first of them poked its head through, and using the natural grease of its body, it wriggled out.

  “We will gather in the southern weeds of Palzhad, in the land of the Slopeites,” Anand shouted. “The Hulkrites will be looking for us. We must head east, then make our way north through the unknown grasslands. The Hulkrites will not follow us there. Good travels, beautiful wanderers, until we meet again.”

  He added this last part because he knew of the unreliability of roaches as mounts. Members of the clan would essentially be on separate journeys. Anand worried about the withered elders as they rushed the roaches, sliding onto their heads and grabbing at reins as the insects squeezed out the grate. When all but Anand and Daveena had departed, he sawed again to make a larger hole so that the largest roaches could exit. While they waited for a suitable ride to push through, Anand took his betrothed by her waist and kissed her.

  “I have dreamt of you every night,” he said. Her eyes glistened. In them Anand could see reflections of the full moon before her tears bulged, then spilled. The bones of her face were so prominent now that they gave her a haunting beauty.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked.

  “It is my joy that cannot be contained,” she said. He smiled at her, knew her relief must be as overwhelming as his own. “You must eat,” Anand said, and he reached into the bottom of his pack and gave her a flattened, sugared ant egg he had saved just for her, which she gladly accepted.

>   He turned back to the insects’ progress. Squeezing through the opening was the largest roach in the pit. Daveena got on first and Anand followed, grabbing the roach’s reins. He pulled out the lure stick tucked under the head scale, took the sheath off the lure, and unfolded the stick to full length. Leaning his body over the roach’s head, Anand had a strange and unstoppable stream of thoughts. The memory of the slain in the feasting chamber came back to him, and with it a remorse that scalded like fire. A moment later, he had a vivid remembrance of the Slopeish queen who charged over on crippled legs to shield her subject from a Hulkrite’s cruelty.

  Anand made an abrupt decision that he knew was right but he was not sure of the reasons why. “We have something to do first,” he said to Daveena, and steered the roach towards the compound that contained the Slopeish prisoners. He dismounted behind a grass clump and tethered the roach to it. “Wait here,” he said to Daveena, giving her his roach antennae to hold. He approached the cage on foot after fastening his cape. The foot guards at the Slopeites’ cage were pacing to stay awake when they noticed him and reached for their swords.

  “Hulkro is great,” Anand shouted as he walked towards them.

  “And Tahn is his messenger,” responded the first guard. “Who comes here?”

  “Lieutenant Quegdoth,” Anand said. “With orders from the Prophet.”

  The guards looked confounded as Anand got closer.

  “Why aren’t you on a mount, sir?” the first one asked.

  “I stepped in roach dung,” Anand said, “and the ghosts will not come near me.”

  “Where are your antennae, sir?” asked the second one.

  “Why, they are right here,” Anand said and opened the cape. He raised his blowpipe and targeted the guards’ chests. As the guards twitched, Anand looked into the cage to see the Slopeites and Queen Polexima were awake and staring at him in fright. He took out his handsaw and went to work on the gate’s lashings.