Anand could barely wait for night to conduct his experiment. He set Britasyte women to soaking up the spider’s scent. As he waited for darkness, Anand inspected the second and larger fire pit, the fuel of which would not be ignited until the night of the invasion.
While the Britasytes layered the kindling, Slopeites beyond fighting age were engaged in the fashioning of one hundred and thirty separate components of an enormous effigy of wood. Its twigs were wrapped with human hair that was soaked in stinking grease. The figure would tower as tall as a tree but would be light enough for a thousand men to raise from the ground with ropes. The caste of basket makers who worked at it guessed at the final image, but until the night it was raised, none but Anand would know its shape.
Basket makers from different mounds had bickered with each other and argued over how to secure the separate components. When they could not agree on knots, lashings, or materials, Anand placed one man, Tafro the Fuzzy-Eared, in charge. He convinced Anand he was the man for the task when he demonstrated his ideas in a small model. Anand put his faith in Tafro, and then turned his concerns to another direction: his hopes for flight at night.
Right before sunset, Anand flew a locust in lazy circles before landing it in a clearing just outside the cages. He waited for the moment the insect would grow confused by darkness and crawl under a plant and cling to a leaf. When it refused to fly, Anand changed his gloves and pressed lair spider-scent to the highest segments of the locust’s antennae.
The locust bucked. It pivoted, jerked, and fluttered its wings in some defensive movement. It jumped but did not fly. Anand tried different segments in different combinations and ran the scent through the sensors of its head. The locust’s mandibles pulsed and beat its mouth-slime into brown foam. It kicked up its back legs and pushed its own face into the sand . . . but it would not take flight.
Disappointed, Anand walked back to the cages. He tried the spider-scent on several other locusts with the same results. Some would not even leave their cages but smashed themselves against the bars, tearing off their antennae. Very well. Blue-mottled flyers will not take wing at night. How stupid of me, he thought. If the Dranverites were unable to achieve this, how could I?
That evening as he slept in his hammock, Anand dreamt of Hulkrites raping Daveena. He was screaming in his sleep when two men grabbed him by his shoulders and shook him awake.
“Who are you!?” he screamed, searching for his dagger.
“Your family,” said Terraclon. Anand could make out his friend’s face and then his father’s. “We came this afternoon on the locust you sent. We left our stomachs somewhere over Abavoon.”
Anand wiped sweat off his face when he heard screaming in the field of leaf tents housing the recruits. They ran outside.
“What happened?” Anand shouted to the gathering men.
“An orange-winged demon,” said a shuddering recruit whose beliefs prevented him from saying the true name.
“Who did it take?”
“Benjul, the one-armed.”
Anand looked to the sky. Above him and heading for the trees was a night wasp, her wings a fiery blur in the distance. She had knocked over a tent in silence, clutched and then paralyzed the hero who had brought Anand a lair spider. He remembered the night when a wasp had flown him to her nest, how he was sick with fear. Poor Benjul must be drowning in fright, he thought.
“Let us pray for Benjul,” Anand said to those who gathered round, “a man who sacrificed his life to build the New Country.” As friends and kin of Benjul gathered, Anand hung his head. As an idols keeper mumbled the prayer for the working dead, Anand looked up at the new moon and grew queasy. I have less than twenty-eight days! he thought as he looked into the trees, searching for the wasp nest. Suddenly, a notion dropped into his head like a seed to the mud. Its roots sprung immediately and plunged downwards as its sprout reached up for light.
When Anand returned to his hammock, it was with an idea that would rob him of sleep that night. He questioned certain aspects of his plan, wondering whether it was brilliant or insane. By dawn, though, he decided he had no other choice. His strategy for the war was set.
The following morning, Anand learned Tafro had failed to show up at the effigy site. He had spent the night celebrating his new position with a fermentation party and was passed out with his kin. When Anand replaced Tafro with Bilka the Baggy-Eyed, the two men fought when Tafro arrived to resume his position. Their respective kin were drawn into the conflict when Tafro and his cousins undid all the lashings, igniting a full-on brawl. When Tafro and his men heard the Son of Locust was returning to oust them, they fled towards the Dustlands, vowing to take up with the Hulkrites.
Anand ordered the Dneepers to hunt down Tafro and his kin and confine them to cages—he could not take the chance that they would reach the Hulkrites and divulge any of his plans. The best thing to do now is gather my pilots for their mission, he thought. He looked very tired and not at all like the son of a god when the summoned locust flyers gathered around.
“Brave pilots, I must ask you to be braver still. I need a thousand volunteers. You may lose your lives in this endeavor before the Hulkrites even arrive.”
Nearly every pilot was willing. A reserve remained to train replacement pilots, but most followed Anand to a new location. Men of the woodworking castes were drafted to bring their tools and follow the pilots. Terraclon caught up with Anand as he marched at the head of the procession.
“You did not say good-bye after breakfast, Anand. Where are you taking these people?”
“To some rather treacherous weeds past the border and verging on the Dustlands. They will train there.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Just a few days . . . I hope. You and Father must train with your divisions while I’m gone. Don’t expect special treatment. Tell my father he is always in my heart . . . as you are, Ter.”
Aware that others were listening, Anand could not speak freely. But what he passed to Terraclon in a brief gaze suggested they might never see each other again.
Anand grew nervous as he led his pilots through burgeoning camps that had popped up like mushrooms after a storm. All these men were looking at him, pulling away to bow in reverence. On the outsides of their leaf tents, many had scratched crude pictures of God Locust with His Son riding upon His back. As Anand looked in hundreds of their faces, he was overwhelmed with the risks of his endeavor. When they reached the weeds south of the Petiole’s mouth, Anand fell back to address his builders.
“Woodworkers, on the eve of the invasion, I will command our troops from this spot,” said Anand. “You will build the first of forty observation towers here, tall enough for a view of the Dustlands, twice as tall as Palzhad. It must be sturdy enough to support a chain of messengers spaced along its ladders. They will be the first to relay my commands in a link that will stretch all along the Dustlands’ border—along the shores of the Tar Marsh in the east and along the rim of the Insurmountable Boulders of the Great Jag in the west.”
The woodworkers began the collecting and binding of twigs for a foundation. Anand left them to their tasks and led his pilots to the shadowy weeds that stretched to the shade of distant trees. When he told the pilots what he had in mind, their faces filled with horror. He knew most of them had the urge to refuse his orders, but none of them did.
They trust me, he thought. If only I could have that much faith in myself.
While Anand was away, King Maleps and other nobles in the guise of pleasure hunters crawled on their ants up a ledge to spy on the camps of the New Laborers Army. They looked down expecting to see squadrons of buffoons with inadequate weapons playing at soldier. They were horrified to see thousands of men with frightening weapons being drilled in an exotic shielding technique. Maleps and his twin brother, Prince Kep, sniffed the air as if it stank.
“Something must be done about this,” said Kep, who had lost his perpetual grin.
“Something very final,” sa
id Maleps.
CHAPTER 52
THE TURQUOISE INFIDEL
Seven days later, Anand returned to camp. His pilots remained behind. He heard the spreading rumor that the pilots in the weeds were being trained by the god Locust himself on insects that came from the Great Beyond. The other rumor was that the men were dead, that they had sacrificed themselves as blood meals to Locust to make him strong.
Anand returned to the central camp to find an abundance of newly trained pilots. This allowed the passing of messages to distant mounds and border nations within a day. As expected, Pleps in both the east and west reported that proposals of an alliance with the Slope were refused. The Seed Eaters acknowledged that the warnings of an enemy in the south were true, for deep in their own nests, the harvester ants were nurturing giants. The Carpenters confirmed the threat after sighting the vast armies of the Hulkrish Empire from atop their tallest pine. Still, both nations sent the message they might join the Hulkrites in destroying the Slope.
Anand was expecting this news but was surprised by how disappointed it left him. Knowing he needed more men, he commenced a recruitment tour, which was as much about demoralizing the nobles as it was about adding to his army. The sight of pilots on locusts was becoming common on the Slope. They brazenly informed the nobles in the most ill-spoken dialect as to when they were to assemble their subjects to hear the appeal of the person the nobles spoke of as “the Dranverish interloper.”
After a series of successful speeches at other mounds, Cajoria was chosen as Anand’s final stop. His garment was a deep and brilliant turquoise from an unobtainable Dranverish dye, but even the lowest castes, in defiance of the law, went to hear him in flimsy garments rinsed in the weak dye of sky-berries. Anand saw that more than a few nobles disguised themselves in the clothing of their servants to glimpse the man who had come to save—then split—their nation. Young women screamed and fainted at the sight of his beauty. Young men adopted the hairstyle that concealed Anand’s ears. Many wore the red, brown and yellow stripes he painted on his face. Nearly all seemed moved or disturbed by his message when he spoke.
“Cajorites, I ask for your sacrifice,” Anand shouted from atop his locust through an amplifying-cone. “All men and women who are willing and able must take up a sword and don armor. They must be ready to lose their lives in order to save those of their families. Once we vanquish the Hulkrish menace, those who wish to reside in the New Country may do so, a nation where all men and women are of one caste, a nation devoted to prosperity for all, where honey will be plentiful and free.” A great roar went up in the stadium, and Anand flew his locust about, riding on the current of their cheers.
Most of the nobles, cowering with their families in their dwellings, heard the cheering and felt it vibrate through their walls. The weather was growing cooler and they trembled as they pulled comforters over their fleshy bodies. Some worried that when the assembly ended, the workers would swarm through their homes, plunder their treasures, and stuff their women with polluting seeds.
The nobles and military families were compelled by the priests to cooperate with Quegdoth, but among themselves, they whispered of the time when the gods would restore the Holy Order. The roach and locust-riding Grass men, the Slopeish caste defiers, and especially the turquoise infidel, would all be swept away, like so much dust, when their function was fulfilled.
Conflicting rumors about Anand spread among the nobles as quickly as they did among the workers. It was said that Quegdoth was not a Dranverite at all, but a noble like themselves. How else was he so capable? Some said he had been a priest at Venaris who was seduced and empowered by the roach demon, Madricanth. Others believed Quegdoth was still a loyal Hulkrite and, at the moment the ghost ants were at the border, he would turn the nation over to his superiors: termite worshippers who were mad on turpentine.
To the horror of their mothers, adolescent girls of noble lineage were fascinated by the Dranverite and had hopes of becoming his concubine. Some had set little Quegdoth dolls, wrapped in pieces of rare blue cloth, on the altars of their bedrooms. To the horror of their noble fathers, adolescent boys attempted to capture locusts and fly them. Some imitated the Dranverish accent Anand used when he addressed the assemblies. These same boys were rejecting their meals to grow thin. They walked with Quegdoth’s swagger in capes that fluttered behind them and grew long and droopy mustaches that resembled roach antennae.
When some noble families gathered at meals, they might find an empty seat cushion. Its usual occupant, a son near fighting age, left the dreadful message that he had “gone to the southern border to join the forces of Vof Quegdoth, Righteous Emissary of Dranveria, in his glorious campaign against the Hulkrish invasion.”
In every crystal palace on every mound, in every black sand barracks and rose quartz rectory, nobles, priests, and soldiers whispered the same thing: “Something must be done.”
They were assured in quieter whispers that something was.
On the borders of Palzhad, the woodworkers completed Anand’s observation tower. It was the tallest man-made structure on the Slope and at night, on its north side, its egg-illuminated twigs inspired even greater numbers to leave their mounds and join the Dranverite’s forces. Once it was finished, the woodworkers started building the forty shorter ordinal structures, one for each division of the army, which stretched in a vast chain along the southern border. The peaks of these structures would be illuminated on the eve of the battle and serve as reference points in the positioning of troops.
Men, and more than a few women, were fitted with crude but effective armor that was stuffed with a cladding of spent mulch from the mushroom chambers. Slopeites, who once would have been executed for touching a weapon, were granted their own swords. Everyone of every caste carried a blowgun and practiced shooting darts, caches of which were being produced day and night.
Anand would wait until the night of the battle before ordering the darts to be dipped in a paralyzing concoction he had mixed and remixed in secret. Some guessed it was the Living Death, but it was not. Anand guessed at the formula and knew it involved a combination of spider and centipede venoms but what he came up with left a shorter-term paralysis. He convinced himself this was not a bad thing, as he feared the concoction might fall into the hands of the Slopeish priesthood and, Madricanth forbid, be used against himself.
Wives and daughters of the new army prepared the rest of the potions Anand had demanded from the priests. Included were hundreds of barrels of leaf-cutter kin-scent, which was mixed with human blood. In the clearings of the weeds, this was dried, powdered, and poured into casings of resealed eggshells. Later, extracts of herbs, seeds, and insects were mixed into other concoctions. Britasytes and Grass Men had been ordered to gather as much of their own insects’ secretions as possible. No one but Anand knew what any of it was for but the supplies he had demanded of the Slope’s authorities were received promptly and without protest. They did not question him but accepted his request to address the Slope’s rulers on day twenty-one of the lunar cycle at Venaris at midday. The authorities’ complete and sudden cooperation roused his suspicions. What were they planning?
Anand doubled the number of his personal guard and kept them posted around him at all times. He knew as the moon grew larger that the Slope’s soldiering caste was on high alert, ready to gather at the top of their mounds and wait for the emergence of giant soldier ants to ride into battle when the Hulkrites were detected. General Batra had sent a message to Anand letting him know they were cooperating with his Laborer’s Army in one way only—“Make sure your lot are out of our way when the Slopeish Army rushes to face the Termite worshippers.”
Seven days before the full moon, Anand hastened his daily inspecting rounds at the divisions of the Laborers Army in order to leave for Venaris by noon. He dressed in his Dranverish armor before getting into deep red robes that Terraclon had tailored and dyed with juice from the hymen berry. Fifty flyers would accompany Anand and act as his guard, me
n whose darts were dipped in the same red dye. Their color suggested they were coated in the Living Death. They were not. Anand had only one dart left that contained that potion, a dart he kept in his holster. As he flew to Venaris, he could already hear in his head the commanders’ noisy objections to his proposal.
Anand steered his squadron over Venaris and saw the usual parades of leaf-cutter ants climbing up or crawling down. At the foot of the mound was a train of garlanded-and-bangled carrier ants that he and his men would ride to the top on the main thoroughfare. Crowds of workers had assembled to wave blue flags. Anand landed with his men in an adjacent clearing near a clover patch, some distance from the training fields. It was a good place where his men could tether their locusts and later pass the night in leaf tents if needed.
As soon as Anand set down, an arrow struck his chest plate and jammed in the cladding. His men and locusts were under a sudden barrage of arrows. Deep in the weeds, assassins in green camouflage were shooting from the leafy shadows, and all Anand could do at that moment was watch his men die.
CHAPTER 53
THE WASHING OF HANDS
The head of Anand’s locust had been filled with arrows and it could not fly. Anand leapt to another one, whose dead rider hung tangled in the reins. He got this locust into flight and in a spiral above the arrows’ range. He reached for his blowgun and its loaded magazine and searched for his would-be assassins. He saw no one, though—they had already retreated to tunnels in the sand.
Prophets of the Ghost Ants Page 35