“Then I will tell them that their father was the bravest hero, that he did what he could to spare them from Hulkrish cruelty.” She hugged him and rubbed his back. “To live in fear is not to live,” she said.
“Feel the fear and wander anyway,” he said, completing the tribal adage. He gave out with a great sigh and fell limp into her arms.
“I just had to see you,” he said. “Just in case . . .”
“Shhh!” she said, forbidding him to speak the words.
“But this could go badly,” he whispered. “If the Hulkrites win, you must not come and look for me. The clans must make it to Dranveria. If you do, paint this symbol in red on the sleds. They will know you have come to join them and live by their principles.”
Anand peeled off a glove and drew the Dranverite’s five-sided symbol of peace into the velvet of the locust’s skull sensors. Afterwards, Daveena took his fingers and pressed them to her mouth. Anand kissed her tenderly, pulled her tight and let his tears run down her cheeks. Within the warmth of her embrace, he allowed himself to sob without control. She held him until he was still.
“Can this be our secret?” he said.
“Of course. Should you be going?”
He looked to the sun, blazing in the southern sky. “If I hurry, I’ll just have enough time to see what the Hulkrites have gotten up to.”
He kissed her mouth, her belly and then flew off.
Anand saw the first of the unmounted ghost ants at the northeast shore of the Brackish Lake, where they drank water, passing drops with their mandibles to the masses behind them. He assumed he would see the first divisions of the mounted army at Jatal-dozh, where they would replenish their supplies.
He was wrong. He spotted a few men in dust-camouflage scaling up the mound or coming down, but all were on foot and entering the mound through side portals.
Are they hiding something? Anand asked himself, and felt a rush of water in his bowels. Fear was still having its day. The rain shield of the mound had been lowered to keep ants out. Or to keep something in, he realized. But what?
“Expect the unexpected,” he said to himself. “I am not without my own surprises.” He steered the locust farther south, determined to see their numbers. At first he thought he was seeing another lake, a crystal and shimmering body of water. He soon realized, though, the phenomenon unrolling before him was hundreds of thousands of unmounted ghost ants. Deep in their center, he finally sighted thousands of Hulkrish tents in a camp.
So they’ll attack us through the Tar Marsh Bridge to take Culzhwhitta first, he thought. A moment later, his heart sank when he saw the Hulkrish relay system set in place: spaced at intervals and linked by ropes were portable towers on sand-sleds. The men in the towers would pass their leader’s orders from a central command across vast distances. There was no need for this unless there was a second camp of Hulkrites. He looked west.
Anand flew over a sea of dormant ants and, sometime later, his suspicions were confirmed. He saw thousands of Hulkrish tents pitched directly south of the Petiole. While the Hulkrites in the east attacked Culzhwhitta, these soldiers would march to Palzhad. But the relay towers continued to stretch west. He had to assume this third camp would attack through the natural tunnel of the Great Jag to overcome Gagumji. If they went unimpeded, eventually, all three divisions would coalesce to march on Venaris.
Wise of Pleckoo to use the trident strategy against such a lengthy border. His scouts have seen that we are stretched all along our southern reaches, Anand thought as he recalled a similar triumph in the Dranverites’ past. He knew that in the coming battle, the Hulkrites would launch their assault at different times and places. If the Slope’s forces shifted to face one army, the second or third army would smash through at the vulnerable spot.
Anand felt sure that the Hulkrites could not know he had espied their strategy by flying overhead on a locust. But he felt anything but confident as he viewed what looked like an infinitude of the deadliest ants and a human force that had grown since Tahn’s demise.
A gust of wind came up, jerked the locust, and sent it into a plummeting spiral. Anand fell off the saddle but held tight to the reins as the locust spun and flared its wings. It righted itself, veered over the ghost ants, then swooped back up to the sky. Anand pulled himself against the gusts, regained his seat and took hold of the antennae.
It was time to return to camp, time to take command. As he flew north, Sun died in a lake of blood as Mother Sand shred Him with Her fangs. Moon arose, nearly full, Her face a tilting mask of pity.
The ghost ants reflected Sun’s blood as they roused to the spreading darkness. With their translucent bodies, they looked like a flood of crimson phantoms as they flowed in a mass toward the Slope. I must use a wedge formation, Anand decided, and drive this enemy east and west.
The locust stalled after sunset and halted on Palzhad’s eastern edge. Anand stripped the reins from the locust, released it, and walked back to his sand-sled through the camp’s many divisions. He was not assured to see his followers scrambling to finish their tasks. The tops of the ordinal towers were coated with sap but only a few were glowing with lightning-fly eggs. At his sled, he rejected a meal at a platter and instead chewed on some gnat pickles Terraclon had left him before leaving to join his division. Anand listened to reports and received assurances that all projects were nearing completion. Voice-runners in a chain practiced their relay system and passed news from the distant divisions. Each captain assured Commander Quegdoth that their men were almost ready and their weapons were being sharpened.
“I have some final preparations in the border weeds,” said Anand to the captains of the central divisions. “I’ll return by early morning.”
Anand raced on a speed roach down the Petiole to the distant weeds. He was heartened when he saw the vague lights of his pilots’ camp—these men were still alive.
The following day, a full but ghost-like moon was floating low in the afternoon sky. The sight was pleasing to Pleckoo when he left sleep and his darkened tent to ride north. Soon the leaf-cutter soldier ants would be catching the war-scent of the ghost invaders. And soon the leaf-cutters would be pouring up from the bowels of their mounds to hurtle south with Slopeites strapped to their backs. How delightful, Pleckoo thought.
Pleckoo’s official counters submitted wildly different estimates as to the number of ghost ants that had been pulled into their three-pronged campaign and some added extra strings to their counting knots. At first this was aggravating, but when Pleckoo and Captain Aggle reached Jatal-dozh, they rode to the mound’s top and looked out on their central forces: a lake of fighters without end. Pleckoo laughed and Aggle stared sideways.
“Why do you laugh, Prophet? We are almost at war.”
“I am filled with Hulkro’s joy, Captain Aggle.”
Before the sun had set, the men watched as the hungriest of the ghosts were up and pacing, having caught the leaf-cutter’s rich and fungal odor on the south wind. These ghosts crawled over the dormant ants, rousing them. The ghosts that caught the first sprays of the leaf-cutters’ alarm-scent were up and lifting their gasters to spray war-scent. Pleckoo breathed in the dank odor he had grown to love, and spread out the locks of his hair to catch its heavy perfume.
“Aggle, tell our men here at Jatal-dozh it will soon be time to release their captives.”
“Yes, Prophet.”
Pleckoo and his captain journeyed for some time to rejoin the end of the central formation. Pleckoo switched to his final mount, the largest and tallest ghost ant of all which required its drivers to pat its massive skull with both hands to keep it from racing ahead to the Slope. Archers joined Pleckoo on the ant’s head, while others took side-saddles on the thorax and abdomen to defend the Second Prophet in the unlikely event of a human attack. Surrounded by a circle of captains/advisers on mounts, he shouted to the first of his message relayers in the chain woven through his distant forces.
“Good Hulkrites, we must not rely on our nu
mbers. We cannot be overconfident. All of us must fight this battle as if it were our greatest challenge. The aroma of an enemy’s blood is more pleasing to the Termite when it is mixed with the blood of our own fallen soldiers, and indeed, some of you will be martyrs by tomorrow. But Hulkro wants you all alive—alive to slaughter every Slopeish infidel whose existence is an abomination. Mighty Hulkro, we dedicate this battle to Thee.”
By morning, I’ll be eating my breakfast in the stately chambers of Palzhad, Pleckoo thought. Sometime after that, we will reach and subdue Venaris, and from there take control of all the Slopeish mounds. A short time later and I will reach Cajoria! How clearly I can see it: the moment when the banners of Hulkro are stretched over the palaces of the royals!
Pleckoo looked to the sky and prayed aloud. “Benevolent Wood Eater, I dedicate the destruction of this pit of idolatry to Thy name. I will arrive in Cajoria without my mask so all who knew me as Pleckoo the Noseless will tremble before me as Thy favorite son and Thy holy executioner. So say I!”
“Then so says Hulkro!” his men roared.
CHAPTER 55
WAR
All along the southern frontier, tens of thousands of soldier ants erupted from the leaf-cutters’ mounds. The ghost ants’ scent had not reached Cajoria, or the other northern colonies, but the priests were down in the deepest chambers inciting the ants to join the war by splashing alarm-scent from censures.
On top of Cajoria, King Maleps and his princely brothers-in-law were awaiting their mounts in front of Commander Batra and his captains. The giant soldier ants that emerged had long antennae, bright, new chitin, and mandibles that were sharp and fresh. Their long, strong legs would allow them to speed to the southern frontier by mid-evening as the last to enter the battle. The giants were already fitted with reins, and as they poked their heads up, the nobles grabbed at their ropes, leapt onto their heads and then slid back to a saddle. Commanders and captains were next and were followed by subordinate soldiers. When all were racing south, smaller unsaddled ants emerged to chase their sisters down through the Petiole to the battle in the Dustlands.
Far in the south, the Slope’s mounted forces converged in a single column, racing towards the Petiole. Anand heard their noisy clamor as he smeared his face with stripes of yellow, brown, and red. He dressed in his turquoise robes, and then crossed the clearing where the effigy makers applied the last lightning-fly eggs to the monstrous structure of conjoined twigs. In the pit south of this clearing, the Britasytes waited to make fire. They were silent when Anand arrived for an unannounced visit. He bowed to them and they bowed back, absorbing the somber look on his face.
In a niche between the effigy’s massive feet was an idol of the roach deity. Anand lay on his stomach with his face to the ground and pointed his palms up. His prayer to Madricanth was mouthed in silence.
With a final nod to the Britasytes, Anand rode a roach to his observation tower and began the long climb up the central ladder. The tower had two other ladders, one curving east and one curving west. Along the rungs were voice relayers stationed within shouting distance of each other. The two chains extended in back of the lines to the farthest divisions on the frontier. The relayers on the ground were prepared to run with their messages should their sequence be broken.
Let us pray it doesn’t come to that.
Anand was but a few rungs up when the last of the ants, the Cajorian contingency, bottlenecked near the tower. As Commander Batra’s ant slowed, he noticed Anand climbing in his blue robes. The two stared at each other when Batra scowled, as if Anand were nothing but an irritating child.
Anand simply went back to climbing.
When he reached the top, he looked down at the swath his soldiers left free to allow the Slopeish ant riders to funnel down the Petiole. Their random parade had thickened into a great and irregular blur that was subject to the ants’ own speed and instincts. The moon was floating at mid-sky when the column thinned into stragglers and unmounted ants too old or small to keep up. Anand shuddered with grief as he watched the distant head of the column fade in the blackening horizon. Despite his contempt for the royal armies, he grieved because he knew their fate.
“Fill in the gap,” Anand shouted down the ladder, as his first command. The twentieth and twenty-first foot divisions marched towards each other, then slightly south, spreading out to defend the route the Hulkrites had taken on their raid of Palzhad. The defenders in the eastern and western divisions extended in a vaguely diagonal line, whose distant ends were farther inland, creating a vast wedge formation. The soldiers were concentrated in staggered clusters before the bridge in the east, the tunnel in the west, and the Petiole at the center.
The Grass Men were mounted on their roaches and behind the lines of foot soldiers in a second parallel line. The roaches were bound to each other by ropes to keep them in formation. Their antennae were whipping like barley stalks in a tempest. They had picked up the scent of ghost ants as well as the war-scent of leaf-cutters. Some Grass men had to wrap their mounts’ antennae in order to keep them docked.
“Distribute the Blue and Green” was Anand’s second command. It was quickly repeated and reached the Slope’s furthest extremities in less than a thousand breaths. Moments later, the much-discussed and mysterious potions were passed through the divisions to be explained and applied.
Terraclon’s division in the east was positioned in front of the dry shores of the Tar Marsh, near the divisions defending the stone bridge. “Spread the Blue on your armor, your shield, your skin,” shouted Caleery, Dneepish captain of the 38th division whose yellow skin set off his violet eyes. His interpreter shouted in kind as a barrel of the Blue was rolled Terraclon’s way. The Blue had a familiar stink, something he had smelled on Anand several times. Roach oil! he thought to himself, not daring to repeat it aloud.
Just what were you thinking, Roach Boy?
In the west, Yormu and his division were positioned along the boulders of the Great Jag to defend the tunnel that led to Mound Gagumji. They were already smeared with the Blue and were following the example of their captain, who dipped his dart tips in the narrow-necked jars of the Green.
“Do not pierce yourself or your fellow soldiers with this potion,” shouted the captain’s interpreter, a tubby palace servant whose voice trembled in fear. “You are dipping your darts in a concoction of venoms that will stun both ghost ants and Hulkrish warriors. When a Hulkrite is stunned and you are close enough, gut him or chop through his neck.”
As Yormu and his division dipped their darts, they heard a distant shouting from the next division, something they didn’t understand. Just visible on the horizon was a strange sight lurching closer, something that made even less sense. To their eyes, great clusters of weeds were moving toward the boulders: tall and thick plants that looked to be walking on their roots.
South of the border weeds, Batra and his fellow commanders, as well as kings, princes and Slopeish soldiers, were singing war prayers as they left the Petiole and sped into the Dustlands. Their chest plates were emblazoned with the image of Mantis in an ink of lightning-fly eggs, an image they knew would pierce the Hulkrites with fear.
The Slope’s commanders were employing their usual field strategy for an offensive: they let the ants race towards the enemy in a single column that would puncture the Hulkrites’ first defense of unmounted ants. The Slopeites would then cluster to fight from the center out, while the leaf-cutters used their mandibles of fabled sharpness to eviscerate the ghosts. As soon as the Slopeites sighted the first lines of mounted ants, they would ready bows and arrows for the human targets in their rear.
The problem was, all they saw were endless, shifting walls of ghost ants and not a single warrior for Hulkro.
Batra panicked when his ant was overcome with ghost-scent. All the leaf-cutters raced beyond control into a widening sea of enemy ants, which surged towards them in a deluge. The crash of chitin and the screams of men drowned Batra’s call for retreat. The sea of ghosts
and river of leaf-cutters crawled and collided over each other to bulge into a stupendous, living hill of biting, slashing, and bleeding.
The deathly hill grew higher as the entanglement thickened. Soon it was as tall and wide as the mound of Palzhad. Inside its center, the Slopeites were suffocating or succumbing to attacks from ghosts. The humans who managed to dismount and run were tumbling over ants to the sand.
They landed only to face more hungry ghosts.
King Maleps and his Cajorian brothers-in-law were in the rear of the column and the last to reach the great death pile. Maleps jumped off his ant and turned to run north through a forest of glassy ghost legs. It was only a brief moment before an enemy ant caught him. Sharp pincers reached down to pierce and lift him, quite alive, to be swallowed. The ant reared up on her abdomen so her meal could slide down.
Maleps squirmed and spun inside the ant. He was able to see through her as his lungs sucked in the scalding fluids. As he prayed to Grasshopper for mercy, he glimpsed other ghost ants swallowing fellow Slopeites. In the moment before he drowned, Maleps’s thoughts turned to Hulkro. “I offer myself to you, Termite. Surely you are the greatest god. Forgive my negligence at your altars,” he mumbled into the liquid. He thought he had died and was ascending to the next world as he felt himself gushing in a rush of fluid only to realize he had been spilled on the sand. Far from being relieved, he panicked as he drowned inside the dome of a drop. His vision swam in blackness once again when suddenly the bubble’s surface tension was broken. He was coughing, struggling to breathe, when he was jerked up to look into the mirror image of his brother’s face. In Prince Kep’s hand was the sword he had used on the ghost and to release his brother.
“Maleps!” Kep said, wiping the liquid off his brother’s face. “This battle is lost, but we’re alive.”
Prophets of the Ghost Ants Page 37