Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “We’ve got to fight,” Maleps said.

  “Don’t be stupid. We’ll hide under this ant,” said Kep, “and let its scent disguise us until it’s clear.”

  Maleps looked in astonishment at the boiling mass of ants and humans as the living hill rebuilt itself with insects and their riders. “Get under here!” Kep shouted and Maleps squeezed under the corpse of the ant that had swallowed him. Just as they had done as children on cold nights, the brothers clasped each other and waited for morning.

  You have saved me, Hulkro, Maleps thought—and then thought better of it.

  Batra clung tight to his ant while it struggled to the top of the living hill. He was determined to find a human enemy, a captain or lieutenant or just a warrior to engage, but the only men were panicked Slopeites.

  “Cowards!” Batra screamed at far-distant foes when his mount was grabbed by its mandibles. It was shaken until its head snapped off. As his ant’s corpse fell down the hillside, Batra tried to dismount but he was tangled in its reins and landed under his ant. His chest armor was pierced by the ant’s saddle thorn, puncturing his lung.

  The Dranverite was right, he thought as he coughed up blood, then felt his ears poked by something sharp. Crystal mandibles sliced into his head while another ghost picked him up by his legs. Stretched between two ants, Batra was torn into halves and swallowed.

  The tail of unmounted leaf-cutters entered into the conflict. Ten leaf-cutters banded together might subdue a single ghost, but every unmounted straggler was overwhelmed and destroyed. The smallest of them resembled human children, happily running to mothers. But rather than swinging them high in a joyous show of love, the ghosts tossed the leaf-cutters in the air only to catch them in their maws and swallow them whole.

  Once finished with the last of the leaf-cutters, the ghost ants continued northwards with their meals on display in their abdomens.

  Just as the death pile had stopped growing, Anand received messages from the distant east.

  “Unmounted black ants approaching,” said the relayer. The message was repeated sixteen more times, and Anand knew that black ants threatened the forces guarding Culzhwhitta. Black ants? Bitter ants! Anand realized. So that’s what they were breeding inside Jatal-dozh!

  “All divisions! Do not attack the black ants! If injured, they will explode!” he shouted. “Deflect them, but do not attack! Leave them to the ghost ants!”

  Terraclon’s far-flung division did not receive Anand’s command in time. Fleeing the ghosts who chased them from behind, the black ants rushed north and into the front lines and the Laborers’ captains ordered an attack. Marksmen hurled their javelins into the bitters’ heads, which punctured with a hiss, then flashed with blue light as they exploded in deafening blasts. Their flying parts tore into other bitters and set off a chain reaction. The laborers’ shields blew from their arms or smashed into their heads and chests. Sharp thorns and dagger-like hairs from the bitters’ flying chitin pierced their exposed skin. Some men had their heads and limbs torn off.

  “Shields over head!” shouted Captain Caleery. Terraclon scrambled through bloody corpses to find his shield and raise it. The standing soldiers deflected the falling debris but some were blinded by the ants’ toxic blood. Blisters raced and bubbled over faces, legs, and arms. Whole companies ran north to cower in the Tar Marsh. Some swam the wrong way and stuck in islets of floating tar. Others drowned in the bubbling water.

  Terraclon looked around and saw that a third of his division was dead or had deserted. The wounded were pulled to the rear in back of the roach line. Trembling reinforcements stepped in to lock shields.

  Estimates of casualties reached Anand from the east. As he resisted every urge to panic, a message was coming up the ladder from the west.

  “Clusters of walking plants approaching the first through fifteenth divisions,” said the relayer.

  Walking plants? thought Anand, and searched his mind for any clue. What would the Hulkrites send against troops whose backs were against a boulder?

  “Prepare for an attack!” Anand shouted and instantly felt foolish.

  But what is attacking? he asked himself.

  Yormu and his comrades watched as the weed clusters pushed closer in. The division’s captain realized the weeds were camouflaging great boxes on runners. They were lugged by teams of low and squat longhorn beetles. Yormu knew something alive was inside them, something other than ants that would not be repelled by roach scent.

  “Look out, men!” the captain shouted, as the boxes suddenly tilted up and their lids fell open. Thousands of shooting creatures, too fast to be seen, leapt from the boxes to attack the army.

  “Fleas!” came the shouts as leaping blood-suckers landed on the foot soldiers. Yormu spun and hacked at the monsters clamping on his comrades. Around him were men whose screams faded as they were drained to husks. The largest fleas leapt off with their victims to drink their blood unmolested.

  Pleckoo’s scouts in the east and west filtered back to pass their messages. For some time the Hulkrites’ commander had cherished looking at the death pile of the Slopeish nobles, but when he had news of a devastated people’s army, he nearly fell off his mount in laughter. He looked up at the conspicuous observation tower, knowing this was the seat of his enemy’s command.

  “Let our central forces dismount,” Pleckoo said, “and march up this Petiole. We will chop down this tower, so offensive to the True God, and capture the sinner that leads these infidels.”

  In his tower, Anand heard a single-word message from the west: fleas. His heart thumped in his chest as reports of western casualties poured in. He gripped the rail of his platform as he listened to the mounting numbers. This will never work! I am just a stupid boy, he thought as he struggled for outward composure. He steadied himself only to hear reports of Hulkrites on foot and marching out of the legs of their ants to his tower. Their front lines were lugging sleds with panels that concealed their contents.

  “Yes, come closer to me. It is nearly time,” Anand whispered as rage replaced his grief. He picked up and waved a large and luminous flag.

  At the fire pit, the Britasytes waved a flag of their own as acknowledgement of Anand’s order. They set to making a blaze in their pit and soon had sparks and smoke. The grease-soaked kindling caught quickly and soon a great and hungry fire was roaring for fuel.

  “Hoist!” Zedral shouted to the rope carriers in the clearing behind the pit. A thousand Slopeites picked up the web of ropes connected to the effigy. They marched and tugged up the effigy whose feet were rooted in the pit filling with flames.

  Hulkrites stared at a rising figure with hundreds of thousands of lightning-fly eggs pasted to its frame. As it rose, it grew taller than any bortshu tree. Its illumination outlined the figure of a great, fat roach with a human head: Madricanth waving swords! The idol’s long and sweeping antennae bent with the wind. The Hulkrites were slashed with fright and halted their advance.

  Pleckoo attempted to stuff his fear back inside him. It would not stay put. Anand! he thought to himself as he quivered. The Roach Boy leads the Slopeites and flaunts his demon idol!

  “What . . . what is that, Prophet?” Aggle asked, unable to tear his eyes away.

  “Do not be afraid, men. It is only the bluff of an idolater,” Pleckoo shouted to his messengers. The shake in the commander’s voice revealed his own fear and it passed east and west in his relayers’ voices. The Hulkrites advancing up the Petiole remounted their ghosts and waited for a call to retreat. Those who had hauled the sleds abandoned them.

  The fire in the pit caught the legs of the Madricanth, where it raced up its oily straws. Hulkrites staring at the effigy saw it was suddenly illuminated from below with an orange light. In moments, the Madricanth was blazing. It seemed to breathe as it staggered in the wind like a drunkard. The terrible stench of burning hair and roach oil blew south over the masses of ghost ants.

  The fire’s roach-infused vapors spread through the ghosts and p
lunged them into turmoil. They smashed into each other before retreating south, resistant to human prodding. The Hulkrites on foot who wove among them were revealed and open to attack. Showers of arrows from the laborers poured down on these Hulkrites and pierced their armor.

  Zedral looked to Anand who waved his flag again. “Tilt!” Zedral shouted, and the men strained to angle the Madricanth downwards. “Drop!” Zedral commanded and the men released their ropes and ran back to the pit.

  The effigy fell on the southbound wind and crashed. Its flames exploded into jumping, whirling embers. Hundreds of ants and Hulkrites were immolated in an instant, reduced to burnt flesh and smoking bones. The faces and hands of Hulkrites who caught the embers were covered in ulcerous wounds. Those whose eyes met with fire were robbed of sight.

  What was this torture the Roach God had visited on the Holy Warriors of the Termite? The Hulkrites’ screams ignited a deeper panic, which spread to Pleckoo and his captains. Some Hulkrites shouted out that this was “fire,” the most feared element on all the Sand. The panic spread as quick as a thought to the distant divisions of the Hulkrish army.

  “Hulkro tests the faithful!” Pleckoo shouted into the deepening chaos. He was sure he was sweating blood as his ant was jostled in the crushing waves. “Take control of the ants!” he bellowed.

  But the ants were beyond control. Thousands of them had their antennae burned off and they spun and sputtered in a daze with opened mandibles, piercing and killing their kin. Some ants plowed their heads into sand to leave their hind legs up and twitching behind them.

  Anand watched as ghost ants nearing his tower retreated south to expose Hulkrish foot soldiers that had been hiding under them. Emboldened laborers broke their lines to run out and shoot these Hulkrites with darts. They fell and twitched in agony as their tongues wagged in foaming mouths. When the laborers saw this, they ran out with swords to slay the fallen. They hacked at their armor and through to their stomachs, then stomped on their chests until intestines issued.

  The captains ordered these men back into line. They laughed as they returned, their boots dripping with blood they had danced in. Anand saw that the battle had stopped, but he was not comforted. He knew the Hulkrites would regroup at a center in the distance, while their divisions in the east and west were activated.

  “Prepare for an onslaught!” was the message he shouted.

  When the burning roach scent had blown away, the fleeing ghosts settled in their swarm. Pleckoo wiped the sweat from his face, looked to the moon still high in the sky, and communed with his god. You will have your cousin’s corpse tonight, said a godly voice inside him, and will sacrifice it to Me on the Slope.

  The Second Prophet returned from his trance and was assured by his counters that he retained nearly half of his forces at the center. He was fully intact in the east and west. Fear gave way to utter confidence. Pleckoo ordered his warriors to smash new eggs with concentrates of war-scent, which incited the ants to release their own.

  “Lord Termite has said we will have the Slope and we will have it tonight,” he said to his messengers. “Let the true war begin.”

  CHAPTER 56

  THE TRUE WAR

  Anand looked out at the Dustlands. They were empty of life as the moon shed its cold light. The distant sand looked like the skin of a corpse. The crickets, which had long abandoned the nearby weeds, had left a terrible silence. A message made its way on his left, its quick repetition a long and slow reverberation in the quiet. Anand already knew what the message was.

  “Ghost ants nearing Culzhwhitta.”

  A moment later, the same message came from his right: an attack in the west at Gagumji. Anand felt outside of himself as he gave his commands, like a specter pitying a suffering stranger. His twentieth and twenty-first divisions remained before him to guard the Petiole, staggering their formations before its entry.

  “Push!” was the command he gave his eastern and western lines, and they marched from the middle like two great arms breaking from prayer. The Grass men and their roaches followed behind the foot soldiers in a second, unbroken line, all of them rolling the ghosts to the extremes of the Slope’s borders, east and west.

  Terraclon was giddy as he marched forward with his division, watching the ghost ants rushing backwards in chaotic and glittering waves. Some tumbled and landed on their backs to squirm and wave their legs at the moon. When the laborers marched past these ants they punctured their brains with javelin thrusts through the eyes.

  This is all so easy! Terraclon thought when suddenly the roach behind him was excited by an irresistible lure. It dragged forward the other roaches and they burst through the foot soldiers to race ahead of them, tripping them with their tethers. They entered into the ghost ant sea to create sudden clearings. The roach riders attempted but failed to guide their insects back.

  Farther distant, through the slit in his shield, Terraclon saw an undercurrent of Hulkrites on foot seeping through their ants’ legs and into the clearing. The warriors hauled sleds smeared with the rancid odor of fly larvae, something the roaches could not resist. The roach riders gave up on halting their insects and slipped under their head scales as they rushed to meet the Hulkrites.

  When the roaches got close, sides dropped on the sleds to reveal crossbows and shoulder-wide arrowheads of fabled Foondathan obsidian poised in their quivers. The arrows flew with a force that picked up the roaches and sent them crashing into the laborers. Terraclon dove for the ground just as the roach that had been behind him came flying over, crushing to death the reserves of men at his back.

  Yormu and his division were herding ghosts west when they faced a similar assault. His arm was already scraped and bloody after a frenzied roach scuttled past him and to the Hulkrites’ arrows. The crossbow misfired and its arrow flew at the laborers. It was of such width and sharpness that it sliced through the shields and cut two of Yormu’s neighbors neatly in half before slicing through two more men in the reserves behind them.

  “Forward!” commanded Yormu’s captain. “Re-form lines! Blow darts!”

  The marksmen behind Yormu stepped over the corpses to replace the dead, locked their shields, and switched to blowguns. As the line pushed forward and Hulkrites fell to the darts, the shield bearers trampled over them, stopping briefly to slice with their swords through their enemies’ necks.

  The line reached the Slope’s sanctified borders. The men broke formation to climb over the piles of ant pellets and enter into “the place where priestly magic ends.” This frightened Yormu more than any horror he had witnessed that night. He worried that the potion on his shield was suddenly worthless and that the ghosts could now advance. When the captain called for re-formation of the shield wall, Yormu obeyed but prayed to Mite to protect him.

  South of the border, Yormu watched as Hulkrish and Slopeish men fell by the hundreds. The ranks of the roaches rapidly thinned as they were turned into arrow-pierced missiles that picked them up and splattered them against the boulders of the Jag. Soon their corpses would exude a death stink that was an invitation to the ants to invade. Dizzy with exhaustion and on wobbling legs, Yormu endured with his division and pushed the Hulkrites and their ants toward Red Pine Country.

  In the tower, Anand knew death and devastation ruled in the extremes of the frontier. Was Terraclon alive? Was Yormu? Messages came from the Slopeish civilians of every mound: Which way went the war? Should they flee north and take their chances in the Buffer Zone of the Dranverites?

  “No victory yet,” Anand said as he searched the darkened distance for an invasion at the center. Far from his eyes and ears, his men were dying by the thousands. Were enough of them alive to fulfill his plan?

  News that every last noble and soldier had been slaughtered at the outset reached Cajoria. Trellana was supervising the packing of her chests when Polexima appeared at her portal, as pale as a lily.

  “Trellana. Your husband and all your brothers . . . they’re . . .”

  “What . . . in
jured? Missing?”

  “Dead. They have all been destroyed.” Polexima was woozy, too weak to reach the bed, and sat on the floor.

  “You’re a horrible woman to play such a cruel game,” Trellana screamed. “No one has died but those horrid Hulkrites!” Trellana fell to the floor and clutched her face. “Oh, Mommy!” she screamed, and crawled toward her mother, falling into her arms to sob.

  In the east, the Hulkrites were leaking through their ants’ legs in unstoppable numbers on foot. As Terraclon toiled eastward, he grew dizzy from sharply exhaling through his blowgun. It was a struggle for the laborers to march in lockstep, but the men pushed until they were halted by a barrage of arrows so numerous and powerful it sent them tripping backwards. They scrambled to re-form; there was no choice, as they had no replacements for their front line.

  Terraclon stumbled over a corpse. As he recovered, his shield was filled with arrows. The enemies’ arrowheads were of such sharpness that they burst through the shields to pierce the man behind it. Terraclon looked at the glistening weapon that had grazed his stomach. What strange black stuff was this weapon made from?

  “Push forward,” he said to himself and rose to relock his shield. But there was nothing to lock it against—he stood alone. His neighbors were dead or scattered. The arrows continued to fly. The other survivors crouched behind shields shredded by arrows. These men waited for orders, but none could come from Captain Caleery, for a Hulkrish arrowhead had pierced his lung. The captain lay on his back and mouthed a prayer through the blood spilling up his mouth.

  The Hulkrites gushed out of their ants’ legs in thicker streams with great plows, pushing away shields and corpses of men and roaches to clear a path for their ghosts. The plows left a scent of trunk-trail mixed with food-alert. The ghosts’ antennae found the scents and took tentative steps towards the Slope. The trickle would turn to a stream and then to a deadly deluge.