Dedication
In memory of Caren Bohrman
Friend, Fighter, Goddess of Laughter
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Dranveria Map
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Dream Hater
Chapter 2: Filthy Squirters
Chapter 3: The Judgment of Worm
Chapter 4: The Meat Ant Princess
Chapter 5: The Bee People
Chapter 6: Monsters Big and Small
Chapter 7: A Time to Get Drunk
Chapter 8: The Heavenly Field at the Feet of Grasshopper
Chapter 9: A Quarter Moon Spitting Out Stars
Chapter 10: Disguises
Chapter 11: Squatters
Chapter 12: The Camps
Chapter 13: The First Assembly of Bee-Jor
Chapter 14: Hunger
Chapter 15: The Passenger
Chapter 16: Family
Chapter 17: What It Has Come To
Chapter 18: Ingratitude
Chapter 19: Negotiations
Chapter 20: A Harsh Lesson
Chapter 21: A Day of Ecstasy
Chapter 22: Lies of a Eunuch
Chapter 23: Small Heads
Chapter 24: Not a Cage
Chapter 25: Growing Giants
Chapter 26: Mound Shishto
Chapter 27: A Clan Divided
Chapter 28: Surprising News
Chapter 29: Durxict
Chapter 30: A New Queen for Mound Palzhad
Chapter 31: A Gift from Bee-Jor
Chapter 32: Homecoming
Chapter 33: Worxict
Chapter 34: The Bee Palace
Chapter 35: Surprising Visitors
Chapter 36: Breakfast with the Emperor
Chapter 37: Strange Ideas
Chapter 38: Separate Travels
Chapter 39: The Prophetess of Palzhad
Chapter 40: The Latecomers
Chapter 41: Realities
Chapter 42: A Fine Day of Reckoning
Chapter 43: The Place Where Priestly Magic Ends
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Clark Thomas Carlton
Copyright
About the Publisher
Dranveria Map
Prologue
To: Citizen Dwan, son of Belja-Hapkut
Domicile 313
Boulevard of the Endolomist War Wounded
Officers Quadrant 3
City of Peace, Dranveria
From: Citizen Anand
Palace of Queen Polexima
Mound Cajoria, Bee-Jor
Cherished friend,
I write this letter not knowing how or when or if it will ever be delivered to you, but write it I must, even if it is never delivered.
Dwan, it pains me deeply that I might never have the chance to explain my actions to you and all of Dranveria during our recent defense against the Hulkrish invasion. My decisions as commander were not perfect but we defeated a powerful enemy intent on the conquest of the Slope and the extermination of its millions. I cannot exaggerate the threat that was the Hulkrites and the extent of their crimes, all of which were justified as the demand of their termite deity in order to create a singular, universal religion. As greed is never satisfied, the Hulkrites would have used the Slope as the base for their next conquest: our Dranverite Collective Nations. The first of the prophet-commanders was Tahn, a capable warrior utterly convinced of himself as the Warrior Prophet of Hulkro. Tahn’s rise from poverty to power was in the chance discovery of an ant queen landed from her nuptial flight. Her progeny, the ghost ants of Hulkren, were supreme mounts in war as well as providers of food in a desolate land of the starving. Part of Tahn’s plan for conquest of all the Known Sand was the domestication of leaf-cutter ants in order to provide mushrooms for his women and make them as fertile as Slopeites. He abducted a leaf-cutter egg-layer as well as a Slopeish royal, Queen Polexima, to serve as his urine sorceress and protect the fungus farms from the Yellow Mold. When it was learned that Polexima’s urine had no powers without the consumption of roach eggs, a clan of my Britasyte people and their roaches were abducted and imprisoned in Hulkren. With that clan was my beloved, Daveena, who has since become my wife.
In the attempt to rescue my people, I posed as a defector from a fictional nation to become a Hulkrish warrior. I learned their ways and witnessed their conquests. I freely admit that when I had my chance, I slaughtered Tahn and over a hundred of his highest-ranking officers. I am grieved over their deaths and their misspent lives, but I suffer no guilt for my actions as each of them was a killer, a rapist, and an enslaver. I freed my roach people as well as Queen Polexima. We escaped being killed by Tahn’s successor, Commander Pleckoo, the Second Prophet. I knew Pleckoo’s next mission would be the gathering of his armies for the complete destruction of the people of the Slope—for I knew and understood Pleckoo all too well.
On my return to the Slope, I posed as the Dranverite commander Vof Quegdoth, and with Polexima’s support, we raised and trained a people’s army with the promise of creating a new and just nation. Our victory was a narrow one, made possible by the use of aerial warfare at night. This was conducted on the backs of night wasps—yes, night wasps—which we managed to harness and pilot with the help of an ally, King Medinwoe and the Grass Men of Dneep. They are a roach people who seek to relocate their nation to the Weedlands on our southern border as their Promised Clearing.
I fully admit that on the War of One Night I used a fire effigy as a means of terrifying our enemy and confusing their ants with enemy kin-scent. The Hulkrites outnumbered us with millions of ghost ants and skilled soldiers with the most lethal of weapons. The risk of igniting a wildfire with our effigy was not great, but I understand now that fire in warfare must never be risked, that it is better to lose a war than to ignite a holocaust. For this, I apologize to you and to all people on the Sand.
Since the war, I have made a political marriage with a Slopeish royal in hopes of preserving a truce between Bee-Jor and the Old Slope. Princess Trellana, the daughter of Polexima, is a woman whose first misfortune was to rule briefly over the lost colony in Dranveria. Trellana’s most recent misfortune is to be married to me.
Dwan, I have succeeded in winning a war and creating a new nation, but now I am like some spiderling who has captured a hundred lethal hornets with the first web it has ever spun. Bee-Jor struggles to establish itself while the Old Slope plots to retake us. In the East, the Seed Eaters are likely planning to attack our young and vulnerable nation and retake its stolen mounds. In the West, the Carpenter Nation are already at war with the old and crippled Slope and they have likely set their next sights on Bee-Jor. And as for the South, in what was Hulkren, a thousand other threats are hatching in the chaos of a land whose masters are dead or hiding. My greatest fear is that Commander Pleckoo, my cousin, is very much alive and his greatest passion is to destroy me and all I have won.
I have no choice but to rule as best as I can with hopes I can defend and stabilize this nation. My greatest passion is to make Bee-Jor safe enough for scholars from Dranveria to enter and instruct us in the fundamentals of a just and peaceful civilization.
Yours in peace,
Anand
Chapter 1
The Dream Hater
Pleckoo was in the softest bed, licking honey off the nipples of a sweet-smelling beauty as her fingers scratched through his fresh-washed scalp. He looked into her face with its parted lips and violet eyes and he saw her pure desire for him. She kissed his mouth, then rubbed the delicate tip of her nose against his. Startled, he reached for the center of his
face, and instead of finding a rough cavity he felt a warm tip.
“A mirror!” he shouted, and turned to the wall where a sheet of polished obsidian stood like the portal to another world. He walked towards his reflection and saw it, a perfect nose on the handsomest face with skin that had somehow lightened. Laughing with relief, he rubbed this nose to make sure it wouldn’t fall off when the mirror trembled, opened like a mouth, then sucked him in with a moist tongue. Passing down the wetness of a pulsing tube, he found himself squeezed into the palm of a great and glowing hand. Pleckoo looked up at the full moon face of Hulkro, in his aspect of Lord Termite of the Night Sky. Crawling to the edge of his god’s sixth hand, Pleckoo gaped in fright at the distant sand below when the Termite inhaled and blew him out of His palm. Screaming as his body spun, he plummeted over a parade of ghost ants marching back to their mound. He landed, knees first, on the natural saddle of an ant’s head where he collapsed and blacked out.
When Pleckoo roused from a swirling darkness, he probed his face and did not find a nose, but the usual bone jutting from a jagged hole. “I hate dreams!” he said to himself, realizing he had fallen asleep on his mount. He looked around, wondered where he was, and realized days had passed since he had climbed on the ant’s head at the Brackish Lake. She had found a trunk trail where her sisters were returning with bits of digger wasps as well as the cicada grubs with which they had provisioned their burrows. The morning sun was illuminating a human-inhabited ant mound in Hulkren—but which one? Near the first ring in a clearing he saw hundreds of women in hooded shrouds, gathered at an outdoor shrine and kneeling before a slice of wood with a gallery track. Looking down at himself, Pleckoo realized he was completely naked.
Intensely thirsty, Pleckoo slid over the ant’s head to her mandibles and jumped off them when he reached a clump of barley grass. He used his sword to saw off a central stalk and then sucked up the water that welled at its top. To cover the hole in his face, he made a sash from a grass blade, then tied it around his head with its stringy vein. Before approaching the women, he turned his sword belt so that the hilt fell over his genitals. The women turned and saw him, a nude man whose skin was a bizarre mottle of green pond scum, white paint, and lake mud. As he walked towards them, his sword bobbled between his legs and the sight made them giggle.
“Do you know who you laugh at?” Pleckoo snarled. The women turned away from him and back to their shrine. “I asked you a question!” he said, kicking at their backs until one stood tall to face him.
“Good Hulkrite, we not here for laughing,” said the woman in broken Hulkrish. Her face was shadowed by her shroud. “For victory, we pray here.”
“I heard them laugh!” Pleckoo said, hitting the side of her head with his fist. The woman peeled back her hood. She was a great beauty with thick, sensuous features, tawny skin, and massive braids of dark orange hair that had softened his blow. Her eyes were hooded with an enchanting fold and their pupils were as green as the jade of her necklaces. From the mass of her chunky jewels, Pleckoo knew she was the favored wife of one of his high-ranking officers.
“I need clothing and antennae,” Pleckoo said. The woman nodded, then spoke in a foreign language to a young slave, who limped off as quickly as she could.
“What mound is this?” he asked.
“Fadtha-dozh, of course,” she said. From her coloring, Pleckoo knew she was from the Seed Eater lands.
“Captain Fadtha,” Pleckoo said. “This was his mound. South of Jatal-dozh.”
“Mound belongs to Hulkro but is Fadtha’s mound for rule—to him it was granted by Tahn, First Prophet, blessed is his name. Muti, I am, Fadtha’s first wife. You have come from war on Slope?”
Pleckoo nodded.
“You are . . . are . . .”
She looked away from him.
“What? A deserter?”
“No . . . I . . . not my place to ask.”
“I was sent here. To wait in reserve.”
“What news of war have you? Of Second Prophet?”
“He lives,” said Pleckoo. “Lives to fight for Hulkro’s glory.”
“And war is over?”
“You ask too many questions, woman. Send food and drink to the throne room in your husband’s palace.”
The woman’s slave returned with a plain tunic of chewed eggshell and a simple pair of antennae. After dressing, Pleckoo walked back to the trunk trail and antennated a ghost ant that had squirming clover mites visible in its abdomen. After climbing atop the ant, he rode it to the mound’s top, where hobbled man-slaves dangled from ropes to rub dust and grime from the translucent walls of the crystal palaces. Looking down through the different levels of the mound, he saw slaves going about the usual labors of dew delivery and carrying off trash. Below, in the riding fields, Fadthan youths were riding atop ghost ant minims and at play in mock battles with blunted weapons. A field over, younger boys were involved in the same activity with stick ants between their legs. The women at the shrine had turned from worship to the stringing of dried flower petals for victory wreaths and garlands.
Pulling himself through a portal flap, Pleckoo entered the throne room of the largest palace, where a wealth of treasures bulged from boxes and barrels. The glittering jewels hurt his eyes, as the light flooding in made them all too beautiful. He looked up the flight of steps, which in ancient times had been peaked with thrones for Slopeish royals. Now they were topped with a pedestal bearing the usual lump of rough wood and a single termite track.
Drawn to a pile of human-hair rugs, Pleckoo collapsed into their softness and felt all the aches of riding for days on an ant. He wanted to sleep, but when he closed his eyes, he saw it again, that monstrous image: a rising effigy of the Roach God, blazing with fire and falling to blind and burn His men. After ripping away the tatter of grass around his face, he shouted up the steps to the block of termite-ravaged wood. “Wake me from this dream, Termite! Show me that all was not lost, I beg You!”
Hulkro did not crawl out of the wood to perch upon it and offer a comforting message.
Knowing he was alone, Pleckoo fell to his hands and knees and wailed. He choked on his own sobbing, hoping to cough out the hundred thousand demons that warred inside him. Dizzy with convulsions, he looked up to see several figures in the shadowy distance rising from amber loungers. Sleepy or drunk or both, they stood on unsure legs as they left their silky cushions.
“Who makes such unmanly noise?” shouted one, with a harsh and gravelly voice, in Hulkrish. The men fumbled for their swords and stumbled towards Pleckoo as he reached for the handle of his own. He stood slowly, his head down as he retied his face sash, and the strangers faced him in a half-circle. Their feet and legs were coated in a filth-spattered white paint—Hulkrish warriors. But what were they doing here?
“Forgive me, Good Hulkrites,” said Pleckoo. “I am a wood brother too.”
“Oh, wood brother, you are?” said Gravel Voice as he curled his lip. Pleckoo raised his eyes to look at them, his nose hidden. The men were naked, reeking of grass liquor, and their lips and teeth were stained with green. Gravel Voice was large and hairy, and his front teeth looked to have recently been knocked from his bloody gums. His chest was matted with drying blood from recent cuts.
“Not from this mound, you are?” asked Gravel Voice. Pleckoo guessed from his orange pubic hair and his accent, like Muti’s, that he had been a Seed Eater.
“I am from Zarren,” Pleckoo said.
“Zarren-dozh,” said the man next to him, who scratched inside his ear with his thumb. He had thumbs and pinkies but his other fingers were missing and the stumps of them were covered with leaking scabs. He struggled to grip his sword as he squinted at Pleckoo. “Was it not Zarren where righteous Second Prophet foresaw greatest victory of Hulkrish army?”
“What great victory it was,” said the third man, who tilted to one side. Between his ribs was a length of a Seed Eater’s arrow with its four-pronged arrowhead buried inside him, too deadly to remove.
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br /> “Hulkro tests the faithful,” Pleckoo said.
“No more talk like that,” said Gravel Voice. “We tested Hulkro and found Him failing.”
“Do not speak that way—about the One True God.”
“One True God is true shit who led hundreds of thousands of followers to slaughter.”
“They’re martyrs!” Pleckoo shouted. “They went straight to the Promised World!”
“Followers went straight to shit after carrion beetles ate corpses, and got squeezed out as dry little turds.”
Pleckoo blinked in silence. “H-how did you get h-here?” he stuttered. “Did you desert?”
“Not desert,” said Fingerless. “We fought. We believed—until we believed no more. When old country joined battle we saved ourselves instead of waste our lives. You, wood brother, why you not up in Promised World eating honey while angel-girls gobble on knob?”
“I . . . I survived,” Pleckoo said. “A ghost ant took me here.”
“Me too,” said Leans to One Side. “Survivor. Deserter not. Smart enough to get ride on ants who knew it was over too. No shame in it . . . wood brother.”
They were quiet a moment, studying Pleckoo, then looking into each other’s faces to confirm a mutual suspicion.
“From where you . . . from where before, brother?” asked Gravel Voice. “Before you wear white paint?”
“I was . . . was . . .”
“Ear is clipped.”
“Yes.”
“From Slope, are you? Mushroom Eater?”
“I was.”
“Should hate you for that . . . since we are Seed Eaters, what you call us. People of Barley Lands.”
“Best maybe you move on to Urtkess-dozh,” said Fingerless. “Heard other mushies make it back there. You like own kind to be with, yes?”
“All men are my kind,” Pleckoo said. “We are all brothers, created by the One True . . .”
“Stop!” said Gravel Voice. “No mention of Blind One again—if you want to keep own eyes.”
Pleckoo blinked. A silence passed in which all he heard was his breathing and his thumping heart.
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 1
