The blue mantises again! The ones who appeared over the sacrifice yesterday. This is a good omen!
But a moment later, the sight struck him as odd. What message is Lumm sending me with mantises that fly in pairs? And during the light of morning? That our victory is won in two days? Or two moons?
The insects turned west and disappeared.
In any event, it is a fine day for riding, and a finer day for reckoning.
Terraclon stood on Cajoria’s ant riding field, trying not to pace, as the sun neared the noon position. He looked to the midden in the South, where enormous piles of locust and roach moltings made rustling sounds as they were picked up and shifted in the wind. He turned his eyes to the sky, as much to the gods in prayer as it was in hopes of seeing his messenger pilot. The first had come by early morning with news that the Seed Eaters were indeed on the march after burying their human sacrifice. He stroked the amethyst pendant that dangled between his breathing filter and his blowgun, and listened to the flutter of the locusts inside their cages. They were as anxious for freedom as he was anxious for war.
His pilots, standing in loose formations, also looked to the sky, but turned every so often to look at Terraclon, he thought, in admiration as much as for direction. As much he should have been thinking about war, he was satisfied to know that his alterations of Sahdrin’s uniform had been effective. He had darkened the armor from the inside out by stuffing it with tar-soaked cladding, a practical innovation he had suggested that all the defenders adopt. On top of his helmet were short and practical antennae, extending from a low crown of hammered gold he had taken from Sahdrin’s dressing shelf. To complete it all, the quilted gambeson wrapped around his chest plate featured a cunning rendering of Locust the Sky God in rare blue thread. Terraclon wondered if the pilots would respect him as much if they had seen him late in the night, frantically completing his embroidery under the fading light of a fungus torch as he mouthed a prayer with every stitch.
At last, from above, they heard a faint buzz and then sighted it: the returning locust, leaving an identifying trail of red powder before its approach. “Give him some room,” Terraclon shouted, and the pilots stepped back to make a clearing. The locust went into a landing spiral, but its rotation was too short and it fell on its side with a thump. It lay on the sand as a brown liquid bubbled from its mouth, through jittering mandibles. The pilot rolled off, and was helped to his feet as the locust was righted and inspected for punctures and wing damage. “Speak!” said Terraclon, mildly surprising himself with his increasing comfort at giving commands.
“Pious Terraclon, the roach brigade has succeeded at following the Britasyte caravan into the Barley Lands. They are stretching along the Southeast Weedlands of Xixict and are nearing their sand route leading west.”
“To your mounts! Inspect and adjust your loads before flying!” shouted Terraclon. “And may Locust be with you!”
“Locust! Locust! Locust!” shouted the pilots as they ran to the stacks of cages, climbed their ladders, and entered to mount the thousands of mottled blue flyers. Terraclon went to his own locust, freshly painted with white stripes, and hitched to a pole in the open. He examined the chains of filled egg- and aphid-shell capsules that lined the locust’s belly, and checked the twine that bound them. “Are you ready, Defender Mikexa?” he asked the muscular, yellow-skinned pilot who sat in their saddle, patting the locust’s head.
“Ready, Pious,” she answered in a voice deeper than Terraclon’s own, before she handed him a thorn horn. He blew it three times, then counted sixty breaths before blowing one long blast. The cages’ doors fell open in a great clatter, and released their locusts, which united in a rising spiral.
“Up!” Terraclon commanded his pilot, and they leapt into flight and joined the swarm. The drone of thousands of wings was deafening, and made his armor vibrate; but as the locust whirled in the vortex of this flying army—his army—he had never felt more elated, more determined, more deliciously powerful.
“North and east!” he shouted into Mikexa’s ear, and their locust broke out of the spiral. He looked in back of him at his pilots and bowmen atop their mounts, and was sure that he had never seen anything more beautiful. They winged over the Freshwater Lake as it reflected the blue of the sky and its white clouds and the flickering undersides of their locusts. When the lake ended, they continued north over the sea of barley grass, and flew high enough to avoid the arrows of the hungry hunters within it.
Unsure of how far to go, Terraclon was worried he had already overshot his mark, and was nearing Stink Ant country when he sighted a beetle-drawn convoy heading southwest along a sand artery. He pushed his feet further into his stirrups. “Veer west!” he commanded, and the pilot lowered her head, shifted her grips. The locust tilted to the right for a turnaround, and the swarm swung towards Xixict.
I’ll find this Emperor Volokop, Terraclon thought. This Great Deformity who hides like a coward at the tail of his army. And once I capture him, I’ll rip his abundant body apart . . . until they bring me Anand!
Polexima lost sight of the flying locust guides when a strong wind blew them south and rustled the long stretch of marsh marigolds that hid her roach brigade. The roach’s smaller antennae were waving in a blur as Punshu held tight to the longer pair to keep their mount from crawling forward. “Hungry,” he said in Slopeish. “Roach hungry smell good thing.”
“Yes,” said Polexima when she heard the unexpected sound of crickets chirping out of synchrony during the day. Several of them crawled from under the marigolds, disturbed from their sleep, to jump away. I will take that as a sign, she thought as Punshu regained control. She looked through the weeds to the near distance and saw what might have been the tops of the punk weeds growing on the lake’s edge. The guiding locusts were back in view, circling sunwise, to signal to the roach brigade they had come as close as they needed and should remain where they were, hidden, at the edge of a loamy clearing.
“They’re coming, hold position!” she shouted as she set the flat of her sword just above her helmet. She looked to her left and right and saw the riders pass her signal by setting their own swords just above their heads. Breathing hard, she felt like she might vomit if her stomach held any contents. Glancing at the sky, the locust guides were still circling. The roach brigade waited to advance when she heard the faint clacking of a chain of wooden bells from behind them in the South.
“Attackers from the South! Hold positions! Bowmen, pivot!” she shouted with a full rotation of her sword. Though it pained her, Polexima turned in her saddle, her back to Punshu, to face the southern threat. She saw flickers and shadows of what had to be Seed Eater sentries from the nearby villages filtering through the weeds on foot.
“Arrows first, blowguns second!” she commanded, and heard her words repeated north and south.
Jakhuma, Kula, and the other women with small children and babies in their arms were at the center of the slow-moving huddle of Ledackis, heading south through the camps. The Ledacki men were on the outside of the huddle, holding shields to make a walking wall while keeping weapons at the ready. Most of the refugees they approached let them tramp through their camps until they reached a clan of Mosquito Hunters. “Give us your food and we’ll let you pass,” said their leader, a man whose fuzzy hair was caked with red swamp mud. His hand gripped a blade in his waist strap.
“We are in search of food,” Sebetay shouted, leading the huddle.
“Then leave us a baby . . . or one of your children.”
“I will give you the sharp end of my sword,” said Sebetay. “So your children can eat you!”
Each time they trudged through a camp, the Ledackis halted until the men at the back could reset the wall they had broken through, and the men at the front could negotiate the next part of the journey. They had halted again and were waiting in the brightening sun when Jakhuma turned to Kula Priya.
“Can you bear me if sit on your shoulders?” Jakhuma asked.
“N
ot for long, Princess,” said Kula. “Why?”
“To see how much farther it is to the end of the camps.”
The women passed their babies to Tsepalang to hold. Kula knelt, and let Jakhuma climb on her back to her shoulders. With the help of the other women, Kula stood and let Jakhuma peer over the lake of humans to the distance.
“What do you see, Princess?”
Jakhuma could only see a great stretch of humans; but somewhere at the horizon, she thought she saw movement. “I’m not sure. Maybe others leaving. Or maybe more arriving.” As she stared she saw a faint rising of dust and heard a distant commotion. Sweat burst out on her upper lip as she felt her heart pump.
“Set me down,” she said, as if she had been punched in the stomach. “Sebetay!”
“Yes, Princess?” he shouted to her from the front.
“We must hurry! Faster! Something is coming!”
“Then we should stay here. Wait for it to pass.”
“No! Forward! Before it gets here!”
“This kind of work is worse than cleaning shit pots,” said Keel. “This suit’s been scratching me raw.”
“Me too,” said Tal. “First they sets us to excavating days and nights, and then this sticky-mucky business. If this is war, then I fucking hate war.”
Keel and his sons dumped some heavily caked trowels in a pile, then stood in a line, waiting to be stripped of the head-to-toe wrappers of tightly woven straw they had labored in since before sunrise. Tal reached one of several young women from the cloth-maker caste of Shishto who was dressed in a wrapper that revealed just enough of a pretty face with sensuous lips. She pulled the blackened mittens from Tal’s hands, then used a quartz dagger to cut the suit off and peel it away from his oiled skin. He lingered before her, excited to be naked in the open, and looked for some sign that she was interested in what was growing.
“Next!” she called, looking around him.
“Not yet,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“They call me Prick Cutter,’” she said, raising her knife. “Care to find out why?”
Tal’s face tightened, and he drew his arm back to smack her when Keel grabbed his wrist. “Let’s not lose our pricks, son,” said Keel as he pushed Tal towards his other boys, who stood naked, warming themselves in the sunshine as their bodies glistened with seed oil. Tal sniffed his arm. “I think there’s roach grease mixed into this oil.”
“Yeah. That’s what’s been making me sick all morning,” said Keel. As they waited for the rest of their division to be stripped of their wrappers, they turned and looked at the wall they had helped to build. Men from inside the structure were crawling out of holes spaced through its top to complete some inspection. The wall was darker in color, its sand grains adhered with tar, and the side facing them had rows of window-like holes, which were also being inspected. At the bottom of the wall were some large slits.
“I’d say that wall’s at least ten times taller than before,” said Keel.
“And it ought to hold in a rain since it’s been glued together,” said Tal. “Except for all them holes.”
A thorn horn blew and the divisions’ captain appeared, recently promoted, wearing armor stolen from a dead Slopeite. He stood in the weeds a few hundred paces west. “Defenders!” Captain Klonpak shouted through a sound-cone. “The Seed Eaters are near! Use the spans, quickly, but one at a time! Resume your weapons and your position and check your ground ropes!”
Keel and sons waited their turn to trot along one of several beam-and-rung structures just above what looked like a ground covered with fallen leaves. At the end of the span, the captain reached into a sack and offered each defender a grateful smile and a sugared mite. Keel took his mite and noticed the captain’s right earlobe was clipped.
“Did you see?” he whispered to Tal as they bit into their meal while walking to their assigned position. “Our Captain Klonpak is a shit worker like we is.”
“And not even a foreman, like you, Dad. Who’s he to be ordering us about?”
“I guess he killed himself a few Hulkrites,” said Keel as he checked the tautness of the red ground rope that stretched to distant stakes ahead and behind them. He turned and spoke to his sons as they dressed and set breathing masks and goggles around their necks. “Boys, let’s see who can kill the most Seed Eaters. The winner gets a prize. The loser gets his ass beat.”
Volokop was annoyed when the march stopped again. The stilted ants were wobbling as they were forced to wait. “Find out why we’re slowing!” he shouted to the messenger on a speed ant at his side.
The parade picked up and continued but at a slower, maddening pace. The messenger returned. “Your Imperial Majesty, the ants are slowing as they reach the stretch near some marsh marigolds, where they become difficult to control.”
“Why?”
“We are not sure. Perhaps roaches.”
“Roaches? Britasyte roaches in the Northwest outland?”
“Perhaps, Majesty. If not wild ones.”
“If there are Britasytes nearby with roaches, find them and threaten them with their lives. Have any leaf-cutter ants crossed our border yet?”
“None reported, sir. No conflicts.”
The messenger touched his chest and rode off, his ant weaving under the stilted ants, then crawling over and through the war ants of the elite forces to relay the emperor’s command.
Why aren’t any leaf-cutter ants attacking us yet if we’re at their borders? Volokop wondered as the parade continued. They would have smelled us by now. Did the Slope lose all their ants to the Hulkrites?
Perhaps this is going to be easier than I imagined.
Polexima’s thumping heart quieted as she looked over her arrow dipped in spider venom. Shadowed figures were coming towards the line of roaches from the South. She saw their orange helmets, bobbing like lightning flies in the shadows, as they got closer. Village sentries, she realized. From the watch towers. Arrows flew, one over her shoulder, making a fwish sound. She aimed her own at a shadow beneath a dandelion, waiting for someone to appear. Fwish, fwish, fwish! She felt Punshu’s breath on her neck as he turned his head in concern. An orange helmet in the shadows came forward, and Polexima released and missed. She heard her arrow skid over the loam, and reached for the next in her quiver.
A sentry came close enough for her to see that he closed one eye as he aimed at her face. Their arrows were pointed at each other when she released. She heard the arrows slide against each other in the air, then felt a sharp pain in her shoulder. An arrow had pierced her armor but stuck in the cladding with its tip, making a shallow puncture. She heard herself scream, not in pain but in rage, and loaded her bow again. The sentry howled at her, running forward as she struggled to pull back the drawstring. She could see the spaces in his teeth when he stopped to aim. He fell on his back as he released his arrow, sending it upwards as he writhed on the ground, his back arched over the ground. Polexima turned, saw Punshu over her shoulder, his blowgun at his mouth, having saved her. He had released the antennae and their roach was crawling forward. He scrambled to regain control as the insect’s antennae whipped and whirled.
Polexima raised her blowgun and steadied the soft magazine as the next sentry advanced. She missed, pulled the magazine one slot, then aimed again, this time piercing the sentry’s chest armor and sending him falling and foaming at the mouth. She looked to her left and her right, and saw that the brigade was keeping their positions, but some riders and their drivers had fallen. One roach was wandering north with a corpse slouching in its saddle, as its unpracticed driver struggled to turn it back.
“Tethers!” Polexima shouted left and right. As the command was passed down the column, Punshu took the hooked ropes from under the saddle and threw their weighted ends to the nearest roaches. The drivers or the bowmen caught the ropes, and linked them to their saddles to hold the roaches in a steady barrier. Once his roach was stabilized, Punshu stood on the saddle behind the queen, targeting the attackers from
the South with his blowgun. “Pancha, shava. saata,” she heard him counting. He aimed at a sentry running up when the roach lurched forward, then snapped back in the tether to send Punshu falling. He conked his head on a jutting sand grain and groaned.
The attacker, a young man with a sparse red beard, shouted in rage as he took in his fallen fellows. Reaching into his quiver, he found it was empty and dropped his bow. He yanked out his quartz sword and ran towards Punshu, leaping over the corpses to lunge at him. Punshu struggled to stand, and reached for his own sword. The sentry jumped up and his arm came down. The sword shattered the shoulder plate of Punshu’s armor, and he stumbled, then dropped to his knees. The sentry, his nostrils quivering and his beard wet with sweat, raised his sword to swing out, and then down through Punshu’s neck.
Polexima threw herself from the saddle and onto the sentry, knocking his chest to the ground. The sentry screamed and rolled up from under her, bashing her nose with his forehead, stunning her and drawing blood that welled inside her nostrils. He pushed her off, then stood to jam his blade through her neck when Punshu grabbed the sentry’s wrist. He clamped his teeth on the sentry’s fingers, biting deeper, until he dropped his sword. Punshu snatched the sword and threatened its end as he anchored himself. The sentry spun around him, attempting to tear his hand from the teeth.
Punshu’s face screwed tighter and his skull bulged through his skin, when the sentry fell to the ground, screaming, it had to be, for mercy. Polexima sat up. She felt lost, half-conscious, consumed by the pain in her shattered face, and having to breathe through her mouth. She saw the sentry grasping for her sword with his free hand, dragging Punshu with him in order to reach its hilt. Rage exploded through her, and a scream ripped out of her throat that deafened her own ears. She stood on her weak legs, grabbed her sword, and hacked off the sentry’s hand at the wrist, with the blade breaking on the pebble beneath them. The shock of the impact stiffened her arm and made the puncture in her shoulder pulse in agony. Punshu got off his knees, stood, and spat out severed fingers. A moment later, he spat out his bloody front teeth before he hacked through the sentry’s neck.
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 40
