Only trickles of ants were climbing up and down the mound. A few dropped their leaf pieces to run their antennae over the arriving Cajorites. The humans who were at home ran outside to see the queen they knew as a child. Polexima knew the faces of many of them and waved the arm of her newborn daughter. The queen could see the deliveries of abundant torches to the feasting halls as well as fragrant blossoms to shred and sprinkle on the floor. She smiled as she imagined her father was in the royal kitchens taste-testing her favorite dishes before he was girdled and dressed in his finery.
It’s so very good to be home.
Corra and Yormu were housed with the Palzhanite midden caste in their fragrant dwellings set among the weeds. It was Yormu’s first time in a house and he sat in his first chair. Both were astonished when a torch, a bag of berry-wine, and worm fudge were delivered. They were gifts from King Kammut, who wanted all in the mound to celebrate.
The Palzhanite untouchables invited the strangers into their largest house for a gathering but they were frightened by Corra’s darker skin. Some of them looked for the poisonous stinger above her buttocks that Britasytes were said to possess. She lowered her skirt and laughed as she showed them she possessed no such thing. They were won over with her gifts of damselfly bangles, and by the liquor that had them giggling within minutes of imbibing. She didn’t tell them it was enhanced with what their priests called the Holy Mildew, something they were never supposed to know about, much less sample.
The moon was high in the sky as the middenites enjoyed a third squeeze of liquor. They asked Corra to perform her Mantis Mating Dance for a second time when they heard a commotion of insects outside the shelter. They stepped out slowly to see leaf-cutter ants, scurrying wildly, crawling down from the mound with their eggs and larvae clutched in their mandibles. Corra saw Yormu’s panic when he smelled the alarm/disperse-scent they were spraying.
“Why are the ants abandoning the mound?” she asked.
Her hosts had no answers, but it didn’t take long to understand what was happening.
A strange and meaty smell of alien insects was crawling up their noses. They turned to see the surrounding grass bend with the weight of coming intruders. Corra saw the first of some massive, see-through ants with scissoring mandibles crawling towards them. She didn’t know what they were, but she was sure she needed to run and hide.
Raucous laughter and orchestras throughout the mound were drowning the ears of the Palzhanites. In the royal feasting hall, His Most Pious Ejolta stood with the other priests near the quartz viewing window, sneaking sips of fermentation as they looked out at the frenzied ball. Their raised eyebrows were a reminder not to abandon all propriety.
The window suddenly darkened, and the high priest turned to see what had blocked the moonlight. He looked out and down and was astonished to witness their queen ant being pushed and pulled down the mound by attendants. Her fat body used weak legs to stumble over man-made structures and she tumbled down more precipitous slopes. When she reached the bottom, her clustering attendants attempted to push her beyond the weeds and to safety in the sand fields.
It was far too late.
A swarm of alien ants, some with human riders, had surrounded the mound and were gobbling up the leaf-cutters. The priests could not absorb the invaders’ appearance which was so eerie it was paralyzing. Pious Ejolta looked out and could only ask himself, Has a ghost army erupted from the Netherworld? It has to be an apparition!
Surrounding Palzhad was an army of enormous, transparent ants, an insect no Slopeite had ever seen, and half of them mounted by humans. They were a few hundred at first, then suddenly as innumerable as the leaves of a tree. The soldiers riding on them were white as chalk and clad in transparent armor. Pious Ejolta clenched his eyes closed. When he opened them, the army on ghost ants had not faded like a mirage, but instead continued its advance up the mound.
“Priests, do you see what I do?” he asked.
None answered him, though, as the priests watched in stunned silence as the invaders slaughtered the leaf-cutters, their massive pincers piercing the leaf-cutters’ heads and lifting them to be guzzled whole. Eggs and squirming larvae were taken from the leaf-cutters’ mandibles by smaller ghost ants. These little raiders raced with their living prizes to a trunk trail going south.
Ejolta, in turn, raced to King Kammut, who rocked Pareesha as his daughters whirled in a dance circle.
“Majesty, we are under attack! A great army so numerous our ants are fleeing instead of fighting.”
Kammut rose to his feet. “Seed Eaters or Carpenters?”
“Neither. They appear to be . . . ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
Kammut ran to the window and reeled from the bizarre vision. He jerked himself away to displace the orchestra’s conductor on his platform. The room quieted.
“I regret to inform you we are under attack and our ants have fled,” the king shouted. “As quickly and quietly as possible, you are to walk to the tunnels and down to the shelters. Our guests from Cajoria need your guidance. We do not need panic.”
The king’s message was relayed quickly through the tunnels and to the other castes. The Palzhanites had rehearsed shelter drills years ago, but after years of peace the practice was unfamiliar. In the feasting hall, children and women of childbearing age exited in a daze. The military scrambled through the barracks and fumbled for their weapons.
What brazen fools would attack a mound of the most powerful nation on the Sand? thought Kammut. He looked again at the phantom insects, whose insides glimmered with moonlight. “Slopeish armies will gather in an instant to confront these attackers. They’ll butcher them and send the rest running,” he said to Ejolta, with an imitation of bluster.
Ejolta said nothing. They watched as an enemy sand-sled was pulled towards the Palzhanites’ ant queen. The egg-layer made a pathetic attempt to crawl away, but her swollen gaster slowed her down. Her clustered retinue tried to protect her, but they were picked off or crushed and then swallowed by the ghost ants. The human invaders then had to fight back their own ants to protect the leaf-cutter queen. In an instant, the panels of a cage were erected around her to protect her from further assault.
They wanted her alive!
Kammut panicked when he realized these marauders were abducting the Palzhanites’ egg-layer. Just then, an unmounted ghost ant reached the feasting hall’s window. It was three times the size of the largest leaf-cutter soldier ant and so frightening that Kammut staggered. I’m a soldier, he reminded himself and regained his composure. “It’s best we disguise the crown princess as a boy,” he said, and Lamalla was swept away and re-dressed. The other Palzhanites tumbled down to shelters designated by caste.
Below in the weeds, Yormu, Corra, and the Palzhad middenites awaited the moment they should flee. Ghost ants were surrounding the house they had gathered in and were sawing through its walls with their mandibles. “What do we do? They won’t let us in the mound,” Corra shouted as she paced with her satchel of jewelry.
“Our hiding place is in the nearby weeds,” said the midden elder. “You must follow us. Leave your satchel!”
As ghost ants’ heads poked through the walls, the middenites fled into the low weeds and ran under them to avoid attackers. Yormu stood in a daze, then jerked Corra by the hand and yanked her outside. She would not abandon her satchel, though, which slowed them as they ran through a maze of battling ants. She stumbled and fell and they lost sight of the others. Yormu looked up to see grass blades bending from the weight of climbing leaf-cutters.
Setting its sights on one leaf-cutter, a ghost had crawled up a barley stalk to engage the smaller ant. The two tangled and fell. Yormu tried to pull Corra away from the falling ants, but he was too late. Yormu strained as he dragged her crushed form out from under the fallen ants and prayed she was unhurt.
She was not.
A gush of blood soaked her clothing, where a thorn of the ghost’s petiole had pierced her lung. She was weak a
nd in pain and could barely breathe. Yormu urged her on as human foot warriors advanced through the weeds, but she could not rise. Yormu was lifting her into his arms when the blade of a human soldier sliced out and into her chest. The warrior took aim at Yormu, who was blinded by blood. The weight of his wife’s body pulled him down and away from the deadly swipe.
Foot warriors trampled over Yormu and then he felt the claws of ants. He was torn between the fear of dying and the desire to join his wife in death. He was giving in to death when someone grabbed his ankle and dragged him through a hatch to the middenites’ underground shelter. In the moment of safety, Yormu surfaced from his despair, attempted to shout his wife’s name, and climbed out of the hatch to grab her ankles. But her body was jerked away and hoisted up by a ghost ant that swallowed it whole. Yormu watched from under the hatch to see her as she slid down the gullet of the transparent invader. He saw her face and realized she was still alive as she thrashed and drowned in the ant’s fluids before it crawled away. He blacked out in grief.
In the upper stories of the mound’s barracks, Palzhanite soldiers futilely shot their arrows. The archers were too far away to take aim and their arrows fell like so much mist. Retreat was called for the first time in centuries. The mound’s defenders fled to the military’s shelters, where their wives and children waited. The soldiers entered in humiliation, and their presence deepened their families’ panic.
Ghost ants reached the top of the mound and destroyed the living gate of leaf-cutter sentries before pouring down, killing and eating the crippled, aged, and lost men and women. The human warriors came in the next wave, mounted or on foot, and grabbed at the wall-torches to light their way. They fanned out through the royal compartments, uninterested in the abundant treasures. They journeyed instead downward through the rectories, the barracks, the merchants’ apartments, and the shelters of the laboring castes.
The warriors splashed an X in glowing paint over every searched chamber. They took tunnels to the depths of the mound and spread through the mushroom chambers, the cathedral, the larval and queen chambers, the food stores, and the water tanks.
Tiny ghost ants sniffed out the clusters of humans through the shelters’ seals, signaling a find with whirling antennae. Foot warriors broke the walls with mallets and entered with their swords. They slew the males and crones within moments. Young women and children were bound and gagged.
One warrior, scrawnier than the others, was central to the mission, albeit inexperienced with his weapons. Beneath the transparent chitin of his helmet, his nose had been deformed, cut off to create two gaping nostrils with a knot of protruding cartilage.
The Palzhanites were most frightened by this man with his skull-like face. When he came close to examine the dress and faces of the women, they saw his white skin was dark under its cracking paint. He shook his head before leaving on a new search, but not before he smashed a filled eggshell to release a noxious liquid.
The warriors scurried out and left their victims to die from the liquid’s fatal fumes. The ghost ants were impervious to the gas, however, and rushed in to eat the fallen or the fleeing. Palzhanite children and young women were doused in the kin-scents of the invaders and thrown in sacks dragged over the tunnel’s floors.
Inside the royal shelter, Polexima sat with her baby, King Kammut, Princess Lamalla, sixteen of her brothers and their wives and the priests. The air tube was clogged and all were sickened in the poisoning atmosphere. Each attempted to suppress their panic when Pareesha’s tiny fists flailed and she cried out. Polexima quieted her with a cupped hand, but it was too late.
The wall crashed in and outside it, Polexima could see a stream of the monstrous ants crawling through the tunnels. Some foot warriors walked over the rubble, set down their mallets and raised torches to the royals’ faces. The man with the missing nose examined Polexima. She looked in the jagged cavity of his face when he scowled, nodded his head, and pointed.
“Didn’t expect you’d be here,” he said to the queen in the low tongue of the Slope. “You’ll be coming with us.”
Polexima wondered how he had recognized her. Had he been a Cajorite? She went rigid with dread.
“Wh-where are you taking me?” she asked.
“You know the place as Hulkren.”
“H-Hulkren! What? Why?”
The skull-face turned from her when another warrior of Slopeish stock alerted him to something in their own tongue. The warriors backed away and bowed their heads as a magnificent figure rode up through the tunnel on the largest ghost ant Polexima had seen yet. The ant’s rider dismounted in the swirls of his gossamer cape.
“Your Majesty,” the noseless man sneered, “may I present you to Commander Tahn, the Warrior Prophet of Hulkro.”
Tahn looked to be a man of forty summers with a high and noble forehead. He was covered in white paint, and Polexima thought he had a disturbing beauty with a jutting chin, sharp and high cheekbones, and a full mouth. His eyebrows were knitted in anger, like twin caterpillars battling for the same morsel. Tahn eyed her up and down, with a hungry look that made the queen clutch her child even closer. He directed his Slopeish convert to ask the queen a question in a tongue that was not completely foreign.
“Is this your infant?” asked the skull-face, scornfully imitating an upper caste accent. “Would this be the Princess Pareesha whose birth was celebrated just before her sister Trellana left on a Fission trek?”
“No! I mean . . . who . . . who are you? Where are you from?”
“Do not ask questions,” he said, exaggerating the harsh accent of his caste. “I am Pleckoo, a soldier for Hulkro, and disciple of his prophet.”
Pleckoo examined the elaborate dress of the baby and when he held a hand torch closer, Polexima could see he had discerned a family resemblance. He spoke with Tahn, who responded with an order.
Pleckoo reached for Pareesha. “The brat comes, too.”
“No! Take me, but leave my baby with the priests!” she screamed.
“The priests will all be dead,” Pleckoo shouted, and then boxed her ear. “You can give me the baby, or I can take the baby.”
Polexima would not give the baby up. Pleckoo signaled the others. They rushed the priests, King Kammut, and the princes. The men’s chests were slashed open and their rib cages were pried up. Those who tried to run were stabbed or shot with arrows through their backs. Princess Lamalla’s disguise as a boy had worked too well, and her head was lopped off her neck. The older wives of the brothers were beheaded while the younger ones were thrown into rough sacks that were cinched and hooked to the ghost ants’ saddles.
The men turned their swords towards Polexima and surrounded her. She felt a lump in her throat as big as Palzhad as she handed Pleckoo her baby. Someone grabbed her hair and dragged her out to the tunnel. She screamed as Pareesha was tossed in a circle like a ball.
Ghost ants converged on the corpses of the royals. Polexima collapsed at the horrible sound of crunching that could only be the snapping bones of her family. Children stuffed in sacks wailed as they were dragged past her. She was stripped of her clothing. The baby, also stripped, was given back to her just before the moment both were forced into a sack reeking with the kin-scent of ghost ants. The sack was cinched and Polexima gasped as she felt it being hoisted up and left to swing from a hook.
As Polexima hugged her baby, she could hear the commander as he shouted his next orders, and her blood chilled when the harsh translation came from the malformed warrior. “Back to Jatal-dozh and hurry,” Pleckoo interpreted for the other warriors of Slopeish descent, “before the leaf-cutters at the nearby mounds pick up our scent.”
The ghost ants were large and quick, with tall legs that took powerful strides. They herded the smaller raider ants that had stopped to lick their prizes of eggs and larvae in order to coat them in the ghosts’ kin-scent. The raiders crawled with their captives onto their giant sister ants before they all raced south.
Breezes with the scents of the in
vaders slowly roused the sleepy ants at the southern mounds of Bentilamak, Rinso, and Caladeck. A few leaf-cutter soldiers were out and marching with their gasters held high as they sprayed recruiting-scent to call out their numbers. The human sentries of Rinso rode their ants to the tops of rocks to look south. They witnessed the uncanny sight of transparent ants racing through the Petiole, the narrow channel between the Tar Marsh and the Great Jag that led to the Dustlands.
It was far too late for the Slopeish commanders to rally their armies and ants to attack. Like wraiths, this new enemy seemed to have faded back to the Netherworld. Not that it mattered—even the ants that had mobilized to enter the Dustlands kept losing the invaders’ trunk-trail. The scent of the ghosts had vanished as quickly as they had.
CHAPTER 14
THE ANOINTING OF QUEEN TRELLANA
When Anand woke, he was lying on his back on a soft mattress of cocoon skins and looking up at the underside of a magnificent and leafy bortshu. When he raised his head, he realized he was in the sand-sled of the scraper caste. Beside him were a water bladder and a bowl of dried mushrooms. He squeezed some water on the fungi to reconstitute them and drained the rest to quench a vicious thirst.
Finished, he sat up to see Elora’s mother and the female kin of her caste marching behind the sled, pulling a smaller one of their own. They were smiling at him and, in defiance of all rules, the mother spoke and made eye contact.
“How do you feel?”
“How long have I been sleeping?”
“Two days. When you are ready, you must rejoin your caste, Anand. But for now, rest.”
Anand. She had called him by name!
“Someone wishes to say something to you,” the mother said. Anand turned to see Elora swinging in a hammock behind him. She weakly raised her head and managed to smile.
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