Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  Anand had journeyed south for a day when he reached into his backsack for some worm jerky. That was when he realized he had left his copy of The Loose Doctrine in the tent of the Fallogeths. They would not know what it was. What if they dumped it with their trash or sold it as a curiosity? The loss of the book haunted Anand for days. It felt like the loss of his closest friend.

  Anand knew he could not look well-fed when he entered the lands of the Hulkrites. Over the long journey south, he limited his food to leaves and roots. The Hulkrites would be suspicious of him if he looked anything other than bitter and hungering.

  That was a guise he could easily re-assume.

  Oblivious to the Slopeish sights around him, he became a tireless strider, a creature constructed of hate that slept very little each night. It might take him months or years, but he would learn who was responsible for his mother’s death. And if the Hulkrites had harmed Daveena or any other Britasyte, he would make them suffer and then destroy them. He set his sights on the Great Jag, the chain of steep-faced boulders that hemmed in the Slope’s southwestern queendoms. When he finally reached Palzhad, he smelled the sulfurous Tar Marsh, which stretched across the southeast border. Between these two barriers lay the Petiole, the narrow passage the riders on ghost ants had traveled when they raided Palzhad.

  When Anand reached the ravaged mound, border patrollers ordered the young worker to return to his mound and his duties. Anand bowed respectfully and presented each with pyrite flecks. Once the patrollers took them, they allowed him to wander into the thicket of weeds.

  Just before the walls of the rebuilt borders was a large white rock with distinctive veins that resembled a spider in its web. Anand took off his rags and his Dranverish armor and put them in a waterproofed sack with the rest of his currency. Last to go in the sack was a jar with leaf-cutter kin-scent. He buried it all near the spider rock to be exhumed on his return . . . if he should return this way.

  One thing Anand did not put in the sack was a small, tightly capped tubular jar bound with beeswax he had borrowed from the gottallamos’ store of weapons. Under the thick coating of wax, the jar had Dranverish writing that warned of an extreme poison and gave lengthy directions for the handling of its contents. Anand grimaced as he tucked this bottle into his pouch.

  Night had arrived and with it, moisture and cold. Whispers of clouds drifted over Moon. To Anand, the clouds looked like ghosts fleeing some calamity, for ghosts had been much on his mind. He looked both ways in search of border patrollers before crawling over the piles of ant pellets, for it was a crime punishable by death for anyone other than a soldier to leave the Slope. He remembered telling the Dranverite scholars that the Slopeish words for border translated to “place where priestly magic ends.” He could still hear their clucks of disapproval.

  On the other side of the border, it was very much the same: dense weeds that blocked any view of the distance. Clad in rags, Anand carried only his dagger, his pouch and a water-skin. He made his way towards a glowing cluster of lightning-fly eggs on the underside of a blue wort plant. Fashioning a quick torch from them, he continued his hike and disturbed grasshoppers, which flew off with a frightful kick and sprays of their mouth-slime.

  Holding his torch up to the thick stem of a tar-berry plant, Anand saw a ripe one and ate a drupe to quench his thirst. He knew his water would be colored black the next day, but he savored the tart-sweet delight. Atop the plant were slowly moving thorns that trailed long, diaphanous threads. They were thorn aphids, and Anand shimmied up the stalk to reach them. He wrapped their threads around a stick for later eating, then suckled the end of one for its sugar-rich dew, avoiding the sharp tack that grew on its back.

  Anand was frightened to travel in unknown weeds in the dark. When he reached a clearing and could look up, the clouds had parted to reveal a sky that was black and sinister. The stars looked like clusters of dew-spattered spiders, ready to drop on threads to bite him. All around were creaking twigs, rustling leaves, and the crunching mouths of nocturnal hunters.

  His heart beat faster and his head throbbed with panic. He felt safer when he walked. The Learned Elders of Dranveria believed prayer was useless, but Anand turned to Madricanth for his/her protection and to the spirit of his mother for guidance. His mother . . . had he told her how much he loved her before he left with the pioneers?

  “How did you let this happen to her?” he suddenly screamed to the skies, the place where Madricanth roamed at night. “What kind of protector are you? Will you let me die, too?”

  His rant was halted when he heard great gurgling and smacking sounds. Blocking his path were undulating walls that he realized were two great earthworms. They had surfaced to mate and were coating each other in mucous before linking. Anand smiled as he skirted the gentle monsters, for this sight was a good-luck omen to Britasytes.

  He slipped in the earthworms’ slime and was falling forward when he felt something grab him. Webbing had snapped around his face, his torso, his ankles and he was lifted off the ground. His body was spinning as sticky threads wrapped tight around him and his arms were bound to his body. Dizzy and pulsing with fear, he looked through the threads at the multiple eyes of a lair spider. Its black fangs were parting as Anand went for the dagger in his holster. He could not reach it. The webbing pulled tighter. The spider leaned back, stretched Anand between its forelegs, and readied to sink her fangs as she raised his chest to her mouth.

  Anand was drenched in his own cold sweat. Just as he gave himself up to dying, the spider went still. Her legs relaxed and Anand swung between them, as if in a hammock. His sweat had lubricated him, and he was able to squeeze his hand down to his knife. He was sawing at threads when he heard a deep and almost musical buzzing. The lair spider was taking flight! How? Anand looked down at the ground through the webbing. What had come to his rescue? He was higher than he had ever flown on any locust’s back.

  Anand saw the answer to his question and his dread flared anew. He was being flown toward a nest of night wasps. He must be dead! His spirit was in the Netherworld the Slopeites had warned him against! Soon he would be stung and chewed to bits, and a short time later, he would be whole again and the torture would start all over.

  He remembered the Dranverites did not believe in a punishing Netherworld. “I’m not dead,” Anand said to himself. He realized that a night wasp had paralyzed the lair spider and was carrying it to her nest to dismember and feed to her sisters and their young. The night wasp was as yet unaware that she had also captured a human.

  The wasps’ cone-shaped nest hung from a slender attachment to the underside of a tree-branch. The insects’ massive black bodies blended into the night, but their garish wings were an obscene orange, as frightening as the flames of a fire. Hundreds of wasps were crawling over the six-sided cells stuffed with their maggots. When the wasps discovered Anand, they would sting him to paralyze him, then tear him to pieces.

  The stunned lair spider was dropped on top of the nest, where the wasp’s sisters converged on it with an angry buzzing and gnashing of mandibles. The spider’s limbs were chewed and tugged until they fell away. Suddenly Anand was freed from the legs of the spider, but not its web. The wasps smelled him as he squirmed away and over the papery top of their nest. He used his free hand to pull himself inside a cell occupied by a maggot.

  Struggling to cut himself free, Anand kept at the sticky threads until he could scrape them off his body. The maggot wriggled and turned its mouth to Anand. He was coated in its slime, which helped him to worm out of the last of the spider’s threads. He caught his breath, backed into the cell, and braced himself against the maggot. It alternately swelled and grew thin as its mouth-end craned for food.

  What to do now? he asked himself. He pulled himself out to the edge of the cell and looked down. The height was dizzying and it felt as if his insides were pouring out of him. Up above, the wasps were tearing into the spider’s blood-rich abdomen and were lapping up its green jelly.

  One
wasp was already regurgitating spider blood to the maggots. The wasp flew back to refill her mouth, then targeted the cell where Anand was hiding. He backed away, knowing the wasp could pluck him out with her claw. Instead, her antenna probed the cell and brushed Anand’s head. His pounding heart threatened to burst from his chest. The wasp paused a moment, cocked her head at Anand. Her mandibles parted and her mouth opened to reveal spider blood. She expected him to eat. I have their kin-scent, he thought. She thinks I’m a maggot!

  To test his assumption, Anand popped out of his cell. The wasps were crawling all around. One came near him, antennated his body, crawled over him. Anand looked up at its massive body and realized he could pull himself on top of these creatures. He had no choice, no other way out, but to get on top of a dreaded night wasp!

  Anand grabbed one by its claw, and then climbed its leg hairs toward the thorax. He slid over her and then crawled onto her head. Between her antennae was an indentation, a natural saddle like those of the blue-mottled flyers. Anand knelt in it and grabbed the wasp’s thick antennae with his hands.

  The wasp did not respond to his prodding for he had no pilot-scents. Anand looked at a bit of spider blood on his chest and rubbed it on his hands. He pressed his palms to the tips of the antennae and the wasp buzzed its wings. When he pressed harder at the center, the wasp flew off.

  Anand thrilled to the sudden flight. The wind blew cold on his skin, but it felt like freedom itself. The wasp did not jerk or skid on the currents, as locusts did. She had a gorgeous fluidity in her flying, a combination of hovering and soaring.

  As Anand probed the antennae for different responses, he realized its receptors were much like those of the hunter ants. He slapped its head to slow it, and when he stood and flared out the antennae, the wasp made a gentle spiral downwards.

  The night wasp did not abruptly drop and clutch at whatever plant lay below it, but hovered first, negotiated its landing, and set down on all its claws. Anand slid off its head and fell to the ground. The wasp stood quietly, waiting, and then crawled after Anand as he walked away. Thinking he was safe, she suddenly lunged, knocked him down, and he panicked. He turned to see the wasp with her mandibles open but her antennae were drooping as she bowed to nuzzle him.

  Anand collapsed in relief. He pulled himself up from some jagged sand grains, then laughed as the wasp pivoted around him. May as well fly to Hulkren, he thought, and climbed back on to her thorax. The wasp resumed flight, heading back for her nest, but Anand prodded her antennae until she turned south. Throughout the night they flew over terrain that would have taken days on foot. As the moon was sinking, the weeds below Anand grew sparse and gave way to patches of sand.

  At last, he saw a silvery sliver on the horizon. As they flew closer, the Great Brackish Lake spread before him. The water was like a vast and glittering mirror where Moon admired Her own image before She slipped to Her bed below the horizon.

  Anand knew he should not approach the lake on the back of a night wasp. If there were other defectors waiting on shore to join the Hulkrites, it would bring him far too much attention. He coaxed the wasp to spiral over a thicket of low-lying mehta plants which thrived on sand. These had tall stalks with ugly brown flowers that stank like human corpses to attract flies.

  He dismounted and trod softly through the leaves since their undersides were speckled with mites and could hide larger predators. The wasp was still crawling after Anand, tending him. The plants thinned out to reveal a great plain, empty and made more ominous by the dark. Anand’s legs wobbled with fatigue. After cutting a broad leaf from a mehta, he examined it for mites, then made a slit at its end. Inserting the leaf’s stem into the slit, Anand made a tent and weighed down its edges with larger sand grains.

  Inside the tent he lifted and arranged the sand until the floor was somewhat flat enough to lie on. Without a blanket, he curled himself into a ball and dreamt of ghosts again. Streams of ghosts screamed as they floated back and forth from the Sand to the Spirit World, unhappy to be in either place. The wasp waited outside the tent, occasionally nudging it. When the sun appeared, she crawled under a broad mehta leaf and hung upside down to sleep until darkness returned.

  Harsh sunlight woke Anand. He left the tent and looked at the arid expanse ahead and saw distant stands of devastated bortshu that were broken, leafless, and gray. Many of the trees had become jagged stumps or logs turning to powder. Farther south there were no stumps at all. This was the Dustlands and all that was left in it were abandoned mounds, trailing back over centuries of Slopeish migrations. Before the sun could take it, he licked the dew on his leaf tent.

  Anand took the first step to the Great Brackish Lake. A few times the lake appeared before him, blue and shimmering, but when he ran to it, it was a dream that disappeared. The grains under his feet grew large and rough and pierced the soles of his boots. A gray dust blew over the sands. He filled his mind with images of Daveena and sang her name in every tune he could remember. She was there somewhere in the south, waiting for him, singing his name in all the tunes she knew.

  The sand yielded to layers of dried and cracked mud. Sometimes Anand fell through the delicate pieces and coughed on clouds of powder. At last he reached the water’s edge where he found other men who were silent at his approach. They looked at Anand in disappointment, wishing he were a Hulkrite bringing food and potable water.

  Anand went to the dark yellow water. He touched it with the tip of his fingers, tasted it, and found it was indeed quite bitter. In the distance were great water striders. The insects’ elongated bodies and thread-like legs allowed them to glide on the lake. Anand swam towards them, hoping to tear the limb from one and suck at the blood within, but as soon as he drew near, they slipped away in a speedy blur.

  The water striders converged at a distance from him, a skittish audience. While in the water, he reached in his pouch for the tubular jar bound in beeswax. This he hid in his most personal place. As he waded out of the water he saw some of the other men on shore were Slopeites, but a few of them were Seed Eaters. Two men were of the Carpenter people and fifteen others were from unknown eastern and western tribes. Anand gasped when a young man with a Slopeish face walked towards him. He looked strikingly like Pleckoo before his nose was taken from his face. His hair was tied behind his neck to reveal intact earlobes that showed he was low caste, but not an outcaste.

  “I’m Aggle,” he said. “From Culzhwitty. Do you have any water?”

  “No,” said Anand. He was about to give his name, then hesitated. “How long have you waited?” he asked with a Dranverish accent.

  “Two days,” rasped the Slopeite. “We can’t capture much dew here. Too few plants. One of us has already died. He would not wait and drank the lake’s poison.” Aggle pointed to a corpse. Anand looked at the others, who were weak with thirst, and knew that sweet, clear water was the only thing on their minds. He looked out at the water striders, their forelegs crouched before them, waiting to strike at something. Anand figured their prey must be wriggle worms or something that lived under water. He got an idea and reached for his dagger.

  Holding his breath, Anand swam just under the water’s surface, his face up, with his dagger’s dull edge clutched in his teeth. He could see little through the cloudy water, but just as he was dying for breath, a dark blur came over him and the sharp claws of a strider’s legs clasped his chest. He was jerked up from the water and brought to the strider’s mouth. Anand took his dagger and smashed it between the strider’s eyes. He felt his fist burst through the chitin of the insect’s head. With its claws hooked into his sides, the strider raced and spun with Anand over the water as he fought to mount its head. Anand screamed in pain as the claws dug into his ribs. Pulling himself higher, he reached his arm back and smashed the knife again, this time crushing the insect’s brain.

  The striders legs stilled, but it continued to float, pushed into an idle twirl by a breeze. Anand yanked the claws out of his bleeding sides and dropped to the water. He gr
abbed the insect’s corpse by its leg and swam with it to shore.

  “Help me bring it in,” he shouted. The men from the Slope who understood his words jumped into the lake. They dragged the insect’s corpse onto the sand where it was rolled onto its back. After Anand rubbed mud on his wounds, he used his dagger to split open the abdomen. Inside its shell was sweet and watery lymph that would quench the men’s thirsts and fill their stomachs.

  After Anand recovered, he looked about at the men to see that they were staring at him. Their eyes were wide and unblinking. These men had become his followers.

  “Let’s go farther south,” he said and they followed. They trudged and trudged and saw nothing on the horizon. How much longer before they were approached by the Hulkrites, if ever? They kept on.

  Finally in the distance, the men saw what might be an ant mound glimmering under a coat of shellac. Just as they turned towards this delicate vision, they heard the faint splashing of something speeding over the water. Anand turned to see a great pack of water striders whose size and number were astonishing. Their legs pumped invisibly fast and they would be at the shore in moments.

  “The striders want revenge!” shouted one of the Slopeites, a one-eyed man who looked in fearful accusation at Anand. “Run!”

  “Let them come and get me,” said Anand. “They won’t step on shore.”

  Anand knew the striders could not run on land, that their legs were designed for water. Aggle and the other recruits looked in his face, borrowed his resolve and stood as firmly as he. Only the one-eyed Slopeite ran away.

  When the monstrous water striders reached the shore, the recruits looked up to see Hulkrites riding high atop them. The warriors dived from their mounts and waded to shore, their heavy swords before them, grunting in a foreign language. Anand tried not to smile. He knew he should look afraid at their show of might. Since he was not fearful, he dropped his gaze and fell to his knees as the Hulkrites approached.