The Prophet of the Termite God by Clark Thomas Carlton

Author:Clark Thomas Carlton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

Mound Shishto

Anand felt arrowheads hitting his armor and falling away as he and the pilot scrambled up the loose sand and ant droppings that tumbled out of the wall. The pilot gasped in pain and lost his footing. Anand turned to see an arrow had pierced the man’s calf. Both were coughing from the toxic spray of the harvester ants, which stabbed into their lungs with its tiny needles. Their eyes flooded with tears, and Anand felt as if a burr was stuck in his throat.

The pilot’s leg gave out and he slid down the wall’s rough slope and lodged behind the locust’s corpse. Anand dropped to the locust, and using it as a barrier, he raised his blowgun above it and targeted the attackers. His darts landed in the opened mouth of one bowman and the cheeks and chins of others. They went into spasms, violently shaking and losing control of their ants. Anand knew more soldiers on brown ants would be racing up to replace them.

“Can you climb?” Anand shouted to the pilot.

“We have to,” he said. The two resumed painful ascents up the crumbling wall, when the pilot reached for a sand grain that dislodged and he slid again. A new barrage of arrows sailed towards them. One whizzed past Anand’s ear and broke in the wall. The pilot screamed when an arrow pierced his hand. Anand grabbed the pilot by his wrist and pulled them up, using his pain-wracked legs when an arrow grazed Anand’s neck and lodged between his helmet strap. He raised his heel on a shelf of quartz, which snapped. The two men slid again.

A shadow was over Anand when he realized a mass of yellow ants was crawling down the wall. Ten, twenty, and then thirty leaf-cutters were pouring over his body, some stepping on his face with their scratchy claws. The leaf-cutters had raced into battle, stirred by the odors of harvester ants. Immune to the harvesters’ toxins, the leaf-cutters reached their enemy and sheared away their antennae and clipped off their legs to leave them immobile. The harvester ants attacked the leaf-cutters by clamping on to their stout abdomens to insert their stingers, but the leaf-cutters were overwhelming. Arriving Seed Eater bowmen jumped from their embattled ants. Some men were caught by the quicker leaf-cutters and screamed when they were made limbless. They were silenced when they became headless.

More leaf-cutters crawled over the wall as a stream of harvester ants wove out of the barley grass to confront them. Anand struggled to flatten himself and cover his face when he heard voices and realized Bee-Jorite sentries had arrived on antback. “Down here! We are Bee-Jorites!” Anand shouted. Men wearing breathing filters and quartz goggles dropped from their saddles and threw down rope loops to pull him and the pilot up to safety. As they were lifted up, more of the wall crumbled beneath them and left an even larger rupture. Once on the Bee-Jorite side, Anand and the pilot were carried to the underside of a watchtower, where they were set on mattresses of bound grass.

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