A Chimerical Hope

“It’s all under control,” Yanseno says, his harness lifted off him with a single swipe of his aura‍-​wreathed tarsus. It drops to the smoked conk platform beneath them, forgotten. “I sensed Makuja moving, chi‍-​nrv burn suggestive of active bloodletting. Mending, or her myxokora are out. I signaled Boleheva to tail her.”

“Is she okay?” Ooliri asks. “Why not tell her to help?”

“Your girl’s agitated. Don’t trust that brute to handle a sensitive situation, not when it’s her fault.” Yanseno glances at the gray nymph. “I get the impression she isn’t the most stable of your group, is she?”

He thinks of Awelah. “Well, it’s more…”

“Of a competition? Yeah, I could see that.” Yanseno shifts his eyes to the distance as he slips a raptorial into his trenchcoat. A moment later, he’s palming a dark ball. Ooliri wants to call the material glass‍ ‍—‍ it has all the trappings of vague translucency, the only problem is the images suggested in refraction were unlike anything actually present. A dark plain without trees, without clouds in the sky, the scape dotted with twisted scleritomes. Ooliri doesn’t even need to ask before the bane is explaining, “Sensor ball. Easier, cheaper than doing it with endowments.”

“Could I use it?”

“Nope.”

“Erm, is that no as in you won’t let me, or no as in it wouldn’t work?”

“Both. Don’t want to clean your umbra sig off the glass, and you don’t have the control needed to sense much of anything, nor the training to understand what you could sense.” A chill comes, underscoring the words, and the glass darkens. Yanseno looks out in the direction of the tower.

Fringing the town is foliage whose consistency of height and spacing suggest they were planted. The expanse is like a second wall around the town. Yanseno peers into it. Paths aside from the big main road out of town were winding affairs cutting through the arboreals‍ ‍—‍ ants were fond of mazes and he supposed this is another. Meant he couldn’t see Boleheva or the kid coming through. But he’s a sensor. He waves to the boy. “Let’s go face the mess coming this way.”

Ooliri’s about to ask what’s wrong, but as the sensor is stepping directly over the fence (rather than going through the gate), an ant clad in dark blue and green rags is scuttling up. Little feet kick gravel out of the way as the ant approaches. That one pokes Yanseno with an antennae. There’s a high‍-​pitched stridulation. One leg taps a sheet held by mandibles.

“Not now.”

Ooliri comes up behind him to give the ant a look. Seeing Ooliri, this one turns and presents the sheet. Slips of cloth are pinned to it and strings are drawn between the clothes. Each of the tag‍-​like bits of cloth has a word sown onto it. As Ooliri peers, an antenna taps on a word, and then rides a string to another tag, taps that, and so forth. This one is rubbing legs against its gaster all the while, stridulation pitched higher than a diamantid voice‍ ‍—‍ and after a moment, Ooliri realizes it sounds almost like words. So different from a mantis’s palps, the ant must be unable to pronounce most words of Panthecan, only simple articles. The words on the cloth are all nouns, and parsing them together with the chirps, Ooliri realizes it’s communicating, as simple and odd as the implied sentence is.

“Hi! [Vesperbane] has [attention] for [[pleading]]?” It taps vesperbane one, the other antennae pointing at Yanseno. Attention is tapped twice, and it repeatedly taps pleading as Ooliri stares.

“I think he’s busy right now. He might be able to speak with you soon?”

This one continues fiddling with the strings as Ooliri speaks, rearranging the tags with a speed he can’t quite follow. Ants have awful eyes, he recalls, so he isn’t sure how they could use the tags if they could even see the sheet in front of them, which they can’t. Unless‍ ‍—‍ those words are sown onto the fabric. Is it feeling the bumps and telling the words apart like that? While Ooliri muses, a new sentence is readying, and interpolated with more chirps.

“Buh, buh. [Inquiry] of [smallness] with [promptitude].”

A quick and simple question? “Our friend might be hurt. I think he’s worried about that right now.”

“Hmp. [Mirror] of [colony].”

What? Mirror… the same? Did colony mean ‘us’? “Your friends might be hurt?” Ooliri asks, even as it clicks. “Oh.” He glances to Quessa, the green nymph with antennae drooping and a growing frown. “Do you think they’re…”

“That one expected an arrival?” Quessa asks, looking at the blue‍-​ragged ant rather than Ooliri.

“Uu. [Emptiness] of [knowledge] as [[delivery]] to [fullness] of [knowledge] as [[returning]]. Not [returning]. So [emptiness] as [return]. So [attention] for [scouting] and [foraging] of those ones who [return].”

Before Ooliri can tease out what that means, Yanseno calls.

“She’s here.”

Even without the sensor to confirm it, the energy of the ants crowding and passing the gates changes. The first to react are the ants waiting on top of the wall, bigger bugs tightly clad in black, with bulky mandibles distinct even from this distance. They stand on four legs, antennae stretched out into the sky, and, with a twitch as if catching a scent, drop to sixes and move. Meanwhile, the ephemeral flow of ants in lines up and down the trails slows, changes direction. Grouped in threes and fours, those who carrying bags or carted wheelbarrows stop and look around, while the ants with empty backs don’t dawdle, gathering into a massed crowd.

A wall‍-​mounted ant has traversed to a wider platform and, half obscured by a railing, it takes a mallet and strikes it twice against a small gong. The sound carries farther than their stridulation would, yet near enough only those outside the gate clearly hear.

Around them, they can see the ants who had pushed barrows reach into them, and retrieve farm tools, passing them around. Big, black mandibles lift the tools as improvised weapons.

At first, Boleheva’s acrobatics had been impressive. The staid banes of the Asetari clan were much more inclined to walk at speeds that could only be called a procession, and even in duels, it played out so much more like a game of sworder draughts. Awelah grits her teeth as the thought of her clan leads to its inevitable end point. But she wouldn’t cowardly deter her thoughts to spare herself. She wouldn’t forget this pain.

“Holdin’ on real tight there, aintcha?”

Awelah only grunted.

At first, Boleheva’s acrobatics had been impressive. But with every creek or pit leapt across, every metataxite kicked off of, Awelah had to hold on tighter to not fly off. She was a vesperbane now‍ ‍—‍ why force her to clutch tight like a child to their mommy? (Though if Awelah were still that child, would she ever let go?)

When the acrobatics stop and Awelah need no longer cling, her first thought is that she wants to keep going.

“Why did we stop?” She doesn’t see Makuja anywhere near her.

“Looks like someone needs our help. Lift yer eyes.”

Awelah sees it, then, up in one of the ferns. An ant clutches its topmost fronds, bending them toward the ground yet still hanging meters above it. Some of the branching stalks look to have slipped in between loops and ribbons of cloth that all spinners wore, holding it there. The ant is wriggling a bit now, having seen them. They hear dissonant chirps‍ ‍—‍ distress.

“I got ya, little one.” Boleheva pick Awelah up and sits her down‍ ‍—‍ with some difficulty, as Awelah twists and pushes away her tarsi.

“We don’t have time for this,” the nymph says.

“Shouldn’t take more than a wee minute. Longer if ye argue.”

“Makuja might be hurt. This ant looks fine.” Awelah looks around, then glances for prints in the mud. “It has friends in the area, doesn’t it? It’d have too. Ants are a hive race.”

“Think a bit before you speak, eh? We saw where your girl fell. Ain’t there‍ ‍—‍ means she must’ve gotten up and moved. Can’t be too hurt, and this anty might have seen her. Now quiet.”

As she gets closer, grabbing hold of the fern, a pronounced size difference is highlighted‍ ‍—‍ the ranger’s foreleg is longer than the ant, and only a bit thinner. Jostling the fern a little, the yellow bane looks the entrapping plant up and down.

“Hold tight a moment, friend. I’ll get ye right down.”

Awelah hears a bit of fern stalk crushing as her grip tightens, and her other foreleg is drawn back. Boleheva exhales, and the foreleg shoots forward, slamming into the fern below her grip. The thing shatters, hard green splintering and brown oozing out. The ant cries out, jolting, as Boleheva lifts the whole giant fern with her other foreleg, bearing the weight just a moment before the other foreleg turns it to a two tarsi grip. Steadied now, Boleheva carefully rotates the severed stalk, so that the ant is right side up, and lowers it to the ground.

“There ye are, right as ye wish. Before you go, can I ask how ye got like this?” Simultaneous with speaking, Boleheva is waving at the pale nymph, dactyls curling to beckon her forward.

The ant chirps slowly, eyes downcast. “Wugh. [Bat‍-​bug : red, black] who [screams] had [threat] and [command]. Urm. This one who [hides] in [fern : big] has [expense]. The ones who [read] have now [duration : longer] for [arrival : later].”

“You make much of that, girl? Don’t know much formic myself‍ ‍—‍ Ruby usually handles things with the locals.”

Awelah’s family’d had a few spinners; they’d woven their robes. She didn’t know them well‍ ‍—‍ hard to talk to spinners if you can’t read‍ ‍—‍ if you couldn’t read for years after than your agemates could. When older, she had dealt with them formally, at the point where playing with the servants would only lead her to long evenings in the sitting room with father. (Awelah waits for the stab of loss, and this time it does not come.)

To the imago, Awelah only clicks her mandibles, palps curved in a downward frown as she scrapes, “This is a distraction. It’s here to waste our time.”

Boleheva glances between the ant and the fern. “Threatening my people, tossing them up in ferns.” Vesperbane eyes could get so much darker than laymants. “Just as I said, there best be a damn good reason behind your behavior.”

Awelah meets that hard gaze, and wonders what in the gulfs Makuja is doing.

“While I’m normally not one for heroics,” Yanseno starts, “you’re making that a difficult habit to keep. Haven’t even stepped into town yet and you’ve already got a knife to innocent bug’s throat.”

The maverick had met her, stopped her right where the path to Wisterun opens up. She says, “Ants don’t speak fluent Panthecan. Those I encountered mistook me for some danger, made an intimidation display. If I was attacked, it would not end well for them, so I ensured they could not make that mistake.”

Yanseno glances to the knife she holds to the ant’s throat‍ ‍—‍ something one might mistake for danger‍ ‍—‍ and opts not to comment. Instead, “Can’t blame them, myself. Not when you stink of killer fear. They were made to be scared for their life.”

Red antennae fold at that, fluff furrowing. The kid hadn’t realized it? She says, “Nevertheless, faced with the choice to entertain their threats or not, I chose the option that gave us both what we wanted quickest.”

“How selfless,” Yanseno mutters. “It was pointlessly rash. Because you were scared too, weren’t you? Fallen from a height that might’ve killed a laymant, might’ve crippled your friends, you survived, but it shook you up, didn’t it? Hate that it happened, but I need you calm.” Not waiting for a response. Yanseno chooses to make a tarsign, for all that he has control enough to not need it. ⸢Nouform: Calming Draft!⸥

Makuja’s antennae splay out. Her grip on the knife and the ant slack enough for the ant to wriggle free. The ant walks up to one of this one’s companion, who wraps two legs around that one in a hug.

As Makuja’s myxokora unknit and drain back into her body cavity, she asks. “What was that?”

“Simple nouspell. Easy way to get someone calm fast.”

“You manipulated my mind?”

“Does a splash of cool water manipulate your mind? Not much more to it. I could show you the spell, pretty low level stuff.”

A momentary palp‍-​tap‍ ‍—‍ she’s considering it‍ ‍—‍ but she shakes her head. “A lethal accident which may have been an attempt to kill, and you’re forcing me calm? I will not be distracted from this.” What went unspoken‍ ‍—‍ the kid wasn’t subtle enough to leave it unimplied‍ ‍—‍ was that this action is just what an assassin covering their tracks would go for. Mighty suspicious, ha.

Yanseno says, “Sure. I’m not stranger to paranoia myself‍ ‍—‍ it’s a survival skill in this business. Don’t mistake my cool head for a cocky dismissal of the possibility. This could have been deliberate‍ ‍—‍ there could be killers in every shadow, and sometimes there are. But it’s weak evidence for a faint hypothesis. It’s about proportion, kid. Don’t let mere bad luck get under your skin like this.”

“Mere bad luck,” she said it as if, after hearing the words, she needed to spit them back out.

“Who’d need that much setup to take out a bug no one will miss? Course it was bad luck‍ ‍—‍ the incompetent cause more trouble that the malicious. Boleheva doesn’t use the zipline, and that bane might get nothing done if she didn’t have the wardens holding her to it. Nobody but her pets do inspection of ranger equipment around here. If this is what’s got your suspicion hackle’d up, I wouldn’t want to see you glimpse a scarecrow at night.”

“The hypothesis is more than faint.” First Vilja attacking her and only her, and now this? Perhaps this is how the Asetari feels. Makuja glances to the thickening crowd of ants as thoughts work through her antennae.

Yanseno listens to the unspoken. “Don’t want to share what you’re thinking in front of a crowd?” he asks. “Maybe you know something I don’t; save it for later. Now, I can see Bole getting here. She’s gonna be pissed when she finds out what you did. I’ll go smooth things over with her. Keep your knives in your sheaths while I do that?”

Yanseno turns from Makuja, flicking his attention down to his sensor ball. The end of the conversation is punctuated by a wave passing over the ants that surround them.

Outside of Wisterun spawls a kind of lot, a flatten expanse of packed dirt and gravel, with workcarts and barrows parked by the wall. The ants present aren’t enough to fill the lot by any stretch‍ ‍—‍ perhaps a dozen, pressed closely enough together they take up even less space. Tightening mandible‍-​grips on their improvised farming tools, the ants press closer to Makuja.

Yanseno glances up from his black orb. “Unless I need to stop a lynching first?”

The answer comes from one of the bigger ants. This one’s word‍-​sheet is much smaller, the antennae‍-​pointing less graceful. The chirps are deeper as it conveys, “Aa! [[Threat]] to [colony] from [bat‍-​bug] who [stabs].”

Another, smaller ant behind that one supplements: “[Disjunction] of these ones will [attack] or the one who [breathes : black] will [attack].”

The big ant, again, underscores it with, “[Colony] will have [defense]. Aa!”

The chorus of ‘aa!’ is repeated by other ants, becoming a mantra.

The burgundy bane lifts a foretarsus to rest on his head. But he doesn’t need to say anything.

“Wait!” high‍-​pitched mantid voice comes from behind him‍ ‍—‍ Ooliri and Quessa are trotting forth from the smoked conk platform. Ooliri has his notebook out, held in one tarsus. “This is a misunderstanding.”

(As he scans the crowd for an opening to slip through, the sensor mutters, “Wouldn’t that require an attempt to understand?”)

Quessa takes the lead, mellow voice quiet but insistent. “Please don’t attack our guest. She is our ally, and yours!”

“Feh!” a small ant says, pulling a new tag out from a fold of cloth. “No one who [threatens] in [alliance].”

Quessa looks around. “Who was the one who came to us earlier?”

“You called him the One Who Bites Water, I think?”

“Right.” She scans the crowd once more, and picks out the one clad in blue and green. “You! You had something you wanted to ask?”

“An expected arrival,” Ooliri provides, “messengers, you were waiting on them, weren’t you?”

“[Affirmative].” A head bobbing slowly, as if in immitation of mantid expression.

“They’re dead,” Yanseno puts it simplest of all. “Got ate up by a direanter in the old farms.”

“But it’s dead now! We killed it!” The green nymph points at Makuja. “She killed it. If not her, we would have never been lead to it. If not for her, it wouldn’t have been weakened and distracted enough for us to land the final blow.”

(Another quiet comment from Yanseno: “Laying it on a little thick there, ha.”)

“Most importantly,” Quessa continues, raising her foretarsi, bringing them together, “if not her, I wouldn’t have been able to read some of the ants message‍ ‍—‍ and store it with one of my teacher’s technique! I can tell you of what the ant wished to say! But his rank of the spell can only store about a page of text, I’m sorry, I saved what I could.”

She had been making tarsigns‍ ‍—‍ now she completes them. For release, she brings a finger to her head, and presses it between her ocelli. ⸢Nouform: Poet’s Recital!⸥

“Ooliri, if you’d hand me the sheet?”

A page torn from his notebook falls into her heads, and a bit of charcoal.

She begins writing, and as she writes, she says, “I will tell you‍ ‍—‍ but only if you stand down, and thank our guest for what she’s done for you.”

The biggest ants who had formed the frontlines of the mob glance to the smaller ants behind them. The ants chirp like a choir of birds, looking among those beside them, weaving and unfurling the threads of their head‍-​clothes and rubbing antennae against the cloths of others.

“Thank her? For this crock of spidershit?” With that exclamation, they knew: Boleheva, at last, had arrived.

(One ant among the crowd reacts to this, the one called Bites Water looks to the ranger, the look becoming a stare as this one hisses faintly.)

Yanseno only smirked, as if something had come together. Addressing the ants, he says, “If it makes your decision any easier, act as though Makuja is in our custody already. Your ranger can attest. It’s his jurisdiction, but if the Entcreek colony has objections… I suppose you’ll be fine explaining this intervention to the Stewartry?”

The ants are quiet now and black eyes glance dartingly at each other, elbowed antennae drawing back in apprehension. The ant in blue and green takes this moment to step forward. This one scuttles up to Quessa, poking her with an antenna. “Baa, this one who [remembers] has [message] for [[pleading]]?”

“Of course!” Quessa smiles, and then it falters a moment after. “I… may need to cast the spell again. It… may have slipped from my mind.”

As the ants gather around Quessa, and Yanseno is thus at last freed to continue over to Boleheva, Makuja instead glances to the one mantis who hasn’t spoken. The Asetari, coming up behind the yellow imago. Makuja finds the pale nymph is already staring at her.

Yanseno points at Awelah and gestures for her to scram. She frowns, says something unheard from this distance, but the imago only repeats the gesture. Makuja’s approaching, beckoning her teammate over.

“Asetari.”

“No‍-​name. Why did you do all this? Are you,” she stops, and then continues, “did you get hurt again?”

“I needed to do something. I’m fine. That’s not important. What is important is,” Makuja stops, and glances around before starting to walk around the perimeter of the lot. She continues, “that we can speak with some privacy.”

Awelah lifts her labrum. “What do you want?”

“My fall‍ ‍—‍ I still don’t know if it was an accident.”

“You did it on purpose?”

Makuja lifts her own labrum. “Boleheva, or Yanseno, could be conspiring to kill me. My fall makes it more likely. What do you think? You were with Boleheva‍ ‍—‍ did you notice anything?”

“Boleheva was surprised, concerned. Nothing about her suggested wanting to kill, let alone being capable of hiding it.” She clicks her mandibles as punctuation.

“But it was her harness.”

“Why use the harnesses, though? Boleheva could kill you in one punch.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. It’s a poor choice of weapon‍ ‍—‍ it did not work. What constraints would birth that approach? My theory is only one of them wanted to kill me. The benefit of the harness is that it looks like an accident.”

“Probably because it is.”

“Do you think we’ll survive assuming the best? I wish to be prepared, and need only know if you’ve seen a thing I haven’t.”

Awelah bites a palp. Then, “I have.”

Makuja frowns, pausing as if worrying Awelah would reiterate her disbelief. “Tell me.”

“You’re too much of a killer.”

The red nymph lifts one antennae.

“Your training, your thinking, it’s fit for assassination, not a fight. You try to kill bugs with one sudden move. So you think this was that one careful move, aiming for the heart. You assume it failed. But in a fight, you’ll throw punches you don’t expect to land, and certainly couldn’t end the fight. You jab to probe the defenses, to set up a better attack.”

Makuja glances at the pair of vesperbane imagos, having their own private conversation.

“Just… Don’t just pick apart the failure. If I thought this was enemy action… Figure out what opening you gave them, and what follow up is coming next. That is, if you aren’t just punching a sandbag.” Awelah starts to turn away, but reverses to add: “Thing I’d wonder first… why target you? I’m the one with teams hired to kill me.”

That hadn’t been their mission parameters. But Makuja doesn’t correct her. “Recall what their first impression was, from us fighting the anteater.”

“Oh,” Awelah says. “So they’d think you’re the strong one.”

“It’s not inaccurate, is it?”

Awelah turns around fully this time. “I see.” She tooks a step back, then took quick steps toward the two imagos. They follow after Quessa and Ooliri had gone to the gates, to ask the ants to please open, and Awelah catches up.

Makuja walks forth alone as they finally approach Wisterun.