Robert Hughes - The Power and the Prophet

Clawsps were small insects with shiny, purple bodies with a singleminded obsession for sugar. They took it wherever they could find it, from ripening fruits to the tables of kings. With it they built the sparkling castles of crystallized sugar that decorated the eaves of most human dwellings. Clawsps were docile creatures as a rule. Whenever they became alarmed, however, their violet armor exuded a stinking chemical that produced very nasty burns. Most mothers tolerated clawsps; while they could empty a sugar dish in a week, they never took it further than the roof outside the door. Once the dish was empty it was easy enough to put on a pair of gloves and break off a tower of the constantly growing clawsp castle to grind back again into granules. Meanwhile, the little buzzing guards kept childish fingers out of the sweets. The relationship had always proved of mutual benefit to human and clawsp alike. It meant, however, that Terril the twin-killer had a standing garrison in every house in the land. His only difficulty lay in mobilizing this vast army. The process was loathsome.

Each castle was an autonomous unit. Clawsps did not speak, but they did communicate through the sense of smell. That chemical that proved so painful to human fingers had a pungent odor, that transmitted the concept of war. There was a variety of other scents as well, each with its own meaning. As a sugar-clawsp grew older, the odor it exuded became more powerful, until by shifts of scent it could dominate the younger clawsps round it. Clawsp castles were therefore ruled by elders. All an older clawsp needed to do to create a stir or arouse controversy was to make a stink.

No mere clawsp, however, could make a stink like Terril. Each time he buzzed into the clear hallways of a new crystal castle, he projected a scent more powerful than that of all the elders put together. In moments, he could raise the band to frenzy, for his odor communicated far more than simply war. In the small nerve centers of the buzzing bugs, it birthed the concept of godhood. Inflamed and inspired, the insects would swarm from the castle like miniature maenads, searching for a victim on which to vent their rage. A single clawsp was merely a nuisance. However, a thousand sugar-clawsps clustered upon every exposed part of a human body brought about a hideously painful death. Terril needed only to guide his mindless devotees to his intended target and make a single angry pass. Then he could glide to the side and watch as his victim went down beneath a glistening purple wave.

It was a most effective power—by far the most useful his peculiar altershape had gifted him with. But he loathed it. His stomach soured every time he had to enter a new castle. While his body glistened with the same purple oiliness as the shells of these insects, he saw them still with human eyes. The scent that summoned them to war choked his human sensibilities. The cacophonous buzzing of wings in motion assaulted his mind. But worst of all was the suffocation of their adulation, as slimy, stinking insects struggled to rub their armor-plated bodies across his.

Just thinking about it made Terril retch. It took powerful motivation to force him down those crystalline hallways. But Terril was powerfully motivated. Although he was not the kind of man who could admit such to himself, Flayh terrified him.

Terril had simply ignored the first invitation to the High Fortress. Flayh had then summoned him to court, the summons bearing the king’s own seal. Terril had dismissed it with a characteristically haughty reply.

Then one day, while in his altershape, he felt the net close around him—invisible, yes, but far more effective than a web of woven steel. It had irresistibly drawn him to Ngandib, to the High Fortress, up a narrow, fetid spiral staircase into a darkened chamber. There it held him fast as Flayh lectured him intermittently on manners. Between lectures, Terril had experienced physical and psychical miseries unparalleled in his existence. He was known throughout the Mar as an evil man for the cold-hearted murder of his identical twin. But when at last Flayh freed him from that tower, Terril had a new appreciation of just what evil was. Flayh was intensely evil. And the threat of one day finding himself locked in that tower again was motivation enough to drive him into a thousand clawsp castles and more.

He was driven by more than just fear. Greed was an old comrade that had traveled with him ever since he found his altershape and left the cow pens of Carlog behind him. Genii had left with him, though at that time Terril’s brother had yet to discover his powers. They’d set out to make their fortune from Terril’s shaping and had tried to build a monopoly on sugar. Then Gerril had found his own altershape—as well as his conscience. For the first time, Terril saw something other than a mirror image when he looked at his brother, and the sight humiliated him. While Terril was a stinking, stinging insect, Gerril was a seven-point stag.

War had come—that uneven war when Pelmen stood alone

against six other wizards and prevailed. He would not have done so, perhaps, had the stalwart stag not aided him, and Pelmen’s victory had cost Terril a treasure. He’d plotted his brother’s death from that day.

One winter he’d tricked his brother into the forest and into his altershape. A lonely hunter had sent the shaft through Genii’s neck, but it was Terril who’d guided the huntsman to the quarry. As Gerril had collapsed upon the snow, changing shape a final time as he drew his dying breath, his treacherous twin had taken to the wing, bearing with him a new nickname: the twin-killer. The moniker was a gift from Terril’s comrade, greed. Greed drove him. And laced among the threats, Flayh had spun marvelous pictures of Terril seated upon the golden throne of Chaomonous.

But it was more than just fear and greed that drove him northward toward Bronwynn’s capital. Deep in his soul, he nurtured a quiet longing for a new vengeance. The death of his brother in that frozen forest had freed him, at last, from a lifelong shackle. He prized that freedom. He would not submit easily to the yoke of Flayh. He would sit on the golden throne, yes, but not at the behest of any upstart merchant, regardless of how powerful. When the time was ripe, he would act. There were, after all, clawsps in the High Fortress as well.

Until that time came, however, it made sense for Terril to impress Flayh with his loyalty. This could be easily done. Flayh had given him explicit instructions regarding a merchant he wanted murdered, and Terril would happily oblige. As he crossed the bridge into the city of Chaomonous, he spied a petty peddler moving slowly through the streets.

“My friend!” Terril called. “Can you direct me to the castle of Uda in your fair city?”

The man turned to regard Terril with undisguised contempt. “You sound foreign. You’re a merchant, aren’t you?”

“Not I.” Terril chuckled. “But I do have some business with one. Do you know the way?”

The man raised an eyebrow in disdain, then pointed forward. “You’re going straight toward it. The large building on the right, just before you cross the bridge to the palace isle. It’s no castle, though.”

“Thank you, friend.” Terril waved as he rode on. “You’ve been a great help.” He heard the city dweller snort as he rode

past and smiled maliciously. There would be time, he thought to himself.

Terril could hardly miss the house. It was draped with red and purple bunting, the colors of Uda, and was easily the grandest dwelling on this very grand avenue. Terril urged his horse into an alley, then changed his form. A moment later he buzzed into one of the open windows of Uda’s townhouse in Chaomonous.

It took only a few moments of observation to identify the man named Jagd. From a corner of the ceiling, Terril watched as the little merchant moved around the main office, snapping orders, signing documents, and browbeating underlings. Terril suddenly realized that this Jagd was very much like Flayh. Both men were small in stature. Both were iron-willed, tight-fisted merchant lords, using and discarding people without a thought. Terril decided he could take pleasure in settling this score. While his minions bumed this Jagd into senselessness, he would imagine they were burning Flayh. Terril whizzed unnoticed out of Jagd’s open window and found a clawsp castle hanging from the eaves directly above it.