God Conqueror 3 Read online

  Chapter One

  After another two days of traveling through the desert, which involved weathering more sandstorms and constantly adjusting our pace and direction to avoid disturbing more sandworms, our caravan finally reached the town of Bjurna.

  Bjurna was a fortified town surrounded by crenellated walls built out of a stone that was pretty much the same color as desert sand. I could see people’s colorful laundry hanging out of windows, and the tops of palm trees waving in the wind.

  Beyond Bjurna, there were green grass and trees spreading across the horizon. For now, there would be no more thirst, no more heat exhaustion, and no more eerily beautiful sand dunes that all looked the same and patiently waited to swallow the bones of those who got lost.

  “How wonderful to see signs of civilization again,” Florenia said as we approached Bjurna. Despite her olive-toned complexion, she was rather sunburnt at the moment, but that didn’t hide the fact that she was just about as gorgeous as a woman could be, with the chiseled angles of her face, her sultry hazel eyes, and the lusciousness of her full mouth.

  “I don’t know, civilization seems like a pretty hit-or-miss proposition to me,” Willobee remarked from his perch atop a camel. Riding a camel was somehow, strangely, just about the only activity I had ever seen the chubby, three-foot-tall, lavender-bearded gnome perform gracefully. “I mean, sometimes in towns or villages they have honey mead and friendly strangers to play card games with. But sometimes they try to kill us.”

  “If you mean those thugs that came knocking on the door after we rescued Ilandere, don’t you remember that was after a certain gnome cheated them at cards?” Lizzy asked pointedly. Lizzy had a cute freckled human face, but the long, pointed ears, the shaggy tail, and the hind paws of a wolf. In between the edges though, her voluptuous body was all woman.

  “Well, what about Ferndale?” Willobee asked indignantly. “I didn’t cheat anyone at cards there, and a bunch of them tried to kill us! And eat us too, just to add insult to injury!”

  “But the ones that attacked us were undead,” Ilandere protested. Ilandere was a petite centaur, with the head and torso of a beautiful silvery-blonde woman and the hindquarters of a silver-dappled horse. “The plague had warped their minds. So I don’t think it’s fair to hold them accountable for their actions.”

  “People can’t improve themselves without being held accountable for their actions,” Elodette stated. Elodette, the fifth of my companions, was a muscular black centaur who was also pretty and female, but almost twice Ilandere’s size. She had cold gray eyes and brown hair that she always kept braided back and carried a massive bow and quiver of arrows that never left her side.

  Lizzy snorted. “How are you s’posed to improve someone that’s already dead that’s got nothing left inside their brain except an unstoppable urge to gnaw your face off and spread the plague to as many poor souls as they can?”

  “By removing their heads and dissolving them back into neutral particles of matter, just like we did,” Elodette replied matter-of-factly.

  The caravan members within earshot of us were starting to stare as if they weren’t sure whether we were joking or not, so I arranged the faces of all four of my bodies into what I hoped were friendly and reassuring grins.

  When the merchants of this caravan we were traveling with had first met me, there had been some who continued to believe that I was just triplets, no matter what I or my close friends said about the matter. But after I defeated the caravan’s long-term greatest enemy, the fire god Pyralis, and gained a fourth self before their very eyes by claiming the altar of his temple for my own, they had recognized the truth. That my mind was unified, but my bodies were potentially infinite, and increased in number with each victory that I won against another god.

  Whether I was myself in fact a god, the god Qaar’endoth the Unvanquished, whose temple I had been raised and trained in as a novice, was a more complicated matter. The more improbable feats I achieved, and the closer I came to accomplishing my ultimate goal of destroying the bloodthirsty god Thorvinius who had massacred my entire temple order, the more likely it seemed that I was truly a god… and the more irrelevant the question became in my mind. What I cared about was wielding godlike powers, and possessing consorts worthy of a god, and I definitely enjoyed both of those benefits.

  As we approached Bjurna, I realized that its wall was taller than it had appeared from a distance, probably close to forty feet in height. That was certainly taller than the walls of any of the villages that my friends and I had stayed the night in during our travels so far. Usually, when we approached a new town or village, we would come up with some kind of benign cover story to win entrance without attracting too many questions. It wasn’t that it was illegal exactly to be a god on a quest for bloody revenge with multiple bodies, multiple beautiful lovers, and a faithful although sometimes unscrupulous gnome servant. It’s just that it tended to make some people feel uncomfortable around you.

  Danazar, the leader of the caravan, took a completely different approach to getting past the gatekeeper. He walked right up to the peephole grinning broadly, bowed with a flourish, and said, “You don’t look a day older since the last time I saw you, Huznu. Please give my compliments to your lovely wife and daughters, I hope they too are well.”

  Then, he passed a small jar through the peephole. Only one of my selves was close enough to observe the gesture. Some of the merchants saw it too and had no reaction, as if it were a typical gesture.

  I asked Kiki, one of the caravan members who had grown closest to me and my friends over the course of our desert crossing, “Er, I assume that was a sample of the… what did Danazar call it… ‘courage, bliss, and delusions of grandeur of the powdered variety’?”

  “You assume correctly,” Kiki replied.

  The caravan derived its wealth from trading in some sort of local drug that, as I understood it, was both highly sought-after and highly illegal.

  After he finished sniffing the powdered contents of the jar and using his finger to place a daub on his tongue, the gatekeeper nodded and replied, “My wife and daughters are well indeed. And yours? The talents of your wives are renowned in Bjurna.” He gestured to someone on the inside of the wall, and the gate started to move up.

  Danazar’s otherwise useless wives, who spent most of their time being lugged around inside litters, were highly skilled in a form of erotic dancing that he had once had them demonstrate for me.

  “It is kind of you to say so, my friend,” Danazar replied with a smug smile as he motioned for the rest of the caravan to follow him into Bjurna. “You must attend their next performance.”

  “I will keep my ears open for tidings of it,” the gatekeeper said. The jar of powder had disappeared somewhere into his clothes, but unless I imagined it, there was already a faint sheen of sweat on his skin, and his pupils were somewhat dilated. The two men bowed deeply to one another, and then the caravan rolled past the gatekeeper into the streets of Bjurna.

  Both sides of the first street that we moved down were crowded with venders with colorful wares and amiable smiles, who called out to us,

  “Another successful crossing! Glad to see you back again. Come, look at the new patterns I have devised while you were away.”

  “May the desert always smile on you so. Would you care for a refreshment after your journey?”

  “Danazar and his dancing ten?” Danazar had twelve wives that I knew of, so I supposed that vender’s information must have been out of date. “It cannot be! A miracle! Just the special friends I have been waiting for! Look at the necklace I have saved for you, no other woman could wear it, but one of your dancers.”

  We hustled past them all and waved them away when they tried to shove carpets in our
faces, cups of tea in our hands, and drape jewelry over the women. Many of the caravan members, however, did recognize some of the venders, and they greeted each other by name and traded a gibe or two in passing.

  “I’m afraid you and your friends will have to part ways with us soon,” Zembo, Kiki’s partner, said to me as we turned onto the next street which was slightly quieter.

  “He means that we are heading toward the warehouse where we’ll be transferring over our wares,” Kiki explained, “and the people we deal with… don’t like to see unfamiliar faces around.”

  “Well, Vander makes friends with everyone,” Ilandere said proudly. “Even the people that are prejudiced against us at first, when they realize how kind and helpful he can be--”

  “You mean when they realize that he can kill their problems for them,” Lizzy snorted.

  “Guys, I don’t think likability is the issue here,” I said quickly. “It’s a security issue. We understand, Kiki. We’re not trying to poke our noses in your business.”

  Nothing good could come out of our getting involved in any side of Bjurna’s black market, since I had no desire to interfere with the caravan’s livelihood, and I also had no desire to harm any law enforcement officials who were just trying to do their jobs. Or, in the case of the gatekeeper, just trying to collect his illegal bribes while also getting paid for the government job that he was intentionally failing to perform. For me and my friends, Bjurna was just a stopping point on our way to Thorvinius, a place for a nice hot meal, a mug of honey mead, and soft beds to sleep in for the night.

  “I just don’t want you to run into any trouble,” Kiki said.

  I had to laugh at that. Hardly a day went by that my friends and I didn’t run into some kind of trouble, whether one of us stirred it up ourselves or it just fell into our laps, and Bjurna’s drug dealers were the least of my concerns. “Don’t worry about us, Kiki,” I said. “We can take care of ourselves. We’ll miss you all, though.”

  “You’ll have to come back and visit us then, sometime before we’re all under sand,” she said. “We’ll be right here, on one side of the desert or the other, or out in the middle of it.”

  Another of my selves was riding up in the front of the procession near Danazar. That self said to the caravan leader, “I understand that you have business to attend to now that will be easier without being accompanied by strangers.”

  “You are no longer strangers to us,” he replied. He fixed me with a soulful gaze through his long-lashed, charcoal-lined eyes. With his perfectly groomed eyebrows, prissy mannerisms, and a penchant for jewelry, Danazar looked more effeminate than most of his wives. “You will never be a stranger to me, not after you saved the most precious of all my children and destroyed Pyralis, the bane of the desert. You are family now, and you will always have places of honor with us any time you choose to claim them. But I know that you, too, have business to attend to that will carry you into the east for now. Another god to slay, if I recall correctly?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Thorvinius the Devourer. We have to stop him.” And I needed to avenge my people. Nothing mattered more than that.

  “My, my,” Danazar purred. “Such anger. Such focus and drive. Well, it certainly would not be my cup of tea, but I wish you all the best on your mission to save the world. And if you ever decide to retire from all that, well, perhaps you could come and run security for my caravan. We could compensate you handsomely.”

  I smiled. “I hope we’ll be able to come back and visit someday, Danazar. For a rematch at Sandmaster.”

  “All right, well, just consider the offer,” he sighed. “I could find you many more beautiful wives, too. Yours, of course, are exquisite, but surely four is not enough to satisfy the appetites of a god.”

  I laughed. “That depends on the four.” Elodette was not my lover, but the other three were, with the recent inclusion of Ilandere, and between them, they definitely kept all of my bodies busy.

  “Well, someday when you are craving another exotic flower to add to your collection, come to me, and I will remember the services you have rendered my caravan,” Danazar said.

  I just smiled and nodded, but Danazar’s methods of acquiring women weren’t really like mine. I had heard that he purchased his wives from their fathers like merchandise. All the women traveling in my group had joined up with us voluntarily. Elodette was often grumpy about being there, sure, but it wasn’t me who was forcing her to stay, it was her sense of duty to Ilandere, whom she had served as handmaiden when they were back with their centaur herd.

  “Oh, look how beautiful that necklace is, Qaar’endoth!” Florenia whispered to another of my selves as she pointed to one of the jewelry stands that we were passing. The necklace in question was made of emeralds, and I could see how it would complement Florenia’s hazel eyes, a fact which I am sure was not lost on the duke’s daughter herself.

  “I am a penniless pauper,” I reminded her with a subtle tilt of my head toward Willobee. The gnome had been eager to act as the party treasurer and eventually I had traded him a bag of gems I had brought from my old temple in exchange for letting me break down his wooden carriage into materials for building a bridge. Since then, he had multiplied that wealth many times over through his gambling prowess.

  Willobee was nearby Florenia and that one of my selves, and he took the hint immediately. The gnome was extremely stingy, but he was also extremely eager to impress beautiful women of every species, despite declining to mate with any that were not gnomes, and in this case, the latter impulse won out. “Well, I am a phenomenally wealthy gentleman,” he announced to Florenia as she turned toward him, “and it would be my honor to obtain your heart’s desire for you, since in this case that would require no more than a meager crumb of my tremendous self-made fortune.”

  “If you will excuse us,” I said to Danazar from my place beside him, “one of my companions has taken a liking to a certain necklace that I think we will go inspect now. There will never be an easy time to part, so I guess this is as good a time as any.”

  He groaned theatrically. “Ah, you shatter my heart into a thousand pieces. But we will sing songs of you and your friends, especially the gnome, for as long as we live, and we will eagerly await your return.”

  I started quietly signaling to my friends to withdraw themselves from the caravan with as little fuss as possible. We had caroused through the night with these people many times over the past week, before and after my defeat of their greatest enemy, Pyralis, and his fire-wielding followers. We wouldn’t have survived the desert crossing without their guidance. We both knew what we owed each other and what we meant to each other, and I didn’t see a point to initiating a maudlin, drawn-out goodbye now and causing a public scene.

  The caravan members that noticed us extracting ourselves from the procession and separating our horses from their camels seemed to feel much the same way. They smiled and nodded and sometimes raised a hand in farewell, but that was it. Everything that needed to be said had already been said during frigid desert nights beneath portable canopies with mugs of spiced honey mead in hand.

  Then I groaned. “Willobee,” I said warningly.

  “Yes?” the gnome asked innocently from his humpbacked, copiously drooling mount.

  “Give back the camel,” I said. The poor beast was only a loan, and although I was sure the caravan wouldn’t begrudge it to us as a gift, we were going to be wandering through a lot of climes that camels weren’t really suited for. Besides, camels were rather unpleasant, smelly creatures. I much preferred our five horses.

  “But Mount Ugga is very fond of me,” Willobee protested. He had, apparently, named the camel after a mountain we had recently climbed, a mountain on which Willobee had been buried in a rockslide. So the original Mount Ugga certainly hadn’t been fond of Willobee, and I wasn’t convinced that the second one was anything more than tolerant, although its awkward anatomy did somehow seem to complement the gnome’s awkward anatomy perfectly.
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  “You can ride on my back again,” Ilandere offered. “Now that we’re not in the desert and wading through sand in the heat anymore, it won’t be too much strain for me to handle.”

  The gnome’s lantern-like jade colored eyes glowed with delight. There was nothing he loved better than being carried by the princess, although her graceful and delicate form made him look even more like a sack of potatoes by contrast. He patted Mount Ugga on the neck, and the camel promptly sank to its knees in the middle of the street, a trick which no one else in my party had managed to replicate even though we had spent our own share of time riding camels to give the horses a rest. Willobee hopped off and patted Mount Ugga again to give him permission to rise.

  Then the gnome trotted over to Ilandere to be lifted up to his favorite seat, while Kiki took charge of Mount Ugga.

  “Kiki, thanks for vouching for us, all the way at the beginning,” I said. She was the one who had first called Willobee out for cheating at Sandmaster, and then promptly proceeded to invite us all along with the caravan for their next desert crossing. “None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t asked us along.”

  She winked a bright brown eye at me. The rest of her was wiry, perpetually dust-covered, and weathered by the blistering desert sun, but I was pretty sure her eyes and her energy would remain youthful forever. “Hey, no problem,” she said, and jerked her chin toward the gnome. “I know real talent when I see it.”

  As Florenia, Lizzy, Willobee, and the two centaurs gathered around the jewelry stand with my four selves, the caravan clattered ahead without us, and soon the last members disappeared among the buildings of Bjurna, although we could still hear the faint strains of their familiar voices.

  “That one,” Florenia pointed to the same emerald necklace that had originally caught her eye, after she had scrutinized all the vender’s wares by holding them up to the light and then holding them against her ears or bosom and preening in the long-handled mirror that he eagerly held up for her.

  “Your taste is as impeccable as your beauty is peerless, my lady,” the vender exclaimed.