God Conqueror 2 Read online

  Chapter One

  In the morning, Lord Kiernan proved as good as his word and then some in supplying me and my five companions with food and other supplies for our journey toward the heart of Ambria. His most magnificent gifts were the four mighty destriers for Lizzy and all three of me, and the swift courser for Florenia. As for Willobee, he and Ilandere would not hear of any other riding arrangement than with the gnome on the princess’ back. This being the case, I convinced him to leave his two ponies behind at the baron’s castle in the care of his household. They were hardly warhorses, and I saw no reason to endanger them and slow us down by bringing them on the warpath. Willobee was quite fond of his ponies, but he reluctantly agreed to part with them for the sake of their own comfort and safety. Especially since the baron’s two young daughters already adored them and promised to spoil them rotten.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, Lord Kiernan,” I said to him. “I hope we will all meet again someday.”

  “Of course we will,” the silver-haired baron replied. “Once I build your temple for you, please return and see it.”

  “I will,” I replied. When it came, I would be able to install a statue of Qaar’endoth at the altar, and thereby gain yet another self. Thorvinius the Devourer may have commanded untold thousands of fanatical slaves, ready to slaughter innocents at his behest and he was pretty damn skilled at that job too, but unlike me, Thorvinius could not multiply himself. So, if I kept displacing more gods and making the kinds of friends with deep enough pockets to build new temples of my own, it was inevitable that I would eventually become even more powerful than that mass-murdering tyrant and capable of ripping him back up into tiny little bloody bits of whatever formless chaos that gods were made out of. In the meantime, I was going to use Lord Kiernan’s intel to start tracking my archenemy to the seat, or more likely multiple seats, of his power.

  “But there is just one more thing you must do before you leave for now, Vander of Qaar’endoth,” Lord Kiernan said gravely.

  “What is that?” I asked him quickly. I could feel Lizzy and Florenia getting huffy beside me, and I didn’t want them to be rude to our benefactor. Lizzy, my ferocious she-wolf, didn’t really understand the concept of manners, and Florenia, the elegant daughter of a duke, was extremely sensitive to any perceived challenge to my authority.

  “You must each select a weapon of your choice from my armory,” he replied with a smile. “As we discussed before.”

  Lizzy and Florenia relaxed. Only about half of the members of my party were fighters, but pretty much all of them seemed enthused about the prospect of more presents.

  Elodette, of course, chose the mightiest bow available, which few grown men would have been strong enough to bend. Lizzy generally seemed to have a penchant for daggers, which I supposed felt natural to her since she was used to wielding her wolf claws in a similar fashion, but when we entered the armory, it was an ornate axe that caught her fancy, I suspect partly for the mother-of-pearl inlaid haft. Florenia was the one who chose a dagger, I suspect mostly for the ruby-encrusted pommel. Willobee insisted upon a solid oaken shield that he could barely lift. In addition to that, he was wearing his chainmail again now that we were on the warpath. I felt bad for Ilandere for having to carry all that extra weight.

  As for me, I wasn’t quite sure whether the baron had been counting me as one person based on my single consciousness or as three based on my three identical bodies when he made his offer of one weapon per person, but I didn’t want to seem greedy and tax his generosity even further, so I decided to err on the side of caution by taking less rather than more.

  But Ilandere declined to accept any weapon for herself because she said she couldn’t imagine ever using one to harm someone and urged me to take another weapon in her stead. That allowed me to equip one self with a perfectly matched set of gleaming longswords. Another of my selves bore the Sword of Saint Polliver, which carried a dangerous curse that made its hilt just as lethal as its edge to anyone but me, and my third self made do with the falchion and annoyingly dulled bastard-sword left over from our dwindling looted arsenal.

  After that, we bade Lord Kiernan and his family fond farewells, and rode off while the baron’s daughters sniffled and waved their silken handkerchiefs at us.

  “Er, shouldn’t we be turning left instead of right, Vander?” Lizzy asked the one of me that was riding next to her. “This is back the way we came, not towards where we reckoned Thorvinius’ guys must be heading.”

  “We’re only a few miles from Ferndale, and I think we should drop by and say a proper goodbye to Ed and Maire,” I replied. The two of them had helped us enormously in our efforts to save the rest of their village from succumbing to the horrible plague that a local necromancer god had inflicted upon them. They were good, tough, sensible people.

  “Maybe they’d like to come with us,” Ilandere suggested to the one of me that was closest to her.

  “You heard Ed,” Lizzy replied. “He wouldn’t dream of ditching his village even when it were all poxy and filled with flesh-eating dead, so I don’t guess he’d be itching to go now it ain’t.”

  “They are peasants, and they belong in a place like Ferndale,” Florenia agreed with the self that was beside her. I don’t think she intended to sound cruel, she just had a bit of an elitist streak. Maybe more than a bit.

  When we arrived in Ferndale, the first villager to spot us didn’t say “Hello” or “Good afternoon” or “Hey, good to see you again” or anything normal like that. Instead he fell to his knees and bellowed, “Hail Qaar’endoth!” at the top of his lungs.

  “Hey, hey, you don’t have to do that,” I said quickly as I tried to recall the fellow’s name. “I mean maybe Father Norrell had you doing that for Hakmut, I don’t know, but just ‘Hi’ works fine for me. Todd was it?”

  “Qaar’endoth, my love, you should not reprimand the man for demonstrating the level of respect to which you are properly entitled,” Florenia whispered from her mount beside me.

  “Hakmut was a false god, you are a true god,” Todd replied immediately and sucked more air into his lungs to yell an even louder, “Hail Qaar’endoth!”

  “Hakmut wasn’t exactly a false god, I mean he existed, he just wasn’t very nice,” I muttered helplessly as more villagers started emerging from the paths that wound through Ferndale and from the huts nearby to gather around my party and chorus things like, “Hail Qaar’endoth,” and, “Thanks be to our savior,” and, “May the fourth son of the Fairlands walk among us forever,” and so on and so forth.

  I started to wish we had just snuck in, found Ed and Maire without running into anyone else, and snuck back out again. It wasn’t that I minded being worshipped exactly. It’s just that it felt a little awkward sometimes, since I was new to the experience, and considering I wasn’t quite certain myself yet that I was indeed the human incarnation of the god Qaar’endoth, as the oracle of my fallen temple had prophesied. I didn’t want to deceive anyone. Still, whether or not I was a god, it was true that my team and I had saved these people from a death worse than most, so I figured if this was the way they wanted to express their gratitude, there was no real harm in it. There were too many voices to respond to individually, so I just nodded in three directions and tried to keep a friendly, gracious, and regal expression on all of my faces.

  Then, much to my pleasure and relief, I spotted two familiar scarred faces as they appeared at the edge of the crowd. Squat, sunburnt Ed and his red-haired partner Maire waved happily at all of us instead of bowing or kneeling like the rest.

  Once they had elbowed their way through to us, Maire said to me, “Your temple is being repainted today, Qaar’endoth, to mark the transition of ownership. And the altar is already well supplied with offer
ings.”

  “Offerings?” I asked. The villagers hadn’t even known I would be coming back after I left the day before with the baron’s men. And it’s not like they had much to spare to give to me. Ferndale wasn’t an easy place to scrape a living out of, although I guess I’d never seen it in its happier, plague-free days, or in the summer when purple wildflowers bloomed.

  “Yeah, a silver spoon or candlestick here and there, some carved beads, a few slaughtered goats,” Maire explained.

  “I never asked anyone to slaughter their goats,” I said in dismay. “Can you get them to, ah… calm down a bit, do you think?”

  “I tried,” she said with a grimace. “I tried to tell them that you’re not that kind of god, you know? But, well, you see how they are.”

  I didn’t think any of the other villagers had even heard our conversation, they were so busy loudly competing against each other to express the most reverence and gratitude.

  “Hey, Vander, it’s great to see you again,” Ed said to me with a grin. “You back for good now? Gonna rule over this place? Well, I know you probably got more important things to do, but maybe just one of you? You’d do a much better job than that prick Father Norrell and that fucked-in-the-head god of his, that’s for damn sure.”

  Ed sounded so hopeful that part of me wanted to be able to stick around and help rebuild Ferndale, but I knew it was going to take a lot more than three of me to defeat Thorvinius. And it might take all three of me just to keep my five companions, two centaurs, an ex-aristocrat, a she-wolf, and a gnome, alive along the way. So I replied, “Well, maybe I would. But I couldn’t do a better job than you will, Ed.”

  “Me?” he mouthed as he pointed his thumb at his chest with an expression of comic astonishment.

  “Yeah, you, you and Maire,” I replied. It wasn’t something I’d planned out beforehand, but the idea felt exactly right as soon as it came out of my mouth. I knew that I could trust my two new friends to use their common sense to keep Ferndale from falling to pieces again in my absence. Besides that, they had been ostracized before my arrival simply for being plague survivors and bearing scars that marked them out as different, contaminated or cursed in the ignorant minds of some. If they had the authority that I, as a presumed god and the savior of Ferndale, could now confer upon them, it should deter their fellow villagers from mistreating them again.

  I held up all three of my hands simultaneously for silence, and the dozens of villagers who surrounded us immediately fell silent as snowflakes.

  “Hear me, Ferndale,” I shouted. “I will return one day, but I cannot stay now. Hakmut and his plague are gone, but there are a lot of threats still facing the rest of the kingdom that need to be dealt with. But in my absence, you will not be alone. You will not be without guidance. I am appointing Ed and Maire here as my representatives in Ferndale. They will govern you with kindness, wisdom, and fairness. You will obey them as you would obey me. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Qaar’endoth,” the villagers chorused. Some of them sounded a bit less than enthusiastic, but some of them bowed to Ed and Maire as they had bowed to me. I didn’t imagine it was going to be a seamless transition, but I knew that with the weight of my authority attached to them, Ed and Maire would be able to rise to the challenge. And I knew there was nothing Ed cared about more than doing his best for Ferndale, even though his life there had been far from easy, and nothing Maire cared about more than making Ed happy.

  “Qaar’endoth, they have no governing experience,” Florenia whispered to me.

  “She’s right, we don’t,” Maire said anxiously.

  “Neither did I, a couple weeks ago,” I pointed out.

  “Just do whatever I’d do,” Lizzy told Maire cheerfully.

  “Er,” I said. “Maybe not, you know, exactly what she would do, in every circumstance… ”

  Maire laughed and put her arm through Ed’s. “We won’t do exactly what Lizzy would do, Vander. And we can’t do exactly what you would do. But I swear to you, we will do our best by Ferndale, and we will make sure your temple and your statue are looked after.”

  Her mention of the temple and statue gave me an idea about how to solidify their status a bit more.

  I pointed at the couple with three arms and shouted with three voices, “All hail the high priest and priestess of Qaar’endoth!”

  Strangely enough, the villagers actually responded with noticeably more enthusiasm to these titles than to having Ed and Maire introduced in a more general sense as their new leaders. Maybe it was because a minute’s reflection had already brought them to accept the idea of Ed and Maire being in charge, but maybe it was because these people just really seemed to like their traditions and mystic ceremonies. They’d suffered a lot under Father Norrell’s regime, but maybe some part of them just craved a spiritual leader, no matter how awful, to explain a world they couldn’t make sense of on their own and whip them into line, literally or figuratively. And for them, the titles of high priest and high priestess established that position in a way that “mayor” or “reeve” wouldn’t.

  “Don’t let them slaughter any more animals on my altar unless they’re planning to eat them, all right?” I said to Ed.

  “You got it, boss,” he replied.

  Ilandere burst into tears and flung her slim white arms around the middle-aged farmer as she exclaimed, “I’ll miss you so much, Ed!”

  He blushed furiously. The angelically beautiful centaur had a way of turning everyone bashful.

  Willobee, my three-foot-tall, rosy-cheeked, lavender-bearded little gnome friend, leaned out from his perch on Ilandere’s back to doff his ostrich-plumed cap to both Ed and Maire. Ed nodded back to him. That small gesture meant a lot more than it might have otherwise, considering the fact that Willobee had almost gotten Ed’s entire village eaten alive on the day the two of them met, and they had pretty much hated each other’s guts ever since.

  Elodette spoke polite goodbyes to both of them, but without any embracing involved. The powerful black centaur was a lot more reserved than the silvery little princess she served as handmaiden.

  Florenia and Lizzy both dismounted to go up to Ed and Maire and offer them thanks and encouragement, so I did too. One of me, that is. The other two were surrounded by other worshipful villagers, and I was a little afraid that if I got down from my destriers, I would be instantly pulled apart into little tiny relics and treasured forevermore in little household shrines, so I stayed atop them and allowed dozens of mouths to kiss my hands.

  “Ferndale owes its lives to you as much as to me,” I told Ed and Maire, “and you two will be the founders of its future. I know that next time I see this village, it’s going to be a much happier place. So thanks for everything you’ve already done. And thanks in advance for everything you will accomplish next.”

  I could tell that the couple appreciated my words, despite their humble protests, but what pushed Maire over the edge and brought her to tears was when Lizzy handed her a blue velvet ribbon that she’d been gifted at the baron’s castle.

  “That’s for you, to remind you that you’re better than the rest of them,” the she-wolf announced.

  “I’m not better,” Maire sniffled as she stroked the ribbon, “but I just wish I could be strong and fearless like you.”

  “Aw, you’re already strong, so you just gotta stop letting shit scare you,” Lizzy replied unhelpfully. Objectively unhelpful, that is, but based on the way the redhead looked up to the warrior wolf-woman, I was pretty sure she’d memorize the casual remark and turn it into a personal mantra.

  Finally, after last hugs all around, Lizzy, Florenia, and I mounted back up, and my party carefully disentangled ourselves from the impassioned crowd of worshippers, which was hard to do without trampling any of them. It was weird to think about how they were the exact same people who had distrusted us so much a little over a week ago.

  Once we’d passed out of sight of Ferndale, we continued down the road, passed the gray towers of the ba
ron’s castle again, and headed into unknown territory.

  Chapter Two

  It was still late winter according to the calendar, but as we traveled, the air had grown slightly warmer, and I started seeing more and more trees that still had their leaves. I was taught that the meteorology of Ambria was complicated and its biomes variable, which had to do with convection currents or something like that, depending on whom you asked. Others simply explained that each local god had his or her own climate preference. That made more sense to me.

  As we traveled, I carried on three separate conversations with Florenia, Lizzy, and the two centaurs plus Willobee.

  “Every family in Ferndale will pass down tales of you for generations,” Florenia told me dreamily. “And they have that statue, I know wood is impermanent of course, but they can use it as a reference for their iconography, and being that it’s three-dimensional and done to scale, it provides all the necessary information to proliferate your likeness throughout the region.”

  “Er, yeah, it was really anatomically accurate,” I coughed.

  “It’ll probably give rise to all sorts of innovative tantric practices,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Uh, innovative what?” I asked.

  “I kinda missed being on the road,” Lizzy was saying meanwhile. She did seem quite energized. Her long wolf ears were twitching with excitement, and her spring green eyes were sparkling.

  “You did?” I asked. The poverty and banditry involved in Lizzy’s past seemed to have given her a taste for the finer things in life, and I’d thought she’d been pretty weak in the knees for the comparatively spectacular wealth on display at the baron’s castle.

  “Yeah, it’s funny ‘cause I’ve always hated being poor, and not having enough of anything, and being hungry, but the constantly moving around part I guess I never minded,” she replied. “I only ever set down stakes a couple times in my life for any longer than a month or so, but every time I did, I started getting a bad itch. And I ain’t never had mange or lice or nothing like that if that’s what you’re thinking.”