God Conqueror 3 Read online

  “I want that one,” Lizzy pointed at a similar necklace of rubies. That was a predictable choice for her. The she-wolf tended to gravitate toward attention-grabbing fashions and favored perilously low necklines and the color red.

  “Ah, no man will be able to take his eyes off you wearing that,” the vender assured her. The bespectacled, bearded man looked like he was about to burst from excitement. I had no idea how much he sold in a typical day, but I was willing to bet that Florenia had probably chosen one of his most valuable pieces on display, and that the purchase of her necklace and Lizzy’s combined would amount to a substantial windfall for the vender.

  I looked over at Ilandere, since I knew the little centaur would be far too shy to request a gift for herself, although she loved pretty trinkets just as much as the other women did.

  “Which one do you like best?” I asked her.

  “Me?” the little princess asked as she blinked her huge dark doe eyes through her silvery blonde hair.

  “Yes, of course you,” I said. “I would like all of my consorts to be adorned like royalty, as they deserve to be.”

  Ilandere smiled and blushed at my use of the term. She looked over the shimmering rainbow of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and more draped across the vender’s tables and said, “I don’t know how to choose, they’re all so pretty. Which do you think would look best on me, Vander?”

  I considered for a moment and then pointed to a necklace of sapphires with a more delicate design than the ones Florenia and Lizzy had chosen for themselves. “That one would suit you perfectly,” I said.

  I turned to Elodette since I didn’t want her to feel left out. The black centaur scowled as soon as I opened my mouth.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “I’m not a doll for you to play dress-up with. And I have no use for shiny objects that will reflect more light when I’m trying to pass unseen.”

  I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  “Ha!” sputtered Willobee. “You are a veritable thief! Four thousand? No one has attempted to perpetrate such a blatant outrage upon gnomish kind since the Massacre of Lilisgad. One thousand, and you may count yourself lucky that my master here does not skin you alive for your sheer nerve!”

  “Do not insult the value of my wares, gnome,” the vender exclaimed. He gestured at the three waiting women. “For the curve of her luscious lips, for the mischievous sparkle of her eyes, for the silken waterfall of her tresses, I will grant you another thousand… but I cannot allow myself to be seduced into beggaring myself, I have a family to feed! Twelve children! Do you have any idea how much twelve children eat on a daily basis?”

  “At the price you are demanding of me, you could feed twelve hundred brats for a year!” Willobee retorted.

  As their heated bickering continued, Florenia sighed with impatience, and Lizzy wandered off to examine some colorful posters that were tacked up on the side of a building halfway down the street.

  Finally, after the gnome and the Bjurnian vender had circled back around from vehemently insulting each other’s mothers and became cordial friends again, they shook hands on a price, and Willobee handed over an assortment of gold pieces and gems from his purse that the vender proceeded to inspect and weigh.

  Once he was satisfied that the gnome was not trying to cheat him, the vender very ceremoniously clasped the emerald necklace around Florenia’s neck, the sapphire necklace around Ilandere’s, handed each woman a mirror with which to admire herself, and then looked around for Lizzy.

  The she-wolf loved shiny valuables, but she seemed to have forgotten all about the necklace. She barged straight through the middle of the group without noticing that she was stepping on one of my selves’ right foot and another of my selves’ left foot and excitedly shoved a crumpled piece of paper under Willobee’s knobby red nose.

  “Look, it’s the god version of you!” she exclaimed.

  “Er, actually, that is a piece of paper,” Willobee informed her. “A meager scrap of kindling. I hope you do not consider me equally disposable?”

  Lizzy huffed impatiently and uncrumpled the paper as best as she could, although this involved tearing it in several places accidentally with her claws, which didn’t improve its legibility much. Nonetheless, it became possible for us all to see that the mangled piece of paper had once been a colorful poster before it fell victim to Lizzy’s overexcitement, and that the poster had featured an illustration of a gnome who did, indeed, look practically identical to Willobee except that his saucer-shaped eyes were more turquoise-tinted than jade and his curling, silken beard was magenta colored instead of lavender. The caption read,

  MARVINCUS THE MAGNIFICENT: THE GNOMISH GOD OF TRANSFIGURATIONS, ALCHEMY, and ALL THE MOST PROFOUND SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

  “He looks just like you!” Lizzy chortled. “Like a little baby grandpa.”

  Willobee’s complexion had turned pale as flour, and his eyes had turned a sickly hue.

  “Er, Willobee?” I asked cautiously. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” snapped the gnome. “I am an extremely handsome example of my kind, whereas that unfortunate creature verges on the downright grotesque.”

  Lizzy, Florenia, the two centaurs, and I all squinted back and forth between the poster illustration and our diminutive friend. None of us said anything, but I don’t think any of us could find a single physical distinction besides the color variations.

  “Er, yeah, silly thing to say, Lizzy,” I said finally. “Hard to tell they’re even the same species, eh?”

  “… Yeah, real hard,” Lizzy said uncertainly. It was very unlike the she-wolf to tell a lie out of kindness, she was more the type to rub an unfortunate truth in your face and laugh about it, but I think we were all taken aback by Willobee’s unusual level of agitation, although we were familiar with the gnome’s vanity by that point.

  “It looks like an advertisement for some kind of magic performance,” Ilandere piped up, maybe with the intention of changing the subject. “Can we attend, Vander? It sounds like it would be something really spectacular to see. Maybe like the entertainments that the caravan put on at night when we were out in the desert.”

  “My master is far too intelligent to be amused by the cheap transparent tricks of a shameless charlatan with the audacity to masquerade as a god,” Willobee snarled, and Ilandere’s huge dark eyes widened in alarm.

  “Hey, I’m sure we could find something else fun to do tonight,” I began.

  At that point the vender who had been nervously seeking an opportunity to hand off the ruby necklace to Lizzy, decided to speak up. “Ah, Marvincus,” he exclaimed. “Bjurna is a town of many wonders, I tell you, but you will find none so extraordinary as Marvincus. If you attend one of his shows, you will witness a god in the very flesh. Do not allow his short, stout personage to deceive you. Marvincus wields powers that make him a giant among us mere mortals!”

  “Yeah, we could find something else just as fun as a Marvincus show, like hammering nails into our eyeballs or releasing burrowing beetles into our eardrums,” Willobee agreed.

  “Why you got such a grudge against this gnome for, anyhow?” Lizzy demanded suspiciously. “Just for bein’ ugly? Cause that ain’t a reason to hate someone. Maybe a reason not to fuck them, but not to hate them.”

  “Why, I have no grudge whatsoever,” Willobee replied haughtily. “Never in my life have I had the misfortune of meeting the fellow. It simply offends me that some common fraudster would have the hubris to posture as a god, when even my master after all the many times he has proven his genuinely divine abilities continues to humbly equivocate regarding that classification.”

  That wasn’t a very convincing explanation, considering that Willobee had never really expressed a firm opinion on whether I was a god. Florenia was wholeheartedly convinced of it, Ilandere also seemed inclined to believe it, and Elodette rejected the idea with the utmost contempt. But Willobee and Lizzy’s attitudes were both more like mine on the
subject, which was that they knew I at least had godlike powers, and beyond that they didn’t really give a fuck about semantics. Given that agnosticism, my divinity or this other gnome’s divinity really didn’t seem like something that Willobee would feel morally righteous about. Actually, as far as I could tell, there wasn’t really anything that Willobee felt particularly morally righteous about.

  But I had known Willobee long enough to understand that if he didn’t want to tell you something, then you weren’t going to pry it out of him through conversation. Any attempt to do so would just lead to a lot of meandering digressions and bewildering divertive tactics.

  So I shrugged and said, “Okay. Forget about it. We’ll just head to the nicest inn in town and have a relaxing evening, all right? I bet everyone plays Sandmaster here.”

  Willobee’s expression turned more cheerful. He turned to the vender who was busy clasping the ruby necklace around Lizzy’s neck. “Hey Fanil, what is the best inn in Bjurna?”

  “The Cartwheeling Djinn,” Fanil answered immediately. “The most delicious food. The most potent mead. The most beautiful barmaids. The cleanest accommodations and the most respectable clientele.”

  Lizzy patted her brand new ruby necklace, which nestled deep in her generous cleavage, and purred, “Ah, good, cause it’ll take respectable sorts to properly admire our new jewels. The riffraff wouldn’t know ‘em from cheap trash.”

  Fanil gave Willobee directions to the inn which was only a few minutes’ ride away. We thanked the vender for his recommendation and for the three necklaces, which really did suit my companions perfectly and seemed to please them greatly. Then Ilandere lifted the gnome onto her back again, the rest of us mounted up on our horses, and we headed straight over to The Cartwheeling Djinn.

  Chapter Two

  When we stepped inside The Cartwheeling Djinn, we found that its dining room was far more elaborately decorated than that of the other inns we had patronized so far. The walls were hung with tapestries, hand painted pottery, and scimitars. There were beaded curtains, and the air swirled with spicy incense.

  But the most distinctive feature of the room was the large raised stage draped in heavy dark purple curtains that took up the wall opposite the door.

  A girl in a long white gown with a ten foot train was seated in a chair in the center of the stage strumming some kind of string instrument I had never seen before that was almost as large as she was while she sang a song in the native language of the desert traders. Her voice was melancholy and angelic, and the rest of the inn maintained a hushed volume in order to allow it free reign to pierce every corner of the room.

  When the song was finished, the girl stood up and curtsied and the whole room erupted in clapping and cheering. I could see many people wiping tears away. Then the girl carried her instrument off the stage.

  At that point, my companions and I found ourselves a table and caught the attention of a barmaid to request food and drink.

  “That song made me feel so sad, but in a good way,” Ilandere said. “I don’t even know how to explain it.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “It sounded like loss. It reminded me of… my old temple. All my friends there. But the music was bigger than me and bigger than them, bigger than all of us.”

  “Yes,” the little centaur princess whispered.

  The next performers to get up on stage were a trio of musicians wearing peculiar hats who banged out a rollicking dance tune that involved foot stomping and ululating. Then one of them accidentally-on-purpose elbowed another as he expanded his accordion. The one who had been elbowed retaliated by attempting to strangle the elbower with his bagpipes until the third musician intervened by ramming him in the ass with his trumpet. All of their movements were slow and exaggerated, without any real force behind the blows, and they paused frequently for audience laughs. They continued to pantomime a mock fight until all three musicians lay “dead” on the stage amid their mangled instruments. The audience cheered wildly, and they leapt up to take their bows. There were even more tears than there had been for the haunting previous song, but this time they were tears of mirth.

  “Aw, well, we already saw that show for real,” Lizzy remarked. She was referring to our experience with a primitive tribe of humanoids that we had started referring to as drummers after witnessing one of them accidentally hit another with a drumstick and how that led to the violent deaths of two individuals within a few minutes.

  “I wish it had only been for fun, like this,” Ilandere said.

  “I don’t think the drummers were sophisticated enough to have a sense of humor,” Elodette replied. That was a bit of an eyebrow-raising remark coming from her, because although the warrior centaur was quite intelligent, she didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor herself either.

  “Their demises were just a part of the natural process of the gradual extinction of their species due to evolutionary failure,” Florenia stated. The duke’s daughter didn’t really have the same kind of bloodlust that Lizzy showed sometimes, but she did have a certain aristocratic callousness toward the fates of those whom she deemed unimportant. Which was almost everyone outside of our little group.

  “Dunno what that means,” Lizzy snorted, “but who cares what happens to ‘em now, as long as they keep hunting acorns instead of wolves.”

  “They will,” Willobee said confidently. “We are their primary religion now. The Wolf Goddess, the Moon Goddess, the Goddess of the Hunt, the Goddess of Sex, and the God of Peace, Merriment, and Honey Mead. And the Triple God.”

  From the drummers’ perspective, we had all been like gods, not just me. And we had used that influence, along with a helpful dose of our combat skills, to convince them to stop killing flocks of sheep that the local human villagers depended on for their livelihood and poisoning packs of wolves just so that they could wear their pelts, without eating any of their meat, a practice that had deeply upset Lizzy.

  “Hey, that’s the Quadruple God to you,” I reminded Willobee out of all four of my mouths in unison. I loved having a fourth self now. That was enough bodies for me to watch a performance on stage while also paying attention to each of my lovely consorts. I just needed one more to be able to keep an eye on the gnome full-time too. As for Elodette, I was pretty sure that she didn’t need or want my supervision.

  As for how many bodies it would require to defeat Thorvinius the Devourer, I didn’t know exactly yet. All I knew was that it would take more of me than four. A lot more. Not only did Thorvinius have thousands of followers devoted to him to the point of mindless slavishness, they were all built powerfully, many of them with animal or alien features such as the hindquarters or horns of bulls or red or gray skin of strange textures, and all of them could fight like they had been trained to do so from the crib.

  “Qaar’endoth is the Infinite God,” Florenia said.

  Then, up on stage, the purple curtains parted again.

  And Marvincus the Magnificent stepped out.

  The poster hadn’t lied. I felt like I was looking at Willobee with his beard dyed magenta, except that instead of my friend’s customary velvet suit of either red or blue, topped with a foot long ostrich feather cap and sometimes layered with a mail shirt that was really more of a gown on him, this gnome was dressed in robes the color of twilight that glittered with shards of opal or some other similar gemstone.

  Out of another pair of eyes, I looked over at the actual Willobee to observe his reaction and realized that his lantern eyes were alight with terror. That unnerved me, because how could a chubby little three-foot-tall gnome possibly pose a threat to Willobee, especially when he was under the protection of four of me, Lizzy, and Elodette? I tried to catch Willobee’s attention so that I could discreetly ask whether he wanted to sneak outside, at least for long enough to explain the situation to me, but Willobee seemed to be deaf and blind for the moment to absolutely everything except his lookalike up on stage.

  “Good citizens and itinerant guests of Bj
urna, dear discerning patrons of The Cartwheeling Djinn, welcome, welcome,” Marvincus was exclaiming as he spread his arms wide. The sleeves of his robe trailed down to the floor and sparkled all the way. I supposed that a taste for flamboyant fashions might be a common gnomish trait. “From the far corners of the earth, fate has brought you here tonight for a glimpse into the mysteries of the universe. Together, we shall peer into the unknown, we shall reach our hands out to--”

  Then, as Marvincus’ glowing lantern eyes, which as according to the poster illustration were indeed of a slightly darker and bluer tint than Willobee’s so as to be more like turquoise than jade, roamed across the room and all its rapt inhabitants, they lit upon our group, and then more specifically upon my faithful servant as he cowered in his chair.

  Marvincus the Magnificent abandoned his script altogether and fell completely silent. His eyes narrowed. Finally he hissed, “Well, well, well. If my eyes do not deceive me, tonight, fate has handed me Willobee of Clan Benniwumporgan.”

  Willobee, who usually had some kind of eloquent and poetic or at least pompous and long-winded response for everything, squeaked, “It wasn’t me!”

  “Lavender beards, lavender!” Marvincus roared. “Lavender! Lavender! Lavender! No other gnome within thousands of leagues--”

  Willobee promptly changed tack. “It isn’t me, that’s what I meant to say. I am not this… Willamee? personage of whom you speak, and against whom you so clearly bear an inordinate grudge. I’ve never met him. Never heard of him. Until this minute, I had no notion of his existence. You must have me confused with another gnome, sir.”

  “Oh, not so fast, my friend,” Marvincus said. “It has been one hundred and twenty-six years since last I laid eyes on you, but I would know you anywhere, just as you recognized me at once and started quaking like a leaf.”

  “Quaking, me?” Willobee asked indignantly. “Not at all, not at all. I was just trembling with anticipation to peer into the mysteries of the universe, just like everyone else here, just trying to enjoy a pleasant night of entertainment.”