God Conqueror 2 Read online

  “No, I, er, assumed you meant a figurative itch,” I replied.

  “A figurative itch?” she asked. “That worse than the normal kind?”

  “What we did at Ferndale was really meaningful, Vander,” Ilandere was saying shyly as she blinked her enormous dark doe eyes at me through her silvery blond hair. “Sometimes it just seems like your quest for revenge involves… well, a lot of killing, you know? I know they’re all bad people and that you’d never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, it’s just that sometimes I wish that ridding the world of evil didn’t involve so much violence. But Ferndale was different. We were nursing people back to health. I felt like we were really making the world a better place.”

  “Princess, remember who was causing the plague?” her fierce brunette handmaiden asked with a sigh.

  “It was a… uh… bacterium?” Ilandere’s little face brightened as she recalled the word.

  “That was the mechanism he used,” Elodette said. “But the real architect of the plague was Hakmut. So that he could play his nasty little necromancer games. And who stopped Hakmut?”

  “Vander and Lizzy,” Ilandere piped up.

  “And how, exactly, did they stop Hakmut?” Elodette asked.

  “Uh…. ” Ilandere looked a little disheartened as she remembered how Lizzy and I had had to team up and behead both Hakmut and his priest at the exact same moment, to prevent the necromancer god from transferring his consciousness back and forth between the two bodies and resurrecting each one that we killed.

  “It wasn’t cough medicine,” the brunette centaur hinted. “It wasn’t freshly baked bread. It wasn’t kindness and compassion. It wasn’t--”

  “Princess, why don’t you just order her to be quiet?” Willobee suggested from Ilandere’s back.

  Elodette glanced over at the little gnome draped in chainmail and clinging to an oaken shield that weighed nearly as much as he did. “You know,” she observed, “you aren’t the most skilled of riders at the best of times, but all those completely absurd accessories have turned your balance from mildly precarious into downright asking for an accident.”

  “Elodette, how could you threaten one of our friends?” Ilandere asked, aghast.

  “I didn’t threaten anyone, Princess,” Elodette replied. “That was a mere statement of fact.”

  “I can hear a stream up ahead,” I interrupted. “Why don’t we break to water the horses and refill our water skins?”

  Once we reached the stream and started doing just that, Willobee remarked, “We should name these beasts.”

  I wondered if he was missing his ponies, whom he’d called by any number of names depending on what kind of impression he was trying to make on the person to whom he was introducing them.

  “Blackie, Brownie, Brownie II, Whitie, Spots,” Lizzy suggested. It was a pretty visually intuitive system of nomenclature, I had to give her that.

  “Let’s name them after Lord Kiernan and his family, the kind people who gifted them to us,” Ilandere suggested.

  “Nah, Lord Kiernan has a wife and daughters, and the destriers are all males, only Florenia’s courser is a mare,” I replied.

  “Let’s name them after the heroic traits of Qaar’endoth,” Florenia suggested excitedly.

  “I don’t know, you guys, don’t you think that’s a little egotistical?” I tried to protest.

  But Willobee was already waddling up to the nearest horse, one of the brown destriers I’d been riding. It leaned its head down to snuffle him curiously and sneezed when it accidentally inhaled the ostrich feather in his cap partway up a nostril. Undeterred, the gnome placed a hand on its muzzle and intoned solemnly, “I dub thee Generosity.”

  Florenia placed her hand on the neck of the white destrier which I had also been riding. “And I dub thee Virility,” she purred, and then she glanced at me and bit her bottom lip.

  Fuck. This was happening whether I wanted it to or not, and my friends weren’t exactly choosing the kinds of virtues that I would personally want to run around characterizing myself by. I hastily pointed to the black destrier. “That’s Fury!”

  Lizzy pointed to the other brown destrier. “All right, that’s Slayer.”

  “‘Slayer’ isn’t a virtue,” Florenia objected.

  “Is too,” Lizzy retorted. “You know, Slayer as in Dragonslayer. I mean it as a compliment.”

  “I’ve never slain a dragon,” I pointed out.

  “You have too, figuratively speaking,” Lizzy replied with a grin. She seemed very pleased with the word after I’d taught it to her. “Lots of ‘em.”

  “Well, maybe we could wait till I slay a literal one before we start making that one of my epithets?” I suggested. “It just doesn’t seem right to brag about something I haven’t really done yet.”

  Lizzy shrugged. “Suit yourself, we’ll call him just Slayer for short till we find us one of ‘em scaled beasties then.”

  “It’s still not a virtue,” Florenia insisted.

  “Don’t tell me you’re a pacifist like the horse,” Lizzy said as she pointed at Ilandere.

  “That’s not the issue, the issue is that a virtue has to be an abstract concept, not an occupational title,” Florenia tried to explain.

  “Slayer is fine,” I interrupted, because I felt a lot more comfortable calling a horse that than “Virility” and I didn’t want to give the duke’s daughter the chance to give multiple horses names with sexual connotations. Florenia pretty much already looked like the walking embodiment of sex, with her angular, sensual features, especially her full lips, her golden skin, and her willowy curves. So, it didn’t help my focus any that sex also seemed to be one of the primary preoccupations of her brilliant mind.

  “Vander, may I name a horse?” Ilandere requested.

  “Of course you can,” I said. The last unnamed horse was Florenia’s silver dappled courser, which actually looked a lot like the all-horse version of the centaur princess herself.

  Like virtually all horses, the dappled courser instinctively adored Ilandere, and it whinnied happily as she took its face between her two hands and kissed it on the forehead.

  “You are Chivalry,” she told it.

  “Aw, shucks,” I said. “I mean, I try.”

  By that time, everyone had drunk their fill, so we mounted back up onto Generosity, Virility, Fury, Slayer, and Chivalry and continued on our way.

  As we reached what I guessed to be the edge of Lord Kiernan’s domain, based on the map he had shown us, we came to a narrow spot in the road where there was a crude wooden gate manned by a dozen men. They were all clad in matching livery and looked rather bored. Some of them were leaning on the gate, others sitting in the dirt and swigging out of flasks, and a few appeared to be dozing until the sounds of my party’s approach woke them.

  “Good afternoon, most honorable ladies and gentlemen,” called out one that seemed to be the captain of the group, based on his feathered cap.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “Er, who are you?”

  “Why, nought but the humble servants of the great baron,” the captain replied with a smirk. He had a pointed little goatee and didn’t look like he’d bathed for quite a while, if ever.

  “Lord Kiernan’s colors are violet and silver,” Florenia informed him disdainfully. “You and your men are wearing mottled variations of purple and gray.”

  “Er, begging your pardon, my lady, but what’s the difference?” asked the greasy-looking, goateed captain.

  “It’s on account of we been on the campaign trail so much,” explained another of the men, who had conspicuous buck teeth. “Just been wearing our lord’s uniforms through the thick and thin o’ battle so often lately they’ve got a bit faded, begging your pardon, my lady.”

  “Lord Kiernan didn’t mention anything about being involved in recent battles,” I said.

  “Er, these were some more clandestine type missions, not of a sort he would be like to brag about to dinner guests,” the buck-toothed man said. He se
emed to be the most creative thinker of the lot although I wasn’t sure that was saying much. There didn’t seem to be much point arguing with him about their alleged backstory though.

  “Well, what do you want with us?” I asked. “Mind if we pass?”

  “No, no, not at all, of course you are most welcome to pass, and we wish you a lovely journey,” the captain said with a grin. “We’ll only be needing to collect a small toll first, on behalf of the baron like, for contributin’ to the welfare of his subjects and all.”

  All twelve guys had their hands on their sword hilts now and were scowling blackly at us in what they probably considered a menacing manner. They had to be a wealthier crew than the one Lizzy had been running with when I met her, if they could even afford swords at all, mismatched as theirs looked. Maybe a lot of easy marks used this road and just paid up without raising a fuss.

  “You should be ashamed of yourselves for attempting to swindle honest travelers out of their rightful property, and for appropriating and abusing the honorable name of the baron in this manner,” Florenia said fiercely. “Why, if this sort of thing ever happened in my father’s duchy, I guarantee you the perpetrators would be drawn and quartered.”

  “Eh, not all of us were born heiresses to duchies, so the rest do what they gotta do to scrape by,” Lizzy said with a shrug, “but these ones here? This amateur shit gives the whole trade of banditry a bad name. Kinda makes me mad.”

  “Look, buddy, you really don’t want to make her mad,” I said. “So this is your warning, okay? Just move aside and let us pass and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

  The captain sneered at me, “I may not be no aristocrat nor answer to one neither, but I ain’t so stupid I can’t count, and there’s twelve of me and mine, and only three of you. Three and a half if you count the gnome, and I ain’t counting the gnome. So how about you cough up some silver before you annoy me, and the baron’s tax rate goes up?”

  Well, the captain wasn’t wrong about counting Willobee out of any potential fight. But failing to count Lizzy or Elodette was a mistake that was probably going to end up being fatal. Then he drew his sword and jabbed my chest with the point.

  That was another fatal mistake.

  If I had liked and respected him, then I would have fought fair. But I didn’t like or respect him, so I reassimilated that self, then sent out my third self again right behind him and cracked his neck like a chicken’s with one twist.

  The other bandits screamed in shock and charged.

  One of me ushered Florenia, Ilandere, and Willobee safely out of the way along with the horses.

  Like me, Elodette seemed to have decided that these idiots weren’t worthy of her full combat skills and hadn’t even bothered to draw her bow. Instead, as one of them charged one of my selves, she intercepted him by rearing up and delivering an anvil-sized hoof to the head that severely and irrevocably altered the shape of his skull. Elodette was extremely protective of Ilandere, but not usually all that protective of me, so I suspected she had mainly been motivated to illustrate to these bandits how wrong they had been not to count her as a warrior.

  “Even the Dungville Dastards would have wiped their ass with you lot!” Lizzy screeched. Her conflicted sense of ex-bandit pride manifested itself in her dodging a sword swing, kneeing the swordsman hard in the groin, and then burying one of her daggers in his teary-eyed face.

  I had been mildly impressed by the fact that these common bandits even owned swords, but I wasn’t impressed at all by the way they used them. They were clearly more used to fighting with knives and fists and didn’t know how to maintain the right distance with the longer blades. Once I got inside the bucktoothed one’s sword range, I drove my fist up under his chin so that his teeth clacked together, and his eyes rolled back. As he fell, I grabbed his sword and used it to provide a few quick swordplay lessons that my students would never get a chance to apply.

  One of them raised his sword to block my overhead swing, but my movement had been a feint, and I whipped my arm lower to run his stomach through. He screamed when my blade tore through his spine, and his legs went limp before he could attempt to make a dying counter attack.

  I yanked my blade from his stomach as soon as he was on the ground and then made a quick stab through his skull to end his screaming. Only one other man faced me now, and he lunged forward in a tragically inept fencing pose. I easily parried the flat part of his blade with the edge of mine, but then my second body appeared behind him, grabbed his head, and lifted his skull up so that his neck was exposed. My victim screamed as he tried to buck loose of my second body but my other form that had parried his first thrust made a precision swipe and tore the front of his throat out with my blade.

  He died a few moments later.

  There had been twelve of the fraudulent tax collectors, which was only three apiece for my two participating selves, Lizzy, and Elodette, so the fight didn’t last long.

  When they were all dead, Florenia asked gravely, “So, has Lord Kiernan graciously decided to waive the toll for us?”

  I swept her a bow and said, “He has indeed, my lady.”

  We gathered up and packed away the dozen swords, which I was pretty happy to gain, since my frequent reassimilations meant that the weapons I carried were constantly vanishing and needing to be replaced.

  Then we pushed through the makeshift gate and continued on our way.

  After a few minutes Lizzy said to Florenia, “One thing’s been bothering me, though.”

  “You mean the fact that you just slaughtered those men for one of the same crimes in which you yourself used to participate?” Florenia asked. Her tone was not the slightest bit accusatory or judgmental, it was more just one of philosophical musing.

  “No,” Lizzy said. “I mean the fact that violet and silver really are the same thing as purple and gray. Ain’t they?”

  “Oh goodness, no,” the duke’s daughter replied. She hadn’t been fazed at all by the gory fate of the bandits, but she sounded genuinely disturbed by that suggestion. “Purple is a mixture of red and blue. It’s much brighter than a true violet. And gray isn’t even metallic, so how could it be the same as silver?”

  “Hmph,” Lizzy grumbled.

  That evening, just as it began to grow dark and I began to think about finding a good spot for us to camp out for the night, we encountered a man and his wife rolling along in their wagon.

  “Good evening,” I said as we passed. I always tried to be polite to strangers. Some people had already been unnerved by me back when they just thought I was twins. Now that I looked like triplets to the uninformed, I was probably going to attract even more unwanted attention, and I just didn’t want it to be the hostile kind.

  “Y’all heading to Sanctimia?” he asked.

  “What the hell is Sanctimia?” Lizzy asked.

  He frowned at her, and his wife raised her eyebrows. I didn’t know if that was a reaction to Lizzy’s language, to her wolf ears, tail, and hind paws, the excessive amount of cleavage that she was displaying, or all of the above. “The village a few miles yonder, where it looks like y’all are heading,” the wagon driver replied as he jerked a thumb behind his shoulder. “It’s a fine place full of fine upstanding folks.”

  “You think they serve good honey mead there?” Willobee asked hopefully as the wagon rolled past us.

  “Do you think the inns will have featherbeds?” Ilandere asked breathlessly.

  I shrugged. “I’ve never heard of Sanctimia, but if it’s only a few miles farther on, I guess we might as well check it out.”

  “I tend not to get along so good with ‘fine upstanding folks,’” Lizzy remarked.

  “You know, it’s easy enough to get along with anybody, short-term,” Willobee told her. “You just have to present yourself as exactly the type they feel comfortable associating with.”

  “What am I s’posed to do, snip me ears and tail off?” Lizzy demanded. “Cause they makes a lot of folks nervous at first glance, befo
re I even open my mouth.”

  “No, no, of course they’re going to notice you’re part-wolf, just like they can’t help noticing that I’m a gnome,” Willobee conceded, “but, you know, you could try convincing them that you are a demure and well-bred gentlewoman, whose wolf features are just purely aesthetic anomalies, and not at all reflective of your behavioral tendencies.”

  “What for?” Lizzy asked.

  “Why, to get what you want out of them, of course,” Willobee replied.

  Lizzy shrugged. “I know how to get what I want out of people. Most of them will cooperate if you pretend like you’re gonna fuck them or pretend like you’re gonna eat them. If that doesn’t work, you can always just eat them for real and take what you want off the bones.”

  “My beautiful and ferocious friend, you still have so much to learn about the world,” sighed the gnome.

  “Don’t you think the best way to deal with people is just to treat them the way you would want to be treated?” Ilandere asked timidly.

  Both the she-wolf and the gnome burst into laughter.

  Soon after that, we came into view of a walled village. When the eight of us rode up to the gate, the gatekeeper demanded, “Good evening, what is your business in Sanctimia?”

  His eyes stared out at us suspiciously through the peephole.

  “We are just a few weary travelers,” Willobee said in a nasally voice. “Weary of the wicked ways of the world, that is. Sanctimia’s reputation as a bastion of virtue has reached our ears, and that bit of hearsay particularly warms the cockles of me and my party, my good sir.”

  “You and your party of… what, exactly?” the gatekeeper inquired as he squinted at the three of me, and then at the four female members of my party, none of whom were dressed in what you’d exactly call a modest fashion.

  “Upstanding citizens,” Willobee answered.

  “What are your professions?” the gatekeeper demanded. “What, exactly, are the women’s professions?”

  “Oh, they’re, ah--” Willobee began.

  “We are daughters of Nillibet,” Florenia announced.