God Conqueror 3 Read online

  “Ah, yes, how rude of me, how rude of me indeed to forget about my guests!” Marvincus exclaimed. He turned away from Willobee to smile broadly at the rest of the inn. Willobee seized the opportunity to dive under the table.

  “Willobee!” I said. “I’ll protect you. What do you need from me? Do you want to leave? What’s this guy’s problem anyway?”

  “Not even you can save me, Master, no one can,” Willobee wailed unhelpfully.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Lizzy snorted. “This is a fucking gnome we’re talking about. No offense or nothing. Want me to take his head off for ya?”

  Marvincus announced, “My dear, honored guests, I bequeath to you the exquisite pleasure of selecting the particular form of justice that I shall visit upon this wretched villain of a gnome, from among the following options. Firstly--”

  Enough was enough. All four of me stood up. “Hey,” I yelled out of all four mouths. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re not about to lay a finger on my friend. Keep talking that way and your own list of options is going to start getting a lot shorter.”

  Normally, the talking in unison with my selves trick was pretty effective. When people who didn’t know me first saw me, it was easy enough for them to assume that I was just identical siblings. Well, I guess that had been easier back when I looked like triplets, and even easier back when I looked like twins. Quadruplets were pretty rare regardless. But still, when they realized that each of me knew exactly what the others were about to say, that got them to thinking that there was something a lot stranger than that going on.

  Marvincus, however, merely raised a tufted magenta eyebrow. “Ah, just one mind between the four of you then, is it? A pity it’s not even a particularly clever one. I never had any intention of ‘laying a finger on your friend.’”

  “What are your intentions then?” I asked.

  “This,” Marvincus said, and he pointed one knobby finger at our table, under which Willobee was still crouched out of sight. Then he lowered the finger.

  “Pointing at us?” Lizzy scoffed. “Real neat trick, you froufrou bully. If you got a beef with Willobee, then how bout you bring your sparkly pink haired ass over here and--”

  She was interrupted by the sharp gasps of Florenia, Ilandere, and Elodette as the duke’s daughter lifted up the tablecloth to reveal Willobee in his hiding place.

  Willobee was no longer there.

  In his place there was a small, lavender toad.

  It let out a dismal croak.

  “Willobee?” Ilandere exclaimed. “Oh, no! This is terrible!”

  The little centaur princess scooped up the toad in her hands and held him up while all four women leaned in to stare.

  The rest of the customers in the inn, meanwhile, erupted in wild cheering. Some of them were crying with laughter. After the previous act with the musicians’ brawl, they clearly thought that this was also all a prearranged performance for their benefit.

  “He’s kinda cute that way,” Lizzy said, which produced an angry croak from the toad.

  All four of my selves, meanwhile, charged the stage. As soon as the she-wolf realized what I was doing, she followed close on my heels.

  “Guards!” screamed Marvincus.

  From behind the curtains, six gnomes in chainmail wearing round steel helmets and carrying spears of about their own height popped out.

  I had to laugh. I thought it was about to be a brief fight indeed and that I’d just have to try not to hurt the poor little guys as I chucked them out of the way.

  Then, as the gnomish bodyguards ran toward myself and Lizzy, Marvincus started pointing at each of them in turn.

  The first one that he pointed at grew eight feet tall and sprouted whirling horns like a mountain ram’s.

  The second one dropped down onto all fours and swelled up into a wolf-like creature with glowing green eyes.

  The third one didn’t change size or proportions at all, but every inch of him turned gray with the texture of rock.

  I didn’t have time to watch the transformations of the fourth, fifth, and sixth bodyguards, because by then all of my selves were busy. The tall horned one reached one of my selves first.

  At first he tried to stab me with the now ridiculously stubby looking three foot long gnomish spear that he still carried. I dodged to the outside of the spear and used the same trick that I had used during a friendly sparring match in the desert recently to disarm him, which involved grabbing the spear and pulling it in with the haft against my body before twisting my hips to jerk it against the holder’s thumb and wrench it out of his grasp.

  After he lost the spear, the bodyguard backed up, lowered his head, and attempted to skewer me with his horns. As he charged I calculated that they were about three feet long, which was a problem, because the stupid spear was so short that I didn’t have enough range to stab him before the horns reached me. I solved the problem by running a few steps to meet him with the spear raised at the ready and then dropping to the ground at the same moment as I plunged the spear into the top of his skull right between his horns so that I slid between his legs as his momentum continued to carry him forward.

  He bellowed in agony and thrashed on the ground. For the last few minutes of his life, he looked a little like he had three horns sprouting out of his skull.

  Meanwhile, another of my selves was occupied with the bodyguard that looked like he was made out of stone. I had also managed to disarm him pretty quickly, but when I tried stabbing him with his own spear, the point snapped off against his rock hard belly.

  His neck had the same destructive effect against the dagger that I tried using next. Then he flung his arms around one of my thighs, which was as high up as he could reach, and squeezed. It felt like my leg was being crushed in a vice. I knew better than to punch the gnome, because that would have just broken my hand, but I placed my thumbs on his eyeballs just in case there was any sensitivity there and dug them in with all my might. It just felt like pressing my thumbs against stone, and the gnome didn’t even flinch. My entire leg had gone numb by that point, and the gnome’s arms continued to contract as if he intended to amputate the whole limb slowly.

  So I reassimilated the trapped self into my nearest other body, which left the stone gnome clutching empty air, and quickly sent a fourth body out before he could figure out what had happened to grab him from behind and pick him up. My intention had been to throw him, but he was really fucking heavy, probably close to three hundred pounds despite being toddler-sized, so instead I staggered over to the nearest wall of the inn while he thrashed in my arms, heaved him above my head, and smashed him through the timbers and plaster like a battering ram. I left him there embedded in the wall with his head poking through to the outdoors and his feet kicking angrily inside the room and went to rejoin the fight.

  One of my selves wasn’t fighting at all, instead I was trying to usher all the inn guests out of the way so they wouldn’t become collateral damage. They quickly abandoned their tables and crowded along the walls to give the combatants more space, but instead of evacuating the inn like I wanted them to do, they stood there and clutched their mugs of honey mead and jumped up and down with excitement.

  Instead of screaming with terror, they were yelling things like, “Get him, Marvincus! Show them who’s the fucking boss!” and, “Yeah! Right between the eyes!” and, “Stab him harder! That was barely any blood at all! I wanna see a geyser!” One girl was asking, “Who is that guy?” Her friend replied, “I don’t know, but I think he’s hot, I want him to win.” “His brother’s even hotter,” the first girl said as she pointed to another of my selves, which apparently must have been turned toward her at a slightly more flattering angle.

  “Shut up everyone!” I yelled. “This isn’t a game, it’s real! Get out of the inn, for your own safety!”

  A lot of audience members shrieked in response, but they were happy shrieks. “Ooh, we’re scared now,” someone called back at me with a wink. “You’re am
azing!” another girl yelled. “It does look fucking real!”

  At this point, if one of them got hurt by accident, I was only going to feel slightly guilty.

  Lizzy had, predictably, made a beeline for the gnome that had been transformed into some kind of demonic wolf, since she knew a lot about the way a wolf’s body dynamics worked, and managed to get his belly sliced open and his guts spilling out. They reeked, just like spilled guts tend to.

  I hoped that that might finally convince some of the inn’s customers to head for the door, but even though there were a lot of complaints and pinched noses, no one did. “Aw, was that smell effect really necessary?” someone groaned.

  A friend informed him, “They probably stopped at the butcher’s to pick up some scraps right before this. You have to give them credit for the level of planning that goes into something like this.”

  Meanwhile, Elodette had dispatched one of Marvincus’ bodyguards that got too close to Ilandere with a well-placed kick, to audience screams of, “Yeah! Give it to him baby!” and comments like, “Hey man, do you think centaurs are sexy? Cause I think that one is.” And “Those two both are, which I never thought I’d say, but that one would crush your skull, friend. Bad idea. Don’t go for it. Maybe the little one.”

  Another of my selves had already taken care of a bodyguard in the form of some kind massive tusky warthog with a skin disease, so that just left the sixth, who looked like a human man except that he had an extra set of arms sprouting out one from his chest and one from his back, and both sets of hands seemed to be ambidextrous, which enabled him to wield blades in all four directions at once.

  Lizzy and one of me converged on him together. She ducked as he tried to stab her with a spear, got ahold of the spear haft, and started wrestling him for control of it. In the meantime I dueled one of his other arms sword to sword. A good yank from Lizzy caused him to tilt off balance a little in her direction, which gave me the opportunity to slice that arm off. While still facing Lizzy, he battered me uselessly with the bloody stump while I sawed off another of his arms. It would have been a clean slice, since I wasn’t a sadist, except that he wouldn’t hold still. Then I had to leap aside with a yelp as a spear burst straight through him and barely missed stabbing me.

  “Watch it,” I yelled.

  “Sorry,” Lizzy called out apologetically as the four-armed man toppled over gurgling, which left the two of us facing each other over his soon-to-be corpse.

  We high-fived, and the audience went absolutely wild. I stared around the wreckage of what had been a lovely and expensively decorated dining room, which was now strewn with five mutant corpses and had one live stone gnome still thrashing around inside a hole in the wall and causing more cracks to spread through the plaster. The other inn customers’ meals had mostly been dumped on the ground in the commotion. The customers themselves were splattered with blood and gore.

  And they all looked like they’d never had more fun in their lives.

  I had no idea what else to do, so all four of me faced one of the walls, and then in unison with my selves, I each took a deep bow.

  Meanwhile Lizzy sprinted over and nabbed Marvincus as he attempted to sneak out the back door and hauled him back over by the beard as he yelped, “Ouchouchouchouch!”

  “Help me!” Marvincus yelled to the surrounding inn customers. “Help me, you ingrates! I have shown you such wonders! And you profess to be admirers of mine! So help me!”

  “This was your best show yet!” yelled a man who looked human, but whose beard was dyed the same shade of magenta as Marvincus’, perhaps in imitation of the gnomish magician.

  The rest of the audience loudly seconded this opinion. Marvincus seemed to wilt.

  “Change him back,” I said to Marvincus. “Now.”

  Ilandere, Elodette, and Florenia cautiously came up to us.

  The little centaur princess held out the lavender toad in her hands with tears in her eyes and said, “Please.”

  Marvincus mustered up as much ferocity as he could, given that he remained in the undignified position of being held captive by the beard by a woman who towered over him by two-and-a-half feet and spat, “Never!”

  “I know they think this is all happy make believe,” Lizzy hissed to the gnome as she nodded toward our audience, “but I didn’t think you was enough of a moron to think we’re just playing pretend here. That what you think, Sparkles?”

  She yanked on his beard to jerk his head back and expose his neck and placed her dagger against his throat. “Hmm, that what you think, Sparkles?”

  The toad croaked in alarm and started hopping up and down so frantically that he almost fell out of Ilandere’s little hands.

  “Lizzy,” I said warningly. “Look at Willobee. I think he’s trying to tell us something.”

  “Oh, you think he wants me to kill Sparkles in a nastier way than this?” Lizzy asked. “I know they got some kind of gnome squabble that sounds like it goes way back. Well how do you think he wants him done then?”

  “No, I meant--” I began.

  “If you kill me in any manner whatsoever,” Marvincus said gloatingly, “then your little friend there will forever retain an exterior that perfectly reflects his interior.”

  “If we kill him, Willobee stays a toad,” I translated for Lizzy. “I’m not saying I agree with the insult, I’m just saying, that’s what I think he means.”

  “The style of transfiguration that I perform cannot be undone except by the caster,” Marvincus informed us. “Even if, hypothetically, you were to find a magician-- I mean a god-- more powerful than myself, not that such a one is likely to exist, he still couldn’t do it, because the spell bears my unique imprint and could potentially be overwritten, but not reversed. And overwriting a spell is a very imprecise solution. If you wanted to turn that worthless little canker into a horse instead, you could do it easily enough, well I don’t mean you, perhaps, but a magician of sufficient skill could. If you wanted to turn him into a mushroom or a teacup, likewise. Why, you could even turn him back into a gnome if you liked, but the same gnome he was before? Not all the power of the Fairlands could do that. Only I, Marvincus the Magnificent, can do that! And I flatly refuse.”

  “I dunno, that sounds like a load of bull shit to me,” Lizzy said suspiciously.

  Willobee emitted another urgent croak.

  “Er,” I said. “Willobee doesn’t seem to think it’s bull shit, and seeing as he’s the one with the most at stake in this situation, I think maybe we shouldn’t chance it.”

  Willobee let out a more mollified sounding croak in response.

  “Okaaay,” Lizzy agreed reluctantly, “but, we could still chop off little bits of him, yeah? All I have to do is leave him his brain and that one finger he uses for pointing at stuff and changing it. So that leaves me a lot of material in between to work with.”

  I sighed and said, “Marvincus, what do you want? What would make it worth your while to change Willobee back to exactly how he was before-- and never mess with him, or any of the rest of us, again? Just to, you know, let bygones be bygones for whatever it is that he did a hundred something years ago?”

  A crafty look came over Marvincus’ face, which resembled Willobee’s so closely that it seemed familiar, even down to the expressions. “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose there is a certain favor you could do for me, that might persuade me to consider your request.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Well, out with it. We don’t have all day. We’ve already wasted too much time dealing with you and your minions. And you better make it something reasonable, cause otherwise I’ll just let Lizzy try her way.”

  “Very, very reasonable indeed, a piddling crumb of a favor really, a symptom of my overly lenient and compassionate nature, all things considered,” Marvincus replied, which made me think that he was about to ask for something extremely fucking unreasonable.

  Lizzy growled. Her green eyes narrowed, and her long, pointed ears twitched. She looked about as wolfi
sh as I had ever seen her look while still in her human form.

  Marvincus took the hint and hastily continued, “I just need you to collect a certain herb for me from a nearby forest. Only five miles from here. I can draw you a map. It’s not hard to find. Really just a token gesture of reconciliation, eh?”

  “Oh, no,” someone groaned. The rest of the inn’s customers were still spectating intently. “He’s going to say the Kanminar Forest, isn’t he? He’s going to say fucking Kanminar.”

  Marvincus glanced over at the commentator and then back to me and Lizzy and said brightly, “See? It’s a very well-known spot. Easy to find. Just five miles from here, like I said.”

  “Okay,” I said wearily, “what’s wrong with Kanminar?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with Kanminar,” Marvincus said. “It’s a lovely spot for a stroll. Highly underappreciated.”

  Someone yelled, “Don’t fall for it, it’s a trap!”

  “Well, most of it’s fine, but there’s a certain area where no one goes, cause everyone who goes there vanishes,” explained another helpful inn customer.

  I looked at Marvincus.

  “Well, you did ask if there was any price at which I could be persuaded to change your friend back,” he said defensively. “And that’s my price. I need that herb. One bushel of it should do nicely.”

  “How do you even know it grows in that area, if no one who’s been there has ever come back?” I asked.

  “Because people used to go there all the time and come back no problem, but a few months ago, things changed,” the inn customer with the dyed magenta beard explained. “It got dangerous somehow, must’ve anyway. We don’t know what. It’s almost like the forest itself just got unfriendly and started eating intruders. What a dastardly ploy, Marvincus. Either you get that herb you want, it must be useful for magic, right? Or your enemies perish in the attempt. Brilliant really. Will you do another performance about what happens to them in Kanminar?”