God Conqueror

by Logan Jacobs

  “Look here, horse, when Vander does something irrational it’s not because he’s being stupid, it’s because he’s being noble,” Lizzy informed her.

  “I am not being stupid or noble,” I said in exasperation. “I am just being faithful to the prophecy of an oracle. And to the memory of my order because Meline told me that saving Ferndale is the only way I can succeed in avenging it. I don’t care if it costs me both my lives, some fucking plague is not about to stop me from wiping Thorvinius out of existence. I told you how we’re going to do it, now let’s fulfill that fucking prophecy. Any questions?”

  “I have a question, Master,” Willobee squeaked. His green eyes glowed with anxiety in his chubby little face, and I wondered if it was going to be another bile-related question. “Er… two questions depending how you count them, Master. Firstly what exactly are we going to be eating, and secondly where shall we be resting our weary bones after the arduous business of valiantly delaying this pathetic village’s inevitable demise?”

  “Uh. We’ll eat what we can hunt and forage,” I responded. “Speaking of which, Elodette, when you and Ilandere go to gather medicinal herbs, try to scope out natural water sources too. I’ll check for any wells or cisterns they may have in the village. And we will sleep… ” I hesitated as I looked around with both sets of eyes. Then I pointed. “There! In the temple. Qaar’endoth is the new resident god here, and Hakmut’s priest will have no further need of it.”

  Lizzy and I went to stable Damask and Diamond in a corner of the temple where they would stay relatively warm, and where no curious or desperate villagers would likely dare to disturb them. The centaurs trotted off for the greenest-looking parts of the frosted woods, with Florenia remounted on Elodette’s strong back, and the richly clad gnome waddled off toward the village fields where we had passed the corpses on our way in.

  Meanwhile I walked up to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.

  Time to get to work being a living god

  Chapter Thirteen

  Throughout most of Ferndale, the villagers who Lizzy and I encountered seemed as barely alive and hollowed-out as Millie, every one of them with a loss to mourn, although none of the others had kept bodies inside their huts, thankfully.

  The exception to that were a few huts where the sole occupant, or all the occupants, were dead. I marked the doors of those huts-turned-tombs for Willobee’s reference with X’s smudged in ash. Some huts had been left empty after all the occupants died. Other huts had been deserted, based on the neighbors’ accounts, by villagers who fled Ferndale after the plague struck, and no one knew if they had survived the harsh winter, the wild beasts, and the bandits, but it wasn’t likely that any other lord would agree to provide them with land and protection if he figured out that they came from a plague village. The baron who owned Ferndale, Lord Kiernan, barred his gates to the villagers to prevent them from coming to him with their pleas for help, but he was aware of the situation and delivered them food supplies via riders who warned them to keep their distance. He had also hired the physicians in “beaky masks” that Millie had mentioned, but everyone agreed they had been of absolutely no use.

  In the nineteenth hut that I entered with the she-wolf, the red-haired woman who answered the door looked immediately different from the rest. She was lean but not gaunt, and she looked wary and exhausted, but not defeated. Her facial features would have been on the pleasant side of ordinary, except for the pitted scars that clustered across her left cheek and the right side of her forehead.

  “Who are you?” she asked us. She was actually the first one to ask us that since Millie. Most of the other huts so far contained at least one member of the priest’s procession, and they tended to react to me in a very servile manner and seemed eager for Lizzy and me to get the hell out of their homes. I didn’t blame them. These people had been without hope for so long that they probably wouldn’t recognize it if it kicked them in their faces.

  I wanted to tell the scarred redhead to call me Vander, but I had decided that the village needed to know me as a god for the sake of their cooperation and ultimate benefit. So I said, “I am Qaar’endoth, fourth son of the Fairlands. This is Lizzy.”

  The woman looked at me blankly. “Fourth son of what? Are you some kind of lord or something?”

  Before I could respond, Lizzy blurted out indignantly, “No! Well, yes, damn right he is. He is a god. The Unvanquished One. Fights and fucks like no other.”

  “The god of what?” the redhead inquired. She didn’t sound hostile or particularly intimidated, just cautiously interested.

  “Everything,” Lizzy replied. “Most recently, this village.”

  “The god of this village is Hakmut,” the scarred woman corrected her, with an eye roll that suggested she didn’t think very much of Hakmut.

  “Was,” Lizzy retorted triumphantly. “You are a bit behind the times.”

  While Lizzy, who had been doing a good job until then of complying with my request for her to remain silent and focus on the inanimate contents of each hut, relished the chance to steal this conversation, I slipped into her assigned role and started wandering the hut.

  It wasn’t like the other huts.

  This one had a dirt floor, a single bed, a hearth, and a stool like many of them, with a wooden chest and a few shelves in the corner, but there the resemblances ended. Instead of the usual scant cooking and cleaning implements and even scarcer foodstuffs, it was full of weapons. Not high-quality ones like you might find in a castle armory. More like every ordinary village tool in existence that could plausibly be weaponized, including but certainly not limited to pitchforks. I saw axes, knives, and shovels. I also saw scythes, shears, hammers, tongs, and hunting nets and traps. I also saw spare parts that appeared to be the makings of more weapons, such as handles from butter churns and piles of nails and cutlery that I guessed they might intend to melt down for metal.

  “Er, miss?” I asked the hut’s owner hesitantly. “Are you expecting some kind of battle?”

  She blinked at me and replied, “They haven’t told you?”

  “… Told me what?” I asked with a bad feeling in my gut.

  Instead of answering me, the scarred woman sighed. “Should’ve known. The spineless creatures. It’s because Father Norrell, tells them that talking about it will summon them. It’s nonsense. Ed and I are the only ones doing a damn thing to keep Ferndale in existence, and sometimes I just don’t think it’s worth it anymore.”

  “Summon who?” I asked. The name “Ed” sounded familiar, and I remembered that Millie had mentioned someone by that name in connection with trying to take away her children’s bodies.

  “The dead,” she answered simply.

  Lizzy and I exchanged glances.

  “Uh, miss, I hope you don’t mean…” I began.

  “I think I mean exactly what you hope I don’t mean,” the redhead replied. “The dead here come back. Not all the dead, just the ones that died of the plague, which is most of them lately. And when they come back, they aren’t themselves anymore. They do head for their own homes first, usually. There’s some lingering instinct that makes them do that. But they don’t recognize anyone they meet when they get there, nor any other friend or lover they’ve ever known. They don’t seem to have any wits left at all. They don’t feel pity and they don’t feel pain. All that’s left of them is hunger.”

  The redheaded woman’s grim tone and the unusual way she had furnished her hut made it pretty clear to me that she wasn’t referring to hunger for kidney pie or eel stew. “Then you and Ed have a way to stop them?” I asked.

  “We try,” she muttered. “But it isn’t easy, and the other villagers despise us for it. Just like they despise us for surviving when their loved ones didn’t.”

  “Ah, that’s where you got them scars then,” Lizzy remarked. “From the plague.”

  “Oh. Yes.” The woman ran her hand across her pitted face. “Ed has them too. I know they’re hideous, but Ed said they’re
… constellations of the ways we could’ve died and didn’t. Or some kind of crap like that.”

  “Is Ed your husband?” Lizzy asked curiously.

  “Well, n-no,” the redhead stammered. “I know it ain’t right. But Father Norrell never would have agreed to marry us. And times being what they is… We both of us were married before, but I lost my husband, and Ed lost his wife, and in some ways we’re the only ones who understand what each other have been through.”

  “Don’t worry, we don’t give a shit,” Lizzy assured her cheerfully. “Vander and I aren’t married either. I mean Qaar’endoth and I, and we fuck all the time. It’s great.”

  “I… I thought you told me you were his disciple?” the village woman asked uncertainly.

  “Of course I am,” Lizzy scoffed as she rolled her eyes.

  “But you’re also his… woman?” the redhead asked carefully as she glanced back and forth between us.

  I sighed. This really wasn’t the time to discuss my sex life, and I knew Lizzy enjoyed talking about it all too much and might either not realize that she was shocking this villager, or might take additional enjoyment from that fact.

  “What is your name?” I asked the woman before the she-wolf could start in on any graphic descriptions.

  “Maire,” she replied.

  “I am very glad to meet you, Maire,” I said. “And I look forward to meeting Ed as well. My friends and I want the same thing you do, which is to save Ferndale. And I think we can all help each other if we work together.”

  “If the other villagers think that you’re friends of Ed and me, then they won’t want anything to do with you either,” Maire warned me.

  “Once we prove that I have more power to help them than Hakmut did, I think they’ll start to change their minds about a lot of things,” I replied.

  “I doubt it, but you’re more than welcome to try,” Maire said with a shrug. “You and Lizzy seem like honest folk, and you don’t seem worried about the flesh-eating risen dead, so either you’re just idiots of a different kind than my neighbors are or… or heroes or something. Maybe even a god like you say you are. How about you spend a night with Ed and me, and then we’ll see which it is?”

  “That was my plan exactly,” I said. I was about to ask where Ed was right now and what he was up to, but then the door of the hut crashed open, and an angry middle-aged man barged in dragging Willobee by the beard behind him.

  He shouted, “This fucking gnome has doomed Ferndale!” before realizing that he and Maire had company.

  The stranger stared at me and Lizzy. Maire stared at Willobee. Lizzy and I grimaced at each other.

  Then Willobee whimpered, “Master, please tell this brute to unhand me.”

  I grimaced apologetically at the stranger. He was blond, sunburnt, squatly built, and looked generally how I’d expect a farmer to look, except that his face, like Maire’s, was noticeably marred by plague scars.

  “Er, if you wouldn’t mind, sir…” I gestured vaguely at the disheveled-looking and quivering gnome, whose chainmail shirt was now muddy up to his middle.

  “Why should I?” hissed the scarred man as he clenched Willobee’s lavender beard even tighter in his fist. “Who the fuck are you anyway, and what are you doing in my house?”

  “Ed, close the gnome and let the door go, I mean close the door and let the gnome go, and we’ll sort this all out,” Maire urged him anxiously.

  Ed kicked the door shut and reluctantly released Willobee. “You don’t know what he did, Maire,” he spat at her. “And who are these people? Why are they here?”

  “Van-- Qaar’endoth’s the new god around here,” Lizzy announced as she pointed at me.

  “That’s Qaar’endoth, and that’s Lizzy,” the redhead answered her partner. “They might be heroes or something, I dunno why else they’d show up to a place like this at a time like this. I told them about the dead coming back and they said they want to help us.”

  Ed squinted at Lizzy and me in our matching leather surcoats, which looked like a uniform over my pants and an extremely skimpy shift over her long bare legs. His brown eyes lingered on her wolf paws, ears, and tail. And they certainly did not overlook the numerous blades strapped to every convenient part of both of our bodies.

  “I think they’re either exotic prostitutes or mercenaries,” he concluded. “Either way, they’re in the wrong place, since no one here can pay for their services.”

  “Did try both of those lines of work, but neither turned out well,” Lizzy muttered unhelpfully.

  “Ed, we should give them a chance,” Maire spoke over her. “What do we have to lose?”

  “Does no one care what the gnome did?” Ed demanded as he pointed accusingly at Willobee. “He woke the dead!”

  “But it isn’t even dark yet,” Maire gasped.

  “Almost is, and he as good as woke them,” Ed replied grimly.

  “I was just trying to dispose of the bodies like you said, Master,” Willobee whimpered. “I didn’t use any slime. I swear it.”

  “He buried them,” Ed informed Maire. “Twenty of them.”

  From the look of horror on the redhead’s scarred face, you would have thought the blond man had just accused Willobee of murdering twenty villagers instead of burying them. I needed to know why, but I also had another question.

  “Twenty? How?” I asked the gnome curiously. It had only been about three hours since my companions and I had parted ways to go about our separate tasks, and the ground was frozen nearly solid in most places. I wondered if gnomes had some kind of superhuman digging abilities.

  Willobee shrugged his sloped little shoulders with a jingling of chainmail. “There was a giant pit all ready, and twenty bodies lying next to it. Also the ones in the fields that we saw, I dragged five more over too. It just seemed like a serendipitous arrangement, Master.”

  Ed groaned, and his scarred sunburnt features twisted in despair. “They weren’t ready.”

  “They looked past ready to me, Master,” Willobee insisted stubbornly.

  I ignored him and addressed Ed. “I’m guessing you mean there’s some kind of process involved, to keep them from…coming back?”

  “To delay it indefinitely at least,” the middle-aged blond man replied. “It’s pretty simple. To de-animate them, you have to remove their heads. And to keep them from repairing themselves overnight, you have to burn them. Completely. We know these things from… trial and error, let’s say.”

  “Should we go back, dig them up, and burn them?” I suggested. “I can round up my friends to help. You haven’t met the rest yet, but there are seven of us, including both of me. And Willobee.”

  Ed shook his head. “There is no time. The pit is deep. And now that your gnome packed in the bodies, and my kindling, under damp soil, they will not burn easily. And I estimate less than an hour before it gets dark enough for them to rise.”

  “You’re right,” Lizzy told him, and he gave the she-wolf a strange look. She muttered to me, “I ain’t some kind of plague-ghast, but I bet it’s the same for them, and I feel it coming on.”

  I remembered suddenly what Meline the oracle had said about guarding Ferndale “from old mistakes by moonlight.” This must have been what she was referring to. The hunger of the dead that had not been safely disposed of.

  “Why did you leave it so late, Ed?” Maire asked with obvious distress. “I thought you’d be done by now, so I was repairing my axe. If I’d known I would have come and helped.”

  “It was Mother Dora,” Ed explained. “She wouldn’t release Gwen’s body to me. Kept lying about where it was. It turned out to be hidden under the floorboards. Then she cried and screamed once I found it. By the time I got done dealing with her, I raced back to the pit carting Gwen, and found….” Ed gestured at Willobee in an extremely unfriendly manner. “Now, our only chance is to rally as many villagers as we can that are still willing to defend their homes and families, the living members of their families from the dead ones, that is
, and get them armed and set up a perimeter.”

  “The ones that were willing are dead and gone, Ed,” Maire said softly. “It’s just you and me now. The best we could hope for is that some of them might listen to us and flee into the woods before it starts. But I don’t know how far they’d get anyway.”

  “We’ll defend the village,” I said immediately. “My friends and I will. Maire, go sound the alarm if there is one or go door to door and tell everyone to stay inside and bar their doors tonight. Not that they probably ever don’t lately. There were bodies inside the huts marked with ash, although hopefully Ed got around to collecting most of them after Lizzy and I left, and they are numbered among the twenty-five in the pit now. Lizzy will help you deal with any leftover dead that turn up here. The rest of my friends and I will post right by the pit and behead anything that climbs out of it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re in for, stranger,” Maire replied, “but… thank you.” With that, she rose, took her axe, and headed out of the hut to spread the warning through Ferndale.

  “Lizzy, first, find the centaurs and Florenia,” I told her. I knew that the she-wolf would be able to track the other half of our party down even more quickly than I could with her keen sense of smell. “Ilandere just needs to take Florenia someplace safe. They’d both just be a liability. I don’t care what you have to tell them to make it happen, just get rid of them for the night. But send Elodette to meet both of me by the pit. I have a bad feeling we might need her. Ed, where is the pit?”

  “It’s half-a-mile southeast of the temple, across a cabbage field,” Ed replied. “You should be able to find the path I’ve trod through the woods there. And it starts right by the biggest elm in the treeline.”

  “Got it, Lizzy?” I asked her, and she nodded. “After you’ve given the centaurs and Florenia their instructions, come back here and help Maire deal with any… plague-ghasts that show up around the huts. Millie’s children first. Make sure you get to Millie’s hut before dark. Then, watch out for whatever comes out of all the ash-marked doors.”