by Nick Harrow
“Not today.” Zillah’s voice was almost calm as she seized a gnome with her left hand and slammed the mancatcher’s crotch straight into the mouth of a second screaming cannibal. The spear sheared the gnome’s teeth off at the gumline and ripped its jaw away from the skull. She closed her left fist and crushed the trachea of the gnome she held captive with a sound like a plastic water bottle being stomped on.
“Guard the hostage,” I thought to Del. “There’s no room for anyone else in here. We’ll send word when the fight is over. And if you don’t hear from us in five minutes, come finish the job.”
Zillah was a deadly fighter, but it was clear she was even stronger when I was inside of her. Her strikes were laser precise with an enormous amount of strength to complement her new accuracy. The gnomes had fucked with the wrong scorpion queen.
The little bastards were too stupid to realize how badly they’d screwed up, though. They continued their suicidal attack even when their hatchets missed their mark or bounced off the chitinous armor that protected Zillah’s chest, forearms, and tail. The stunted creatures were so caught up in a frenzied bloodlust they didn’t realize the screams they heard from their allies were not battle cries.
Another surge of blood gnomes emerged from burrows around the room’s perimeter like bot flies from their infected hosts. They charged toward Zillah with ululating cries fraught with rage and hunger. Their hatchets whipped through the air with a berserker fury that led to more than a few injuries to their allies. The pain and bloodshed didn’t slow the blood gnomes even the teensiest little bit. If anything, it spurred them on.
A small horde of goblins rushed toward Zillah’s left side, weapons raised and mouths opened wide.
Zillah lashed her tail into the gnomes’ legs with such force their spindly calves shattered like toothpicks and their bodies tumbled through the air. With a feral roar, the scorpion queen slashed her spear in a horizontal arc. The weapon’s metal haft slammed into the airborne goblins with bone-crushing force and sent their corpses hurtling into their allies. The unexpected maneuver smashed half the goblins in the fight against the cavern’s wall with a wet squelch and knocked the other half onto their asses.
“Holy shit, this is amazing,” Zillah crowed. “I want you inside me all the time!”
As much fun as it had been to watch Zillah slaughter the blood gnomes, it was time to end the game. I seized control of her mouth and roared a command at the diminutive fighters who were still alive.
“This fight is over!” I shouted. “Big Gnome, get your ass out here. I don’t want to kill all your people, but I’m sure as hell going to do it if I don’t see your ugly face right now.”
The blood gnomes seemed grateful for the cease-fire. They dragged their wounded and broken away from the scorpion queen’s wrath and kept their heads low and their eyes averted so as not to piss her off again.
“You kill me if I come down,” a voice called down from the hole in the ceiling above Zillah. “You go now. You bad meat.”
“I’ll tear this whole fucking place apart if you don’t come down,” I shouted. “I am Lord Rathokhetra, and I will bring my dungeon down on your heads with a furious vengeance that will leave no wormhole for you to hide in. Obey me, Big Gnome, and show yourself if you want to survive.”
I didn’t really want to waste a bunch of time and energy rooting these fuckers out of their warrens, but if they left me no choice that’s exactly what was going to happen. This was my territory, and I damned well protected what was mine.
There was a moment of silence, and then something shuffled over our heads. Zillah held her spear at the ready to skewer any hostiles who made an appearance.
A blood gnome grunted wearily, and a pair of pasty legs appeared through the hole in the ceiling. Those skinny sticks wiggled and pumped but dropped no farther. The gnome was stuck.
“Get down here, you fat fuck.” Zillah grabbed the gnome’s feet in one hand and yanked it into the ambush cavern.
The creature wailed as the edges of the hole raked along the sides of its corpulent body, and the world’s fattest blood gnome hit the cavern’s stone floor with a pained squeal. Its arms and legs were as skinny as those of the other blood gnomes we’d seen, but its stretch-mark-covered belly was several times larger than any of its kin. Zillah’s maneuver had carved ragged scarlet strips into the thing’s pale flesh.
“Hurts! You hurts babies!” it cried. “Big Gnome no hurt you.”
It was pregnant? Ew.
“You tried to eat us,” Zillah retorted. She stomped on the creature’s shoulder before it could rise. “No, don’t get up. The boss wants a few words with you.”
“It was stupid to attack us,” I told Big Gnome, who stared up at Zillah in confusion. “You understand that?”
“Big belly, small brain,” Big Gnome said. “You teach. No more mistakes.”
I let out an exasperated sigh and pinched the bridge of Zillah’s nose with the index finger and thumb of her left hand. Had I given her a headache, or was it just the mental weight of all these problems on my shoulders that made my thoughts feel like they were covered in cactus spines?
“Call out the one who guided us here,” I said.
“Snizlet!” Big Gnome bleated. “Come now!”
A blood gnome crawled out of a hole near the wall and scurried over to the fat gnome beneath Zillah’s foot.
“Yeah, Big Gnome?” it asked. I had no idea if this was the same gnome or not. Aside from Big Gnome, they all looked the same to me. Whatever. One blood gnome was as good as another for what I had in mind.
I caused Zillah’s spear hand to dart forward like a striking cobra. The twin blades of the mancatcher punched through the scrawny blood gnome’s back and out its chest with the ease of a sewing needle through cotton. Blood sprayed onto Big Gnome’s face and puddled on the floor around it.
“Lesson one,” I said with Zillah’s mouth, voice pitched loudly enough to reach into the hidden burrows the blood gnomes loved so much. “Do not cross me. Ever. If you betray me or my people, we will fucking destroy you and everything you hold dear.”
Big Gnome’s sensory stalks jutted up from the pits where its eyes should have been, and their tips vibrated with tension. Its nostrils flared and thin lips parted to let the air into its lungs in great, slobbery gulps.
“Never,” it gasped. “Never.”
“Good.” I took Zillah’s foot off the gnome’s shoulder, stepped back and motioned for it to stand. “I can be a merciful lord, but never forget that, from this moment forward, I am your master and my vengeance is legendary.”
Big Gnome scrambled onto its knees but didn’t rise any farther. It pressed its forehead against the stone floor so hard I thought it might break its own skull.
“I obey.” The blood gnome practically wept as the words tumbled from its mouth. “Forever and always. I obey, Lord Rathokhetra.”
“Good.” I tapped the gnome on the shoulder, and it scrambled to its feet. It didn’t look at Zillah as it rose, but it didn’t try to run, either. That was a good start. “Now that we have that out of the way, it’s time for your marching orders.”
Big Gnome nodded vigorously but wouldn't meet Zillah’s eyes. It fidgeted as I explained what I had in mind and only looked up at the scorpion queen when I’d finished.
“All meat we want?” Big Gnome wrung its hands together like a toddler who needed to take a piss. “All?”
“Every. Fucking. Bite.”
I patted Big Gnome on top of its head, and the gross little killer practically glowed with excitement.
Two problems down, one to go.
“Clay,” Nephket whispered in my thoughts. Even at the worst of times her mind was like a cool breeze, but I sensed trouble in her tone.
“What’s happened?”
She told me, and I groaned.
“I have to get back to town,” I said to Zillah. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I guess I had four problems, not three.
Chapter 9
– A Trinket
THE RETURN TRIP TO my body was over in the blink of an eye. One moment I was safe and cozy inside Zillah, and the next I was back at City Hall with the sound of assholes in my ears.
“Goddamnit,” I grumbled. It was barely noon, which meant those merchants and their friends had been camped outside ready to bust down the doors the instant my deadline expired.
I summoned my khopesh with a thought and headed down the stairs to the main hall. The arguments grew louder with each step I took, and by the time I reached the first floor, I was ready to crack some skulls.
“Enough!” I shouted. My core bobbled over my right shoulder like even it had been startled by my thunderous outburst.
Stunned faces turned toward me as I emerged from behind the throne where Nephket sat.
“Thank you,” she murmured in my thoughts with a purr that sent tingles down my spine. It was weird to feel my body again, and I wondered what would happen if I stayed in Zillah or another guardians for days, not hours. My life was getting stranger by the day.
“Anytime,” I responded.
A merchant raised his hand and shoved his way through his compatriots to reach the steps up to my throne.
“Silence.” I cut him off with a sharp wave of my khopesh and scanned the crowd that had gathered inside the audience hall. There was fear in their eyes, but there was something even stronger there, too.
Anger.
That was interesting.
“Thank you for appreciating my need for privacy as I concentrate on securing our future,” I said to the gathered audience. Some of the words were mine, but some also belonged to Rathokhetra. I didn’t exactly hear his voice as I spoke, but the words that came out of my mouth weren’t quite the ones I’d imagined myself saying. I wasn’t used to addressing crowds, so the old bugger’s tips were appreciated, but it was disconcerting as hell. We’d have to have a talk about personal space. Soon. “I do not have time to hear from each of you. Pick one among your number to speak for you.”
The merchants were the most numerous with their yellow robes, but there were a number of blue-robed craftsmen, and even some men and women in plain linen who might have been farmers or shepherds.
I’d assumed the three groups wouldn’t work together and I’d be stuck listening to three versions of the same story, but the villagers surprised me. All three groups huddled up together and spoke in hushed, anxious voices to one another. There was a moment of disagreement, which was settled with shocking speed and an even more shocking lack of outrage from any of the parties.
To my surprise, it was the satyr who emerged from the huddle. He held his head high and didn’t even try to hide the mischievous glint in his eye. I half expected him to petition me to open a whorehouse just to spite the assholes behind him, but he surprised me again with his eloquence and poise.
“My Lord Rathokhetra,” he bellowed from twenty feet away from my throne. “I come before you on behalf of your humble citizens to beg your aid. Our enemies beset us from all sides with their predations.”
I leaned forward and motioned for the satyr to approach. He took a few steps, stopped, and opened his mouth again.
Before another syllable could burst from his lips, I shook my head and pointed at a spot not five feet from where I sat.
The satyr took a deep breath, gulped, then raised his head and strode forward as if this was all his idea. The crowd watched him with surprise; they couldn’t see the fear that forced his eyes to grow wider with every step he took toward my throne. By the time he’d reached the target I’d set for him, I was afraid the damned things would roll right out of their sockets.
“Hey,” I said in a conversational tone. “No need to be so formal. Let’s just talk through whatever’s got you and your pals riled up.”
“Just between you and me,” he said, “they aren’t my pals.”
Before he continued, the satyr fished around in his robes until he came up with a small, sapphire-blue bottle. He pulled the plug with his teeth and poured a healthy slug of dark booze into his half-opened mouth. Satisfied, he resealed the bottle and vanished it back into his robes like a practiced magician. He gave me a nervous smile and waited for the liquid courage to kick in.
“Just what the doctor ordered.” He fidgeted, remembered where he was, and went still. “The truth is, we’re scared. Farmers complain someone’s taking their livestock. The merchants are freaked out that orders they placed a week ago haven’t made it to their shops, and their stocks are low. Craftsmen can’t get supplies to make their wares, and if that doesn’t change soon the blacksmiths won’t be able to craft weapons or armor for your troops or even repair the dinged-up shit the soldiers are using now.”
The source of all these problems was no mystery to me. That money-grubbing asshole of a tax collector had used his forces to put the squeeze on the supply lines that led into the Kahtsinka Oasis. I’d have done the same in his position, which didn’t make me hate him even a single iota less. He was confident I didn’t have the strength to push back against his attacks, so he could do whatever the fuck he felt like doing.
I pretended to ponder the satyr’s words while another worry twisted through my thoughts like a poisonous vine.
I could accept that the oasis had gone through some freaky time and reality distortion because of my shenanigans. But if there were trade routes into the oasis, that meant the merchants in my little town, a settlement that was hardly three days old, had placed orders with suppliers outside of the oasis before they’d even existed. My mind boggled at the ramifications of people who did not exist retroactively interacting with the rest of the world.
There had to be some way I could use this weird shit to my advantage.
The satyr cleared his throat, and I decided my time was better used talking to the guy in front of me than pondering the universe’s bizarre mysteries of time and space. I leaned forward to make sure my voice didn’t carry.
“These guys know we’ve got an army parked on our doorstep, right?” I asked the satyr. He nodded. “Then they’re smart enough to know that all these problems are caused by that army?”
“Yep.” The satyr dug the booze out of his robes and took another slug.
“What do they expect me to do about their concerns when I have much bigger problems of my own to deal with?”
“Stir your mighty wrath and wipe your foes from the face of the earth?” the satyr suggested with a sheepish grin. “You’re Lord Rathokhetra. They expect a miracle.”
That’s the problem with being a god. Everyone thinks you’re omnipotent, instead of just super potent. So annoying.
“All right, thanks for the update, my man,” I said. “You still can’t open a whorehouse.”
The satyr nodded glumly and took his leave. He strutted like the cock of the walk as he headed back toward his peers and would probably drink for free for weeks on the story about his one-on-one session with yours truly.
Good on him.
“Thank you for bringing your concerns to me,” I said to the gathered crowd. “While our enemies are mighty, they are not wise to tempt my anger. For the moment, it is to my benefit to let them believe we deal from a position of weakness. But I will do what I can to alleviate your suffering.
“I will provide a shelter for your herds, to protect them from thieves who would steal them under the cover of darkness,” I said. “I will also consider a way to feed your herds that will not require them to graze where predators can reach them.”
My hope was that a single Trough Hall upgrade for my dungeon would be sufficient to feed a bunch of goats or sheep. The description on the tablet claimed the hall couldn’t feed more than five creatures, but I hoped there was some wiggle room there. Surely herd animals had to require less food than even a vegetarian guardian, right?
One of the merchants raised his hand, but I waved him down.
“There’s little I can do about the missing shipments at the moment,” I said to the merchants. “We are at war,
and our enemies have damaged our supply lines.”
There were groans at that, but fuck the haters, right? Their concerns should have been about their potential deaths, not the loss of a few coins. I did have one bone to throw them, though.
“As for the supplies needed by the craftsmen, I have a partial solution for that,” I said. “I have a source of iron the blacksmiths can use to craft weapons and armor for our defenses. It will take a day or two for me to finalize the arrangements for those supplies, but they will be delivered to you as they become available.”
That was a solution I knew would work. The rock boys had been tossing chunks of iron ore into the magma pit, and there was no reason we couldn’t haul those to the surface for the blacksmiths.
There was more to this plan, but none of the craftsmen would like it, so I’d fill them in on the details after they received the iron.
“My lord,” Nephket whispered into my ear and placed her hand on my wrist.
I raised my head and blinked when I saw that the audience chamber was nearly deserted. Shit, I’d zoned out again and the merchants, farmers, and craftsmen had gone. They’d been replaced by the woman with alabaster skin and unbowed pride. She stood with her back ramrod straight and her eyes fixed on my face, her rags thrown back to reveal her stunning features. This time, however, she was not empty-handed. A long bundle of rags rested across her shoulders, her arms looped over its ends to hold it in place.
“How long was I out?” I tried not to let my panic bleed into the thoughts I sent to Nephket, but lost time always rattled me. As a hacker, my attention to detail and focus on the task at hand had kept me alive. This recent tendency for my brain to slip out of gear freaked me right the fuck out.
“Not long. It’s good to make them wait to see you,” Nephket whispered as she stepped away. The priestess cleared her throat and raised her voice to announce the woman who stood before us. “Your last petitioner for the day, Lord Rathokhetra. She has waited patiently for you to complete your reverie and humbly begs for a few moments of your time.”
