God Conqueror 2

by Logan Jacobs

  “It is just abstract curiosity, I’m sure,” Elodette snapped at me. “A bit indecorous, but nothing unnatural, under the circumstances.”

  “Well, you know how you call Florenia and Lizzy your consorts?” Ilandere asked shyly.

  “Yeah, kind of, I mean, Florenia’s the one who uses that term mostly,” I replied.

  “Am I your consort too?” the centaur princess asked.

  “No,” Elodette answered immediately.

  “Yes, if you want to be,” I answered.

  “What would that entail, exactly?” Ilandere asked.

  “Er, you’d be a sort of companion to me, but more than that, one of my life partners,” I tried awkwardly to explain. “Florenia would have a better definition than that, it’s ah, kind of a formal word that I think aristocrats tend to use.”

  “But Elodette and Willobee and I are already part of your team, aren’t we?” Ilandere asked with, I suspected, less innocence than she pretended. “And we’re loyal to you and we spend all our time with you already. So what’s the difference between that and being a consort?”

  “Well, Florenia and Lizzy are also… you know… romantically linked to me,” I said. “If that makes sense?”

  “But I love you too, Vander, just as much as they do,” Ilandere said. “Do you think you could ever have feelings for me? Even though I’m part horse?”

  “You are not part horse!” Elodette sputtered.

  “I know not scientifically, but to humans, we do look kind of like horses,” Ilandere said dejectedly.

  “Of course I could, Ilandere, I already do have feelings for you,” I said.

  “Platonic feelings of affection and protectiveness, I hope,” Elodette said sternly.

  “Is that what you mean, Vander?” Ilandere asked me disappointedly.

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to make things messy between myself and the centaur, or between the princess and her powerful handmaiden. And I didn’t want, above all, to hurt Ilandere’s feelings in any way. But she clearly wanted reassurance that I could be romantically interested in her as a centaur, and the truth was that I could. Even though part of her, to me, resembled a small, silver-dappled pony, the rest of her was all woman, and she was an exquisitely beautiful woman. Her features were ethereal, like a porcelain doll’s. She had huge dark eyes you could easily drown in, the sweetest little rosebud mouth, and delicate human curves from her collarbones to her tiny waist to her hipbones. And she had the sweetest and most purely good nature of anyone I had ever met. All in all, anyone would be lucky to have her for a consort. I had just never wanted to take advantage of her innocence in that way.

  Unless, of course, Ilandere herself really wanted me to.

  And lately, it did seem that way. She kept pressing the conversation on subjects that she would have been too embarrassed by and avoided when I first met her.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean. I am attracted to you romantically, Ilandere. It doesn’t matter that you’re a centaur. Well, I mean, it does, because that’s part of your identity, and it’s part of your unique beauty. But that wouldn’t stop me from… wanting to take you as a consort.”

  For a long moment Ilandere stared at me with those doe eyes and an expression that I couldn’t read at all, and I worried that I had offended or shocked her somehow.

  But then she opened her mouth and asked, “I want to be your consort, the way Lizzy and Florenia are. Will you show me how?”

  “This is a mistake, Princess,” Elodette hissed before I could respond.

  Ilandere looked over at her, and her expression turned imperious. “You are welcome to stay if you like and participate even. But if you’re going to stay then you need to stop criticizing my choices. I’m not a filly!”

  Elodette hesitated. Then she rose, stalked out of the tent, and pulled the flap closed behind her, which left me and the princess alone.

  I knelt in front of Ilandere, placed my hand behind her neck, and lowered my head to kiss her gently. Her skin was like marble, and her mouth tasted like berries. Her long eyelashes brushed my face as she closed her eyes.

  As far as I knew, the princess had never even been kissed before, so I didn’t want to do anything that might startle her, and I didn’t know how much guidance she might need from me. But then without any prompting from me, as we started to kiss more deeply, Ilandere’s dainty little hand slid down my chest and inside my pants to grasp my cock.

  She gave a little gasp of delight. “It’s so hard!”

  I laughed a little at her tone of pure childlike wonderment. “Er, yeah, that’s, uh, because of you, Ilandere.”

  “Me?” she asked in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “It gets that way when… I’m around a woman I’m attracted to, because my body wants to… er, you remember what Danazar’s wives were doing with those rods?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yes. I would like to feel you inside of me, like that.”

  I continued to kiss her with the intention of taking things slow with her. Her hand eagerly explored every inch of my shaft and balls until she broke off the kiss in order to unlace my pants, draw them down, and examine this newfound territory visually.

  Then, apparently by pure instinct, she leaned forward as tentatively as a baby bird and kissed the tip of my shaft before she licked it experimentally. It shuddered against her tongue, and I let out a sigh.

  “Oh!” she gasped and giggled. “You… like that?”

  “Yes,” I said as I ran my hands through her long, silky hair.

  She leaned forward, took me in her mouth, and started to suck. She didn’t have Florenia’s confident expertise yet, but she did have both enthusiasm and stamina, and she was very sensitive to even my subtlest responses. The beautiful little centaur really didn’t know anything about sex, but as the hours wore on, she proved herself a swift learner.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next morning the entire caravan was hungover, but otherwise in a cheerful mood. They packed up and loaded the camels with somewhat less efficiency than usual, and then we were off, just as the lovely, cool, gray morning began to turn into an uncomfortably hot early afternoon.

  “How long we still got to go before Burna?” Lizzy asked Kiki and Zembo with a sigh.

  “Another three days, if we’re lucky,” Zembo replied.

  “It’s Bjurna, not Burna,” Willobee informed Lizzy as he towered above us on camel top. “The burning stops when you get out of the desert.”

  The gnome was very proud of his rapid grasp of the merchants’ language and wasn’t about to miss a chance to show it off obnoxiously. He also, apparently, couldn’t resist a chance to get in a subtle jab about the sunburns that were starting to appear on Lizzy’s, Florenia’s, both centaurs’, and my own faces, although even his own knobby nose was also distinctly redder than usual.

  Kiki hissed through her teeth. “Do not speak of burning,” she said, “especially not while we are still in the desert.”

  “But ain’t we doing that already, like the gnome says?” Lizzy asked obliviously.

  Kiki turned and stared straight at her. There was an unusual intensity in the desert woman’s bright brown eyes and an unusual hardness in her weathered face. “No,” she answered. “We are not.”

  Somehow, all of my loudmouthed companions instinctively refrained from saying anything more to that.

  I thought of the Sword of Saint Polliver, the most precious of my belongings and the first weapon on my mind whenever I reassimilated, which I always made sure to transfer over to another self first. Now, what Polliver did to any mortal who touched his hilt could properly be called burning. I had witnessed his ability two times, or sort of three.

  The first had been in the sanctum of my temple where he had lain undisturbed on a pedestal for as long as anyone at the temple could remember. The night of the Thorvinian massacre, one of them had attempted to steal Polliver, and his crispy charred corpse at the foot of the sword pedestal had been the first thing I s
aw when I entered the sanctum. But the high priest’s instructions had been for me to claim the sacred cursed sword as part of my divine right as the new embodiment of Qaar’endoth, so I had had to risk it anyway, and despite my natural misgivings, contact with Polliver had not harmed me.

  The second time had been when Lizzy and her crew of bandits had attempted to rob Willobee on the road, and then when I tried to intervene, they had started messing with me and eyeing my goods too. I simply offered Lizzy’s former mate my obviously extremely valuable sword, and the instant he seized Polliver’s hilt, he had gone up in flames and been burnt alive before my eyes. All his crew members had turned tail after that, except, of course, for Lizzy, who had been oddly unfazed and promptly declared that she would now be my woman.

  The third time had been with Father Norrell, the puppet of the necromancer God Hakmut. When I encountered him at the head of a flagellant procession in plague ridden Ferndale, busily spreading germs by flogging Hakmut’s healthy and sick followers with the same scourge, and he had refused to listen to anything I had to say about why that was a bad idea, I hadn’t even offered him Polliver. I had just grabbed his hands and placed them on Polliver’s hilt. Polliver, as it turned out, did not care about a mortal’s intentions or lack therein in grabbing his hilt. He incinerated the priest just the same as the bandit.

  Of course, I didn’t know what Kiki’s reason was for reacting so strongly to the mention of burning. But my experience with Polliver just gave me the suspicion that it was probably a valid one.

  After a few minutes of pensive silence, while Kiki stared off into the distance and Zembo scowled, the orange-clad merchant woman spoke up again to explain herself.

  “Pyralis is the god of fire,” she said. “The sandstorms and the sandworms are always present, and they are always a threat to us, but they are a part of nature. They cause us harm without meaning to. The followers of Pyralis murder us without cause, and they kill in the worst of ways. By burning.”

  I decided not to mention Polliver’s history to Kiki.

  “Their cause is that they are elementally opposed to us,” Zembo said. “Shoragua and Pyralis cannot coexist. Eventually, one must triumph.”

  “Uh, when was the last time you guys encountered Pyralis?” I asked. “Or his followers, at least?”

  “Eight months ago,” Kiki answered immediately. “Eight months, two weeks, and four days.”

  “That must’ve been the skirmish that Khan mentioned?” I asked.

  Kiki’s and Zembo’s faces darkened even further, as did the faces of several of the other caravan members within earshot.

  “It was an ambush,” Kiki said. “And it was only the latest in a string of bloody attacks. Khan tries to downplay the threat posed by Pyralis because he hates the idea of us all living in fear of him. But over the years I’ve lost my niece and two nephews and dozens of friends to the Pyralians. The same is true, of course, of sandstorms and sandworms… but it feels different when someone wanted them dead. Someone that, maybe, we could have fought, could have stopped.”

  “We cannot fight caravans like Sharman’s,” Zembo said.

  “I noticed that some of you, ah, carry spears,” I said. I didn’t mention the scimitars featured in Danazar’s wives’ dance the previous night, because those seemed to be used for more… recreational purposes. “If those aren’t useful against sandworms, then are they for dealing with hostile caravans? Have you launched counterattacks against Pyralis’ followers?”

  “That is not really… Danazar’s policy,” Kiki said. “He keeps saying that we’re biding our time and waiting until we gain the strength to oppose Pyralis. That it would be suicide for us to launch attacks now. But I feel like we’re not gaining any strength, we’re just gotten used to avoiding his caravans the way we do sandstorms and sandworms. And with perils that are native to the desert, there is no choice, but there is a choice with Pyralis to do something about it besides just letting ourselves be gradually picked off.”

  “Yes, we could fling ourselves at the fire god headfirst instead, and let ourselves all be wiped out at once,” Zembo agreed sarcastically.

  “Fire god?” Lizzy asked with interest. “Vander’s got a fire--”

  Sword, I knew she was about to say, but I didn’t want to discuss Polliver with people who were so fire-averse, so I managed to reach over in time and pinch the she-wolf in warning to keep her from completing the sentence.

  Instead Lizzy concluded, “Well, I could eat him for you! Maybe not if he’s a giant ball of fire or something, but at least his caravans of followers, I could eat those.”

  Kiki, who had never seen Lizzy morph, raised her eyebrows and gave her an odd look, but she didn’t make any reply to that. She probably just thought my friend was delusional and that it was better not to engage with her.

  Zembo, on the other hand, said impatiently, “Even if you’re a better warrior than all of the men here, you’d never get the chance to ‘eat’ any Pyralians--”

  “I could give her the chance by shooting them first,” Elodette said. It was the first thing I had heard her say all morning, besides the bare minimum of greetings and answers to questions she was asked. The powerful black centaur seemed to be in an even more sullen mood than usual after the previous night with the princess. “I mean, they don’t have all that sandworm blubber to protect them from arrows, do they? They’re just human, aren’t they?”

  “They’re human,” Zembo conceded, “but they wield the power of fire given to them by their god.”

  “What, torches?” Florenia asked. “But your men can swallow fire, they showed us that last night.”

  “That is an illusion,” Zembo said. “And what Sharman’s men and the others use are not torches. They are flamethrowers.”

  “What’s a flamethrower?” Lizzy asked curiously. “Sounds like something I’d like to get me one of.”

  “I’ve used fire arrows,” Elodette said. “Is it like that?”

  “No, these are much more powerful,” Zembo said. “Fire arrows sputter out half the time before they ever reach their targets, and they carry only a handful of flame. A flamethrower… is like the breath of a dragon, but wielded in the hands of men. These weapons can melt the sand and turn it into glass. And they turn men into ash. That is why it is futile for us to meet Pyralian caravans on the battlefield.”

  “What’s the alternative, if they’re seeking you out?” I asked. “Aren’t there established waypoints, like oases or something, where you would have to meet up, eventually?”

  “That is why we do utilize such waypoints as little as possible, even though other caravans frequent them freely, that are not in conflict with Pyralis,” Zembo said. “Only once our water supplies start to run low and there is no other alternative. But even then, we send scouts, we send runners. We do not mass in one body at such places.”

  “We are the prey, they are the predators,” Kiki said bitterly.

  “Let’s just find us this Pyralis guy, and we’ll see about that,” Lizzy crowed. “Vander and I will fuck him up for you.”

  I coughed and tried to catch Lizzy’s eye, but she wasn’t looking at any of my selves. She was too busy grinning eagerly at Kiki and Zembo, neither of whom seemed convinced by her bravado. I really needed to have a word with my consorts about offering up my combat services without so much as consulting me first. Yes, Danazar’s caravan had treated us well, and yes, I would of course defend them as well as my friends if we came under attack while my party was traveling with them. But with any kind of long-seated conflict like this one they apparently had going with Pyralis and his followers, there were always two sides to the story, and we hadn’t heard a peep from the other side, so I didn’t want to make any premature assumptions about the fire god.

  “Well, I think avoiding Pyralis is a good idea,” Ilandere spoke up.

  “Of course you do,” Lizzy scoffed.

  “If you can’t get along, it’s better not to interact at all, right?” the little silver-da
ppled centaur continued. “That way, fewer people get hurt. And if Pyralis’ followers don’t understand that and keep trying to catch up with you, then I think you taking the extra effort to avoid them makes you the more generous and more enlightened caravan.”

  “I don’t know what ‘enlightened’ means but I guess it must be a nice way of saying scared little bit--” Lizzy began.

  “Lizzy, we don’t fully understand the situation here,” I interrupted hastily. “We weren’t here when Pyralis’ followers attacked. We don’t know what it was like. So let’s not jump to conclusions.” Or at least, let’s not voice them aloud if they’re derogatory to our hosts, I thought.

  “I like this caravan’s lifestyle,” Ilandere said, which seemed a bit tangential to the discussion, but she was very emphatic about it.

  Lizzy glanced over incredulously at the dusty, exhausted, sunburned little centaur, who hated danger, uncomfortable climate conditions, and physical hard work and had always been most at home in luxurious settings featuring feather beds and fresh apples. “You do? What exactly do you like about it?”

  “Uh,” Ilandere stammered, “I like that everyone… enjoys each other’s company. And focuses on relationships and happiness, instead of people getting upset and getting into fights all the time, like some of the places we go.”

  Lizzy squinted at her suspiciously. “You’re saying you like that they fuck a lot? I thought you and Elodette hid out from all that part last night, in your own little tent. Thought you were too precious for it or something.”

  “I have… learned a lot and become a lot more open to new experiences since I started traveling with Vander,” Ilandere answered defiantly.

  “Wait a second,” Lizzy said as she glanced back and forth between me and the centaur princess, who was now blushing furiously. “You mean you…”

  Florenia sighed. “That’s all very well, Qaar’endoth, but just create a fourth self soon, please. So the supply can keep up with the demand.”

  “It’s not that easy!” I protested. “I can’t just snap my fingers and defeat a god, just like that.”