God Conqueror 2

by Logan Jacobs

  “Well, you sure make it look easy,” Lizzy purred. “Especially with me there with my teeth and claws, and Elodette with her bow. And Florenia’s brains. And Willobee’s random weirdo talents. And I guess Ilandere… adds a nice decorative touch.”

  Lizzy really didn’t have a verbal filter. I sighed. But when I glanced over at Ilandere herself to make sure her feelings hadn’t been hurt, I noticed that she actually seemed to have interpreted Lizzy’s rude comment as a compliment. Part of that was probably her well justified physical vanity, part of it was also probably her generally blissful mood that morning.

  Kiki, who had been listening in intently, was much more interested in the mechanics of my divinity than the intricacies of our group’s social dynamics. The merchants didn’t necessarily buy into the idea that I was really a god, especially since I didn’t remotely resemble their concept of a totally non-human, elemental god, but they did seem to accept nonchalantly the fact that I had certain mystical abilities.

  “You can create more bodies?” she asked incredulously.

  “Er, yes,” I said.

  “So can every male past the age of twelve,” chuckled a nearby merchant.

  “How many more?” Kiki asked curiously as she ignored the joke.

  “Qaar’endoth can create infinite bodies,” Florenia answered confidently, even though of course that was only an untested hypothesis at this point.

  “Then you could create an army of your selves?” Kiki asked.

  “That’s the plan,” I said. “So that I can gain the power to destroy Thorvinius.”

  “Wow, that would be a really useful ability,” Kiki mused.

  “One of you is already as much as I can handle,” Zembo teased.

  “Well, look at Vander,” Kiki replied. “He’s not asking one woman to handle him, he’s got four. Or three, I mean,” she quickly corrected herself as Elodette’s icy gray eyes narrowed in her direction. The caravan had quickly warmed to the rest of us and accepted us as new friends. Elodette, however, could be prickly, and while I didn’t think they disliked her, they did instinctively adopt a policy of giving her a wide berth.

  Zembo rolled his eyes. “If you ever become caravan leader, then you can take multiple spouses like Danazar. I’m not carrying them around in litters though.”

  “Careful what you promise, Zembo,” said one of the merchants that I thought was his brother, but wasn’t sure. I recognized most of their faces by this point but didn’t know everyone’s names. “Kiki’s probably next in line. You know. If anything happened.”

  “Your leaders are popularly elected?” Florenia inquired.

  “Yup,” sighed the merchant that may or may not have been Zembo’s brother, whose name I couldn’t quite remember. “So fuck knows how we wound up with a dandy like that. But Danazar’s got a true affinity with Shoragua, I’ll grant him that. He’s kept us alive for the most part over the last decade.”

  “Democracy is a risky system,” the duke’s daughter remarked. “Even a democratic republic is risky. It leaves the leaders subject to the whims of the ignorant, selfish, and irrational masses. You are not really being governed by someone whom you chose as wiser than yourself, you are being governed by your neighbors, who are on average no better than you, and allowing them to curtail your liberties and vote themselves a share of your property. A monarchy or an oligarchy is far superior.”

  “I don’t know about all of that,” Ilandere sighed, “but I do know that if my herd elected its leaders by voting, I never would have been chosen as a princess. I would be free to mate with whomever I wished and lead whatever kind of life I wanted because the rest of the herd wouldn’t care.”

  “Isn’t that precisely what you are doing anyway, Princess?” Elodette pointed out icily. She wasn’t exactly wrong.

  “Without worrying that I was neglecting my responsibilities or doing something wrong,” Ilandere said in a small voice.

  “You’re not,” I said. “Your herd doesn’t own you. You didn’t volunteer to lead them and then ditch them. Besides, it doesn’t sound like you had a governing role anyway. I’m sure they all miss you, but I don’t think your absence would impair the way the herd normally functions.”

  “I hope not,” Ilandere said.

  “Ilandere’s mother rules as the queen,” Elodette said, “but Ilandere was to be her heir.”

  I had never heard either of them mention Ilandere’s mother before. But I did know that Ilandere had been miserable as a princess with the centaur herd, and I did remember her telling Elodette that she was the only member of the herd she had actually missed. So I had to conclude that Ilandere’s relationship with her mother had not been a very good one.

  “Well, she’ll just have to name a new heir then,” I said.

  “My mother wouldn’t approve of my choices ever since I left the herd,” Ilandere said. “But… this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life.”

  “Then you’re exactly where you should be,” Lizzy said in an unexpected show of support. The centaur princess smiled at her gratefully.

  “I don’t believe in hereditary duties,” Florenia said. “I only believe in upholding the duties that one voluntarily takes upon oneself. Like if you pledge yourself to someone, then you should be loyal to them. But if you just happened to be born as someone’s child that shouldn’t mean that you’re forced to do their job.”

  “That’s an awfully convenient viewpoint for you, isn’t it,” Elodette sneered, “considering how you’re always going on and on about the absurd human privileges that you enjoyed due to your birth. Like baths with flowers in them, and maids that never let you lift a finger to do the simplest task for yourself. Centaurs don’t even treat our royalty that way. It makes people soft. And ungrateful and oblivious to the needs of everyone else. It convinces people that they’re special and lets them forget what they owe their people in return.”

  “Yes, perhaps my life was luxurious once, but I am not living that way anymore,” Florenia retorted. “And I would give it all up in a heartbeat again in exchange for the life I have now. Just like Ilandere. If you really love her, you should want her to be happy. If you love her as a pers-- I mean cent-- well, as a friend, not just as a title that you owe some kind of abstract allegiance to.”

  Elodette was silent for a minute, and at first I thought she was going to refuse to respond to that at all. Then finally she said, “I do owe Ilandere a form of allegiance that you will probably never understand, despite having been born into a similar system. A form of allegiance that’s based on the structure of our whole society and is bigger and more meaningful than either of us as individuals. But, I also love her on a personal level, as you say, as if she were my younger sister. That is not a good thing, it’s a liability, because it interferes with my judgment and causes me to be more lenient in my guidance of her than I should be, as her protector. But it’s true. And it also makes me more sensitive to any… risky choices that she makes.”

  “Elodette, between you and me,” I said, “nothing will ever harm Ilandere.”

  The brunette centaur narrowed her gray eyes at me. I knew she considered me to be a liability and a risk to Ilandere myself, emotionally if not physically. But I held her gaze steadily and hoped she would understand that I was just as committed to taking care of the princess in every possible way as she was, and eventually, Elodette nodded to me once and turned her head forward again.

  We continued to slog through the sand in silence for a while as the sun beat down and sent beads of sweat trailing down our skin and soaking through our clothes. The women were in a pensive mood. Willobee wasn’t even riding near us, he was off happily chattering away with caravan members in their native tongue and oblivious to the complicated undercurrents that were buffeting our group right now.

  Shortly after the midday meal, there was another sandstorm. Danazar was, again, the first to detect somehow its approach via environmental signs that were too subtle for the rest of us to notice. The caravan as
sembled atop the crest of the nearest dune again, and this time, the nursemaids kept an especially close watch over the children and none of them were buried again. This second sandstorm was not as violent as the first had been and didn’t send people and their camels sliding all over the place, it just blew grains into our faces that stung our skin and made us cough. But there were no casualties, so everyone just matter-of-factly retrieved their stuff that had gotten scattered, and we continued on our way.

  Lizzy spat out some sand grains. “Wish the ground would stop trying to kill us,” she said. “First that rockslide, now these sandstorms. You sure there wasn’t a better route to catch up with Thorvinius, Vander?”

  “This was the most direct one,” I responded.

  The real trouble didn’t start until a few hours later.

  Danazar habitually sent scouts ahead of the caravan, although they didn’t really roam all that far, since it was very easy to get lost in the desert and almost impossible to find your way back to a moving caravan once you did. In this desert, you couldn’t even navigate by familiar terrain features, since the terrain itself was constantly shifting.

  This time, the two that he had sent, Khan and a merchant named Yuri, returned in a state of extreme agitation, and they were not alone.

  They were leading two men with their hands bound, one behind each of their camels and dragged at the end of ropes. The men were robed in dark red, they wore golden helms with protruding pieces designed to look like flames, and their expressions were sullen, their lips pressed tight together.

  Two of me were farther back in the caravan with the women, but one of me was right up front near Danazar to hear the scouts’ entire report.

  “We found camel tracks,” Yuri informed Danazar. “Recent ones. So we followed them. Sharman is here.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Danazar, who had been in the middle of a dramatic retelling of a childhood incident in which he had beheld his face in the waters of a clear well once and had the sudden revelation that he was destined to lead a caravan of his own one day, immediately turned serious. “You saw his caravan?”

  “Where is the rest of your caravan?” Danazar demanded of the two captives. They just stared at him. One of them spat in the sand. “It is entirely up to you what manner of hospitality you receive while you are the guests of my caravan,” Danazar said softly in the most dangerous voice I had ever heard him use.

  The news of the scouts and their captives had started to spread rapidly through the entire length of the caravan. My other selves watched Kiki stiffen and start moving up toward the front, with Zembo close behind her. Other caravan members moved aside to let her pass.

  I had thought that Danazar might call a halt in order to interrogate the captives, but instead he steered his camel forty-five degrees right and picked up the caravan’s pace significantly with the apparent intention of putting distance between us and Sharman’s caravan. Even though we didn’t know where they were.

  “Their flamethrowers, do you have them?” Danazar asked Khan and Yuri as they wheeled around to keep up with him, which caused their captives to be dragged along too. The other merchants around them hissed at them and cursed them. One tried to spit on them, but the glob missed its mark.

  “Yes,” Khan said as he produced two long iron rods from his saddlebags and handed them to the caravan leader. “They got Yuri’s arm before we could disarm them. He needs medical attention.”

  “Show me,” Danazar ordered the other scout, who had been concealing his left hand and forearm within his robes.

  Yuri produced his arm. From the elbow down it was swaddled in some kind of white gauze, which he proceeded to unwrap with a grimace.

  What was underneath drew gasps of horror from the surrounding caravan members. His hand and wrist were swollen to twice their usual size, and there were patches of bright red meat exposed beneath skin that had been seared off as well as huge pockets of yellowish pus rising up.

  “It will have to be amputated,” Danazar said flatly.

  “No!” Yuri protested. “Please, I can’t lose my hand… if I just apply a poultice, with Shoragua’s blessing, surely… ”

  “The flesh is rotten, it will spread through your body and take your life if we do not amputate it, so we shall,” Danazar said, again without visible or audible emotion. The effect was especially chilling because Danazar was so wildly, theatrically expressive at other times.

  I didn’t know enough about medicine to know whether Danazar’s statement was accurate or not. The nurses at my temple sometimes treated burns, but they had never performed an amputation, because novices would simply replace any bodies of theirs that became badly damaged enough to require one.

  I wished I could help Yuri, but his problem lay far outside my areas of expertise. What I could do for Danazar’s caravan was help them fight Sharman’s. And if these flamethrowers wielded by the followers of Pyralis were such a big part of their destructive power, then I wanted to know how they worked, and if we could thwart them somehow or make our own.

  “Can I see one of those?” I asked Danazar.

  He handed me one of the iron flamethrowers. It was about a foot long and surprisingly lightweight, and carved with ornate decorative motifs, mostly involving fire. It also featured birds with long, flowing feathers, camels, and warriors dressed like the two captives. It had a ruby inset at each end.

  What it distinctly lacked, however, was any kind of activation mechanism. There was no trigger, no button, no segment that could be twisted, pushed, or pulled in any way. The rod was entirely smooth except for the superficial carvings and one united piece throughout, without any knobs or hollows. I focused on the rubies for a while until I was satisfied that they were really just decorative stones.

  “You can’t use it,” Kiki said when she noticed what I was doing. “Only they can. It’s not technology. It’s a power given to them by Sharman.”

  I had fairly advanced weapons handling skills when it came to traditional weapons like swords, shields, spears, arrows, maces, grappling hooks, and so on and so forth, but I didn’t have any kind of expertise in advanced weapons technology. So I couldn’t be absolutely certain that she was right about these flamethrowers, but what I did know was that if they could be unlocked or activated somehow, I didn’t have the ability to do it.

  “Well, that doesn’t seem even to me,” Lizzy remarked. She had come up to the front to join us by then, since she always wanted in on wherever the action was, and the rest of my companions were close behind. “What about Shoragua, didn’t he give you anything decent then? Like… I dunno, water shooters or something?”

  “Shoragua is… a defensive god,” Kiki answered carefully. “He’s not an offensive or destructive god. He doesn’t provide weapons.”

  “So you mean he’s a useless one,” Lizzy snorted.

  “Do you consider water in the desert useless, girl?” Zembo demanded. “Then you have never known thirst.”

  “I’ve known thirst,” Lizzy answered. “I’ve known thirst and hunger, I’ve known fighting other vagrants for rich men’s scraps. And when I’m thirsty, I’ll drink anything. I’ve drunk blood, and some of it human.”

  “If you think that could scare me, then you have never seen a man burned alive,” Zembo said. “You have never seen your friends burned alive. They just go up in flames. They stagger around. Their flesh is melting. And there is nothing you can do to help them.”

  “I seen that same thing happen to my former man,” Lizzy replied coolly. I was thankful that she didn’t mention the context of that incident and that Polliver and I had been the ones responsible. “Fire is scary. But so am I.”

  Zembo snorted but made no answer to that.

  The pace that Danazar set for the next hour resulted in four caravan members ending up unconscious and strapped to the backs of camels. It was also notable because as fast as the caravan moved sometimes, it always alternated that with creeping along and pausing, not just to enable the people an
d camels to recover physically but also, we were told, to avoid disturbing the slumber of the sandworms.

  Then, finally, when I was starting to worry that Ilandere would pass out too, Danazar shrieked, “Halt!” and most of the humans gratefully more or less collapsed, while the camels shuffled and drooled.

  The canopies were set up as usual, but the mood was different. Usually the caravan savored its rest breaks. This one was all business, and everyone remained on the alert. The first order of business was Yuri’s arm. The sides of a canopy were let down to form a tent where he was enclosed with his wife and three or four other caravan members who apparently had medical knowledge, and their tools.

  Of course it was not possible for anyone on the outside to see what was going on inside the medical tent, but as we set up a meal, much sparser and plainer by this point based on what was left of the food supplies, everyone kept glancing over at it. Then, a few minutes in, the screams started, and all other conversation pretty much ceased until they stopped. We just shoved food into our mouths and washed it down with water while staring at the sand.

  Danazar had been uncharacteristically cold and silent ever since the capture of the Pyralian scouts, but after Yuri emerged white-faced and sweat-soaked with a bandaged stump and leaning on his crying wife, the caravan leader marched over to the two captives and told them as the entire caravan gawked, “You will wish it were that easy for you, that it were just an arm for you and nothing more. Do you understand me? Your people have taken enough from mine. I need to know where they are. Or I will have to try to exact generations’ worth of vengeance on just two men.”

  The captives just glared back at him defiantly. At first I thought Danazar was about to get violent with them but then he seemed to become aware that the entire caravan’s eyes were on him, including all the children’s, and decided not to escalate things at that time.

  When enough conversation had resumed that it was possible for me to talk without being too noticeable, I asked Kiki, “Ah, does Danazar always react this way? After encounters with Pyralians? Because I thought his policy was to keep running from them.”