by Logan Jacobs
Ed and Maire had described the ghasts as hungry to eat living humans, but after seeing them in action for myself, it didn’t really look that way to me. It looked more like the plague itself had possessed these corpses and was using them in an all-out effort to invade other hosts. One monstrous mind that controlled a potentially limitless supply of bodies. Like a fucked-up version of me. But I made my own bodies. I would never steal anyone else’s, even if that person were already dead. That was just fucking wrong.
As we worked our way through the remaining ghasts, one of me used Polliver to protect Elodette, while the other fought as a clumsily double-bladed whirlwind at Ed’s side and kept him from getting bitten. The middle-aged villager wasn’t much of a warrior physically, but he had a raw courage born of bitterness and despair that I had to respect as I watched him clumsily batter away at his dead neighbors and dodge their grasping hands and teeth. One by one, we reduced the plague victims back to the inert flesh that they truly were.
Then the battle was over, and we’d won against the undead.
Elodette wiped and then sheathed the sword I had loaned her, which she really hadn’t used much. The centaur obviously favored her bow, but it seemed that in a situation where arrows were of no use, her instinct was to default to her powerful hooves. I made a mental note to myself to practice swordplay and spearplay with her when we had time, because I knew the athletic brunette would be an even more impossibly fearsome warrior if she became truly proficient in a wider range of weapons, instead of haughtily relying upon the narrow skill set that already placed her among the ranks of the elite.
Ed didn’t look as pale and stunned as the lovely black centaur did. He just looked sweaty and exhausted. Once he had enough breath back in his lungs to speak, he pointed at my two swords and gasped out, “Holy fuck.”
“I know, the balance was so shitty, and the blade on this one hadn’t been sharpened since the smithy,” I groaned.
“That was the most fucking majestic sight I’ve ever seen,” the grizzled villager exclaimed, and I refrained from informing him that only someone extremely ignorant of swordplay could approve.
Well, that was two members of my team safe and accounted for.
“Willobee, you can come out, it’s safe now,” I called.
The gnome didn’t immediately answer, and for a few horrible seconds I thought I must have missed a ghast and allowed it to find him behind his tree and devour him. But then with a nervous clinking he edged his way into view.
Just as I was about to laugh at the terrified expression on the gnome’s chubby little face, he burst into tears that quickly drenched his lavender beard.
“Willobee!” I exclaimed. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“N-n-no, but I should be dead,” Willobee sobbed. “So many times I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you, Master, and I don’t deserve all the rescues. I don’t even deserve to wear this chainmail. You were right, I should have taken it off, because it’s a warrior’s garb. And a warrior doesn’t hide behind a tree while he watches his noble master do battle on his behalf, and not just both of you, Master, but also a fair lady, and also a dunderheaded farmer, and even him fifty times more valiant than Willobee of Clan Benniwumporgan.”
“Willobee, the chain mail’s just the wrong length for you is all, you can wear whatever makes you happy,” I replied. “And you’re right, you’re not a warrior. I don’t need another damn warrior. I’ve got Elodette here, and nothing’s more lethal than her aim with a bow, except for maybe a kick from her hooves. I’ve got a four-hundred-pound she-wolf with an appetite for blood to match her sex drive. And not to be an arrogant dick or anything, but I think it’s fair to say most people would probably count me as worth a lot more than two in a fight. But I can’t sing songs like you do, I can’t spin tales like you do, I can’t talk people dizzy and wrap their minds in knots and convince them the sky’s not blue and befriend anything with a pulse like you do. So don’t feel guilty about me rescuing you, I just do it because there are a lot of reasons I need to keep you around, all right?”
“Really?” Willobee sniffled as he brightened up a little.
I grinned at him. “Yeah. Really. And one of the important reasons is I just plain like you, but there’s another specific one that could come in real handy right now.”
“There is?” Willobee asked hopefully.
“Yup!” I said. “You look pretty ill right now, you know. Think you could muster up some barf to send these poor souls to their final rest?”
Willobee nodded vigorously. “Never felt more inclined to barf in my entire life, Master. But I thought only fire could completely destroy the ghasts?”
“That’s what Ed thought,” I conceded, “but Ed hadn’t met you or seen what your blue slime can do. We can’t be sure it’ll work. But we could try it now and check on the bodies in the morning and burn them then if it’s still necessary. You said they can’t reattach their heads immediately, right Ed?”
“Yeah, seems to take at least a night,” Ed confirmed.
“I also thought you said my slime would upset the villagers that are still alive,” Willobee said hesitantly.
“Yeah, if they find out about it, it might,” I agreed. I looked around at the beheaded corpses that we had just spent the last half hour furiously battling, with the threat of certain infection if their teeth so much as touched us. Corpses that could potentially rise again and again and get another chance each time to transform more living humans into mindless vessels for the plague, mindless vehicles of destruction just like the slaves of Thorvinius the Devourer. “But I’ve just decided that I no longer give a fuck.”
Willobee shrugged. Then he waddled over to the nearest corpse-of-a-corpse and heartily barfed up his guts all over it. Elodette, who didn’t flinch in battle, could not repress a gagging sound of her own at the sight and smell of this.
“Save some for the rest!” I exclaimed.
“I’ll start heaping them all back together so they’ll all get nice and covered at the same time,” Ed volunteered. He walked around the area and started using his shovel to push and roll all the dismembered body parts into a single pile. Elodette helped with her leather-wrapped hooves. One of me helped them too. I didn’t want to touch anything else with hands that had gripped plague-ghast flesh, so I’d have to re-assimilate that self afterward.
Meanwhile I remarked to Willobee, “If this works, it might become a regular thing. It’s faster and more manageable than using fire. Is there a limit to how much you can generate in a day? Is there anything that would help you generate more?”
Willobee thought for a moment. His enormous green eyes acquired a calculating glow. “Honey mead,” he replied. “Buckets and buckets of honey mead.”
And that was how I knew that the littlest member of my team would be just fine too.
Chapter Fourteen
After we were convinced that all the ghasts had been thoroughly slimed and triple-checked that all of their heads were completely severed from their bodies, I lovingly cleaned and sheathed Polliver, and the six of us returned to the village.
Maire immediately ran up to Ed and wordlessly flung her arms around him. He hugged her back and patted her on the back.
“Twenty-five,” she said grimly. “I was so worried.”
“There now, no reason for that,” the grizzled villager replied. “You know we’re immune to the creatures’ bites, now we’ve both had their damned pox and were too tough to die of it.”
“Immune to the plague, yes, but not immune to getting killed in other ways, not immune to having your limbs torn off and eaten,” the redhead pointed out. Then she looked over at me and Elodette. Her eyes widened, and she frowned in confusion as she stared back and forth between my two bodies. She also gasped a little at the sight of the giant black centaur, thoroughly muscled throughout both her demi-breastplate-clad human torso and her horse body, and strikingly pretty on top of all that. “Oh my… Thank you all, whoever you people are. Ferndale wo
uld have perished tonight without you.”
“You are most welcome,” Willobee replied with a courtly bow. I decided not to remind Maire that without the gnome’s interference, those particular twenty-five bodies that my team had just re-killed might have been successfully burned before dark.
“How did you fare here?” Ed asked his redheaded partner.
“See for yourself,” Maire replied as she stepped aside slightly and extended her arm like a merchant showing off her wares.
The scene of carnage spread out behind her on the main path between Ferndale’s huts was somewhat underwhelming, compared to the mountain of blue-slimed flesh we had left behind in the woods. I only counted four beheaded bodies. And one head. The rest of the heads had clearly been torn off rather than severed, judging by the condition of the neck stumps, and they were nowhere to be seen. I recognized with a pang that one of the bodies belonged to Millie’s little girl, but at the same time, I was glad that meant that the women had reached Millie’s hut in time to save her from being devoured by her own dead children.
“It was mostly the wol-- Lizzy’s work,” Maire admitted.
“Where is Lizzy?” I asked.
“Lizzy!” my other self called.
“She went… over there,” Maire pointed uncertainly at one of the huts.
I headed over in the direction the village woman had pointed, and before I could reach the hut, a giant wolf slunk out from behind it. She was furiously working her jaws and licking her bloodstained snout.
“… Lizzy?” I asked suspiciously.
The giant wolf tried to swallow inconspicuously, but no movement that she made in either form was ever really inconspicuous.
“Lizzy,” I groaned. “What if one of the villagers peeked out a door or a window? How do you think Millie would feel if she saw what you did?”
Lizzy hung her huge shaggy head. I suspected that she was refraining from changing back not out of modesty, but because she didn’t want to have to talk to me right now.
“There ain’t no windows here, my lord,” Maire interjected.
I had noticed that myself when I was making my inspection of the village earlier, but I had simply forgotten because I was accustomed to the many beautiful stained glass windows that adorned almost every building in the temple complex and found it almost unbelievable not to mention depressing that an entire village wouldn’t have any. I guess these poor farmers probably couldn’t afford the glass that was needed.
Maire’s remark seemed to give Lizzy the courage to speak up for herself. She morphed back into her human form, which made Ed blush even redder than his naturally ruddy skin tone, cough, and avert his eyes. “Yeah, no windows. And I ain’t had a thing to eat all day, Vander,” she whined. From the way Lizzy wriggled her hips and thrust out her ridiculously large round breasts at me, I realized that changing back had been a stratagem on her part to distract me. I wasn’t an idiot, and her trick was the oldest one in the book. That didn’t mean it wasn’t working.
“You ate most of the rabbit stew that was left in the pot this morning,” I growled. “Everyone else had about one spoonful.”
Lizzy held her hands a foot apart in such a way that her arms squeezed her plump breasts together. “A rabbit is only this big, Vander,” she informed me. “And we had already ate most of it last night for supper, so there was only this much left.” Her hands moved closer together and the squeezing increased.
My pants were also suddenly uncomfortably tight in the front. Both pairs of them, even though the one of me that wasn’t talking to Lizzy kept my eyes averted just like Ed was doing. I gave up on scolding her. “Go find Ilandere and Florenia and bring them back to the temple,” I told her through gritted teeth. “Elodette, go hunt us something proper for supper, please. Willobee and I will take these bodies and bring them over to the pit with the others. Then we’ll all meet back at the temple.”
“Anything else you need from us for the night?” Ed asked me with his arm around Maire’s shoulders. “After what I saw you do tonight… anything you need that’s in my power to do for you, I’m your man.”
“No, you two go to bed,” I said. “You fought as bravely as anyone tonight, Ed, so I’m glad I know I can count on you. We’ll come get you both in the morning, and you can help us carry out our plan of the day then. You know this village way better than we do, and it helps that you’re immune too. My team and I might be able to handle the situation without you, but with you? The plague doesn’t stand a chance.”
His scarred face cracked into a broad grin at that. “Thanks. I, er, was just wondering one more thing… what’s your name?”
Before I could answer, Lizzy piped up, “Vander.” She knew that I had decided to go by my god name with the villagers, but she struggled a little with pronouncing “Qaar’endoth” and at this point she seemed to have forgotten that she was even supposed to try.
“Ohhh,” Ed nodded his large blond head. He pointed at each of me in turn. “Qaar’endoth, and Vander. Got it. Thanks all. Good night.”
He raised his large calloused hand and waved as he and Maire retreated down the path to the hut they shared.
I sighed. “I don’t know if that makes it simpler, or more complicated, if they think that I’m twins?”
“They are just humans, so why should you care what they think, Vander?” Elodette asked. The centaur still refused to acknowledge me as a god, but she also increasingly seemed to forget that I was one of the humans she so disdained. I think what she actually unconsciously categorized me as was a centaur, albeit one without horse parts.
I sighed again. I loved having all of my beautiful lady friends around, but each in her own way could be quite a handful. Once I gained more selves, I could not only destroy bad guys more efficiently, I would also hopefully have more spare time to give each the attention she deserved. “Anyway-- would you please see about dinner, Elodette? I think I’m almost as hungry as Lizzy, although not hungry enough to share her diet. Lizzy, go find the other girls and tell them everything’s all right now and that I can’t wait to see them. And Willobee, come with me, we’ll be needing just one more dose of barf tonight.”
“Don’t worry, Master, I’ve got plenty more to donate,” the gnome squeaked cheerfully.
Elodette happily unslung her previously useless bow as she cantered off. Lizzy twirled around slowly to give me a full view of her human backside, which had just as much of a pants-tightening effect as her glorious frontside, before she changed back into a wolf and loped off.
I each carried two bodies, while Willobee carried the single uneaten head. It wasn’t that far of a distance back to the pit, and we knew the way now, but I had to admit that I didn’t really enjoy heading back to the haunt of the undead in what was currently the full darkness of night, even though I knew they were immobilized for now. So I didn’t blame the chubby little gnome for quickly waddling so close to me that I nearly tripped over him several times. I flanked him on both sides and slowed my pace so that he could keep up without having to almost run.
Once we reached the pit where the horrible shapes of twenty-five torn-apart and plague-ravaged bodies, almost unrecognizable as human beneath the combination of their pustules, wounds, and Willobee’s slime, loomed up, we deposited the new additions. Willlobee promptly slimed them.
Then I said, “The girls will be impatient for us to get back,” slung the chainmail-clad gnome over my shoulder, and jogged out of there at a slightly faster pace than I would want to admit to.
When we arrived at Hakmut’s temple, Elodette was still out hunting, but everyone else-- Lizzy, Florenia, Ilandere, and the two patient white ponies who had been waiting for us there all day-- were back safe and sound. My packs were still sitting in the corner where we’d left them. And there was only a minimal amount of pony excrement to stink up the place.
The only strange thing was that Lizzy was calmly curled up near the temple altar in her wolf form, with her surcoat, pauldron, bracers, necklace, and weapons n
eatly stacked beside her, while the other two women huddled together on the opposite side of the room with their backs to her, and their faces toward the door.
As soon as I entered with Willobee, Ilandere ran up and flung her arms around one of me with tears streaming down her little white face from her enormous dark eyes. Florenia leapt into my other self’s arms and kissed me passionately.
“Come on, now, you two didn’t think Elodette and I would be able to kill twenty-five soft-ass farmers, when some of them were women and children, and every one of them was already dead anyway?” I joked to try to lighten the mood. It didn’t sound quite as funny after the words had left my mouth.
“Lizzy t-told us that you were both nearly dead,” Ilandere sobbed. “That you had each fallen into pit traps and broken your legs, and she n-needed our help to get you out before you bled to death, but then when she led us back she c-couldn’t find the traps anymore. We spent hours searching the woods.”
“Fuck,” I groaned. I looked over at Lizzy reproachfully. She raised her head and shrugged her massive furry shoulders. I guess I didn’t really have a right to get mad at her for this one, since I had instructed her to tell the other women whatever she had to to get them out of the area of danger. “Well, listen. Just for future reference, so you don’t worry for no reason. If I really had both fallen into pit traps and broken all of my legs at the same time, all I’d have to do is re-assimilate one of my selves. Then, if the pit was shallow enough for me to reach, I’d send out my other self outside of the pit, and that one wouldn’t be injured. Then I’d re-assimilate the one that was still inside the pit, and send out another uninjured one. Or, if both pits were too deep for that, then I’d re-assimilate into whichever pit was shallower, and send out my other self still inside the pit, but on top of the broken one, so that I could help lift myself out. Either way, I wouldn’t be stuck there bleeding out. Furthermore, haven’t you noticed Lizzy’s tracking capabilities? There’s no way she’d lose me in the woods, if I were staying put in one place anyway, and not be able to find me again.”