by Logan Jacobs
In the intervening days before the baron’s next delivery, fewer villagers perished each day, for a total of ten more plague deaths. And another four that were sick, with the nourishment and medicine provided by Florenia and the centaurs, managed to recover as Otis had done.
Back at the temple, I was used to going to bed exhausted from the combat training and studying for classes, but the work here at Ferndale left me exhausted in completely different ways. I still found more energy than ever each night to make love with either Lizzy, Florenia, or both, which I think was in part because of the plague rather than in spite of it: being surrounded by the ugly pointlessness of all this gruesome, bedridden death made me want to squeeze as much joy as possible out of life and health.
But on the sixth day, my ability to do that was significantly enhanced.
While I was in the middle of chopping wood for the ovens, Florenia came up to me and held out the dagger that she’d snatched away from me several days ago with a smug smile on her perfect lips.
“Er… what did you do, exactly?” I asked her.
“I facilitated the tertiary manifestation of a divine being,” she replied sweetly.
“You what?”
“Come look,” she invited me.
Florenia led me over to Ed and Maire’s hut. In the yard behind, Ed and Maire were standing together holding hands staring speechlessly at something. Their backs blocked my view, so it wasn’t until Florenia said, “There,” and they leapt aside at the sound of her voice to make way for us that I saw what they had been staring at.
It was a six-foot-tall life-size statue of… Florenia’s conception of Qaar’endoth.
Looking at the statue’s face and body was like staring into a mirror, other than the fact that my complexion didn’t look like wood grain.
“What do you think?” Florenia asked eagerly.
“It kind of scares me,” I answered honestly.
“Scares you?” she asked in confusion.
“Yeah… I don’t know whether that’s me, or this is me,” I admitted as I pointed from the wooden man to myself.
“I was always praised by my tutors for my fine detail work,” she said with satisfaction.
“You made this?” I asked her in disbelief.
“Well, not by myself,” she admitted. “Ed supplied the wood when I asked him, and he cut out the general shape of a person for me to start with, but I was the one who went over every square inch and made it… you.”
“Don’t look at me, Vander-or-Qaar’endoth, it was all her-- all I done was give her a human-sized blob to work with,” Ed said. “I ain’t ever seen anything like this in all my life.”
In certain places, the statue featured what most people probably would’ve considered an uncomfortable level of anatomical detail. The kind of details that Ed wasn’t privy to, but Florenia was.
“Duke’s daughters are taught how to carve statuary?” I asked her incredulously.
She laughed. “Not exactly, but we are taught how to embroider and paint, and if you extrapolate some of the general principles from those other artistic disciplines, and if you have the chance to observe an experienced woodsman like Ed at work for a few hours before you try it yourself, then it’s really just a simple matter of synthesizing all the theoretical knowledge and applying it in practice with a steady hand. And with love.”
“You don’t make any sense,” I told her, “but if this doesn’t work, well then either that necromancer freak wasn’t a real god, or I’m not Qaar’endoth.”
“Shall I have it moved to the temple now then, my lord?” Ed asked brightly.
“Er, I could probably move it myselves,” I began, since my other self had just finished a water delivery and was already on the way over.
But Ed ignored me and yelled to two passing youths, “Timmy, Ned, get your fucking arses over here!”
The village youths lugged my wooden likeness all the way over to Hakmut’s blue-painted temple, which attracted a crowd of curious villagers. My other self also showed up with the rest of my team, who wouldn’t have missed this moment for the world. I just hoped it really would be the moment we were all waiting for, and that I wouldn’t disappoint everyone.
When they placed my wooden self behind the altar, to preside over the temple, I felt it in my gut. I knew that I could do it.
The assembled audience looked around eagerly for a third Qaar’endoth as I walked up to the altar in order to move my sending radius where I wanted it.
Then, I stepped out from behind the statue that had, in a weird way, given birth to me, and the room erupted in cheers.
My three selves were the most awkward and bewildered people in the whole temple. I couldn’t count how many times I’d stared myself in the face, but I’d never seen two of me before. I guessed that it probably felt just as weird to me as it would feel to a non-order member to suddenly encounter his or her clone.
When I couldn’t handle looking at myself anymore, I started looking at my surroundings instead, out of three pairs of eyes this time.
“I can see North, East, and South at the same time,” I whispered as my brain spun with my new powers. Or perhaps it was brains, since I was now all three of me, and they all enveloped Florenia in a crushing hug.
“Thank you,” I whispered in her left ear, her right ear, and at the top of her head.
“I didn’t kill Hakmut, my lord, you did,” she replied.
“Lizzy killed him just as much as I did,” I said, “and you made it worth my while.”
She smiled and bumped her hip against one of my crotches in a suggestive way that aroused a reaction three times over. “I know you’ll make learning how to carve worth mine.”
“I promise,” I whispered, while another of my selves went to scoop Lizzy up in a hug, and my third self went to thank Ed for his role and graciously accept the other villagers’ congratulations.
Then finally, the next day, which was the seventh my team had spent in Ferndale, Lizzy declared all the surviving villagers plague-free. The village itself, of course, was very far from being plague-free, so we organized a huge bonfire in a field that was a safe distance from the huts and brought over all the contaminated bedding, dishware, and other objects to be burnt. It was a celebratory bonfire in some ways since the plague had been defeated, but not a joyful one considering how many lives it had destroyed first. As the household objects burned the plumes of smoke that went up made me think of the ghosts of those who had used them.
Then, my morbid thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of two riders at the edge of the village where one of my selves was patrolling with Ed. It was immediately obvious that neither of them were villagers. Their horses were of noble quality, with matching chestnut pelts as glossy as Florenia’s tresses, and decked out in silver and violet livery. The riders themselves were two bearded men built like warriors wearing livery in the same colors as their mounts, and they also wore swords at their belts. One was blond and the other was brown-haired. The brown-haired one held aloft a violet banner that had a stag embroidered upon it in silver thread.
“Lord Kiernan sends his greetings to the villagers of Ferndale,” the banner-bearer shouted.
His blond companion deposited a large sack on the ground and announced, “Within you will find more sustenance from the baron’s own kitchens. The baron and his family pray daily for your salvation. We will return with more food in three days.”
“Wait,” I said as I walked up to them with Ed. “Will you please bring new bedding and dishware as well?”
“Stay back,” blondie shouted as his hand went to the hilt of his sword.
“I don’t have the plague,” I told him. “No one here does anymore. Except for a lot of the household objects.”
“Who are you?” the banner-bearer demanded. He squinted at me clearly thinking that he’d never seen me before and I didn’t look like I belonged in Ferndale.
“He is Ferndale’s savior,” Ed answered for me.
The half o
f the villagers who weren’t spectating the bonfire in the nearby field were outside on the paths behind me so that Lizzy, Willobee, and I, as well as Ed, Maire, and the other five plague survivors, could clear out their huts of objects that were likely to be infected. They started to shift closer, attracted by the conversation with the baron’s riders, which clearly made the two men extremely nervous.
“No one here is sick anymore,” Maire assured them as she stepped out from the crowd.
Having seen what the plague could do, I couldn’t really blame the two men for not looking all that reassured by her statement.
“How could you know that?” one of them demanded.
“My nose,” Lizzy said as she sashayed up beside me. The baron’s men stared at her wolfish ears, hind paws, tail, and probably some other parts too. If they’d had any doubt about whether or not I belonged in Ferndale, there wasn’t really any source of doubt about Lizzy being foreign to these parts. “I can smell the little specks of plague on anyone and anything that has ‘em. And I can smell the fear on both of you.”
Willobee and the centaurs were over at the bonfire with one of me, but Florenia was in the village with me, and she came up to my side as well. The men’s eyes widened farther at the sight of her. The duke’s daughter didn’t have any non-human blood in her, but her extreme beauty in and of itself made her something of an exotic spectacle, and she would have been hard to miss even if she were covered in peasants’ clothing, but as it was she was robed in a pale pink color that did not appear anywhere else in Ferndale except for on Ilandere’s blouse.
“Qaar’endoth has destroyed the wicked priest of Hakmut, corrected the errors of his followers’ ways, and saved them from a fate worse than any ordinary death,” Florenia announced.
“Wait-- you mean Father Norrell’s dead?” the brown-haired banner-bearer asked.
“Extremely dead,” Florenia replied serenely from my left.
“Roasted at a mighty high temperature, and then chewed up like old jerky,” Lizzy contributed from my right.
The blond baron’s man chuckled. “That arrogant shit thought he was lord of this place.”
His brown-haired companion glared him into silence before turning back to me. “So you claim to have cured the plague, stranger?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not a doctor. I don’t know how to do that. But we helped Ed and Maire here halt the practices that were spreading it to more people, and destroy the plague-infected corpses before they could rise again as ghasts. We also managed to nurse a few people who had the plague through it so they survived. And now no one here carries the disease anymore, so we’re getting rid of their belongings that do.”
I didn’t mention the necromancer god Lizzy and I had hunted down in his cave. I was going to keep my story simple and reasonable so that hopefully these men wouldn’t be too overwhelmed and would treat me in a simple, reasonable manner too.
“Lord Kiernan will want to speak to this man,” the blond rider said to his companion.
“But how do we know he’s telling the truth?” the banner-bearer asked. “What if we brought him back, and ended up infecting the baron’s household with plague?”
“What could he have to gain from lying about it?” the blond rider replied. “If he were a charlatan trying to get rewarded for curing a plague, you’d think he would’ve advertised his services and collected his price first before making any claims that the village was completely cured.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know he’s lying, he could just be delusional,” the banner-bearer suggested.
“I’m right here,” I said in exasperation. This conversation was taking too long, so I re-assimilated the self that was supervising the bonfire, and the self who was carrying some dirty sheets over to contribute.
My second body appeared on Florenia’s other side and added, “And I’m not delusional.”
The two men, as well as many of the villagers although most of them had seen me do that before, gasped aloud.
My third self appeared on Lizzy’s other side and concluded, “And furthermore, if I wanted to infect the baron’s household with plague, there’s nothing you could do to stop me. But I bear him nothing but goodwill. I’d like the chance for a friendly conversation with him to explain the situation here and advise him of the steps that he could take in the future to prevent another plague, as well as help the villagers recover from this one.”
The brown-haired banner-bearer cleared his throat and said, “Um. Why don’t you gather your belongings and your, er, companions and come with us.”
So I did.
Chapter Eighteen
Lord Kiernan’s baronial castle was made of gray stone with crenellated battlements, two outer wall turrets, a keep, and a drawbridge.
“Holy fuck what a fancy ass palace,” Lizzy whispered in one of my ears.
“It’s a bit…provincial, isn’t it,” Florenia whispered in the other.
“I bet the cellars here are well-stocked indeed,” chortled Willobee.
Elodette and Ilandere looked around without saying anything, but it seemed to me that they felt a little uncomfortable within the massive stone walls, and I remembered that their herd was nomadic and unused to the confinement of permanent dwelling structures.
The baron himself, once his men had arranged for Damask and Diamond to be cared for in the stables and had escorted the rest of us into his throne room, elicited equally mixed responses from my friends.
Lord Kiernan was a slim man probably around fifty years of age, clad in black velvet slashed with violet silk. His face was shrewd with warm brown eyes, and his hair was silver, even his mustache and pointed goatee.
“You are the men who call yourselves gods?” he inquired of me immediately.
I was thrice present because I felt that I looked more imposing that way.
“I am one,” I answered in unison from all three mouths. Whatever my private doubts, I was keeping them to myself in the baron’s presence. He immediately struck me as a proud and calculating leader, and I wasn’t going to earn his respect and confidence by hemming and hawing over the uncertainties of my own identity.
Lord Kiernan raised an eyebrow. “Or perhaps you are a set of very clever and well-rehearsed triplets.”
“Can triplets do this?” I asked before re-assimilating and sending my second self out six feet closer to the baron, which halved the distance between us. Then I immediately sent my third self out right in front of him, so that our noses nearly touched.
He stiffened, but then he smiled. “Well, well. So the rumors are true. I had suspected my spies of delusional hysteria. That is an impressive ability indeed, Vander of Qaar’endoth. But not as impressive at what you accomplished against the plague in Ferndale.”
“Thank you,” I said from all three mouths as I wondered what spies he was referring to. Villagers, I supposed. Ed and Maire knew the most about me, but I trusted them and did not think they would have been reporting to the baron without my knowledge, not that I had anything to hide or would have denied them permission to do so. I hadn’t gotten to know any of the other villagers well enough to guess which ones might have been somehow communicating with the baron. But if anything, this revelation made my job easier, because it meant that the baron already had some evidence provided by his own sources to back up the report that I was about to give him.
“I don’t really know whether you are a god or not,” Lord Kiernan continued, “but that is really no more than a matter of intellectual curiosity to me. What matters to me is that you certainly played a godlike role in saving a part of my barony. The poorer part to be sure, since my other villages and cities are much more populous and productive, but still, it was no mean feat, and one that my learned physicians utterly failed at prior to your arrival. So I believe a reward is in order.”
“Oh boy, this is my favorite part of quests,” Willobee exclaimed inappropriately.
The baron fixed his gaze on the chubby little lavender-haired gnome clad in h
is signature velvet suit, ostrich feather hat, and chainmail combination, and his expression suggested that Willobee was also an object of intellectual curiosity.
My first thought had been that Willobee was being uncharacteristically remiss in adapting his personality to the baron’s apparent tastes, but then it occurred to me that maybe the gnome was cleverer than I gave him credit for. Lord Kiernan didn’t necessarily want another person around who acted like a fellow aristocrat, but a buffoonish little creature would probably amuse him and benefit from his lordly indulgence.
“I shall knight you, Vander of Qaar’endoth,” Lord Kiernan announced.
Before I could say anything, Florenia said flatly, “No. You shall not.”
“I… would not require any further services of him in return,” Lord Kiernan assured her, greatly taken aback by her reaction. Being knighted, I knew, was just about the greatest honor a lord could confer upon a commoner in the secular world. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded. I would have been the first member of my order ever knighted, since order members were not permitted to take secular titles, but there were no priests or vestals around to object to it now. And “Sir Vander” had a decent ring to it in my opinion. But Florenia seemed so adamantly opposed to the idea that I decided not to make a fuss over a title that wouldn’t be of any material benefit to me.
“No, but the act itself would imply that Qaar’endoth were subordinate to you, and that it lay in your power to raise him beyond what he is in his own right,” Florenia replied. “It would be demeaning. Does the steward of a manor award a king the title of chief apple-picker?”
Lord Kiernan sighed and instead of answering her, asked me, “So, what reward would you like, Vander of Qaar’endoth?” His eyes roamed over Lizzy, Florenia, and both centaurs with an air of dispassionate artistic appreciation. “I would offer you one of my daughters in marriage, but it appears you are already well-endowed with beautiful concubines. I am however willing to grant you Ferndale itself for you to maintain as my vassal. Its taxes would pass to you and your heirs in perpetuity. A suitable hall could be constructed nearby for you and your… friends, or if you prefer, I could provide you all with quarters in my castle.”