by Logan Jacobs
“How much food and water do your people have stored in there?” I asked Tarlinis, since it seemed like running out of supplies would be their only real problem.
“Enough for another three or four days, last time I checked in with them,” the invisible god responded. “They weren’t prepared for a siege. They received a raven from Peryenia of Ukalion warning of an impending attack, but they weren’t sure whether it was just some kind of prank, and there wasn’t really time to gather any significant quantity of supplies from the countryside anyway. My order is not that wealthy.”
Then we reached the dam again, and my companions stared in awe at the enormous, bone-crushing quantities of water pent up like a caged animal.
“Whoo-ee,” Lizzy said. “Mighty impressive, can’t imagine how hard it’d be to build something like that… Be a shame if someone busted it.”
“I’m not trying to break anything, I’m trying to make the retractable mechanism usable again,” I said. “And if Willobee’s slime can’t eat through the melded metal, then I don’t know what can.”
This time we went farther than I had gone with Tarlinis on my own to scope out the dam and climbed up the hill alongside it until we stood overlooking the vast reservoir pent up behind the ancient barrier. Then the maple leaf stopped abruptly and stayed twisting back and forth anxiously in the air.
“This is the spot?” I asked. “This is where the underwater chamber is?”
“Yes,” Tarlinis sighed.
I held out the vial to him. “Are you insubstantial now, or can you hold this?” I asked.
“I’m not insubstantial, I’m just invisible,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
Yet the vial remained in my outstretched hand, as the leaf started to tremble.
“We don’t got all--” Lizzy began.
“We really appreciate what you’re doing, and your people will too,” Ilandere interrupted. “I know you’re not naturally brave like Vander, and I know Willobee’s bile is a dangerous substance to carry, so I really admire the fact that you’re willing to do it to save your people.”
“I just… can’t bear the thought of them all depending on me,” the invisible god croaked. “I’m not very strong. What if I fail?”
“Then we’ll fill the vial again and try again,” I said. “As many times as it takes to move that wheel.”
“I guess I like being invisible because then everyone can imagine me as so much more powerful than I actually am,” Tarlinis sighed. “Before this awful Thorvinius guy showed up, I’d never really been tested before, so it was easy for them all to believe in me… ”
“If you save them now, if you pull this off and miraculously wash away all the attackers, then I bet the people inside that temple will believe in you for another thousand years easy,” I said.
Tarlinis hesitated for another long moment. Then, the leaf drifted to the ground, and a light touch plucked the vial from the center of my outstretched palm. The vial floated back and vanished as if it had just been swallowed.
“Wih-me-wuck,” the invisible god mumbled and sounded as if he had his mouth full.
“Good luck!” Ilandere called out.
There was no response.
“Think he went in finally?” Lizzy asked.
Still no response.
“Guess so,” I said. “Unless he just left and took the vial so we’d think he went in. But I think he really does want to help. He was just scared.”
“So what do we do now?” Ilandere asked. “Just wait for him to come back? How will we know if he’s succeeding or if he needs us?”
“Actually, I think we’ll have some entertainment in the meantime, Princess,” Elodette said grimly as she pointed into the distance.
From the direction of their main camp, a contingent of about forty Thorvinians was thundering our way.
“Fuck,” I said. “How did they see us?”
“I wish we could turn invisible like Tarlinis,” Ilandere squeaked as she clutched the golden apple to her bosom for comfort, and her eyes widened into terrified dark pools.
“The ability to turn invisible has spoiled his already weak character,” Elodette scoffed.
“Think it’s made his natural scarediness that much worse,” Lizzy agreed. “No sense in wantin’ to be anything like that.”
“Run off into the woods, Ilandere,” I said. “Take Willobee and go, before they get here.”
“Are you s-sure, Vander?” the princess asked. “I don’t want to abandon you.”
“He’s sure,” squealed Willobee from atop her back. “We better do as Master says right away.”
“Florenia, go with them,” I said. The little dappled courser Chivalry wasn’t as powerful as our four warhorses, but she was remarkably swift, and I knew I could trust her to carry the duke’s daughter to safety.
“Qaar’endoth, I will not abandon--” Florenia began.
“It will make my job easier if you three leave,” I interrupted. “You couldn’t fight if you tried, not effectively anyway, so I don’t want to be distracted trying to protect you. Okay? I’ll be fine, and so will Lizzy and Elodette. Now please hurry and go.”
While I was still speaking, two of my other bodies brought their horses up to the women, and one of them kissed Ilandere’s little rosebud mouth while the other kissed Florenia’s full and luscious pout.
When I broke off both kisses, Florenia whispered, “I trust that you will triumph, Qaar’endoth,” and turned Chivalry to go.
Ilandere’s eyes brimmed with worried tears, but she too turned, and the two equines galloped off side by side, with the gnome clinging to the princess’ back.
I sent out my fourth self that I always kept in reserve while we were riding since we didn’t have a sixth horse for another of me, and I handed the unmounted self one of my swords.
“Lizzy, you were spectacular at that outpost, but I know it’s different when it’s daytime and you can’t morph--” I began.
“Ha,” the she-wolf said. “I’m not a pansy like those other two, so don’t you dare even think of asking me to leave.”
“…Wasn’t going to,” I lied. “Was just gonna say, so stick to the smallish ones that you can still handle in this form. And Elodette? Aim for the biggest ones that would fuck us up the worst in hand-to-hand.”
“That I can do,” Lizzy agreed.
“I didn’t need you to tell me that, human,” Elodette scoffed as she started unleashing a hail of arrows.
By now the Thorvinians were close enough that we could see the whites of their eyes. Steel-tipped arrows burst through the skulls of the two that were in the lead, one that looked like an undead panther and one that actually looked rather like a centaur. I appreciated that Elodette hadn’t hesitated in that case, but then I guess that she would regard one of her kind that was willing to work for someone like Thorvinius as the worst and lowest kind of traitor and a black stain on the honor of his or her herd.
Probably another six or seven of the most formidable Thorvinians toppled over with arrows sticking out of them before they ever reached us, although I noticed a few armored types that the arrows just bounced off harmlessly. Then, the rest of the horde was upon us.
My unmounted self got immediately entangled with a freakishly strong gorilla-like Thorvinian that, much to my embarrassment, managed to yank the sword out of my grasp since I wasn’t expecting the move, but it cost him several fingers and was not the kind of thing a sane and reasonable opponent would do.
I knew that if he got on top of me, he would easily batter my skull in with his superior size and brute force, so I flung myself at him in a tackle. Instead of knocking him down as I had intended, the full force of my weight slamming into him merely caused him to stagger backward a few steps. But that was enough to bring him directly into the path of one of his fellow Thorvinians, both of whose three-foot-long tusks burst through his hairy back and out through his leathery gut. The gorilla-like Thorvinian didn’t die right away. Instead he screamed in a
gony as the tusks tore up his internal organs and flailed his ham-like fists, I don’t know whether with futile rage at me, or at the other Thorvinian that had accidentally killed him.
The even more massive, mammoth-like Thorvinian to whom the tusks were attached then swung them at me, but his movements were extremely encumbered by the fact that the tusks were still loaded down with the thrashing, hemorrhaging body of the first Thorvinian. He tried to pierce me through with the protruding ends and add me to the meat skewer, but I sidestepped slightly to place myself in the middle of the two tusks, with the result that I just got slammed by the leathery gorilla belly. The impact caused more of the unfortunate guy’s organs to rupture and some of his blood to spray directly into the eyes of the mammoth-like Thorvinian, which temporarily blinded him and allowed me to slip away, retrieve the sword that the gorilla had taken from me, and bury it in the mammoth’s flanks. He added his bellows to the chaotic symphony of the battle but since I didn’t know anything about his anatomy and was really just blindly guessing at where under the mountain of flesh his vital organs might be buried, it took several stabs all the way up to the hilt before the mammoth actually toppled over dead and crushed three more of his fellows in the process.
“Hey, which team were you playing for anyway, big guy?” I yelled triumphantly as I used my sword to block the mace swing of my next opponent. “Thanks for all the assists!”
My mounted selves were carving through the Thorvinian ranks much more gracefully, but my use of a horse to maneuver couldn’t compare with Elodette’s seamless grace in battle.
The centaur was still using her bow sometimes, but at this range, she was mainly relying on her anvil-like hooves. I saw her crack both of a quadruped’s front knees simultaneously and then when he crashed screaming to the ground, she reared up to plant her hooves on his shoulders and use him as a vantage point from which to send an arrow into the jugular of another Thorvinian behind him. Then she finished off her original quadruped opponent with a casual forehead-denting kick.
Lizzy, who usually fought with daggers when she was in her human form, appeared to have acquired a massive silver axe from someone who presumably had no further use for it. As I watched the green-eyed she-wolf chop through someone’s scaly neck, with her teeth bared and her velvet gown torn and blood-spattered, I wondered if it was an inappropriate moment to feel aroused by her.
While that self was momentarily distracted by ogling Lizzy, another of my selves spotted a human-faced Thorvinian with giant scorpion claws and a whiplike stinger curling up from his back end readying to pounce on Elodette from behind. Her horse hindquarters were even more vulnerable than the back of a human warrior, since they posed a much bigger target to enemies.
I flung my self in the way just in time. The stinger plunged through my chest. I’d died from being stabbed in the chest plenty of times before, so that wasn’t a big deal, but then a moment later I felt the venom course through my veins and paralyze my entire body with an agony so great that I couldn’t even scream. If I could have spared one of my other selves for a minute to put that body out of my misery then I would have, but all three of them were otherwise engaged, so I just lay writhing on the ground waiting for it to be over. As it turned out it was Elodette who whirled around and saw what had happened. She unsheathed the sword that she rarely ever used and wildly slashed off the giant scorpion stinger. Then she thrust the blade through the creature’s human face. Unlike with her archery skills, there wasn’t much finesse in the way the centaur wielded a sword, in fact there really wasn’t any, but a combination of luck and pure fury seemed to have served her in that instance.
Then Elodette looked down at my helpless, envenomed body and seemed to understand what the situation required. I distinctly saw the unfailingly stoic centaur wince, but then she stomped down on my head and instantly ended my suffering. That enabled me to send out a replacement fourth self that called out, “Thanks!” to her.
By that point the six of us had already worked our way through about three quarters of the Thorvinian unit that had attacked us, but then one of my selves that happened to be facing in that direction saw that reinforcements were coming our way.
A lot of reinforcements. About a hundred of them.
I could keep replenishing my selves, but I knew Lizzy and even Elodette would be far too exhausted to handle those numbers after they had already been fighting hard for so long. I wondered if I would be able to convince either of them to leave my sides and save themselves and knew that I wouldn’t.
Then, I heard the most colossal and inhuman roar that I had ever heard before swell up so loudly that it felt like it originated inside of my eardrums.
As I, and the Thorvinians too, turned to stare, the two halves of the dam slowly parted, and more water than a thousand elephants could drink in a thousand lifetimes came exploding through. It surged down the itty bitty trickle of a river that used to have permission to pass, submerged the sixty-foot-tall towers of the temple of Tarlinis, and gobbled up the hundred Thorvinians headed for us by the dam as an appetizer on its way to swallow their entire encampment.
The scene unfolding below us from our vantage point on the safe side of the newly opened barrier was so cataclysmic and surreal that instead of being relieved that the besiegers were eliminated, I started to fear that my plan was so dumb it would result in flooding the entire kingdom.
Chapter Eleven
Then, something even more shocking happened that really convinced me the world must be about to end.
Elodette leaned over to my nearest self, the unmounted one who had replaced the one that died saving her from the scorpion, and kissed me full on the mouth. It wasn’t just a peck either. It was a passionate tongue-on-tongue kiss that made me think that maybe the stern black centaur had been keeping certain feelings bottled up for a while. But just as I started to be able to enjoy it fully through the haze of complete and utter shock that initially clouded my senses, she pulled away again.
I stared at her to try to figure out what was going through her head, but the warrior centaur was no longer even looking at me. Instead her sharp gray eyes were focused on the barrier of the dam. I looked over as well and realized that as a seemingly infinite quantity of water continued to gush through, the gap was slowly but surely narrowing as the two halves started to inch back together.
I was glad that even if he might lack a lot of other qualities, Tarlinis had enough common sense to reseal the dam once it had served its purpose.
But before I could start being pleased with my plan again, the remaining few Thorvinians seemed to wake up from their stupor and flew to the attack again.
There was nothing they could do at this point.
Their entire host had been swallowed in the flood that still raged below us and their battle for the temple of Tarlinis was lost. But they still had the mindless bloodlust that characterized all the slaves of The Devourer and drove them on to fight past reason.
The most fearsome of the survivors was human in shape, but his skin was made of some kind of tough leathery reptilian material, and when what should have been a killing blow with my blade glanced off it like chain mail, he cut off my head with his own blade. My replacement self went to face a different Thorvinian, and my self that wielded Polliver went to resume the fight with the reptilian-skinned Thorvinian. I didn’t fully understand the mystical powers of the sword that had been the martyred Saint Polliver’s last legacy, but it had served me well before many times when ordinary blades had failed me.
The Thorvinian and I clashed blades. Though he wasn’t any better than average as a swordsman, the issue was that every time I found an opening and took it, whether for a stab or a slash, his tough hide prevented my blade from penetrating.
So I stopped trying to cut him and instead started trying to knock the sword out of his hand with heavy downward blows right below his sword’s center of mass. After a few attempts I succeeded and seized my chance to let Polliver do what Polliver did best by grabbin
g the confused Thorvinian’s now empty hand and wrapping it around Polliver’s hilt. There may have been a split second when he wondered somewhere in his reptile brain why I, his enemy, was handing over my own sword to him. But the answer came very quickly when he went up in flames just like every other mortal that ever dared to touch Polliver’s hilt. His impervious skin crackled black and crusty on the outer layer and swelled up red and oozing beneath that as he writhed and died inside his cloak of flame.
Meanwhile Lizzy and Elodette dispatched the rest of the sorry remains of the Thorvinian force.
As we stood panting over their extremely diverse corpses, two silver-dappled equines, one duke’s daughter, and one gnome came racing out of the trees toward us.
When they reached us, Ilandere and Florenia both flung their arms around one of my selves. Then Ilandere went to hug Elodette too as Florenia proclaimed, “That battle, and the dam opening, were the most awe-inspiring sight I’ve ever seen. And it was only a small taste of the infinite power that you will eventually wield, Qaar’endoth.”
Willobee, meanwhile, peered down at the raging flood that had swallowed the sixty-foot-tall temple of Tarlinis, the Thorvinian monsters that had besieged it, and every tree unlucky enough to be in the vicinity, from the centaur princess’ back and chortled, “Holy fuck. Guys, my vomit did that.”
“Er, I guess you could say that,” I said. “I mean, I’d like to think that we all played some small part in today’s victory--”
“Even me,” said a shy disembodied voice unnervingly close to my ear.
“Tarlinis!” I exclaimed. “Hey, great job, buddy.”
It took the better part of half an hour after that for the flood to subside enough to reveal all the wreckage that it had left behind. There were broken trees, Thorvinian corpses, and shreds of their black tents scattered for miles downstream.
The temple of Tarlinis, however, stood tall, proud, and dark and glistening with water in the middle of the river restored to its more manageable size.
“You’d better go check on them first, Tarlinis,” I said. “We’re strangers, and I don’t want to alarm them after what they’ve just been through.”