God Conqueror 3

by Logan Jacobs

  “The theological definition, then,” she said.

  “Well, according to my temple, there were sort of four different components to it,” I replied. “First of all, you have to have some kind of special powers that most mortals don’t have. Although mortals can attain special powers in certain instances too, like Marvincus using nerisbane for transfigurations. Second of all, you have to have some sort of… shrine. But that’s the most controversial of the four components because the translations from the ancient texts are often in conflict. Scholars don’t know for certain whether that refers to a physical shrine tended by your followers, or to a figurative shrine in the hearts of your followers, or both, or just one or the other. So it could be like an altar, which does seem to be the source of my power since that’s how I get my new bodies, or it could just be your followers’ faith in you, which would also make sense since Tarlinis seems to think he lost his divinity when his order changed allegiance over to me.”

  “But he also lost his physical altar when his statue was replaced by yours,” Florenia pointed out. “What if that was the true cause?”

  “That’s true,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t really know for sure how these things work, I’m not some kind of theological expert. I was just a novice when… well, when Thorvinius attacked my temple. But the third thing is immortality. Not invincibility, no god has that. But gods don’t die of old age or natural causes.”

  “Does that mean you don’t age?” Florenia asked.

  “I do age, at least I think I do,” I said. “Since I was a baby, and then a child, and then a teenager, and then how I am now. But maybe I’ll stop aging at some point? I don’t know. Or maybe I’ll stop being a vessel for Qaar’endoth at some point and then just be Vander again and Qaar’endoth still won’t be any older even if my bodies are.”

  “I dread aging,” Florenia said. “It is my greatest fear. So I hope to find some magical way to stop myself from aging. Otherwise, I will have to settle for dying young and still beautiful.”

  “You’ll always be beautiful to me,” I said.

  “That’s not a hypothesis I want to test,” Florenia said. “But anyway, what is the fourth criterion for being a god? Instead of just an ultra-powerful mortal?”

  “Your connection with the Fairlands,” I said. “All gods must inhabit the Fairlands at some point. In fact, most of them stay there. It’s rare for gods to be earthwalkers, but obviously some are. And gods can’t necessarily control whether they exist on earth or in the Fairlands at a given point in time. Sometimes they just get summoned back and forth by forces beyond their control. Like me, I guess.”

  “Are you going to leave us for the Fairlands someday, Qaar’endoth?” Florenia asked.

  “Nah,” I said and grinned at her. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m having too much fun right where I am.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  When we set up camp for the night, the improvised bedsheet tents turned out a little more presentable than they had the first night. After we had completed the essential tasks relating to food and hygiene, the camp divided up for more sparring and archery lessons as before. I noticed that there were increased numbers of priests and vestals who opted to get physically knocked around in sparring bouts over subjecting themselves to archery lessons with Elodette again, which made me suspect that her tongue had been a little sharper than she had assured me.

  But the order members who chose not to train for combat instead gathered around a fire with one of my selves and started teaching me, Florenia, Ilandere, and Willobee some of the hymns that they used to sing in praise of Tarlinis. I realized that all the lyrics had just a faintly ironic tone, which was probably even more pronounced in the singers’ delivery now that they no longer even kept up a pretense of worshipping the invisible god. Their hymns mainly concerned Tarlinis’ lack of substance, their inability to see him, his capricious moods and unpredictable temper, and the general mystery of what he really wanted from them. But they somehow managed to frame all of these traits in euphemistic ways.

  Willobee, who had never been even a nominal follower of Tarlinis, showed no such restraint. At first, he simply sang along with the priests and vestals until he learned their compositions. Then, he started weaving in verses of his own, verses such as, “He lies as prolifically as a gnome, yet he is bereft of gnomish wit,” and, “He plucked the blue stones from the river; if he had stones of his own, they would surely be blue.”

  “Willobee,” I groaned. “He might be listening.”

  “I would expect him to be,” Willobee replied serenely. “If I had the ability to turn myself invisible and eavesdrop wherever I liked, I would naturally gravitate towards the group that was discussing myself.”

  If Tarlinis did happen to be present to overhear Willobee’s new lyrics to his hymns, then he chose not to make any response. But I did sometimes catch glimpses of collapsed tents re-erecting themselves, or used pots and pans carrying themselves over to the washing tubs, or priests and vestals who wandered off to be alone and wrangle with homesickness or private doubts and fears suddenly start talking to nobody and look comforted by the conversation. Now that he was no longer a god, Tarlinis was clearly making an effort to be a better god to his people, and that was all I could ask of him.

  It was uncomfortably crowded in both of the tents that I occupied that night, just like before, but my companions and I had certainly endured worse circumstances, and all in all we slept soundly, satisfied with the progress that we and my newest followers had made.

  We continued on in this way for another five days and five nights.

  A few of the priests were actually former knights or mercenaries who had chosen to retire to a temple, so there were some legitimate fighting men among them, but for the most part, they didn’t really know what they were doing. At least there were many others who had physical strength from former professions such as blacksmithing and farming. In my original temple, most of the priests and vestals had been given to the order by their parents at an age too young for them to remember any other life, but that backstory actually seemed to apply to a minority of the former Tarlinians. From what I gathered, they had had a fairly cushy lifestyle funded by a local duke who believed devoutly in the invisible god, which had been a well-known fact in the region and had attracted many members to the order who weren’t necessarily particularly religiously inclined by nature.

  So, what I had was a mostly untrained crew of pragmatists, not zealots like the Thorvinians. I was aware that they chose to follow me for the time being because they liked and respected me, preferred me to Tarlinis, and agreed with me that Thorvinius needed to be vanquished. I didn’t fool my selves into thinking that they were eagerly going to fling themselves headfirst into martyrdom on my behalf. But at least they were willing to work hard, and a few that weren’t, I sent home on the third day.

  There were about six or seven priests and vestals who hadn’t been pulling their weight when we set up camp, consistently lagged behind the rest of the group when we were on the move, and complained more frequently and with less good humor than everyone else. They naturally started to band together into a group of malcontents, and I feared they would end up pulling more people into their toxic attitude.

  So I asked Gavin and Hester, “Hey, you guys know Ollie and Fiona and them better than I do… ”

  The square-jawed priest and the vestal with the mismatched eye colors exchanged looks of commiseration with me. The malcontents’ behavior hadn’t gone unnoticed by them either.

  “So, what do you think I should do about them?” I asked. “Am I not saying the right things or explaining our moves well enough to motivate them? Is there a better way for me to reach them?”

  “It’s not you, it’s them,” Hester said.

  “I think you need to send them home,” Gavin said.

  “I think they’re still Tarlinis’ creatures at heart and they only declared for you because almost everyone else did, and they didn’t feel comfortable b
eing left out,” Hester said. “Well, I don’t mean that they’re passionately loyal to Tarlinis, I just mean that they’re more accustomed to him, and he never… demanded very much of us. I don’t mean that as a criticism of you. What we’re doing is important, and we should be doing it. But, it would be easier not to do it.”

  “Ollie’s always been a fuckup, Fiona’s always been a whiny bitch,” Gavin said flatly. “Peter, Ashley, Quinn, and Carla are no good either.”

  “I agree with you about the others, but I think Carla would do fine, if she weren’t hanging around Ashley all the time,” Hester said. “Ashley is a bad influence on her.”

  “Okay, I guess she did fine at the river,” Gavin agreed. “But don’t you think she’s slow too?”

  “No, it’s because Ashley slows her down,” Hester repeated. “If you paired her up with someone else, like maybe Della, I think she’d try harder, and she’d be fine.”

  “I hardly think she’s worth the effort, but I guess I don’t mind her as much as the others, so if you think she should stay I’ll take your word for it,” Gavin said with a shrug.

  “Okay, well, can you guys find a time to tactfully tell them to go home?” I asked them. “I don’t want to embarrass them in front of the entire order, so they can make it seem like it's their own decision if they want to, but if they’re going to keep deteriorating morale like this, we need to get rid of them.”

  “Yeah, I can do it when we stop at midday,” Hester said with a sigh. I was glad of her reluctance regarding the task, because if she’d been eager to do it, then she probably would have been unnecessarily cruel in delivering the news. But I also didn’t think the five people that we had settled on would object too much. They’d probably be relieved to have an out from the quest that they clearly no longer wanted to be a part of.

  Once the five of them left together to return to the temple on the river where the members of the order who had chosen to stay behind in the first place under the care of Father Yunis awaited them, our force totaled eighty-seven people, including my five friends and my five selves. The removal of the malcontents erased a lot of the friction that had been building among the group and threatening cohesion, and the remaining eighty-seven of us became closer than ever. Even though, of course, the former Tarlinians had known each other for many years, many of them said that they never had relationships with each other that went deeper than cordiality, since they had spent plenty of time together but had never faced any real challenges together before.

  “The first time I realized how deeply I cared for everyone in the order was when we started preparing for the Thorvinian attack,” Hester told me.

  “When you realized that your life might depend on us?” Gavin asked her with a grin.

  “Well… yes… but it was more than that,” Hester replied. “It was realizing that your lives might depend on me. And that I would do whatever I had to do to keep the rest of you safe. Even though I’d only thought of most of you as friendly acquaintances before. No offense or anything. But the idea of someone like Thorvinius showing up and threatening my home, my people? I didn’t even know that it was possible for me to be that angry until it happened.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “I just wish that I’d had the chance to act on that feeling before it was too late.”

  “You’re sure as hell making up for it now,” Gavin replied.

  “That’s not possible,” I said. “Nothing I do now can bring them back. But the least I can do is send Thorvinius and his hordes into death after them.”

  “Sounds like a plan, boss,” Gavin said with a grin.

  On the seventh day, we were trudging along as usual, and despite my mortification and my protests, my new followers were insisting upon bellowing a hymn at the top of their lungs that had been originally composed in honor of Tarlinis, but lyrically adapted by Willobee to grossly exaggerate my accomplishments well past the point of plausibility. To hear the gnome tell it, I had found a cure for the plague, rearranged Mount Ugga into a more climbable configuration, put out the fire god Pyralis as easily as stepping on a match, and drowned the more recent Thorvinian besiegers not by opening a dam, but simply by taking a piss on them.

  The former Tarlinians were, by and large, people of common sense, so they were definitely taking Willobee’s accounts of our past adventures with a healthy grain of salt, but that didn’t mean they weren’t enjoying them thoroughly and singing along raucously.

  Willobee loved hearing so many enthusiastic voices belting out the words that he himself had composed, and seemed blissfully absorbed in the song, until suddenly he caught sight of something by the side of the road, stopped singing abruptly as his jade lantern eyes glowed bright with agitation, and clutched Ilandere’s waist so hard that she gasped.

  “What is it, Willobee?” I asked him. “Is something wrong?”

  “That tree,” the gnome choked out. He pointed. “I know that tree.”

  The tree that he was pointing at was somewhat shorter and knobbier than the other trees around it. In that sense it reminded me, in fact, of Willobee himself. But otherwise it didn’t look remarkable.

  “What about the tree?” I asked.

  “Nothing, it’s just a tree,” Willobee said. “But I remember seeing it before… right before I reached the Cliffs of Nadirizi.”

  “I see,” I said. “Okay, we’re stopping here.”

  My other selves farther ahead in the group quickly called a halt, both to our movement and to the loud singing.

  “I’m going to ride ahead and scout out the situation,” I said. “I don’t want any of you proceeding any farther until my say-so. A large group like this is likely to attract notice, and I want us to decide when to engage, not Thorvinius.”

  “Okay, I’ll come with you,” Lizzy said immediately, as I had known very well she would. There was no point in arguing with her, it would just make us look divided in front of my new followers, and she would still end up getting her way in the end anyway.

  But I was a little more surprised when Elodette announced, “I’m coming too.” I knew the black centaur wasn’t one to back down from a fight, but Elodette tended to default to staying behind in order to protect the princess, rather than trying to stick by my side all the time.

  I turned to stare at her, and the fierce brunette’s sharp gray eyes met mine with resolution. “This thing with Thorvinius is my fight too now,” she explained. “So, I’m not going to let you lose. And you have a much better chance of winning if I’m there.”

  “Er, you do know I’m not going off to fight Thorvinius single handedly right at this moment, right?” I asked. “Thorvinius isn’t even here. But I’m not going to attack the fortress yet. I just want to get the lay of the land before I bring in my whole… army, if you can call it that.”

  Elodette nodded. “I might not be able to read those scribbles that your kind likes to put on paper, but I can read a fortress better than you can, human.”

  I sighed. “Er, okay, I guess the three of us can go.”

  “I’ll go with you too,” Gavin volunteered.

  I had to put my foot down at that. “No, I need you here to help protect the group,” I said. “And the fewer of us there are, the lower our chances of detection.” Not to mention that Lizzy, Elodette, and I knew each other extremely well and were used to working together as a unit, albeit an unconventional one, whereas I liked Gavin, but he was still an unknown quantity and this wasn’t the time to experiment with incorporating someone new into our team.

  “Willobee, is this a safe place for the group to stop?” I asked him. “Based on your recollections of our current location in relation to the fortress carved into the cliffs? Are we well out of sight and out of earshot?”

  “Yes, we are about a mile from the fortress now, Master,” Willobee replied.

  “Okay, that works,” I said. “Let’s go settle down in that grove of trees where it’s densest. We can tether the horses, set up some tents, and camouflage
them with leaves and branches.”

  Gavin, Hester, and four of my selves led the rest of the eighty plus over to do just that. Meanwhile, Lizzy, Elodette, and I left the road that led straight to the Cliffs of Nadirizi but continued on foot through the woods along the side of it.

  “How many o’ those mutant beasties you reckon there are, Vander?” Lizzy asked. “A thousand? Two thousand?”

  “I couldn’t tell in the vision through the mirror,” I said. “That’s the nature of this fortress. It’s carved into the cliffs, so I can’t even tell the true size of the building or begin to estimate its capacity. And for all we know, the Thorvinians have expanded on the original dimensions of the ancient city.”

  “Hmm,” the she-wolf said. “Well, maybe if we round it up to three thousand just to be on the safe side? That’d give us an even thousand each.”

  “Doable, but I’d need more arrows,” Elodette said. “A lot more arrows.”

  I laughed. “As much as I appreciate the motivation, fighting against impossible odds is not the plan. Finding some kind of structural or organizational weakness is. That’s all I need. One weakness that I can exploit.”

  “What if there isn’t one?” Elodette asked.

  “Everyone has a weakness,” I answered.

  “Yes, that’s true,” the black centaur replied. “But, not everyone has a weakness so grave that it would render them vulnerable, at thousands strong and in possession of a formidable fortress, to being defeated by about eighty noncombatant clowns plus a handful of actual fighters.”

  “Eh, Vander will figure out a way,” Lizzy said unconcernedly. I noticed that her shaggy tail was wagging slightly and decided that she was enjoying this risky mission just a little too much. “He always does.”

  “That’s a logical fallacy to assume that the trend will persist,” Elodette said. “There’s a first time for everything, right? Including failure. So of course he will succeed until he fails, and we’ll keep upping the stakes, so that when he does eventually fail, it will be catastrophic.”