Doppelganger

by Logan Jacobs

  Ilandere, Florenia, and Willobee were the only ones still at camp, since Lizzy and my other self had gone off to find a clearing after our wrestling session. She had returned to her human form but opted to remain on all fours, like she was still in a bit of a canine mood, while I took her aggressively from behind. It felt good to reassert my dominance after the many times she had just pinned me or thrown me in her wolf form, and I found it a bit hard to concentrate on my body that wasn’t experiencing the violent waves of pleasure our lovemaking brought.

  At the camp, I saw that the little silver centaur and the golden-skinned duke’s daughter, left to their own devices, had busied themselves sewing Florenia’s pale pink veil into some other sort of garment while the gnome watched and provided verbal encouragement. Ilandere held it up to her chest, and Florenia tugged at and scrutinized a few corners. Then the ex-vestal set the material in her lap and took a needle to it again.

  “I didn’t know you brought a needle and thread with you,” I remarked to both women as I struggled to divide my mind between Lizzy’s wet tightness around my shaft and the other women. I didn’t know which one the sewing materials belonged to, but I had been under the impression that neither one had had anything more than the clothes on her back in her possession when I met her.

  “Oh, they’re Elodette’s, from her pack,” Ilandere explained.

  “Elodette carries a sewing kit?” I asked in disbelief as I pictured the fierce huntress in her leather breastplate quietly occupied with delicate needlework.

  “Well, it’s part of her medical kit,” Ilandere explained. I pictured the black centaur up to her elbows in gore grimly holding down another warrior and stitching his body back together while he screamed and things made a lot more sense.

  While the girls continued to work on the garment, and the gnome continued to provide them with an admiring audience, I sorted Elodette’s arrows into piles. Most were still perfectly intact. There were a few with split shafts that would be useless now, so I removed the steel heads from them for safekeeping. And then there were the ones with intact shafts but damaged fletching, so I started stripping the fletching from them with a knife.

  Then Elodette returned with an armful of sticks, and we began checking them for straightness, stripping the bark off, paring them down to the proper diameter, and cutting them to her draw length. Once I returned from the woods with Lizzy, who had immediately morphed back into a wolf post-coitus, I sat down to help us, while Lizzy assumed her usual spot by the fire and promptly fell asleep.

  By the time we had carved our way halfway through the pile of sticks and discarded all the ones that turned out to be too bendy or have wood grain that didn’t run parallel, Ilandere was delightedly sporting a new blouse in place of her old chest rag.

  “Qaar’endoth, come look,” Florenia called out to me, clearly proud of her handiwork.

  One of me continued working on arrows while the other walked over to the girls and the gnome. The veil-turned-blouse was a diaphanous pale pink and had just enough fabric to cover the centaur’s small breasts, with scrunching along the edges and in the middle that made it cling in place. It did not have sleeves exactly but small loops of fabric that curved around her upper arms and left her ivory shoulders bare.

  “Do you like it?” Ilandere asked me shyly.

  “It is lovely and it suits you perfectly,” I replied truthfully. The delicate, ethereal beauty with her silver hair and pelt and large dark eyes always looked like a princess no matter what she was wearing, but this garment fit the role as well. “You are extraordinarily beautiful.”

  She blushed prettily, lowered her pointed chin, and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “It would be impossible to enhance your beauty, but this garment displays it to much better effect,” Willobee contributed. “You look like a single miraculous rose blooming through deep snowbanks in the gleam of twilight. Also, it matches your lips.”

  “That’s, ah, that’s what I meant,” I said as I nodded to the gnome.

  The little centaur giggled. “That’s so sweet of you, Vander.”

  “Pardon me?” sputtered the gnome.

  I quickly retreated back to the arrow-making party. By the time Elodette and I had finished cutting all the shafts, sealing them with oil from a bottle in her packs, and setting them out to dry, the other two women were fast asleep right next to Lizzy, with Willobee nestled in the middle of them like a lavender-tufted red velvet ball. His chainmail shirt was set aside next to Lizzy’s clothes, and his body looked half the size without it on.

  “Thank you for your help,” the brunette centaur said to me gravely.

  I smiled, partly because I knew that Elodette couldn’t have imagined even two days ago that she would ever be thanking me for anything. “Of course. Thank you for the archery lesson.”

  “I will take first watch,” she volunteered. “You may both sleep.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “I am not too tired.”

  “Why, do you not trust me?” Elodette asked sharply.

  “Of course I do,” I blurted immediately, and upon brief reflection, realized that it was true. Despite her recent attempt to shoot every single one of us but Ilandere dead.

  “Then go to sleep,” she said with a smile.

  I nodded my thanks to her and curled my selves around both the giant wolf and the slender duke’s daughter beside the gentle glow of the fire. Florenia made a contented sound in her throat and wriggled her body against mine. Willobee let out a long melodious snore.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next morning we breakfasted on leftover rabbit stew and Elodette and I collected all the new arrow shafts and stored them away to complete later. Then we set off down the road and rode for a few hours until four windmills came into sight.

  They were about forty feet tall and half as broad, built round and smooth out of gray stone, each one studded with a few windows, topped with thatched roofs and equipped with grid-like spinning arms.

  “Well, Willobee, they seem to be in good working order,” I observed.

  “Maybe that is a good omen that the village of Ferndale will not be too badly off either,” Ilandere suggested hopefully. “If they had been destroyed like the bridge, I would have been more worried that a hostile army had come through the area. But they are not.”

  “A hostile army gets hungry like any other group of bodies and has got to grind grain to feed itself, if it is intending on sticking around for any long time at all, so it wouldn’t make any sense to be busting up windmills,” Lizzy pointed out. Then she frowned and sniffed the air. “Keep an eye out.”

  “Keep an eye out for what?” Elodette asked. She had her bow and arrow in hand. I saw Florenia tense on her back and brace herself as if she were expecting the centaur beneath her to charge.

  The she-wolf raised her pretty little nose and sniffed again. “That is truly foul.”

  “Lizzy, what is truly foul?” I asked.

  Instead of answering me, she rode Damask up to the road parallel to the nearest windmill while the rest of us trotted to catch up. As soon as we caught up to her, the wolf-girl dismounted and walked off the road through the frozen grass toward the windmill, her tail stiff and her long ears on high alert. The odd thing, though, was that despite her wary body language, the she-wolf had not drawn any of the weapons she wore. I leapt off Diamond and hurried to catch up to her.

  We circled around the base of the windmill. I did not bother to double myself, based on the fact that Lizzy did not seem to be anticipating a violent encounter.

  On the side not visible from the road, crumpled up against the windmill, there was a partially decomposed corpse. Bloated, gray-skinned, with chunks missing and flies buzzing. Most likely male based on the clothing, but the features were too decayed for the sex to be apparent on any other basis.

  “Foul,” Lizzy hissed again. “Vile. Reeking.”

  It did stink horribly, now that we were close enough for me to smell it too, but I was actually a
bit surprised by the vehemence of Lizzy’s reaction. To be sure, a corpse was not a pleasant thing to encounter on our way to Ferndale, and especially if it had anything to do with the problem that the oracle Meline had sent us there to solve, it might mean bad news for us in all sorts of ways. But death and decay and other stuff that normal people considered disgusting just generally didn’t seem to faze the part-wolf ex-bandit all that much. Just the other night she had been eager to gobble down some shit-crammed deer intestines after all.

  “Er, well, it’s not exactly fresh,” I acknowledged, as I examined the corpse from a yard back trying to figure out what wound had caused its owner’s death. But I didn’t see any obvious one. Against my personal preference, I stepped closer and leaned toward the corpse.

  Lizzy yanked me back and growled, “Don’t go any closer.”

  “He’s dead, Lizzy, I don’t think he can hurt me,” I replied.

  Lizzy pointed her clawed finger. “The armpit. Do you see that?”

  “Oh fuck,” I muttered as I realized what had gotten the she-wolf’s hackles up so badly. Mostly hidden beneath the corpse’s rotting arm, a blackened, pus-filled lump the size of an egg bulged out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “What’s wrong?” Ilandere asked nervously.

  I whirled around and barked, “Stay back!” to the two centaurs approaching us with their riders from behind.

  Ilandere backed up worriedly. “I’m sorry, Vander, I didn’t mean to get in your way.”

  “It’s not that, I just don’t want you to get sick,” I explained. “Because it looks like this guy died of some kind of nasty disease. And I’d be willing to bet he’s not the only one who has it.”

  “A human disease?” Willobee asked from atop the princess’ back.

  “Well, I presume so?” I looked at the she-wolf for confirmation, since I knew that just because a creature looked vaguely human-shaped didn’t mean that it was necessarily truly human.

  “Smells human,” Lizzy agreed.

  “Well then, I have absolutely nothing to worry about,” Willobee announced cheerfully. He looked around the group and added, “Besides losing my dearly beloved and peerless master and a bevy of the most magnificent beauties I have ever had the pleasure to behold as well as my two noble and long-suffering steeds to the most agonizing, arbitrary, putrid, and pointless of deaths, that is.”

  “Gnomes don’t get sick?” I asked.

  “Not in the same ways you humans do anyway,” Willobee replied. “We have, what would you call it, enzymes or acids or some such inside of us that instantly dissolve any human germs that get inside of us. We can also spit them up and use them to dissolve any germs or diseases that may be troubling a human.”

  “You can cure diseases?” Ilandere exclaimed as she clasped her hands together in wonderment.

  “Yes,” the gnome confirmed. “We can wipe them out completely. It just, er, involves dissolving the sick person too.”

  “Oh,” the princess said in a small voice.

  “What about the rest of you non-humans?” I asked as I looked around at Lizzy and the centaurs. “Do you know whether you are susceptible to this kind of thing?”

  “I am su’peptible to having to smell it and that makes me want to barf up blue slime too,” Lizzy replied immediately. “But as far as catching it, I reckon not. Once I drank from a filthy river along with one of my old crews and in three days flat all the rest of them died moaning and shitting themselves. But I never even got a tummy-ache. And I can tell you, when there was nothing else available I’ve had to eat meat sometimes that every other predator left well enough alone on account of it having died of its own accord and smelling all wrong or looking the wrong color, and sometimes with bumps or lumps like this fellow’s got that weren’t nothing natural to the species, but it has never bothered me except for being a less-than-delectable dining experience and all.”

  I looked over at the centaurs.

  “… Yes,” Elodette admitted with obvious reluctance. She didn’t sound afraid so much as ashamed. She hurried to add, “Centaurs are, of course, a completely separate species from humans, one that is designed much more ideally, and we are stronger and faster and smarter in almost every way. But… ah… one of our few-and-far-between weaknesses is that we do seem to share the same frailties as the human constitution, in a few instances. … Such as susceptibility to the plague.”

  “All right, well then,” I decided, “you and Ilandere will stay behind with Florenia and set up camp at a safe distance to wait for us, while Lizzy, Willobee, and I continue on to Ferndale to see what we can do to help them.”

  “Qaar’endoth, I already told you that I would never abandon you, and that includes allowing you to abandon me for my sake,” Florenia objected.

  “But--” I opened my mouth, but before I could even speak the ex-vestal added.

  “Even if you order me to. Even if you beg me. Even if you threaten me. It does not matter. I will follow you. Your life is worth infinitely more than mine, and I will not stand by uselessly while you risk it. I know you have a spare body, but what if they both contracted the plague at the same time? If you were immune like the gnome and the she-wolf, then I would not mind staying behind. But since you are no more immune than I am, it is the imperative of my heart and soul to go with you.”

  “I am honored by your loyalty, but I will be fine without you, Florenia. Like you said, I have a spare body. So if one ever feels sick, I will simply re-assimilate and send out a healthy one. But I could not bear for you to come with me and get sick because of it.”

  “If you refuse to let me ride with you, then I will walk to the village myself,” the hazel-eyed beauty replied serenely.

  “You won’t have to walk,” Elodette interrupted. “I will take you there. I do not belong to the human, and he cannot order me around. And I am most certainly not afraid of anything that a human, a gnome, and a half-breed do not fear. So I will go to the village myself to see if it has any real problem, and if it does, I will shoot the problem.”

  “You can’t shoot the plague!” I protested in exasperation.

  “Maybe you can’t, but my aim is far superior to yours, human,” the black centaur replied stubbornly.

  This was going from bad to worse. “Shouldn’t you stay to look after the Princess, Elodette?” I pointed out. “I thought there was some sort of lifelong fealty involved. Something like that. Something to do with centaur honor. Hmmm?”

  “You mean me?” Ilandere asked before her handmaiden could reply. “But I’m coming too, Vander. I couldn’t possibly endure losing my only real friends in the world and being left alone. That would be much worse than getting sick,” she said as her huge dark eyes glistened with tears. “And besides, Vander, I just need to do one truly brave thing in my life. I hate always being the weak one.”

  “Ilandere, you don’t have anything to prove to me or anyone else,” I began.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Vander, everyone’s coming whether you like it or not, so you’d better just accept it if you ever want to get around to killing Thorvinians,” Lizzy declared.

  “You are all being unreasonable,” I argued. “I can handle Ferndale on my own!”

  “Well, you’re not alone anymore,” Lizzy informed me. “And if any of us get sick, well, dear Willobee can just barf on ‘em a little and make it nice and quick. And you know, to disinfect our living quarters and such as an added helpfulness.”

  I had seen three members of Lizzy’s last bandit crew die from being covered in gnome bile, and “nice” and “quick” were some of the last words I would ever have chosen to describe the process. Between that death and death from whatever kind of plague had turned the fellow by the windmill into a rotting corpse, it was really hard to say which one was worse, but I was pretty confident that neither one was better, and I couldn’t imagine losing any of my friends in either way.

  “Lizzy,” I growled as I glared into her unapologetic green eyes.

  “Better catch up,�
� she suggested, and I looked away from the she-wolf to discover that Elodette was already racing down the road in the direction we had been headed with Florenia on her back, and Ilandere struggling to keep up while she carried the chainmail-clad gnome.

  “Fuck!” I yelled and spurred Diamond after them.

  Lizzy snickered as she kicked Damask into action. “You better get used to having everyone obsessed with you and so ready and willing to charge toward their deaths for you,” she remarked. “And if you don’t like it, maybe you’d better stop fucking so many of us.”

  “What? I never touched… most of them,” I sputtered.

  “Well hopefully not the gnome,” Lizzy agreed, “but Florenia and me, and Ilandere soon if you haven’t already.”

  “What?” I yelped. “But she’s--” half horse, I thought. I’d gotten used to that a long time ago and did become uncomfortably aware of her beauty sometimes, like when she had insisted on showing off that new sheer blouse to me, but I always pressed those thoughts down, because her personality made me feel even more wrong about it than her anatomy. “So innocent,” I concluded.

  Lizzy shrugged. “Don’t mean she wants to stay that way forever,” the she-wolf pointed out.

  “I’m not the right partner for her!” I said. “She needs a nice, normal man… or centaur… who will be content living a quiet life in a cozy house and, and tending to an apple orchard or something.”

  “Doesn’t mean she can help wanting you instead,” Lizzy replied unconcernedly. “It’s your own fault, you know. For rescuing her. You should’ve just let me eat her right away before the two of you got attached to each other. But it’s too late now. She wants your cream in that horse pussy of her’s, and you are going to have to give it to--”