God Conqueror 2

by Logan Jacobs

  “This?” I asked as I inserted my finger and jiggled it.

  She yelped with pleasure but she wasn’t satisfied. “No!” she snapped as she bit my ear. Other women would usually nibble, but with Lizzy, a bite was a real bite.

  “Ow!” I exclaimed. I slid my soaking wet finger out and used my free hand that wasn’t supporting one of Lizzy’s legs to rest the tip of my throbbing shaft against her entrance. “This?”

  “Yes,” she growled. “Give it to me, I want all of it.”

  “Well, you asked for it,” I said as I shoved my cock all the way inside of her. She gasped with pleasure. Then I started pounding her against the tree, and her yelps filled the night air, which caused some birds to flap away in alarm. I was aware that the tree bark was probably scraping up her back a bit, but I knew the she-wolf liked it rough. After a few minutes, she climaxed even quicker than usual, and collapsed into my arms panting. It was too much effort to keep her propped up against the tree after the tension left her muscles, and she stopped doing any of the work, so I laid her down on the grass. She wrapped her long legs around my hips, and I continued thrusting hard and fast until my seed exploded into her. As soon as she felt me fill her, she arched her back with a cry as her thighs convulsed around me again.

  As we lay there in a sweaty heap I remarked, “Yeah. Pretty fucking nice moon, that.”

  After a few more rounds, Lizzy morphed back into a wolf, and we padded silently back to camp together. She wrapped up the snoring gnome in her fur without even waking him, I settled down with my back against hers, and we slept soundly until morning.

  We breakfasted on leftover deer meat, and on some sweet purple berries that Ilandere had gathered from a bush nearby.

  “What kind of berries are these?” Florenia asked her.

  “I don’t know,” the little centaur replied, “but it’s nice to have some fruit instead of just meat all the time, isn’t it? It’s lighter and more refreshing.”

  “You don’t know?” Lizzy repeated incredulously. “You’ve spent pretty much all your life outside, ain’t you horse, so don’t you know that lots of plants can kill you?”

  Ilandere looked at her with huge, dark, frightened eyes. “I thought these seemed safe. I was just… so tired of deer meat I couldn’t bear to eat another bite.”

  “Lizzy, aren’t you immune to plant toxins?” I asked her. “I thought you said your stomach was too strong for anything to bother it, something to do with the wolf blood.”

  “Well, yeah, but that don’t mean I haven’t seen loads of other vagrants eat things in the woods they shouldn’ta and end up donating themselves as ready-dead animal snacks by accident,” Lizzy replied.

  “But can’t you also tell by smell when something’s safe to eat or when it’s dangerous for humans, even if it’s not dangerous for you?” I persisted. That particular ability of Lizzy’s had been invaluable in the village of Ferndale, when we had needed to determine what was contaminated by plague bacteria and what wasn’t.

  “Of course I can,” she said in surprise, since she knew that I knew that.

  “Then why didn’t you warn them?” Ilandere exclaimed.

  “Sometimes I wasn’t there while they ate the thing, I was only there for the too late afterwards,” Lizzy said, “and sometimes I just weren’t none too fond of ‘em and couldn’t be bothered to open my mouth is all.”

  There was silence as we considered this. At least half the group had sampled the berries by that point, under the apparently mistaken assumption that Ilandere, as a centaur and native creature of the woods, knew exactly what she was offering us.

  “Don’t make those faces at me,” Lizzy groaned. “I like you guys. Even you, prissy little horse, even though you’re dumb enough to eat berries you don’t know anything about. I dunno what these are either but I know they ain’t gonna make anyone sick. Just give us purple tongues is all.” She stuck hers out at us to demonstrate.

  “A little tiny bit of poison can be a good thing, in certain plants,” Willobee remarked.

  “You mean the ones that have antibacterial properties and can be used for healing purposes?” Elodette asked.

  “No, I mean the ones that make your mind float away and give you strange visions,” the gnome replied.

  “Oh, you mean to give to an enemy to incapacitate them?” Elodette asked.

  “No, I mean to drink in tea,” Willobee answered.

  “Gnomes are just as irrational as humans,” the centaur huffed.

  “Significantly more so, actually,” Willobee declared proudly.

  We finished the rest of the berries, packed everything up, saddled the horses, and continued on our way.

  We had been shivering during our climb of the faintly snow-capped Mount Ugga, but the weather seemed to grow distinctly warmer and sunnier as we continued east, even though so far we had only traveled a few miles from the base of the mountain range. Part of that was probably just due to the day wearing on into the sun’s late afternoon peak, but part of it had to be related to whatever bizarre climate phenomena had produced the desert that we had beheld from the mountaintop and were now fast approaching. Florenia might have attributed the landscape transformation to a meteorological system. But most people would have just called it a divine whim.

  I wondered if I would meet other gods in the desert. I wondered if I really was justified in counting myself as a god. I used to think it was highly unlikely, but more and more so as my quest progressed, I found myself getting into the habit of thinking of myself as Qaar’endoth, instead of as his last surviving servant. Part of that, I knew, had to do with Florenia’s constant ego-stroking. Part of it also had to do with the fact that I’d already tangled with one god, Hakmut, and come out on top, with another self. A mortal couldn’t do that-- could he? Even if the god in question was a creepy desiccated necromancer who spent his time lurking in a cave performing fucked-up science experiments on his worshippers? I wasn’t quite sure, but I figured that if I gained enough god-like abilities and god-like power, then the question of my actual divinity would eventually become a moot point.

  We passed a few of the villages that we had spotted from the summit of Mount Ugga, but were still well stocked with supplies from the baron’s castle and had no real reason to visit them, so we just continued on our way.

  As Lizzy put it, “If these villages here are anything like Sanctimia, they can solve their own problems. We got more important shit to do.”

  In the early evening, we reached a more sizeable walled settlement that deserved to be classified as a town. At the gate, I expected to have to wait through one of Willobee’s usual persuasive performances to reassure the gatekeeper that we posed no threat to those within. But this gatekeeper barely glanced at our group, as if the two centaurs, the lavender-haired, glowing-eyed gnome, Lizzy’s wolf features, my three identical selves, and Florenia’s preternatural level of beauty bored him, and he had seen it all before, before cranking the gate open and waving us in without a word.

  For the first time in our travels so far, we actually had a choice of inns that night. We passed by one that looked shabby and one that looked perfectly decent which Lizzy simply insisted that she “didn’t like the smell of” until we came to a third inn which had a sign with a painted palm tree that declared it The Coconut Oasis.

  I turned to the she-wolf. “This one smell all right?”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. Think they even serve honey mead here, Willobee.”

  With that, the gnome vaulted off Ilandere’s back, hit the ground in a somersault, and bounced back to his feet in the most astonishing display of agility I had ever seen from him. Then he trotted up to the door of The Coconut Oasis as fast as his stubby little legs could carry him and barged in ahead of the rest of the group.

  Part of me had feared a repeat of Sanctimia and that the gnome would only be disappointed in his perpetual quest for honey mead, but my fears turned out to be unjustified. The scene that met us inside was crowded, joyful, and rauc
ous. The inn was huge, and its dining hall currently contained nearly a hundred customers. They were scattered throughout the room, but there was a particularly large group in one area that caught my attention.

  One man who was bald with gold earrings in both ears and a long yellow beard raised his tankard and yelled, “To Mirja!”

  “To Mirja, may the winds carry you far, you bastard!” The surrounding group screamed at the top of their lungs before clanking their tankards and chugging the contents.

  The bald-headed, yellow-bearded man raised his tankard again and yelled, “To Kalee!”

  “To Kalee, may you always find shade, you lazy rotter!” The surrounding group screamed before clashing their tankards and drinking again.

  “To Varek!” Yellow Beard called out next.

  I sat down with the rest of my group while Willobee busily made arrangements with the nearest barmaid for copious amounts of food and absolutely reprehensible quantities of drink, but my attention continued to be engaged by the other group as they performed the same call and answer until they had drunk their way through a catalogue of about forty names. I wondered what the meaning of the ceremony was.

  Unlike in almost every other place we had ever gone together, my companions and I did not seem to attract any undue attention in this inn, despite our individually striking and collectively eclectic appearance. That’s not to say that the women didn’t attract their fair share of appreciative stares, because all of them did, including Elodette, who would have been infinitely more likely to kick in the skull of a human admirer than go to bed with him. But the inn customers by and large seemed to react to them simply as sexy females rather than as exotic creatures, which certainly wasn’t always the case.

  I guessed this probably had something to do with the fact that the inn’s other clientele was something of a mixed crowd. Some of them were pale-skinned, others golden-skinned like Florenia, and others dark-skinned. But their complexions were the least of their variations. Some people spoke the common tongue of Ambria, but there were also the distinctive sounds of at least two or three other languages that I had never heard before mingling in the air. As for wardrobe, some customers were dressed in the styles that I was used to seeing on nobles, like the kinds of velvet suits and dresses that Lord Kiernan’s household wore and had gifted to several of my friends. But most were wearing costumes that to me appeared outlandish. This contrast in languages and fashions indicated to me that people from many places crossed paths in this town so often that they had ceased to find each other’s differences particularly odd or unusual.

  The locals clearly favored bright linens and silks that turned the room into a dazzling array of colors. The men wore loose-fitting tunics, vests, and pants with sandals. Some women wore long, loose dresses layered under scarves; others wore outfits similar to the men’s. Female variations on these clothing styles included tighter, midriff-baring tops and sometimes the addition of a face veil or headscarf. Some men wore just as much gold jewelry as the women did. It was common for both sexes to pierce not only their ears but their noses and tongues.

  “These people look like pirates,” Lizzy remarked. “Good ones too.”

  I didn’t have any idea what a pirate looked like, never having seen one, so I just had to take her word for it.

  “Good ones?” Ilandere asked nervously. “You mean nice ones?”

  “I mean competent ones that succeeded in stealing a bunch of shit,” Lizzy snorted. “And that ain’t something you can pull off by being nice.”

  “You think they are bandits, like you?” Elodette asked disdainfully.

  “I’m not a bandit anymore,” Lizzy said, “and I don’t know anything about these people’s habits, I ain’t never met ‘em before. All I meant was they have the same sort of taste in clothes as people who live by their swords and like to drink and fuck a lot and show off their loot every which way they can before they get the noose, eventually.”

  “Well, I imagine these people come from across the desert,” Florenia said. “They probably cross it regularly, as merchants or something of the sort. So their fashions probably reflect adaptations they have made in order to protect themselves from the environmental rigors of the desert.”

  “Look like pirates to me,” Lizzy said with a shrug. “It ain’t an insult or nothin’. They just do.”

  At that point our food arrived. It looked bizarre and smelled delicious. There were clay pots and tureens full of various meat stews, there were skewers of other unfamiliar meats, there were stewed plant leaves with prickles that you had to pluck out before eating, there were puddings made of dates and nuts, and almost everything, no matter what it was, was garnished with some kind of coconut, whether dried and shredded, diced and frozen, or just the milk that had been poured out.

  They really did have honey mead too, although it was a spiced version, and they called it by some other name that Willobee said translated approximately to “nectar of the gods.” As it turned out, the common tongue was primarily spoken in The Coconut Oasis, but it was mixed in with words from the various dialects of several nomadic desert tribes. This was a little confusing for most of us, even Florenia.

  “I can read, write, and speak four languages,” she told us, “but none of them bear the remotest lexical or syntactical resemblance to whatever they speak here.”

  Lizzy scrunched up her freckled little nose at Florenia’s usage of these unfamiliar terms. “What you mean is after all your fancy ass education, you still don’t understand jack shit any more than all the rest of us do, ain’t it?”

  “Now that is not what I said,” the duke’s daughter sputtered. “Even without the framework of a common root language, I can still make certain philological inferences based on the patterns--”

  A slender youth nearby decked out in striped pantaloons remarked something to his companions that sounded like, “Antulio nia haksem carpedi.”

  Lizzy grinned wolfishly and demanded of Florenia, “All right, based on your frilly-logic, what did he just say?”

  “I never claimed I could render complete translations, it’s more that I have a greater intuitive understanding of the--” Florenia began.

  “You don’t know jack shit,” Lizzy crowed.

  Florenia’s hazel eyes flashed. She glanced over at the three tittering teenage girls surrounding the youth who had just spoken and announced, “It was a sex joke. I would repeat it, but, seeing as the Princess is present, I do not feel that would be appropriate.”

  “I don’t mind,” Ilandere said. “I’d be curious to know what--”

  “Well, I’m glad at least one of you has a sense of propriety!” Elodette interrupted her.

  “I’m not a filly,” the silver-dappled centaur complained.

  “No, you’re not,” Elodette agreed. “There’s nothing inherently more valuable about a filly than a mare, young ones are just more of a liability and have less utility. But you are royalty, which means that you do have an inherent genetic value, so it is all of our duty to protect you and behave respectfully in your presence at all times.”

  “What if I ordered you to just treat me like everyone else?” Ilandere asked.

  “I’m afraid my allegiance to the herd, and the oath that I took to serve as your handmaiden, supersede your orders, Princess,” Elodette replied.

  “I’m not a member of your centaur herd, so I do not fall under your jurisdiction,” Florenia said. “But I have just decided that I should make more of an effort to treat you like the princess that your people define you as, as a gesture of cultural respect.”

  “Yeah right,” Lizzy laughed. “You just don’t know what that preening little fop over there said and you won’t admit it. That’s always the thing with nobles ain’t it, they think they’re better than everyone else, and they’ll bend over backwards to avoid facing the fact that their shit stinks the same, even if a bunch of poor suckers have to die for them to maintain their status, that’s fine by them.”

  “I hardly think an
yone is going to die as a result of my refusal to translate a graphic obscenity for you while we are trying to enjoy a nice meal in peace,” Florenia snapped.

  “You don’t care about being proper, you just don’t got a clue what he said,” Lizzy jeered.

  “He said go shove this skewer up your twat,” Florenia said as she held up an intimidatingly massive skewer of lamb meat dripping with some kind of potent chili sauce.

  “Really?” Ilandere asked in surprise as she stared at the youth and the giggling girls that had started clinging to his arms. “But it seems like they all like each other. Is that a form of flirting in their culture? Do you think they’ll actually… do that?”

  “Of course!” Lizzy laughed and then gestured to Florenia. “I like her a bunch, but we give each other a hard time.”

  “It’s true,” the duke’s daughter said as she winked at the she-wolf.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize that you two were teasin--”

  “Princess, it’s better if you just ignore them both,” Elodette groaned.

  Two of me stayed to supervise my companions’ typical harmless squabble and continue to enjoy the inn’s delicious feast. My other self slipped over to join Willobee, who appeared to have ingratiated himself with the same loud group I had noticed when we first walked in, that had been making toasts to all those people at the behest of that yellow-bearded bald man with the dangling earrings.

  They weren’t playing cards, but they were playing some other kind of gambling game I didn’t recognize which involved little pieces of bone with carved symbols on them that they tossed and moved around along long wooden trays with various compartments carved in them.

  When I sat down next to Willobee, they stared at me suspiciously.

  “Who are you?” one of them demanded. His skin was pale, and his hair was red, but he spoke in the same accent as the darker-skinned locals did.

  Before I could answer, Willobee announced, “He is my master, Vander the Unvanquished. He goes by Qaar’endoth too sometimes. He’s a god. We should let him play.”

  That seemed to me like a pretty weird way to introduce someone, and I would have had plenty of questions if the situation were reversed, but Willobee’s thirty new friends didn’t seem to have many.