God Conqueror 2

by Logan Jacobs

  “You say he’s good, he’s good by me,” a muscular bald one with a tattooed head slurred drunkenly, and with that, I was adopted into the group.

  I didn’t actually join their game, I just spectated, because I had no idea what the rules were and felt that I would likely do more harm than good to my party’s finances if I tried to play anyway. And we only had the one bag of gems among us that now belonged to Willobee after I had given it to him in exchange for letting me chop up his carriage in order to build a bridge. Of course, we had some pretty valuable weapons and horses too, but I had no plans of relinquishing any of those. Gambling was more the gnome’s specialty than mine, so I just sat back, let him do his thing, and observed as his pile of wealth swelled up at its usual suspicious rate.

  At first, I thought that maybe the locals were too drunk to notice that anything was amiss with Willobee’s tactics. I, myself, couldn’t have pointed out anything he was doing that was wrong, exactly, it was just from previous experience in Willobee’s company at the card table that I knew the gnome wasn’t one to leave a gambling outcome up to chance.

  But then, a dark-haired woman with her hair piled in circular braids atop her head and her body wrapped in orange scarves pounded on the table with a dagger in her fist and pointed straight at Willobee. “How the fuck are you doing that?” She shouted. All the locals had strong accents, but most of them seemed to understand and speak the common tongue perfectly in addition to their own tribal dialects.

  “Doing what?” Willobee squeaked. His lavender beard quavered nervously.

  She pointed at one of the bone chips. “Your caravan moved ahead two oases in one turn, and you bypassed Garvin’s sandworm nest without taking any losses. There’s about a 1 in 800 chance of rolling that combo.”

  “I guess I’m just lucky?” Willobee suggested hopefully.

  By this point, the whole table was scowling at him. Fuck. That was a familiar sight, so I laid my hand on my sword hilt under the table.

  “Yes, I might assume that,” the woman hissed, “if not for what happened your last turn. You gained three camels and wiped out Hayli’s caravan? Even though he was twelve leagues ahead of you? Seems to me that you have the ability to roll just about any damn combo you want, and that even when you don’t, the chips on the board just… migrate on their own.”

  “Don’t think that we’re gullible fools,” added an extremely large man with a braided beard and a ring through his nose like a bull who seemed to be her partner. “We get all types passing through these parts. Scoundrels, thieves, and cheaters from all over the world. We seen all their filthy tricks before.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the man next to him, who looked similar enough to be a sibling or at the very least a cousin. He clapped the first man on the back. “Backwards, forwards, and inside out.”

  There were more sounds of agreement from all around the table. They were all squinting intently at Willobee, whose lantern eyes were glowing with alarm and whose round, knobby features had turned bright red.

  “But you,” the orange-clad woman with the braided hair informed him, “are something else entirely.”

  “Yeah, you take the game to a whole new level,” her partner agreed.

  “I think you might be the best damn cheater I ever seen in my life,” the woman announced.

  I braced myself for whatever she was planning to do next with the dagger in her hand, the tip of which she was now twisting in the table.

  But then her lean, weathered face cracked into a broad grin, and she added, “I mean that sincerely.”

  “It’s marvelous,” someone else chimed in.

  “They’d write songs about you in Harvallah.”

  “Bet you could hoodwink the Monkey King.”

  “Show us how?” a skinny youth requested hopefully.

  “Maybe you could join our caravan for a while,” a plump woman with enough charcoal caked on her lids and eyelashes to fire an oven suggested.

  Willobee chortled with delight. “How I wish I could, my fine friends. It is an honor to be asked. But, you see, I serve a very important god, and he’s currently on a mission to destroy another god and save the kingdom from the rampages of his order, and my services are invaluable to him, so I will have to regretfully defer this invitation for the next ten years.”

  The gnome gestured at me. All the players looked over at me as if they had forgotten I even existed.

  “He’s a god?” A woman wearing a pink headscarf that reminded me of a Nillibetian vestal inquired. “He doesn’t look a god.”

  Willobee coughed apologetically. “Well, I suppose by gnomish standards, my dear master does deviate a bit from the classic template of handsomeness, but from what I’ve observed, most human women seem to appreciate his unconventional features with inordinate enthusiasm. So perhaps you are one of the rare ones with slightly more discerning aesthetic sensibilities. But I beg you, do not underestimate his abilities simply because he is oafishly tall, has such unfortunately sharp, square features, and somewhat vulgarly overdeveloped musculature.”

  “Gods aren’t handsome,” the woman stated flatly. “Not ugly, either.”

  “They don’t look anything like humans,” agreed the plump woman with the charcoal-caked eyes.

  Willobee sighed impatiently and tugged on my sleeve. “Master, show them. Hey, guys, you have any kind of enemies around here that need killing? He’s the guy for the job. Doesn’t matter how many of them there are or how dangerous. He’ll do it for you no problem, and then you’ll see that he truly is a god. Even if he is a bit funny-looking.”

  “Willobee,” I said warningly.

  “You know I don’t care what you look like, Master,” Willobee said hastily. “It is your noble heart and your unfailing courage and your useful skill set that I value.”

  “I’m not here to do party tricks and convince anyone of my divinity,” I said. “If they don’t believe I’m a god, that doesn’t matter. So maybe just, uh, keep that one to ourselves in the future?”

  “Well, if you want to call him a god, you can call him a god, we don’t care,” the huge man with the bull ring through his septum said with a shrug. “Just too bad you and your god friend don’t want to come with us on our next crossing. We could really use a cheater like you.”

  “Your next crossing?” I asked. “Uh, is your caravan about to cross the desert?”

  “Yes, tomorrow morning,” he confirmed.

  “Well, hey, maybe we could come with you after all,” I said. “We’re headed that way ourselves. On that god-destroying mission that Willobee just mentioned a minute ago, you know.”

  “You really mean it, Master?” Willobee exclaimed in delight. He loved being around anyone who would admire his talents the way this group seemed to appreciate his dishonest gambling tactics.

  The group cheered.

  “We’d love to have you along,” the orange-clad woman told Willobee.

  “Always room for two more, as long as they have talents that are useful or amusing,” agreed her partner.

  “Um,” I said. “About that. It’s not just the two of us.”

  “There are more gnomes?” someone asked hopefully. “Do they know how to play Sandmaster too?”

  “No, no other gnomes, but we’re traveling with a party of eight,” I said. “Or, er, five, if you only count me as one. But I imagine, for logistical purposes, it would be more relevant to say three?”

  The caravan members gave me blank, confused looks.

  I came up behind me. “I mean, I could just keep myself inside one or two bodies for most of the crossing, if space is pretty limited,” I offered.

  “But if you need more hands to help out with moving something, or another few weapons in a fight, I’ll all be there,” I promised as I walked up on my other side.

  I reassimilated both selves so that once again only my lone self sat there. “I’m not as good as Willobee here at Sandmaster, but I’ve still got a few tricks up my sleeve,” I said.

  S
omeone dropped a tankard. Someone drunkenly tipped over onto someone else and knocked a total of four people crashing to the ground. Besides that, the group was dead silent.

  As the rest of them continued to gape, the orange-clad woman who had been the first to accuse Willobee of cheating and then praise him for it asked, “… Who are you people?”

  “Well,” I said brightly as I sent out my other two selves again, “I’ll go get my other friends, and you can meet them.”

  I led Lizzy, Florenia, and the two centaurs over from our table to theirs. They stared at the caravan members, while the caravan members stared back at them.

  “Your friends are very beautiful,” one of the men remarked.

  “Thank you,” Ilandere said shyly.

  “We should be,” Lizzy scoffed. “We are Vander’s women. He only takes the best as lovers.”

  “So are you just a pretty face?” asked the woman in the pink headscarf who had said I didn’t look like a god. “What talents do you have?”

  “I eat people,” she announced proudly.

  The caravan fell silent again. By this point, I guess they were immediately impressed enough by my group not to assume the she-wolf was just joking. I guess her long, pointed ears, shaggy tail, furred hindlegs and paws, and clawed hands probably also gave them pause in that regard.

  “But only the people that Vander wants her to eat,” Willobee reassured them hastily.

  “Mostly,” I qualified.

  Lizzy’s ears twitched, and her tail tucked a little, although the fabric of her red dress got in the way.

  “I read, write, and speak four languages,” Florenia said, with a mildly hostile glance in Lizzy’s direction. Generally, the duke’s daughter and the she-wolf got along wonderfully, but both of them were proud and stubborn, and they occasionally clashed on petty matters. “I bake. I embroider, I paint, I dance, I carve. I recite poetry, I debate politics, I play several musical instruments.”

  “You are a… courtesan?” asked the lady with the eye makeup.

  “No, I am the consort of a god,” Florenia replied haughtily. “But, yes, if you must know, some of my most finely honed talents do relate to the bedchamber.”

  “I am an archer,” Elodette stated simply. She also knew a great deal of woodcraft and was versed in other forms of combat, but her peerless skill with a bow seemed to be the one she was most proud of and identified herself by. The caravan members looked the huge black centaur up and down, from her dark brunette braid and her icy gray eyes to her athletic human torso clad in a short leather breastplate to her massively muscled horse body ending in four hooves like anvils. They seemed to decide collectively not to bother her with any more questions.

  Ilandere looked a little downcast. She clutched her arms over her chest and said in a very small voice, “Well, I’m just--”

  “She is a princess, and you will address her as such,” Elodette interrupted as she glared fiercely at our new acquaintances. Again, no one chose to question her.

  “Yeah, so, that’s the gang,” I said cheerfully. “What do you say? All right if we hop on board for the crossing tomorrow?”

  The man with the bull ring in his nose rumbled, “Well, we will have to ask Danazar, of course. But I’m pretty damn sure he’ll say yes.”

  “Danazar?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the orange-clad woman replied. “He’s the leader of this caravan.”

  “Well, where is he?” I asked. “I’ll go talk to him.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the woman with the pink headscarf said with amusement.

  “Why not?” Lizzy asked.

  “Because, he’s already retired for the night with his wives,” explained Nose Ring as he pointed to the floor above us. “He doesn’t like to be interrupted after that.”

  “Ah, I see,” I said.

  “Qaar’endoth understands completely,” Florenia purred as she looped her arms around one of my necks possessively.

  The gesture was not lost on the men of the caravan. One of them grimaced a little, then his eyes roved over Lizzy, Ilandere, and Elodette hopefully before he looked back over at me. “Er, these are all your women?” he inquired.

  “Yes,” Florenia answered for me immediately.

  “That’s right,” Lizzy agreed.

  “I suppose you could say that, in a certain sense,” Ilandere stammered as she blushed furiously. “I mean, not in exactly the same way as they are, but, yes.”

  “I am no one’s woman,” Elodette said sharply. “I am my own centaur... and I am going to stay that way.” Her expression made it clear that anyone who made advances wasn’t going to get anything more pleasant than an arrow through the throat.

  “Understood, understood,” said the man who had asked the question in the first place as he raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “We will respect that. Well, you can meet Danazar in the morning, and with his blessing, we will be overjoyed to welcome all eight of you to join our caravan for the next crossing.”

  “Eight it is, sounds great,” I said quickly. I felt a lot more secure with all three bodies up. I had more eyes and ears out that way, and could defend more of my companions at once if anything happened.

  After that, we drank and talked and eventually sang with them until everyone was on the verge of falling over from a combination of the local “nectar of the gods” and pure sleepiness, and then we secured rooms and stumbled upstairs to drowse until daybreak.

  Chapter Nine

  In the morning, half a dozen of our new friends knocked on our doors to wake us up to meet their mysterious leader Danazar. We groggily climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went with them.

  The orange-clad woman from the night before, whose name we had learnt was Kiki, led the way. She was filled with an unnatural amount of energy considering that she had stayed up just as late as me and my companions and had drunk far more spiced honey mead than any of us except perhaps Willobee, who was hard to beat in that regard. Her huge partner with the ring in his nose, Zembo, on the other hand, trudged after the spritely woman and looked just as exhausted as the rest of us felt.

  I didn’t know how deferential these people might behave towards their caravan leader, if maybe they treated him the way servants treated nobles where I was from, but I got my answer when Kiki marched right up to the door of one of the inn’s rooms, banged on it, and yelled, “Get up, Danazar, you got company!”

  A much shriller voice than I had been expecting shrieked back, “Fuck off, Kiki, it’s not even morning yet!”

  Kiki spouted off a stream of words at him in their native language that I couldn’t understand, but it sounded halfway like a torrent of verbal abuse, and halfway like an urgent negotiation.

  Zembo patted Kiki on the shoulder as if cautioning her to tone it down a little.

  An exasperated reply came back through the door, punctuated by the sound of some hard object getting banged against another hard object.

  Kiki replied immediately and vehemently. I understood nothing in her speech except for the word “gnome,” which she repeated several times. Possibly, it was just a homophone and had nothing to do with Willobee, but it was also possible that maybe their culture had just adopted the same word that mine used to describe Willobee’s small, round, clever, barf-prone people.

  Finally, the door burst open.

  The first thing I was surprised by was that the room beyond didn’t look anything like the room’s other inns, several of which I had seen the inside of. It was at least twice as large, for one thing, and it had a huge silk-canopied bed and was draped in carpets and had braziers on pedestals exhaling little spirals of spicy incense. I guessed that The Coconut Oasis must have a special suite that it reserved for Danazar’s use, or at least for the use of caravan leaders like him.

  I don’t know exactly what I had been expecting Danazar himself to look like, but what I saw wasn’t it. He was a very slim man of average height wearing an elaborately patterned silk robe. He wore a lot of gol
d jewelry, and his eyes were even smudged with charcoal. This accentuated the effeminate prettiness of his face, as did his long, silken black hair. From the way he was dressed and his posture as he lay there draped across the bed, I would have drawn some certain conclusions about the guy’s sexual proclivities.

  However, the room’s other occupants consisted of about twelve naked women of various shapes and sizes. When the door opened, they immediately started shrieking and attempting to cover themselves with whatever was nearest at hand, whether it was a discarded gown, the corner of a carpet, or a candlestick.

  “Shut up!” Kiki yelled. “We’ve all seen your tits before, stop throwing a tantrum.”

  One of them pointed at me and my companions and said something furiously to Kiki in their native language.

  “Well, now they have,” Kiki pointed out in a very reasonable tone of voice. “Anyway, Danazar, here they are.”

  She prodded Willobee, and he waddled in first.

  “Oh, how fantastical!” Danazar exclaimed as he clapped his hands together with delight, his earlier annoyance at being roused from bed had apparently been forgotten immediately at the sight of the lavender-bearded, velvet-clad gnome. Willobee had left his chainmail in the room, apparently not wishing to present himself as a warrior to these people. I thought that was a wise choice, considering he was the farthest thing from it, and that wasn’t why they liked him anyway.

  Lizzy, Florenia, and the centaurs entered next. The caravan leader gasped in wonderment at the sight of each one of my beautiful friends, which caused some of his wives to scowl.

  I entered last, all three of me in a row.

  “I am Vander,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Danazar looked from me to me to me and laughed in delight. “Oh, this is marvelous,” he said. “You are… triplets?”

  “No,” I said. “I am a god, and I currently command three bodies.”

  Danazar nodded with apparent fascination. He gestured at Lizzy, Florenia, Ilandere, and Elodette. “And they are?”