God Conqueror 2

by Logan Jacobs

  By that time, the sandstorm had started in earnest, and all the tactics the caravan had hurriedly adopted quickly made sense. The sand whipped up in dense, spiraling ropes and in heavy sheets and filled the sky like millions of tiny birds on the attack. It was so overwhelming that we couldn’t see anything. Trying to move in the middle of it would have been futile, and we wouldn’t have known which way we were going. I held tight to the horses and shut my eyes. All around me, I could hear the sounds of coughing, cursing, and children crying.

  Then, it got worse.

  Whether it was the strength of the winds themselves or the weight of all those humans, camels, horses, and our collective belongings piled on top of the dune, its crest started to slough off, and we started sliding down both sides of the dune. Some people only shifted position by a few feet, but others were swept many yards away. There was a lot of screaming, but the air was swirling so thickly with sand that it was actually still impossible to see and locate each other, so there was not much anyone could do to help their friends and family members unless they already had a physical grip on them.

  The horses were struggling to keep their footing too, but thankfully they seemed to understand by instinct that they were safest at the top of the dune and tried to keep climbing back up there. They all neighed unhappily, but Virility was the only one that tried to run off, and I managed to restrain him after being dragged through the sand for several yards and leaving two furrows where my feet had dug in.

  Then, just when I thought we would all be buried under the sand and become a bunch of miniature dunes ourselves, the wind subsided, and the air cleared.

  There was a lot of coughing and a lot of murmurs of, “Thanks be to Shoragua, we are spared,” and “By the mercy of Shoragua,” and so on and so forth.

  “Didn’t that desert god of theirs send the sandstorm in the first place?” Lizzy muttered to me in a disgruntled manner.

  Kiki overheard her and shook her head. I could only see her bright brown eyes at the moment because she had pulled an orange scarf over the rest of her face when the sandstorm started. “Shoragua is not the god of sandstorms, that’s Neniu. Shoragua’s guidance, and Danazar’s interpretation, is what preserves us in the face of such phenomena.”

  “I’m so glad they knew what to do,” Ilandere said. Her huge dark eyes peeked out fearfully from her borrowed pink headscarf, which matched her blouse.

  Elodette was right next to her, and Florenia was silently clutching one of my selves’ arm.

  “Where’s Willobee?” I asked with a sinking feeling in my stomach as the unpleasant memories of the rockslide came rushing back.

  “Right here, Master,” the gnome piped up.

  Only his head was visible, but at least his lantern-like green eyes, lavender hair, and feathered red cap made it pretty eye-catching. He appeared to have been swept down a few yards from the crest of the dune and buried from the neck down. His borrowed camel stood over him and snuffled him and seemed more concerned about his welfare than Slayer had ever been.

  Lizzy sighed, marched over, and hauled out the gnome covered in sand. She shook him briskly to make the sand come loose as Willobee yelped in protest.

  I looked around at the rest of the caravan with its sixty-plus human members and approximately twenty camels. Some of them looked shaken by the ordeal, but most looked grimly resigned, like it was something they were pretty used to by now. There were a lot of red-rimmed eyes that had been irritated by the sand. Some groups were busy picking up the pieces from loads that had been spilled off their camels’ backs.

  Then, an earsplitting shriek rose above all the other low level clamor of the caravan wearily putting itself back together again in the aftermath of the near disaster.

  The shriek consisted of one word: “Amneli!”

  The person doing the shrieking was the plump nursemaid with the heavy eye makeup. She repeated the word over and over again. “Amneli! Amneli!” From the way she was spinning around and staring frantically across the sand, I realized that it was probably a name, the name of one of her charges.

  “Oh no,” Kiki groaned. “Not that one.”

  “Amneli is a child?” I asked.

  “Not just any child, she’s Danazar’s favorite daughter,” Kiki said. “If he loses her, he’ll be useless for the rest of the crossing.”

  The alarm quickly spread throughout the caravan, and everyone joined in on the search. Even Danazar’s twelve wives emerged from their litters and helped add to the general air of hysteria by weeping loudly. Some of the caravan members just looked for signs of disturbance across the sand, of which there were many, including hoofprints, depressions in the sand where people or camels had been sitting, and tracks where they had slid. Others started digging in seemingly random spots. I wasn’t sure if they really thought that was helpful or that Amneli was likely to be found in any of those spots, or if they were simply trying to look busy in order to appease their caravan leader, because Danazar was, to say the least, not taking the news well.

  While his followers each tried in their various ways to help find his daughter, he paced the crest of the dune, wrung his jeweled hands, and howled, “Amneli! Light of my eyes, pearl of the desert! Shoragua could not be so cruel as to tear you from the side of your loving father! Amneli, my heart’s delight, my only pure joy! Shoragua spare thee from the agony of suffocation!”

  “He’s lost wives to the desert before and forgotten about them by that evening,” Kiki muttered, “but he lost a son once and he was inconsolable for months. Wrote a book of fucking poetry about the kid, who was a spoiled brat without a single redeeming trait, but he looked like a tiny Danazar with dimples.”

  I walked over to the distressed nursemaid and asked her, “Where was the child when you saw her last? Before the sandstorm really kicked in?”

  “Right there!” she sobbed as she pointed emphatically at a spot near the crest. “With all the other children. I counted them. I know she was there. I had her right there with me and then that part of the crest gave way, and she just… vanished… ”

  There were already a lot of caravan members digging at the spot where she pointed, and below it on both sides. Their tracks made it difficult to see what the sand patterns in the dune had been before they started digging.

  “Danazar will roast me on a skewer,” sobbed the nursemaid. The words themselves seemed like a probable idiom, but the way she said them made me worried that she might mean them literally.

  I looked more closely at the crest of the dune and realized that the dip had a sharp angle to it which suggested that that section had broken off in such a way as to carry someone off to the left, past the diggers’ excavation site. All three of my selves hurried over and spread out to work over that part of the dune from top to bottom.

  At first, I didn’t have any better luck than the caravan members off to my right. But after a few minutes I detected a subtle depression interrupting the slope of the dune, even farther left. I ran over, started digging at the bottom of the depression, and a few feet down, my hands reached a small, solid body.

  I pulled the little girl out. She was completely still, had her eyes closed, and did not appear to be breathing. At first I thought she was dead. But then I pressed my fingers against the side of her neck just below her jaw and felt a faint pulse.

  The nursemaid was the first one to see us. “Amneli!” she shrieked. “Oh, Amneli… you found her!”

  She rushed over, as did all the caravan members who had been digging nearby, but then broke down sobbing again as she took one look and came to the same conclusion I originally had, that the child was already dead. “The poor little dove, the little lamb… she was just swept away so fast, there was nothing to be done… it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault!” she wailed.

  Danazar’s wives trooped over to compete with the nursemaid in their own histrionic chorus. Unlike everyone else, whose exposed skin was dusty and chapped by this time, only the hems of their gowns had sand on the
m.

  “There’s one more thing we can try,” I said. I didn’t know much about the kinds of damage that sand could wreak on the human body, but I had seen a vestal revive a drowned novice once after the girl fell into the river during a training exercise and stopped breathing before another novice dove in and pulled her out. The girl’s name had been Meryn, and she had later become my first lover. Thanks to the vestal’s revival technique, she had survived that incident, but not the Thorvinian massacre years later.

  I thought of Meryn’s bright red hair and her infectious, easy laugh and those precious extra few years that had been granted to her as I placed my interlocked hands upon the small chest of Danazar’s daughter and pressed down. I didn’t want to break her fragile ribs, so I only pressed her chest lightly enough to push it down by about two inches. I repeated this press rapidly for about twenty seconds. She still wasn’t breathing after that, so I tipped the child’s head back to open her mouth and blew into her mouth to fill her lungs. Her chest swelled up with the inflow of my breath, and then fell again. I blew another breath into her lungs. Then I returned to rapidly pressing her chest with my hands.

  After a few more seconds of that, Amneli coughed violently and sprayed sand down her front, and then she opened her eyes and sat up. The child’s eyes were a grayish green that was very striking against her dark skin, and her black hair fell in ringlets. Her stare was unfocused, and her expression was one of panic, though. She gulped for breath as if she were being smothered again and then she started to sob.

  “Amneli, my little love, my precious jewel, Shoragua has restored you to me!” Danazar exclaimed.

  The little girl’s eyes focused on her father, and she choked out some word that I thought probably meant “Father” and reached for him. Danazar scooped the child up, used one arm to press her to his chest, and used the other hand to fan himself with emotion.

  “Ahem… Shoragua got the kid back for him?” Lizzy muttered incredulously in one of my ears.

  But Lizzy was mistaken in thinking that Danazar was going to disregard my contribution. After a few minutes of ecstatically cooing over his daughter, while his wives flocked around and petted both of them, the caravan leader handed Amneli off to her extremely relieved nursemaid and walked up to me.

  I thought maybe he would shake my hand or something. Instead, Danazar bowed low before me with a flourish, seized my hand, kissed the back of it with a smack, and then rose and gazed soulfully into my eyes with his charcoal-lined ones. “Thank you, O Miraculous Stranger, for saving the most darling of all my offspring,” he said. “Truly, it was by Shoragua’s grace that we met you and your companions in the inn and that you agreed to enrich our caravan with your presence. I could never repay you fully, but tonight, I will give you a wondrous gift to express my appreciation.”

  “Thank you, but that’s really not necessary,” I said. “We appreciate your guidance in the desert too, and I’m just glad that I was able to help out in some way, and that Amneli is okay.”

  “No, no, no, do not insult me, your host, by refusing what I give you from the bottom of my heart,” Danazar insisted. “And besides, you do not know what the gift is yet. If you did, you would not be able to resist it.”

  “Ooh, what kind of gift?” Willobee inquired eagerly. “Perhaps a pinch of that magical powder you’re bringing to Bjurna to sell?”

  “Is it a weapon?” Elodette asked. Most of the merchants did not seem to be armed, but I had noticed that a few of them carried long, elegantly shaped, lightweight spears.

  “No, no, nothing so trivial as that,” Danazar replied with a dismissive wave of the hand. “On the contrary, I shall provide you and your companions with an experience you will never forget. My wives shall perform a special dance for you.”

  “Oh,” the gnome and the centaur said, both with obvious disappointment.

  But from the way Danazar’s wives started preening and batting their eyes at me when their husband said that, and the knowing looks, which in some cases could be better described as leers, that appeared on the faces of the surrounding caravan members, I had a feeling we were going to be in for an interesting night.

  Chapter Eleven

  For the rest of that day as we continued to travel, little Amneli kept breaking away from the pack of children tended by the nursemaids in order to run up and peer at one of my selves. She never said anything, just smiled at me, and if I tried to talk to her, she giggled shyly and ran away.

  “Does she speak the common tongue?” I asked Kiki after the second or third time that happened.

  “Oh, yes, as well as a six-year-old can, anyway, she just doesn’t speak to adults she doesn’t know,” Kiki explained. “But it’s obvious that she likes you. Do you and your wives have any children?”

  “No,” Florenia answered. “First, we must defeat Thorvinius. Then perhaps Qaar’endoth can turn his attention to populating the earth.”

  Willobee chortled. “Well, well, looks like I have surpassed you in one respect, Master.”

  “Um, what?” Lizzy asked as she stared up at the gnome on his high perch. He wasn’t a very graceful rider on the back of a horse or a centaur, but somehow, he seemed to fit as naturally on the back of a camel as just another hump. “You got kids?”

  “Thirty-seven of them, I think,” Willobee replied.

  “This another of your bullshit tales?” Lizzy demanded as she squinted at him suspiciously. “Where are they all now then?”

  “How should I know?” Willobee asked. “I haven’t seen any of them for decades. But doing well, I hope, seeing as they are equipped with at least some portion of my own extraordinary good looks and irresistible charm.”

  “How old are you anyway?” Lizzy asked. “I mean, I know you look like a little old grandpa and all that, but I kinda figured that’s just the misfortune of gnomes to all look like that. Didn’t think you were actually old, cause there’s no hard or sour in you yet.”

  “Well, you’re quite right, I am still a very young gnome,” Willobee replied. “My two hundred and eighty-second birthday was just this last summer.”

  “Is he lying, Vander?” Lizzy asked me.

  I shrugged helplessly.

  “I would never lie to a friend,” Willobee declared indignantly.

  “No, just stretch the truth till you can twist it into knots,” Lizzy snorted.

  “That is an art form, not a crime,” Willobee said haughtily. “But why would I bother, with a fact as mundane as my age?”

  “What about your children’s mother, or mothers?” Florenia asked curiously. “Dead, or deserted?”

  That seemed like a kind of insensitive way to put it to me, but luckily, it didn’t faze Willobee at all.

  “Neither,” he said. “Gnomes don’t really have a concept of marrying like you humans do. We just hang out together till we get bored or we get in a quarrel. And that usually happens within about a week, maybe two at the most. Gnomes are a very unpleasant breed, you know, even to each other. I am the delightful exception.”

  “Do gnomish mothers raise their children on their own, then?” Florenia asked.

  “No, they just expel them from their wombs once they get too heavy and they toddle off fully bearded and go off to do their own thing,” Willobee answered solemnly.

  “How peculiar,” Kiki mused.

  Willobee glanced over at the six ungainly litters trundling along on the shoulders of red-faced, sweaty, miserable-looking caravan members and replied, “Not as peculiar as marrying twelve women and continuing to cart them around like that everywhere you go even after they start nagging and crying all the time.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Kiki said as her eyes narrowed. She really wasn’t too fond of Danazar’s wives, and I could see why. They were clearly a burden on the rest of the caravan, both literally and figuratively. Whereas my “consorts,” as Florenia termed herself and the others, were each in their own way an asset to our team.

  I had to assume that maybe Danazar just kept
them around as a sort of status symbol, since according to Kiki, his reaction to the loss of one or more previous wives in sandstorms had been less than sentimental. I didn’t really see any other benefit to their presence, since they didn’t ever seem to carry on a conversation with him or anyone else in the caravan for that matter besides among themselves, they clearly didn’t cook, clean, or do any other domestic work, they didn’t lift a finger to help with the childrearing, the idea of them being any use in a fight was laughable, and if the caravan leader had just wanted someone to warm his bed, he surely could have picked up short-term companions in towns or even slept with some of the female merchants in his party.

  It was only once the night got cool and temperatures became reasonable and traveling would have been tolerable, as Lizzy had suggested earlier, that Danazar called a halt, and the caravan started unpacking itself for the night. There was no inn or any other permanent structure to provide shelter; Kiki said that we would not reach one until the next day. So instead we set up the canopies again as we had done for the midday meal. The merchants also brought out carpets to sit on and piles of blankets and furs. They warned us that the night would become very cold, and we would be in danger of freezing without such insulation, which was hard to conceive of in contrast to the scorching conditions of the daytime there.

  Then, as before, they produced an elaborate feast out of seemingly nowhere that had been stashed away among pouches and scarves and the camel’s bags, accompanied by generous quantities of their spiced honey mead. As before, Danazar’s wives’ portion was carried to their litters, so they remained out of sight, and I pretty much forgot about his promise of a dance in my honor.

  The entire caravan of merchants around us quickly became raucously drunk and started joking and laughing about the sandstorm earlier that day and how piddling it had been in comparison with the true desert perils that they had survived in their day.

  Willobee managed to rally dozens of them around him in a fast-paced game of Sandmaster. This time, he didn’t even bother to try to be subtle about the fact that he was cheating. He never allowed his adoring audience to glimpse the mechanisms of how he was doing it and spoil the magic, but he didn’t make the slightest effort to restrain his winnings to the realm of plausibility or delude them into thinking that they had a chance of gaining ground against him. They whooped and hollered with disbelief and apparent delight as their life savings steadily poured into the gnome’s pockets. Sometimes they won money back from each other, which kept each individual from getting frustrated enough to quit, but never a scrap from Willobee. Rosy-cheeked, his jade saucer eyes aglow, I had never seen him look so perfectly content before.