“No!” Fingit yelled. “The Veil can be pierced now. It’s become thin in Unicorn Town—” Fingit stopped himself and closed his eyes a moment before continuing. “It’s thin in the Dark Lands. Sakaj and I have been there.”
“Who hasn’t been there?” Lutigan sneered as he poured himself more ambrosia. “Hell, I’ll send you there right now if you want.” Lutigan fingered the sword at his belt and grinned.
Fingit shook his head and gestured around him. “Not the Dim Lands! Look. Look at my workshop! Last week, it was a repulsive hole. Now I’ve rebuilt it to its glory! How do you think I did that?”
Fressa massaged the table in a sensual way and sniffed. “It took a lot of sexual favors for a lot of imps, I’m sure, but then imps must be inclined to overlook your shortcomings.”
Gorlana chortled. “Now, where is that rotting ginger?”
Harik murmured, “I don’t feel that your new workshop represents an aesthetic leap forward from the old one. It was quaint, in a doddering and ineffective fashion. This one is quite horrible.” He never looked up from feeding Sakaj. He was now popping orange rinds into her mouth, and she chewed them greedily. Fressa climbed under the table and began drawing a penis on Sakaj’s cheek.
Fingit said, “Well, it is better, no matter what you say.”
Krak leaned forward. “This isn’t a very good party. Everyone is angry. There are no naked girls. And where are the unicorn steaks?”
“Everybody listen!” Fingit screamed, and all the other gods paused to look at him. “The Veil is lifting. We can cross it from the Dark Lands. I just struck a trade. How do you think I got all of this?” Fingit lifted his hands to encompass the magnificent workshop, the adamantine gazebo, the chairs inlaid with gold and wood from extinct trees, two winged horses in a nearby paddock, and three imp servants in gold livery waiting by the house. His guests looked around as if noticing all these things for the first time.
Krak stood, radiating a certain watered-down majesty. In rich tones, he said, “Fingit, my son, if I don’t get a unicorn steak, I’m going to piss in the ambrosia.”
Lutigan leaped across the table and grabbed Krak by the waist, accidentally kicking Gorlana in the face as he went. Krak began beating Lutigan on the head with his ruby-encrusted golden goblet, while Gorlana clamped on to Lutigan’s left calf with her teeth. Harik continued feeding Sakaj as if nothing was happening. He had run out of orange peel, so he fed her diamonds as he plucked them off his goblet. Fressa was licking the immortal-berry-juice penis drawing off Sakaj’s face.
Fingit sighed and shook his head. He reached behind him to the gazebo wall and quite deliberately touched a “something that should not be touched” switch.
As Fingit had planned, nine dozen needle-sharp spikes that were cunningly hidden in the ceiling swept through the gazebo in waves. One wave swept west to east, another swept south to north, and the third swept at fifty-seven degrees from north as a special present to Sakaj. Fingit himself was handily slain with Unicorn Town in mind as his destination, but he hadn’t relied upon the spikes to do the job for every god present.
Once the spikes cleared, fifty gallons of god-obliterating acid rained from the ceiling of the gazebo. It ate through the gazebo contents with happy efficiency. Any god remaining alive at this point would be suffering a quite appalling death, and incidentally would not possess much of a body in Unicorn Town.
The spikes and the acid would almost certainly obliterate any being inside the gazebo, and quite a lot of the gazebo itself. Yet “almost certainly” was not the same as “certainly.” Fingit was an engineer, and he worshiped at the altar of redundancy. His final step to achieve effective certainty of destruction was complex but effective. He had placed beneath the gazebo the most precious of his possessions: a pinhead-size dab of the heart of Cheg-Cheg, Dark Annihilator of the Void and Vicinity. He had been hoarding this smidgen of cataclysmic power since the last war. Per standard procedure, this devastating object had lain bound within a tear from the Unnamed Mother of All Existence. Fingit’s pre-positioned apparatus dissolved the tear. At that point, the gazebo and all its contents ceased to exist. Fingit believed not only in redundancy but also in over-engineering. The other things that ceased to exist were the workshop, Fingit’s house, two winged horses, three imps, and a good part of the cliff on which Fingit’s residence had stood.
If anybody survived that, they could just go fight Cheg-Cheg by themselves.
Fingit awoke in Unicorn Town anticipating some confused and excited newcomers. What he got was Sakaj screaming, “Fingit, you gutless bastard!” followed by a brutal kick to his nonliving balls. Fingit toppled forward onto his face, unable to even squeak. Had his stomach not been pierced by two separate spikes, he thought he might have puked for an hour. “I told you not to bring them here, or they’d screw it all up!” he heard Sakaj yell.
A short time later, as Fingit drew a breath, someone jerked him upright by his arm and gave him a tooth-clattering shake. He looked into the face of his father, Krak. Apart from the ragged hole in his forehead, the Father of the Gods looked better than Fingit had seen him in years. Krak frowned threats of anguish down on his son and said, “Boy, did you just elevate every damned one of us?”
Fingit nodded.
Krak lifted Fingit off the ground with his right hand. He pulled off Fingit’s spectacles and crushed them in his left hand. “Why did you do that?” Krak asked through gritted teeth.
Had Unicorn Town not been dimmer than a village idiot, Krak would have seen all the color disappear from Fingit’s face. Fingit wondered, perhaps too late, what
