When the world of man had become as dark as Unicorn Town, Fingit chuckled. “Would you like some soup?”
“What? Don’t you dare!”
But Fingit had already released his body, and after some interval of unconsciousness, he was reborn in the Home of the Gods. He ran to the tiny blue cottage he’d built to replace his lovely, now-vaporized home. Then he clattered around in the obsessively organized kitchen for a while before packing a dragon-skin bag with a sealed clay jug of leviathan-coriander soup. He also packed golden bowls and platinum spoons. He might have been a pauper by divine standards, but he still had some self-respect.
His suicide by hanging felt a little hurried, and the rope was scratchy, but it did the job. Fingit awoke in Unicorn Town, close to his abandoned body. He hadn’t gotten accustomed to that creepy phenomenon.
Unicorn Town had forced the gods to reconsider how their bodies existed. Before then, only two places mattered: the Home of the Gods and the Dim Lands. Whenever a god was elevated, he awoke in the Dim Lands with all the injuries and mutilations he had suffered during elevation. He would be trapped there until the next sunrise. Then he’d be reborn with a perfect body in the Home of the Gods, and his corpse would disappear at the same time.
Throughout the ages, the gods recognized in a desultory way that while elevated, they had two bodies: a lifeless corpse in the Home of the Gods, and an identical but animated body in the Dim Lands. They knew that this probably meant something, possibly something important. However, nobody ever saw his own lifeless corpse, so the gods figured they shouldn’t poke around with things that weren’t broken.
Unicorn Town seemed to work just like the Dim Lands at first. If a god was elevated while thinking about Unicorn Town as a destination, he awoke in Unicorn Town with all his wounds. But then Sakaj screwed the whole thing up by figuring out how to jump out of Unicorn Town and be reborn back home without waiting for sunrise.
Now a god could be elevated at home, wake up in Unicorn Town, jump back home, wake up in a perfect body, and literally trip over his own corpse. He could elevate himself again and wake up beside the body he left behind in Unicorn Town. If he did this over and over, he could theoretically populate a life-size model of an entire gala ball, or the Battle of the Whaling Balladeers, with nothing but his own corpses. If the gods survived the current war, at some point they would do exactly those things. They would do things far more inventive, elaborate, and horrible. Eternity is long.
All corpses in all realms disappeared at sunrise. Every other being in existence should have offered thanks for that, since it saved them from discovering what the gods would do with millions of their own corpses.
Fingit walked a wide circle around his corpse to reach Sakaj. Then he pulled the jar of soup out of the dragon-skin bag suspended by a silk strap over his shoulder.
“You’re crazier than me!” Sakaj shouted. “What is wrong with you? The opportunity might have arisen and you would have missed it!”
“Did the opportunity arise?”
“No,” Sakaj grumbled.
Fingit raised the jar over his head. “Then we have soup!”
They sat a polite distance away from Fingit’s body and unpacked the bag. Sakaj blew on the soup. “It’s mere luck that you didn’t miss anything important. I have heard murmuring, but nothing loud enough to be distinct.”
Fingit bent over his bowl. “Doesn’t the soup smell good?”
“Fine! It’s good soup. It’ll nourish the body and raise the dead. Shut up about it.”
“Fingit!” a voice bellowed from the darkness. It reverberated so that Fingit sloshed some hot soup onto his thumb.
“It’s the Nub,” Fingit whispered. The young man sounded more frightened than he had the last time, and the last time, he’d been bleeding to death. Fingit slipped into the faux trading arena and pulled at the young sorcerer. The Nub materialized on the bare dirt patch. He stared around as if he’d be able to see something. A lot of sorcerers did that.
This is it. Betray the Nub and trust Sakaj to save him, because I sure won’t be able to help him.
The gods disapproved of betraying sorcerers. They had no moral objection to it, but it tended to hurt the gods as often as it did the sorcerers. Early in the gods’ dealings with men, Harik conceived a clever scheme that involved betraying a sorcerer into a perilous situation, then offering to sell the sorcerer a means of escape that would save him, only to betray him into a worse situation, and so on. He figured he could drain a sorcerer of all possible value in fewer than four days, or fewer than three if the sorcerer lived in a dangerous neighborhood.
The inaugural attempt of this scheme appalled Harik. He found that after the first betrayal, he couldn’t even contact the sorcerer, never mind charge an obscene price to save him. The fellow drowned in a sewer, and Harik lost a valuable property.
Trial and error revealed that once a god betrayed a sorcerer, the god could not contact the fellow until he extricated himself. Other gods might speak to the sorcerer, but not the god who committed the betrayal. This phenomenon pissed off all the gods, but Krak declared it was just the universe maintaining balance. He explained, “If you tend a tree, then you may reach up and pick apples every year. But if you cut down the tree so that you don’t have to reach up, don’t cry next year about not having any damned apples.”
All right, I’m going to betray the Nub. Oh, hell, Sakaj is right, I am crazier than
