Fingit’s labor had delivered to each god the finest example of his or her preferred weapon. Lutigan’s two fourteen-palms-length swords could cleave iron or granite. Harik’s javelins delivered lightning, Chira’s bow never missed, and Casserak’s spear shook the earth like an avalanche. Sakaj might find it difficult to strike the decisive blow against Cheg-Cheg using her strangling cord, but that wouldn’t be Fingit’s fault. He’d made the thing deceptively strong and long.
Madimal, God of Deep Waters, came to Fingit to talk about his weapon. “Fingit, you pathetic squint, what the barking hell is this? A net?”
Fingit looked at the net in Madimal’s hand and then pointed at it. “You traditionally fight with a net.”
“That’s when I’m fighting regular Void-beasts, or Lutigan’s flunkies. What am I going to do, capture Cheg-Cheg’s little finger?”
“Give it here.”
Fingit led Madimal out behind the Forge of Thunder and Woe. “See that tree? The big one on the left? Well, screw that tree.” Fingit hurled the net, and in midair, it stretched out large enough to cover not only the tree but also the entire hillside. “It gets big enough to grab whatever you want it to grab, up to a certain point. That certain point is about as big as a hillside.”
Madimal still looked skeptical. “Fair enough. But what do I do then? Drag Cheg-Cheg to the ground like a runaway pig?”
“Say the magic words. Go on.”
“Bite my ass!”
The entire net erupted in flames too brilliant to look at. When they had faded, nothing larger than a blackened stump stood on the hillside—apart from the undamaged net.
Fingit said, “The magic words to retrieve the net are, ‘Fingit is a genius.’” The net refolded as it returned to him, and he handed it back to Madimal.
“I guess it will do.” The God of Deep Waters trudged away.
Fingit hefted his new hammer, the Mallet of Indefensible Devastation. It could crush any object or creature that was hard. The harder it was, the better his hammer could crush it. At least, that’s what Fingit had forged it to do. He wasn’t 100 percent confident he’d succeeded. Nor was he entirely sure the other gods’ weapons could do just exactly what he’d promised. It was a bit of a rush job, but everything should work out fine. He was 99 percent sure.
However, the gods’ new armor provided unparalleled protection, if not comfort. Fingit felt unbending conviction about that. He admitted he might have spent a bit more time on his own armor than on the others’ armor. In fact, he’d spent more time on his armor than on all the other armor put together. But no one could fault him for concern about his own survival. At least, they couldn’t if they didn’t know.
Ever since the first time Cheg-Cheg had bellowed and stomped around their land, the gods had always driven the Void-beast away by fighting it—and hurting it—within the Home of the Gods. Krak therefore planned to fight Cheg-Cheg in the Gods’ Realm today. At dawn, he arrayed his forces for battle. However, by midday, Cheg-Cheg had not arrived.
“Think Cheg-Cheg’s taking the day off?” Fingit scanned the horizon with his Spyglass That Sees through Things That Aren’t Too Thick.The name was pathetic, but Fingit had named it in disgust when he found it couldn’t see through thick things.
Krak, transcendent and exalted in his white armor that was one-eighth as bright as sunlight, grimaced down at Fingit from where they both stood at the summit of Mount Humility. “Shut up. I’m the Father of the Gods, so I don’t get cold, but my testicles are like raisins. No more talk about Cheg-Cheg not coming.”
Fingit glanced at Sakaj, who stood at Krak’s other hand, shimmering in her armor of several colors—the Suit of Ambiguous Mischance. She raised an eyebrow at Fingit as if he were a dog that had trotted face-first into a glass door.
Krak was keeping Fingit and Sakaj with him for the battle. Fingit had felt honored, until Krak said it was because he didn’t trust them worth a damn. The other gods were scattered in the valleys beneath Krak’s vantage.
Fingit had crafted each god’s armor in his or her accustomed color. Sparkly-blue Gorlana, iron-gray Weldt, and his wife, passion-red Effla, were hiding on the right. Blood-red Lutigan and his drab thugs hid on the left, along with void-black Harik. The remaining four hid behind Lutigan. Flashing-yellow Trutch, holly-green Chira, deep ocean-blue Madimal, and ale-brown Casserak completed the wicked pantheon. From the top of Mount Humility, they looked like gaudy berries, some of which must be poisonous. Fingit grinned down at them and shifted against the pinch in the crotch of his steel armor that he had polished as bright as a mirror. He hoped they were all staying alert down there. Even at their best, most of the gods didn’t have much of an attention span.
Later in the afternoon, just when Fingit was thinking about saying some other stupid thing, Cheg-Cheg’s full, volcano-like roar reached them. Fingit inspected the horizon, but Cheg-Cheg must have been too far away for even a god’s eyes to perceive him. Krak grunted and raised a golden horn half again as long as he was tall. He sounded a vibrating blast, almost too low to be heard. The pathetic, whip-thin vegetation in front of him quivered and then collapsed.
Cheg-Cheg roared again. He roared three more times in the next two minutes, and each time, he sounded closer. Within another minute, the titanic creature rushed into view, approaching the gods at a relaxed lope.
Krak released the impossibly searing light of the sun, which crackled across the valley and struck distant Cheg-Cheg on his broad, feathery purple forehead. The beast twitched but didn’t stop. The only damage Fingit could see was a few smoking feathers. Cheg-Cheg doubled his pace and ran straight toward Krak.
Krak bellowed laughter like a god. “That was just to get his attention!”
Fingit nodded. He was too nervous to make even
