Quite a few millennia earlier, Fingit had created a marvelous battle engine, the Flying Chariot of Recalcitrant Obliteration. He made a gift of it to Lutigan, who right away went out to create a pretext for attacking somebody unimportant. During the fight, the chariot crashed onto the battlefield on its side and spun for more than two hours, causing Lutigan to vomit up some things that defied identification. When Lutigan complained, Fingit explained that Lutigan must have touched something that should not have been touched. Lutigan observed how clever Fingit had been to place something inside the chariot that shouldn’t be touched. Then Lutigan stabbed Fingit fourteen times from his neck down to his groin.
Throughout the day, Fingit amassed information and created a novel schematic for this new chariot, which he decided to call the Chariot of Crushing Divinity. He knew that was an insipid name, but he couldn’t think of anything better.
Then Fingit stoked his forge and gathered his materials. Stoking the forge was a huge aggravation. In earlier times, he’d retained several imps to do the scut work around the forge. But when things went to hell, he could no longer feed and house the imps. They turned feral and returned to the forests in the valley.
So, Fingit stoked the forge, fashioned the metal, joined it with cunning, infused it with power he had husbanded for such a task, attended the details of the chariot’s appearance, and handled the entire job himself. The day’s work produced a brass chariot that gleamed in the divine, though dimmed, sunlight of the Gods’ Realm. Fingit smiled upon his work and felt more pride in it than in anything he’d created since the Veil had fallen. He could hardly wait for it to be launched and guided back to the world of man. He just needed to find someone dim enough to ride in it.
After an hour of trudging through the Gossamer Forest, Fingit gave up on finding any stupid gods there. It seemed deserted. He thought he might try his luck down the mountain at the Sun Soul Pavilion, since Weldt and Harik were known to spend evenings there drinking and debauching. Well, their debauching had diminished. Cute demigoddesses once would have toppled onto their backs for these gods unprompted, but now they found Weldt and Harik rather repulsive. The gods sagged unpleasantly, their ears sprouted bountiful harvests of hair, and they were boring in the way only a self-absorbed immortal entity can be. Therefore, the debauching had decreased to almost nothing, and the drinking had increased in proportion.
However, as Fingit walked down the mountain, he spied two figures approaching him. From this distance, one appeared to be throwing a compact net at a small animal, and the net snared the creature without fuss. The accompanying figure ran to the animal, un-snared it, and handed the net back to the first figure.
Fingit hurried to meet these two. When closer, he could tell that the second figure was Gorlana, Goddess of Mercy. Her waves of red hair lacked the luster they had once possessed, and her gown of cream and sapphire didn’t swirl with majesty as it had in the old days. Fingit became excited, however, because she was definitely dim. He recognized the other figure by his blood-red armor, tiger-skull helm, and face like a war ax. This was Lutigan, and that dampened Fingit’s excitement quite a lot. It wasn’t that Lutigan was smart. Lutigan just didn’t like Fingit very much.
When Fingit had drawn much nearer to these gods, he again saw Lutigan toss his small net with appalling speed. The net snared a rabbit near the base of a tree, and the rabbit kicked, trying to free itself. Gorlana rushed to the tangled rabbit as Fingit walked toward her. With immense tenderness, she untangled the creature, and then she shot her left hand forth with a black dagger and killed it with a thrust. Almost as rapidly, she reached into her gown and produced six small black spikes. She staked the rabbit to the ground, one spike through each paw and one through each ear.
The Goddess of Mercy rose with less-than-godlike grace and noticed Fingit staring at her in repulsed perplexity. She smiled a sweet smile from her heart-shaped face and said, “Ants have to eat too.” She carried the net back to Lutigan with a giggle. He responded with a grimace and an aggressive lowering of his mighty red eyebrows.
“Fingit, what brings you out of your shed? Tired of smelling your own farts?” Lutigan said by way of greeting. Fingit felt hopeful, since this was far more polite than Lutigan had offered in years.
Fingit paused to consider the best way to approach Gorlana and Lutigan. How could he introduce them to the idea of the chariot to produce the highest probability of them agreeing to ride the damned thing? Deep within himself, Fingit feared that the chariot would blow up and vaporize its occupants, so he needed to make this sound really good.
However, Fingit could not think of a lie sufficiently convincing to entice even a moronic god to his destruction. Words and lies didn’t happen to be Fingit’s strength. He fell back on the same weapon he used when the gods went into battle. He used a gigantic hammerblow between his opponent’s eyes—metaphorically, in this case. “I built a chariot to fly to the world of man through the Veil. If we don’t get across, all of us will be elevated by Cheg-Cheg or go insane or both. One of you needs to fly it.”
Gorlana giggled. “Fingit, you’re cute. If you ever speak to me again, about anything at all, I’ll stake you out like this rabbit. It’ll take more spikes. I’ll use nine of them just for your penis.” Then she kissed Fingit on the forehead, kissed Lutigan on the ear, and
