by Bill McCurry
On day three, Fingit went with a straightforward hanging by neck until elevated. He found it unutterably prosaic, but it was simple, quick, painless, quiet, and private. He did suffer a stiff neck in Unicorn Town, and it felt creepy to cut down his own dangling corpse each morning before breakfast, but he figured you can’t have everything. He had hanged himself to reach Unicorn Town these past two mornings, and he had experienced a satisfactory elevation both times.
What’s keeping Sakaj? She wasn’t joking when she said there’s not a single thing to do here.
Fingit flopped down to sit on the dark but healthy grass, stuck his legs out straight, and pointed his feet. In another few moments, he had kicked off his sandals and was wiggling his toes. He noticed that one of his divine digits had a hangnail, and he grunted in disgust.
Sakaj faded into existence, lying collapsed across the grass with her eyes closed. Several of her ribs protruded from her torso like legs on a crab, and her breastbone sounded like a harmonica when she breathed. She opened her eyes and looked up. Before Fingit could say anything, she raised her hand. “Don’t ask.” She rolled to her knees and began clambering upright, snapping a rib with her elbow as she stood.
Fingit shrugged and rose, snagging his sandals on the way up. The unwithered grass felt like little kisses between his toes. “I haven’t been able to see anything. I think it’s going to take the two of us again to get anywhere with this.”
Sakaj scanned the sky and chewed her lip. “Let’s focus on your little one. He hasn’t found the Murderer yet, and I’m worried he’s been eaten by a bear or fallen in love with some farm girl. We’ll find him. After all, these are just people. It’s not as if they have flying chariots or anything.” She winked.
Fingit clamped down on an angry reply. If I ever again talk to a god who doesn’t mention Lutigan’s grunt-humping flying chariot, I’ll buy him a drink and give him a mirror that shows other gods naked.
Gritting his teeth, Fingit grasped the hand Sakaj offered and felt grateful that she had a hand for him to grasp. Yesterday, she’d committed suicide by throwing herself into the gates that guarded the Gods’ Realm, the Inviolate Gates of Eternal Compassion. They had turned her into something like the consistency of dumplings and had mashed off her arms. Fingit had to clasp Sakaj’s pulped foot. It had worked, but it was disgusting and just looked stupid.
Sakaj and Fingit merged toward unity of thought and purpose as they reached out to sense the would-be sorcerer’s presence.
“Go left,” Sakaj murmured.
“I don’t think so.”
“Definitely left. Trust me.”
Fingit squinted at her. “That’s what you said yesterday, and we ended up in a volcano.”
Sakaj twisted and poked Fingit with one of her protruding ribs. “There was interference. And the signatures are very similar!”
Fingit hissed. “Let’s try fifty-seven degrees to the right then.”
Sakaj snapped, “We’re not cutting a piece of metal here!” She muttered, “Engineers…”
“Just go right, you spiteful hole!” Fingit yelled.
“Fine!” Sakaj roared, and the sky swirled before settling into a view that shot across the mountains.
“You’re going too fast,” Fingit muttered.
“Well, slow us down then, you whiner.”
“You are so hard to work with,” Fingit whined.
“Hah!”
The view zipped along for a minute.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” Fingit bounced up and down twice. “I feel something!”
Sakaj gritted her teeth and helped Fingit slow the view.
“Just a little right,” Fingit whispered. The view edged right and flew across several miles of featureless, rain-soaked mountainsides and grassy valleys.
“Stop!” Fingit and Sakaj yelled at the same time. Within moments, the Unicorn Town sky displayed three people in a small building of stone and timber.
“I see him!” Fingit tightened his grip on Sakaj’s hand.
“I see them both. He’s sitting right next to the Murderer!”
Fingit dropped her hands. “Oh, great. We should’ve just looked for the Murderer instead of yelling at each other.”
“All right, just relax. Try to call the boy.”
Fingit stared at the dripping boy and invited him to chat. Then he begged for his attention. He threatened the boy with curses upon him and everyone he knew if he didn’t respond. He pretended to ignore the boy, and then suddenly screamed to shock him into attentiveness.
“Still nothing.” Fingit shook his head after a few minutes of effort.
“Maybe you’re doing it incorrectly.”
Fingit waggled his head at Sakaj as he mimicked her. “No, I’m not doing it incorrectly!” He made an obscene gesture up at the boy’s image. “I’ve tried everything! I can’t get him to listen.”
“How the mighty have fallen…”
Bitch! Just ignore her. All right, I can’t make him listen, but maybe I can listen to him.
Fingit stared back up at the sky and began relaxing one muscle at a time, letting his mind float up into the air. After a while, he heard rain on a wooden roof. He smiled and almost laughed in satisfaction. Then he heard a fireplace crackling. At last, he heard words.
“… skip most of the boring-as-bird-shit religious overtones, and we can go to the heart of the matter.”
That’s the Murderer talking. He has a sweet voice for such a nasty-looking old scab.
The Murderer went on: “Every time you do magic, it’s the result of a juvenile, mean-spirited pissing match with some god. I mean, it’s so petty it would embarrass naked children on a dusty street in the nastiest village on civilization’s ass.”
Well, that’s an awfully insulting way of putting things. If he didn’t belong to Harik, I’d try to arrange for him to drown on that beer or be trampled by some flabby herbivores.
“Have you ever bartered with your neighbor for a pig or a quilt?” the Murderer asked. “It’s exactly like that, except your neighbor is an inconceivably powerful immortal crybaby, and the pig is a three-hundred-foot-tall pillar of fire you need to burn down a city. It’s the same thing, fundamentally. Just the details are different.”
Fingit heard the boy speak for the first time. “That’s crazy.”
Yes, it is! Good boy!
“Let me ask you this.” The Murderer leaned back. “What does a man have to sacrifice in order to do magic? Or a woman. As a rule, women are better sorcerers than men.”
“They have to sacrifice whatever else they might have wanted to do with their life.”
“Wrong!”
The boy leaned further forward, palms flat on the table. “A family?”
“Not that, either.”
“I… don’t…”
“Himself, Desh.” Bib tapped himself on the chest. “He trades himself away to the gods, one piece after another.”
“What kind of pieces?”
This should be good. I wonder what kind of idiocy and superstition the Murderer believes.
“I’m asking the questions, but I’ll humor you in light of your finding out that everything you ever knew was horseshit. A god will make a sorcerer do something, or have something done to him, to get power. Or maybe he’ll give up something or accept something he doesn’t want. For a little bit of power, the sorcerer could agree to get three bad colds that winter. For more power, he might have to steal money from his brother and throw it in the river. For a lot of power, he might have to take the blame for a murder he didn’t do.”
Shit… he understands that a little too well. Harik shouldn’t have let this man live so long.
“Is this all true? Bib, don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying, son. Now, based on your vast reservoir of sorcery knowledge, what’s the greatest danger to a sorcerer?”
“Disintegrating yourself. Well, you did mention it. Also, cooking yourself and blowing yourself up. You know, losing control of the magic.”
“Nope. Oh, control can be an annoyance, but the biggest danger is paying too much. Gods will ask a sorcerer to give up memories, forget how they feel about people, do things they thought only a monster would do—until they agreed to do them. A sorcerer has to decide for himself what price is too high, because the gods will take everything they can. In the old days, you’d see sorcerers as crazy as blowflies or wandering in the forest until they froze to death. They traded it all to the gods.”
Void suck my toes! The Murderer is like some kind of disease. He’s going to ruin that boy!
Fingit tried to think of a way to assassinate the Murderer without Harik finding out, but he couldn’t come up with one. Of course, he couldn’t even make his presence known in the world of man right now, so he didn’t have a lot of influence over events.
The Murderer continued: “And if you were an actual sorcerer, you might say, ‘Bib, how can I avoid paying too much?’ I’d tell you to never make the first offer. Making the first offer is a sure way to end up paying too much. Make the god extend the first offer. Do you understand?”
The boy nodded. “Don’t pay too much. How do I know if it’s too much? What are things worth? How do I know if it’s a good deal?”
“There are no good deals. There are bad deals, and there are deals that are less bad.”
“You’re just trying to confuse me now.”
“No, I’m just telling you things that are confusing. Last question. What is the most important thing for a sorcerer to know?”
“I used to think it was knowing your enemy. Now I think it might be knowing what you don’t know.”
“Hah! You should know that sorcery is less about magic than you might think. Mainly it’s about looking tough, being sneaky, and waving your hands around a lot.”
Sakaj whacked Fingit on the arm. “Do something, you pokey fool! The boy sits there, ripe as a melon.”
Fingit let every thought dribble out of his mind except for the boy’s essence. He urged all his supernatural will up toward the human and compelled the little meat-clump to heed Fingit’s call. To ready himself for the commands of his god. Fingit overwhelmed the boy with the most profound mysteries of his godly being.
Almost a minute passed while Fingit crushed this callow human’s capacity to resist.
The boy glanced down for a fraction of a breath and then continued staring at the Murderer, mesmerized by whatever that grimy old shit-hook of a sorcerer was saying.
Fingit’s breath whooshed out of his body, and he shouted an oath that even impolite gods would find unsettling.
Sakaj turned away. “You impotent, insignificant idiot.”
Up through the window in the sky, Fingit saw the boy shifted in his chair, bent over, and seized the table leg so hard it creaked. He uttered an appalling psychic scream that could only be heard by supernatural beings with predatory intentions.
Fingit’s breath caught. That’s it! That’s an open offer right there! He’s bemoaning his pathetic ignorance, the fact that everything he ever knew was horseshit. It’s the same as beseeching the gods for knowledge and offering up his innocence in exchange.
“Yes!” Fingit bellowed, almost tripping and falling onto the grass. He drew a tithe of power out of the tiny pool he had reserved against the day he could once again bargain—separate from his reserve for building things. He yelled, “Done!” and dripped power into the boy, where it would lay ready for use when called.
The boy’s illusions shattered and released a wave of power back to Fingit, who received a thousand times more than he’d given the boy. One-thousand-to-one was the accepted rate of exchange between gods and humans. At least, it was accepted by the gods. No one cared what humans understood or accepted.
The boy pulled away and stared at the Murderer. “You’re crazy! Why did you agree to that?”
Fingit chortled as he drifted away from this conversation and from the world of man. “I made a deal! I got a trade from the little one, the Nub!”
Sakaj turned her back on Fingit. “Why would you call him the Nub?”
“He grabbed that table so hard I thought he was going to tear off his hand and have nothing but a nub left. But who cares? I made a bargain!”
She crossed her arms. “Goody for you.”
“Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“I did…” The Goddess of the Unknowable faced Fingit and pouted. “I’m glad you’re having fun. It’s just that I got eviscerated, and I’m not getting anything in return.”
“Just wait. I’ll get the Nub hooked, and then you can take the Freak for everything she has.”
Sakaj smiled and looked almost like her radiant, eternal self. She squeezed Fingit’s hand. “You wouldn’t make me wait, would you? That’s not very gentlemanly. Share just a bit with me.”
Fingit pulled away as if the power was something he held in his arms. “You cow! It’s mine!” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that to her face.
Sakaj took a slow step toward him. “Tosh. You wouldn’t possess any power at all without me.”
“I have plans for it!” I don’t know what they are yet, but when I figure it out, I’m sure I’ll need all this power.
She took another step and touched his arm. “Just a bit, dear. No more than half.”
Fingit opened his mouth, but his indignation was so enormous that words couldn’t even squeak past it.
“That is, if you’d like to return home anytime in the next age or two.” Sakaj patted his cheek.
Smothering Sakaj with a glare of godlike fury and malice, Fingit withdrew half of the Nub’s power and flung it toward her, forcing her to scramble to absorb every drop. She didn’t show even the faintest irritation. Instead, she giggled. “Thank you.”
With the willpower of an immortal being, Fingit forced himself to nod. Mock me now, you demented slice of toe filth. Maybe you think it’s fun to laugh at Fingit, but I’m still a god. I’ll break you.
Six
(Fingit)
Fingit massaged his temples with a low moan and put his spectacles back on. Krak still had Harik pinned to the ground while Gorlana, the Goddess of Mercy, kicked Harik in the ribs and neck over and over. This had been going on for twenty-seven seconds. Fingit had measured it with an engineer’s obsessive precision. He had hoped that Lutigan might intervene in the scuffle, but he just reclined on his gold-inlaid chair, swilled ambrosia, and watched the fight. Fressa, the Goddess of Magic, was crushing the Berries of Immortality into juice, dipping her finger in it, and drawing pornographic images on her arm. Fingit glanced at Sakaj and saw that there was no chance of her interfering, since she squatted under the transparent, crystal table, busy rubbing dirt into her ear.
Gods do not often suffer the maladies of mortals, but Fingit’s head felt like elephants were frolicking inside it. Hosting a party of seven gods, six of whom are insane, can inspire a headache even in an immortal being.
The fight might not have been so disturbing had Harik, the God of Death, not been chortling during the entire brutal assault upon his person. Fingit didn’t know what had set off the altercation. The gods had been gathered around the table in Fingit’s new adamantine gazebo (five gods around the table and one underneath), and the atmosphere had seemed quite convivial. Then Krak had swept Harik off his chair, with Gorlana right behind to deliver a thorough kicking.
As Fingit wondered what to do about all this, Krak released Harik without a word, stood, and wandered back to his chair, with Gorlana trailing him and chatting with nobody at all. Harik rolled on the ground giggling for about ten seconds before he, too, rose and returned to his chair.
Fingit looked down and stared at the gold-inlaid marble floor as he reflected that the other gods who were not present had sunk even deeper into insanity and couldn’t comprehend his invitation to this party. After six uninterrupted days of horror, today Cheg-Cheg had again granted a mysterious respite from dismemberments and slaughter. However, the most deranged of the gods had refused Fingit’s offer and ha
d chosen to celebrate in other ways, some of which involved burning holy writings, old clothing, or servants.
“Well, I’m sure that was fun,” Fingit said, with a weak smile, looking around at his guests. He kept an eye on Sakaj while he continued. “As I was about to say earlier, the Veil may be lifting.”
Huh. She’s just dumping handfuls of dirt into her cleavage. That probably means she’s too crazy to comprehend what’s going on. I wonder what Krak will say about her twitchy little Unicorn Town secret.
“The Veil between us and man is lifting!” Fingit repeated for emphasis.
The announcement didn’t generate quite the roar of excitement Fingit had hoped. Lutigan produced a long, fruity belch. Gorlana asked, “Don’t you have any ginger for this ambrosia? Tink-Tink and I never drink ambrosia without ginger.” Gorlana tossed her head at an unseen person beside her, whom Fingit assumed was her imaginary friend. Harik busied himself slipping pomegranate seeds to Sakaj under the table, which she wolfed as quickly as he offered them.
Only Krak seemed to grasp any of Fingit’s message. “Well done, my son!” he bellowed. “Well done! Now we can all be insane together!”
“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.”
