Wee Piggies of Radiant Might

by Bill McCurry

  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 happens when a god is elevated in Unicorn Town. If Krak became infuriated enough to crush Fingit’s neck, Fingit might find out in person what elevation was like there. Rather than speaking, he pointed straight up with his free arm. Krak looked up at the mass of colorful, floating points in the sky. He tensed and then relaxed moment by moment, placing Fingit back on his feet.

  “What in the name of the Deep and Noxious Places is that?” Krak mumbled.

  Fingit glanced around and saw Sakaj hissing into Harik’s face, almost touching noses. Gorlana had wandered a short distance away by herself. Fressa, missing one arm where a spike had ripped it off, was leaning back against a tree and watching everybody. Fingit saw no evidence of Lutigan, which instilled some throat-clenching fear.

  Fingit staggered as Krak’s elbow hit him in the shoulder. Damn, Father must have grown a foot here!

  “Fingit… what the… what is this? Explain yourself!” Even in his degenerate condition, Krak scowled in a manner that would have immolated non-divine beings in a trice.

  “It’s just what I said, Father. These are the Dark Lands, and the world of man is up there. The Veil is thin here. We can get through.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lutigan yelled from behind Fingit, who spun, but no Lutigan stood there. “Where am I?” Lutigan roared from nowhere. “What did you do to me, you floppy rodent’s scrotum? I’ll elevate you every day for a thousand years!”

  Good thing I used the acid too. Or maybe Lutigan just got obliterated at the end. I hope it was the acid. That would have hurt like molten lava diarrhea.

  “Leave her alone, you depraved vulture!” Sakaj screamed at Harik. “The Freak is mine! If you ruined yours for all time, that’s just your own fault!”

  Harik, one eyeball punched out and dangling on his cheek, said, “You fail to see that the most harmonious and beneficial approach is to share the resources available to us. Bitch!”

  Gorlana stalked back over to the group and howled, “Aaaauuuu! Uuuuuuuuu! Aaaaaaeeaaa!” Her mouth had been dismantled by a spike, but that didn’t prevent her from having her say.

  Fressa pointed at Gorlana. “Gorlana apologizes for being such an eternal bitch.”

  Gorlana kicked Fressa in the shin.

  “Everyone who doesn’t want to be heaved into the Bottomless Chasm of Nightmares had better shut the hell up right now!” Krak roared with the power of twenty bears, which wasn’t bad, but was nowhere close to old Krak, who roared with the power of fifty bears and sometimes a murderous hippo or two. All the gods shut up. Krak pointed at Sakaj and said, “Suicide girl—show me.”

  If time had any intrinsic meaning in Unicorn Town, and Fingit doubted that it could, an hour passed before Krak nodded and said, “Enough.”

  Sakaj and Fingit had demonstrated the link in the sky, how to move it, and how they had found people with it. They’d shown everyone the Murderer, the Nub, and the Freak. They talked about trying to find other sorcerers with which to bargain.

  Harik begin whining about the Murderer and his open-ended debt, and how Sakaj and Fingit needed to share with him. Krak backhanded Harik and told him to shut up and collect the payments on the debt he was already owed, if he cou
ld figure out how.

  “All right, here’s what we will do,” Krak said in his commanding, pre-Veil fashion. “We will come here every day. Fingit, you’re the only one who’s sort of sane on the other side. It will be your job to elevate us all every day and get us here.”

  Fingit gaped at his father.

  “You’re a smart boy—figure it out. As a reward, you get a monopoly on any trades with the Nub.”

  All of the others stared venom at Fingit when they heard that.

  “Sakaj, you work on the Freak. Find something she wants and break her down. Gorlana, Fressa, and Lutigan, you search for other trading opportunities. Harik, capitalize on the Murderer’s debt—we could use the influx of power.” Krak looked around at everyone except the incorporeal Lutigan. “Does everyone understand?”

  This is what I wanted. Right? Old, Insane Krak is gone, and Mighty Krak is in charge again. I guess I forgot that Mighty Krak doesn’t like me that much.

  Fingit nodded and added his voice to the symphony of affirmations.

  Krak sighed and looked around. “All right, I’m bored. How do we get back?”

  Everyone stared at Fingit. Fingit stared at Sakaj. Sakaj looked off into the darkness of Unicorn Town and pretended not to hear.

  “Someone—and I don’t care who—has five seconds to tell me how to get home,” Krak said. “I may not be able to fry your nipples off with the impossibly searing light of the sun yet, but I can pound any of you thin enough to write poetry on.”

  Fingit and Sakaj both began talking at once. Harik sneered at them. Fressa hurled a dirt clod at Gorlana, who threw up her arms and walked away, while Lutigan’s insubstantial voice cursed everyone in sight. Krak stood with his arms crossed and seemed to grow taller every second. It was therefore easy to understand why no one did anything useful when Cheg-Cheg’s head erupted from the ground beneath them.

  The upheaval hurled gods in all directions as the monster climbed out of the prodigious hole it had made in the earth of Unicorn Town. Fingit hit the grass rolling and smacked against a black tree trunk. He felt at least one rib crack. By the time he’d dragged himself upright against the trunk, Cheg-Cheg’s entire self stood roaring beneath the prismatic Unicorn Town sky.

  “Take us back!” Fingit yelled. “Get us out of here!” He staggered toward Sakaj, who was sitting on her butt and shaking her head one hundred feet away. The monster’s foot slammed down in between them, crashing into the ground like a meteor. Fingit tripped and fell backward, landing on the grass amid a hail of dirt clods.

  Cheg-Cheg twisted, bent, and swept Fressa up with his clawed hand. She flailed her arms and screamed without words, and part of Fingit noted that she hadn’t been this articulate in years. The beast grabbed her right foot with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, and her left foot with the thumb and forefinger of the other, employing the delicate grip one might use with some sort of heirloom. Fressa’s scream shot up an octave and a half as Cheg-Cheg tore the goddess’s legs apart and, with great tenderness, pulled her in two from the legs to the neck.

  Half of Fressa plopped down in an untidy pile right next to Fingit, spattering him with intestines. He rolled away from the viscera, sat up, and saw Sakaj running around the monster’s clawed toes toward him. He shouted, “Sakaj! Take us home!”

  Fingit didn’t remember closing his eyes, but he opened them upon the once-radiant sunrise of the Gods’ Realm. He sat up on the grass of the dim and sickly Emerald Grove. Krak, once more frail and palsied, was coughing as he rolled onto his belly. Gorlana lay on her back, chatting with her imaginary friend as they pointed at clouds. Sakaj had wrapped her arms around a nasty tree and was kissing it, perhaps with tongue. He looked away as she wrapped one leg around the thing.

  Somewhere behind Fingit, Harik cursed and then giggled. Fingit turned to see Lutigan kick the God of Death in the knee. Harik giggled again and limped away downhill. Lutigan wrestled a gummy branch off the tree Sakaj was humping and chased Harik, roaring.

  Fingit stood and looked in every direction. “No Fressa. She didn’t come back.”

  “What?” Krak mumbled.

  “I think Fressa’s dead. Forever.”

  “Huh. The little squidge didn’t give me a birthday present last year, so who cares?” The Father of the Gods sat up and scratched his crotch.

  Murdering us all at the same time every day shouldn’t be an impossible task. I should just ask Cheg-Cheg for advice.

  Seven

  (Fingit)

  Harik bounded away from where Fingit stood with Krak, running toward some gray rotting bushes while Lutigan pursued him. The God of War whacked Harik a glancing blow with a tree limb and then chased him out of sight.

  Fingit tried to push his spectacles higher on his nose and then remembered that Krak had just crushed them in Unicorn Town. All right, my main task is to gather up my family and elevate them. Well, to hell with Sakaj—she can elevate herself, she’s good at it. I’ll just take insane Krak along to find nutty-as-hell Harik and Lutigan before Cheg-Cheg shows up again. Easy. Catch them first. Then worry about elevating them.

  Fingit grabbed Krak’s arm and hauled him upright. The Father of the Gods plopped back onto the dingy grass, chuckled, and lay there as limp as a dead rooster.

  “Come on, Father! We have to catch them now!”

  Krak answered Fingit with a long raspberry that left a line of drool on Krak’s cheek. In Unicorn Town, he’d been the incomparable ruler of all creation. Here he was a gross, whiny old man again.

  Fingit had himself devolved into a flabby specimen too diminished to carry even frail old Krak around. He hauled off to kick his father’s backside but then stopped himself. He called over to Gorlana. “Will you watch Father and make sure he doesn’t crawl away somewhere?”

  Gorlana sat up and looked away from Fingit. “Watch him yourself. We’re planning a party.”

  Fingit closed his eyes for a moment. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to your friend. She’s the most trustworthy one around here.”

  Gorlana looked at Fingit and smiled like a young girl in love. “Certainly Tink-Tink will watch him! If Father tries to leave, she will tell me which one of his knees to break.”

  As Fingit trotted away, he uttered an epithet that compared Gorlana unfavorably to a Void-beast’s unmentionable parts. Halfway down the hill, he spotted the prismatic spire propelled above the Marketplace of Reticular Diversion. It stood at the center of the Gods’ Realm, and while its stock had near evaporated, it should still have everything Fingit required.

  An hour later, Fingit jogged and puffed back into the Emerald Grove, leading a puppy on a leash and carrying a monumental spiked hammer over his shoulder. This ought to do it, although I owe the blacksmith one of those see-the-gods-naked mirrors.

  Krak lay on his back, snoring, just where Fingit had left him. Gorlana stood guard with the same diligence as her invisible friend, which is to say none at all. Fingit couldn’t spot Gorlana anywhere in the grove or in the vale below it. Well, the Void can suck her away. Father is the important one to keep track of.

  Fingit let the inexpressibly adorable white puppy sniff Krak and begin licking the god’s face. Krak woke, said, “Puppy!” and collected the fluffy, melon-size beast into his arms as he sat up. It alternated between licking Krak’s chin and gazing at the god with enormous, adoring eyes.

  “He’s all yours.” Fingit shifted the appalling hammer to his other shoulder. “Let’s go show him to Harik and Lutigan.”

  “What are you going to do with that?” Krak eyed the weapon.

  “Conversation piece.” Within moments, Fingit was striding down through the woods, leading Krak and his new puppy, which Krak had named Dominion. Krak made baby talk, Dominion yipped, and Fingit ground his teeth.

  Fingit expected to find Harik in the Hall of Ambiguity, a rather nasty tavern where the God of Death sometimes went to hide from his wife. Indeed, Harik was sitting against the back wall slurping a beverage, the scent of which Fingit
found repugnant from ten paces away.

  “Harik, my son, meet my new friend and heir, Dominion!” Krak lifted the puppy high in both hands. “He’s the only being in existence with the subtlety of understanding required to assume the throne when I abdicate.”

  Harik glanced over the table at the puppy. “It looks rather like an effeminate rodent to me, not that I mean to give offense. Fingit, what in the name of the Void and our mother’s chins do you plan to do with that horrible mallet?” Harik, still seated, squirmed away from the hammer while trying to appear like he wasn’t squirming.

  “Oh, nothing important. Where’s Lutigan?”

  “I should presume the ruffian is off stabbing someone. Run off and look for him if you’re that interested. Perhaps he will stab you.” Harik waved a hand to shoo the puppy. Krak had set Dominion down onto the table, and the creature was lapping from Harik’s goblet.

  Fingit’s neck tingled as Cheg-Cheg’s distant roar shook dust from the tavern’s rafters. “Sorry, Lutigan. Time to go, everybody.” He heaved the hammer above his head one-handed. Krak stumbled back a step, and Harik raised one arm against the blow. Fingit thought about Unicorn Town, snatched the puppy’s tail, and twisted it hard.

  A tidy package of subtle explosives detonated within the miraculously lifelike mechanical puppy Fingit had constructed using a few drops of his remaining power. None but Fingit would have expected the explosion to produce so little destruction inside the tavern. Also, no one else would have expected it to liquefy a divine being’s organs into goo in such an efficient manner.

  When they reached Unicorn Town, Fingit’s puppy-dog ploy earned Fingit a snort and an approving whack on the shoulder from his father. Then Krak growled and smacked Fingit’s other shoulder for failing to bring Lutigan and Gorlana. Fingit rubbed his numb arm and composed himself for a day of lurking above the world of man like an immortal vulture.