Jig got back up and rubbed his arm. He didn’t get the joke, and he didn’t want to. His arm hurt, his head hurt, and he still hadn’t learned anything useful. Over nine hundred gods. How was Jig to choose which one would be best suited for him? All he knew was that he didn’t want any god who turned into an acorn or a turtle to have sex, fell in love with a campfire, trapped mortals with bits of dandelion fluff, or any of this other nonsense. Which seemed to eliminate almost all of those nine hundred gods. “Are there gods for goblins?”

Darnak snorted. “Nah. Gods aren’t much for the dark races—goblins, orcs, ogres, kobolds, and the like.”

The dark races. Jig liked the sound of that. Intimidating and mysterious. But it didn’t help his problem.

He listened with one ear as Darnak droned on and on. The dwarf must have studied for years to memorize all of this information. He knew the stories of origin for almost every god. How he managed to keep the divine family trees straight in his head was beyond Jig. Or perhaps family vines would be a better term for the way the relationships twisted and intertwined and looped back on themselves, as gods mated with their mothers’ sisters, and so on. Jig twisted his ears, trying to filter out the worst of it.

There was something Darnak had said before, back when he was healing Barius. Something about Earthmaker being busy with the prayers of an entire world. Too busy to spend all his time on one dwarf.

Jig chewed on his bread without tasting it. Not that there was much to taste. But his mind was elsewhere. He could see two ways to use the power of the gods to his advantage. One would be to become a follower of the most powerful god, one who could hurl thunderbolts and destroy worlds without breaking a sweat. Did gods sweat? It didn’t matter.

The problem was that such a god wouldn’t have much of a use for a mere goblin. Which brought Jig to the other option. He could follow a god who had grown unpopular. One with few worshipers, who wouldn’t be busy answering other prayers. One who could devote his full attention to people like Jig. One who might be grateful even for a goblin follower.

His ears shot up as a phrase caught his attention. “What was that?”

Darnak blinked. “Eh? Oh, the Fifteen Forgotten Gods of the War of Shadows?”

Forgotten Gods. That sounded perfect, if a bit misleading. If they really were forgotten, how would Darnak know about them?

“Who were they?”

The dwarf played with his beard. “Let me think . . . they fell out of favor for going up against the Two. You can’t kill a god, of course, but the Two showed them all that you can beat one within an inch of his or her life. Take the Shadowstar. They stripped his mind, flayed his body with blades of lightning, and cast him loose in the desert. May have turned him into a lizard for a while, I’m not sure. He wandered there for two hundred years, all but forgotten.”