She ripped one of her axes from its strap on her back and in the same motion clouted Umber in the head with it. She didn’t even have time to put an ice blade on it, it was just a cold steel spanner straight to the ram-jowls.

“Yah!”

Umber’s eyes went wide. She did it again, a lot harder this time, and His front knees buckled.

These crazy axes. She’d give the Foremost that, he hadn’t oversold them. They were everything he’d said they were and more. You could hit a god with them, and He would feel it.

Umber started to rise, shaking His long muzzle, befuddled more than anything else, and Janet hammered Him again, and again, and again, and His legs folded under Him and He sank down and lost consciousness. Then she hit Him once more, cracked Him right on His ear, knocked a tiny chip out of one of those big horns. Blue sparks flew.

“That’s for everything You did! And everything You didn’t do! You fucking jerk!”

“Janet!” Poppy said, losing her cool a bit for once. “Jesus!”

“Who cares? It’s not Him. He can’t help us. He doesn’t know anything.” Plus who knows when was the next time she’d get to beat down a god? Especially one who so obviously deserved it? Umber sprawled on His side, unconscious, the tip of His thick tongue poking out of His slack mouth.

“Loser.” She spat on Him. “You could never have been a king anyway. You’re too much of a pussy.”

The others just stared at her, and at the slumbering god, laid out on the putting-green grass under a tree on top of a hill in the Chankly Bore.

“That was for Alice,” she said. “And, you know, Penny’s hands. All that stuff.”

“No, we got it,” Josh said. “Message received.”

“We should go,” Poppy said.

But they didn’t, or not yet. In the distance, through a gap in the Nameless Mountains, they could see that the sun had almost reached the rim of the world. They watched it setting.

But then it didn’t quite set. It didn’t quite make it. Instead of dipping below the horizon, the sun seemed to come to rest on it. Bit by bit, increment by increment, its lower edge flattened, and distant flares and gouts of flame began to rise up around it, complicating the sunset. There was a flash of light, then another, a distant bombardment. The sound reached them a few seconds later, a crackling boom, and the tremor a few seconds after that, a heavy industrial vibration passing through the earth, like someone was applying a belt sander to the rim of the world. A few leaves shook down from the tree behind them.

“What,” Josh said, “the fuck is that.”

Janet wished she didn’t get it, but she did.