Роберт Асприн - Forever After

“ No ball but one million, seven hundred ninety-two thousand, five hundred thirty-nine could come down the chute,” Calla said in the stark tones of the deeply wronged. “So what happens? Balloons float up, hautboys hoot and gonfalons flutter, and Princess Rissa announces the winner is nine million, three hundred fifty-two thousand, nine hundred seventy-one. There shouldn’t have been a number that high!”

“Look, I’m not taking anything away from Hormazd,” said another of the elves, “but seventy-eight, a hundred seventy-eight — I don’t see where the art is in that.”

Squill relaxed his handset. This time clipped voices sounded faintly through the keening spirits of the atmosphere.

“And not only that,” Calla said. The others no longer listened to him. The story’s constant repetition over the past week had worn grooves in the surface of their hearing. The elf s words rolled along without leaving a trace in the others’ consciousness. “The guy who wins is a stranger to Caltus who bought a chance ten minutes before the drawing. And he’s the ugliest pipsqueak I’ve ever seen in my life, more like a gander than a human!”

“Art!” said the leading human retainer. “Art, schmart! We’re talking about craftsmanship here, boy, a man who took pride in his death!”

“Roger, five by five,” said Squill. “Knowed Wyvern Two, out.” He broke the handset completely and rose, hefting the backpack with him.

“Are you done, then, sorcellet?” Jancy asked sourly. Fifteen lucking minutes marking time on a garbage heap. Mind you, the Desolation of Thaumidor wasn’t the Garden Spot of the Universe either. More like the fucking asshole, it was.

“I’ve established communication with our base, if that’s what you mean,” Squill replied, flushing. He’d recovered his sense of self-importance now that he’d finally managed to do his job. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that, though.”

“Sorcellet?” said Jancy with a frown. “You are a sorcellet.”

She didn’t have a lot of use ibr men who thought the ability to call spirits from the vasty deep made them something special. To. tell the truth, she didn’t have a lot of use for men, period.

Calla awakened enough from his bleak revery to help Squill fit his arms through the straps of his knapsack. “A sorcellet,” Squill said tightly, “is a wizard in training with a limited number of skills. I am a comspec, a specialist in the communicatory arts. An artio, to use the term of, well, art.”

Sombrisio let out what was either a raspberry or another fart. “You’re a one-trick pony,” the ring shrilled. “A loser in a dead-end job. And if you want to know how dead a loser you are, just take a look at the turkeys you’ve been sent along with!”

“Move ”em out!“ Jancy ordered. ”And Sombrisio, shut up. It’s going to be a long enough trip without you going on about it.“

The party started forward. Every finger’s breadth the sun rose above the horizon boiled new levels of reeking effluvium from the garbage. Honey wagons were already wending their way from the west gate of Caltus with the night’s further increment to the surroundings.

“You think this is a good time for me?” Sombrisio demanded. “Traipsing along with the Company of Intellectually Challenged Adventurers? And for what? So I can spend the rest of eternity in the Lost City of Anthurus, that’s what!”

“I said,” Jancy said in a voice so quiet that hair pricked at the back of the neck of everybody who heard it, “shut up.”

Of course Rissa wasn’t watching. What would a princess want to look out over the municipal garbage dump for, anyway? Besides, Rissa probably had lots of important things to talk over with her fiance, the Prince.

Got a quest for a city lost in the Desolation of Thaumi-dor? Well, jeepers, the only road in that direction leads out through the garbage dump. Let’s send Jancy, shall we? After all, she’s only saved our life and honor about twenty dozen times.

“The only ball that could get through the trap…” Calla murmured.

“Gobble-gobble-gobble,” Sombrisio said in a piercing whisper.

It was hard to tell where the sun was. The sky was bright, but the landscape itself was gloomy and shadowed. The sparse vegetation had a grayish tinge, and sometimes a shrub collapsed in a cloud of bitter dust when one of the party brushed it.

They’d reached the Desolation of Thaumidor, all right.

“Is that—” Calla said. “Yeah, that’s it. That’s got to be the hermit. Who else would live in a bone hut?”

“Now, I’ll tell you what was a first-class death,” said one of the stalwart elf retainers. “When Brightlbck, Prince of the Windward Elves, fought Sokitoomi, the Crystal Giant—”

“Sif, what a desolate place,” muttered Jancy Gaine.

“Hey, what a surprise!” said Sombrisio. “You go to a desolation and it’s desolate . Did your schooling get to the part about not sticking your hand in the fire? Or is fire itself too advanced a concept for northern bumpkins?”

Jancy twisted the ring so that Sombrisio faced palm-ward, but by now the sniping didn’t really bother her. No more than everything else, at any rate.

Thaumidor was a waste of ill-watered dust, not sand. The soil was light and yellow-gray: loess, a concretion of windblown particles, though there hadn’t been any wind in the few minutes since the party had entered the Desolation. The border between Thaumidor and the unpeopled but ordinary barrens they’d crossed to reach it was as sharp as a fenceline.

“—when the lance hit Sokitoomi at the cleave point,” the elf was saying, “the Crystal Giant broke into shards that rained down on Brightlock’s retainers, the warrior-sisters Everill and Worrell. They—”

The agatized femurs of monsters of a bygone day formed the main structure of the hut’s walls. The interstices between these great bones were filled with parts of lesser skeletons in a puzzle of immense complexity. Rabbit tibiae bound bear clavicles and were wedged in turn by the ulnae of sparrows, themselves associated with still finer ossicles. The gill rakers of an enormous shark formed the roof beams, though no sea had penetrated within a hundred miles of Thaumidor during the present Fourth Age of Man.

“Hail, hermit!” Jancy called, twenty feet from the door. “A party of noble travelers comes, seeking your assistance on a dangerous quest.”

A jewel-eyed viper sunning itself on the hut’s roof slid back within the thatching of mouse ribs. The snake’s eyes were literally jewels — yellow topaz, Jancy thought. They had no lids or pupils.

“—cut Everill and Worrell into slices thin enough to see through if you put them between glass plates,” the elf said, continuing his story. “Which is about how it happened, after all. We raised a joint monument over them, because sorting them into separate coffins would’ve been harder than putting two salamis back together after you dropped the slices.”

“Are you going to stand here forever?” Sombrisio demanded in a muffled voice. “That’s all right with me, I’m the one who’s going to be buried for the rest of eternity, but—”

“Hermit!” Jancy bellowed. “Get your sanctified ass out here!”

“Bet it wasn’t seventy-eight slices, though,” said a human retainer. “Not even seventy-eight between the two of them.”

A crabbed little man scuttled out of the hut. His sclera were almost as yellow as those of the viper. The diet of hermits in the Desolation of Thaumidor couldn’t be a very healthy one.

“Well, well,” the hermit said. “Decided to stop by and say hello to the fellow who’s devoted decades to learning the life and lore of the Desolation, have you? Hello, then! Now go away and leave me alone.”