Роберт Асприн - Forever After

“Hey, wait a minute!” Calla demanded.

The hermit had ducked beneath his lintel of buffalo humerus. He turned again and cried, “I have more important things to do than be gaped at by scabs on a second-rate quest! Like watching my fingernails grow!”

Sombrisio giggled. “Well, he’s got you lot pegged,” she noted.

“Wait a darn minute,” said Jancy. “What do you mean, ‘scabs’? We’re here on a bona fide quest, requesting—”

“Requesting now , that you are,” the hermit said, stepping closer and waggling his gnarled index finger toward Jancy’s face. “But let me ask you, Little Miss Venturer, just which member of the Guild of Licensed Cicerones did you employ on your first journey through the Desolation? On a real quest!”

“Ah,” said Jancy. “Ah. Well. You see, the Princess and I were fleeing from minions of the Ghoul-Lord of Otch-backo and we didn’t have a lot of time shop around for guides, so we—”

“Hired scabs!” the hermit snapped. “Well, you can just go—”

“We didn’t hire anybody!” Jancy shouted. Rows of lizard sternums pinning the thatch to the roof beams jounced when she bellowed. “We didn’t have time to hire anybody!”

“Right, right!” the hermit crowed in triumph. “Well, you’re not going to hire anybody now either, because the regulations of the guild forbid members to accept employment from those who’ve previously used scabs. So there!”

He stuck his thumbs in his hairy ears and wriggled his fingers at Jancy.

“Look—” said Jancy.

The hermit lowered his hands and flowered. “Do you know how dangerous the Desolation of Thaumidor is?” he asked. “Three centuries ago, King Voroshek the Extremely Ill-Tempered the Fourth refused to employ guild members when he marched into the Desolation on his way to attack Faltane. He and his army are still there, girlie! And so will you and elfikins here be, three centuries hence!”

“That’s telling them, hermit!” said Sombrisio. “Of course, if you really knew jack shit about this place, you’d have found me yourself, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s it,” Jancy said in her quiet voice. “That’s all of this we’re going to hear.”

She twisted Sombrisio outward and thrust her clenched fist toward the hermit so that he got a good look at the massive ring. “Now,” Jancy said, “you’re going to guide us on our quest. And no smart remarks about second rate or losers or turkeys, do you understand? Or I’m going to use the power of Sombrisio here to turn you into a lobster.”

“And I,” said Calla Mallanik, leaning forward to call attention to himself, “will eat you in cream sauce.”

Jancy blinked. “Well, you know,” she said to her faithful companion, “he won’t really be a lobster, he’ll just think he is.”

The elf shrugged. “So what?” he said. “It’s not cannibalism so long as it’s out of species. And I’ll guarantee he’ll taste better than the can of ham and lima beans I had last night. Where on Middle Earth did the royal commissary get sea rations, anyway? Faltane doesn’t have a navy.”

Jancy returned her attention to the hermit. “Well, anyway,” she said. “If you don’t guide us, it’ll be the worse for you. Do you understand?”

“Oh, sure,” said the hermit bitterly. “Well, my guild’s going to hear about it, though. Wait till the wave of sympathy strikes hits your employers! What land of a wedding do you suppose it’s going to be when the flower girls down tools, hey? And the Worshipful Company of Rice Sellers bans their products from crossing a picket line!”

Jancy sighed. “All you need to know,” she said, “is that if you’re not packed and ready to guide us in fifteen minutes, I’m going to help Calla here look for a cow for the cream sauce.”

The hermit reentered his hut, muttering about strong-arm bully-girls. After that, the only sound for a time was the squeal of Squill’s apparatus. The artio was reporting to base on the progress of the quest.

Though the sun even at zenith was wan, its heat hammered the landscape. The rock basin was rimmed by three distinct margins of differing color: yellow, orange, and a virid hue close to that of copper acetoarsenite. The fluid (it certainly wasn’t water) in the center of the pool quivered; Jancy thought she felt microshocks through the soles of her boots as well.

“Are there earthquakes here?” she asked.

The hermit shrugged. His expression wavered. An expert’s natural urge to pontificate warred with his personal desire in this case to be as obstructive as possible. The former won out, perhaps aided by the way Calla Mallanik fished from his wallet a miracle of elf craftsmanship — a nested nine-piece flatware set, including cracking tongs and a miniature mallet.

‘Well, it’s not so much earth tremors as it is a dog scratching itself m its sleep,“ the hermit explained. ”The Desolation is a living entity.“ He pursed his lips, then added, ”A thoroughly grumpy and ill-tempered one, too.“

A small armadillo charged from its burrow and began to urinate on Calla’s right boot. The elf kicked the little creature through the center of a squamous-looking cactus which collapsed with a sucking sound.

“Seems to attract dwellers of similar temperament,” Calla said with a significant glance toward the hermit.

“I know what you’re hinting at!” the hermit cried, as if anybody with brains enough to breathe wouldn’t have known. “The reason I inhabit the Desolation is that it frees me from the cares of the world, so that I can immerse my mind in holy contemplation.”

“You bet,” said Sombrisio. Either the ring had been dozing for most of the morning, or she’d waited like a true artist for the right opening. “Cares like the string of bad debts you’ve left behind you, starting when you did a midnight flit from the seminary in Quiberon.”

The hermit turned his head with an expression whose horror melted into rage before settling on injured innocence. “Silence, demon, in the name of the Twelve Beneficent Aspects of God!” he said in a piping attempt at thunder.

“Not to mention,” Sombrisio continued with lip-smacking enthusiasm, “that your wife’s new boyfriend said he’d pull your face off if he ever saw it again in Caltus. Those the cares you had in mind?”

“I won’t dignify that with a response,” the hermit muttered. Rather, he mouthed the comment. He’d already demonstrated a capacity for knowing when to cut his losses.

The party topped a rise. What Jancy had thought was the keening of the wind resolved itself into desperate, fluting screams coming from just off the trail.

“Unhand her, you brute!” Jancy shouted as she lifted her ax from its belt loops. She leaped into the brush without waiting to free her shield from the slip knot holding it to her left hip. It was going to be embarrassing if the screams were from a rabbit; or worse, from a man rather than the woman she’d assumed.

It was a woman, all right, buried to the waist beneath a thorn tree. Her marble bosom was bare; her alabaster arms were raised to fend off unseen horror.

Jancy grasped the woman’s right hand and realized her mistake. The arms, like the bosom, were marble. The screams came from the open throat of a statue.

Calla Mallanik eeled into the small clearing. Behind him galumphed the retainers, bellowing their war cry: “Death and glory!”

The screams stopped abruptly. The retainers looked in disappointment at the dismal but harmless surroundings.

Jancy straightened. “What in blazes?” she said as the hermit joined them with a smirk on his visage. “She stopped screaming.”

“Union rules,” the hermit explained. “She gets five minutes off in every two-hour period.”