Роберт Асприн - Forever After

“Well…” Jancy said. She stared at Castrator as if wondering how the ax had come to be in her hand.

“She doesn’t need to be rescued, then?” said Calla Mallanik.

“Rescued from what, dummy?” Sombrisio said. “It’s a statue. Rescued from being a chunk of rock lying in the ground? Boy, I’ve heard elves were dumb, but I’m beginning to think communing with the earthworms in Anthurus is going to be an improvement over you guys.”

Jancy rehung Castrator as furtively as you can hang an ax with a hooked, sixteen-inch cutting edge. She cleared her throat. “Best be getting on,” she said. “I want to march at least another couple of miles before we camp for the night.”

“And if any of you lot is wondering just how stupid your leader is,” Sombrisio continued in a voice that carried like brakes squealing, “ she’s wondering if the Princess Rissa might just be in love with her after all.”

“I am not!” Jancy shouted. “Why, the Princess wouldn’t even think of such a thing!”

“You got that one right, boss-lady,” the ring agreed gleefully. “Rissa doesn’t even know that sort of thing happens. Boy, it’d really turn her stomach if she knew her sturdy defender here dreamed about—”

That was as far as Sombrisio got before Jancy wadded a handful of friable soil around the ring and spat on it. She kneaded the wad into a blanket of clay. The casing smothered Sombrisio’s complaints to a sound as faint as the buzz of a fly’s wings on the other side of a closed window.

Jancy stuck the ball of clay onto the spike of her shield boss, where it would dry rock hard in the sunlight. Dusting her palms against one another, she glowered at Calla Mallanik and said, “Any comment you want to make?”

“Do I look like I want to say anything?” the elf protested. “No, not me. Not a word.”

“Good,” Jancy said. She tramped back out to the trail, deliberately lacking the shrubbery to bits. A bush with thorns and dirty pink flowers squeaked as it trotted out of the way, its taproot twitching behind it.

“What I figure,” Calla continued, “is that anything adult humans want to do within the privacy of their own bedrooms is going to be unspeakably disgusting. So there’s no point in drawing distinctions between one revolting act and another.”

The statue was screaming again. It struck Jancy as a pretty reasonable way to pass the time around here.

“If we’re headed toward the city of Anthurus,” said Calla Mallanik in a tone so coolly reasonable that it was twice as threatening as a shout, “then why is the sun setting to our left, hermit?”

“Look, do you want to take over the guiding?” the hermit said. “I didn’t ask to come with you, you know! Fine, I’ll just go back to—”

Jancy grabbed a handful of the hermit’s long, scraggly hair and lifted. She didn’t have quite the strength in her shoulder muscles to raise the hermit completely off the ground, but the pain brought him instantly up on his tiptoes.

“I think,” Jancy said, “that we’d all be more comfortable if you just answered the question. Especially you’d be more comfortable.”

She let him go. The hermit’s mouth twisted, showing that he was swallowing a spate of shrill complaints; but he did swallow them.

“Directions aren’t fixed in the usual fashion in the Desolation of Thaumidor,” he explained in a chastened tone as he massaged his scalp with both bony hands. “That’s why it’s so important to employ a licensed practitioner, a god-guided soul whose wisdom penetrates demonic illusion.”

Sombrisio responded with a high-pitched whine. The ball of dried clay smothered the ring’s comment to unintelhgibility.

“It’s about time we think about camping,” Jancy said. The sun, which had remained motionless for what seemed like hours, now settled as though somebody was pulling a shade down over the sky.

“Yes,” said the hermit, pointing to a hill to the right of the road. At the top of the moderate slope was a small ruined building with a spire. “We’ll shelter there, in the Little Brown Church in the Vale. It will protect us from the spirits which meep and gibber in the darkness.”

“The little brown church in the what ?” Calla said.

“I don’t name them!” the hermit snapped. “If it comes to that, the boards are weathered pretty much gray by now, too.”

Jancy didn’t speak; but she looked at the hermit, and she hadn’t looked warmly at any damn thing since she’d got this assignment. In a more cautious voice the hermit added, “I suppose it was in a vale, once. I told you, things change around here.”

“I don’t remember the sun going wonky the other time we were here,” Jancy said to Calla Mallanik.

The elf shrugged. “What I do remember about that trip,” he said, “is we were being chased by thirty thousand Ghoul Myrmidons. Put them behind us again, and I don’t expect I’d notice where the sun was this time either.”

He looked over his shoulder. A huge, misshapen shadow fell across the party from behind The creature casting the shadow was invisible; but then, so was the light source that the creature’s body blocked.

“Run for the church!” the hermit screamed. Everybody, including the terrified packhorses, was already doing that.

Jancy charged up the slope, the fatigue of a few moments before forgotten. Castrator swung on its loops. Brandishing an ax against the oncoming invisible giant was obviously a waste of time that could be better spent in flight.

The ring, though…

Jancy plucked the wad off the shield boss and tried to crush die clay between her palms. It was hard as a rock. Hard as her own damned head for hiding the magical weapon while they were in the Desolation of Thaumidor.

The party had been marching in a straggling line. Jancy, Calla and the hermit led, with Squill a few steps back with his apparatus. The packhorses broke free of the retainers leading them and streamed forward across a broad front. Their panniers strewed bags of oats, skins of water, and the ugly green cans of sea rations that rolled in broad arcs when they hit the ground.

One of the retainers kept hold of the lead strap for some time. His boots raised a spectacular plume from the light soil, but there weren’t enough rocks or thorns — for a wonder — on the hillside to drag him to death properly. When the strap broke, the retainer bounced a couple times, then rose and limped toward the hallowed ground on his own.

Jancy slammed the ball of clay against the rim of her buckler. The metal bonged. Bits flaked from the clay, but the mass didn’t break apart as she’d hoped. She was at least halfway to what they hoped was safety, but the curve of the slope now hid all but the tip of the church’s spire.

Calla Mallanik’s long legs had carried him some way ahead of his leader. The hermit was showing a remarkable turn of speed for somebody so old and apparently infirm, staying alongside Jancy even though he took four steps to her three.

It was hard to tell how tall the giant stood, since the question depended on the position of the equally unseen light source casting his shadow. At least the giant’s sex wasn’t in doubt, unless that was a second spike-headed club swinging between his bandy legs.

Jancy had a moment to wonder what the giant’s girlfriends must look like the next morning. The chill the thought shot down her spine should have been pleasant relief from the sweaty overload of her uphill run, but it wasn’t.

Calla Mallanik flung himself through the sagging doorway of the Little Brown Church at One Time in a Vale. The packhorses were already inside, frothing from their unexpected run. Jancy lost a half step to the hermit when she shifted her weight to rap the ball containing Som-brisio on Castrator’s upper tip. The clay finally disintegrated.