Роберт Асприн - Forever After

Sif’s Hair! If the stuff was that tough when air dried, somebody ought to be mining the Desolation for the raw material of unbreakable dinnerware.

Jancy halted beside the church doorway. She tried to fit Sombrisio onto her middle finger. The finger hole was still packed with clay. Jancy reamed it desperately on Castrator’s point.

“Ooh, do that again!” Sombrisio cried. “So nice of you to provide me with a little recreation now that everything’s quiet.”

Retainers dived one by one through the doorway like pinballs falling out of play. Squill crouched by a sidewall; he’d formed his handset. Most of the chapel’s roof was missing, so the tip of artio’s wand wobbled between bare beams.

The packhorses at the front of the nave neighed congratulations to one another. A gelding snuffled the tattered altar cloth in vain hopes of a snack.

Calla stood at one of the Norman windows in a litter of stained glass and lead strips. He drew an arrow to its gold-glittering head and loosed it.

The elf-forged arrow sped like a jet of noonday sun, over the helmets of the struggling retainers and toward the distant horizon. The missile’s course was straight for as far as the eye could follow. Unaffected, the shadow continued to lurch up the slope toward the party.

“There’s nothing there!” shouted Calla Mallanik. “We’re running from nothing, because my arrow would have slain it unerringly if—”

The shadow club lengthened and shrank, as if the invisible reality casting it had been swung in a high arc. Arc and foreshortened shadow ended on the last of the retainers, a human. The ground dimpled into a cavity ten feet across. For the most part, the retainer remained on the bottom of the basin, but some of him spattered as far as the ruined church.

“Well, you know, maybe there’s something there after all,” Calla said, examining the point of another golden arrow with an expression of puzzled concern.

“Who needs Sombrisio?” the ring said as Jancy tried to work her finger through the hole again. “We’re such all-knowing heroes ourselves that we don’t need her help!”

The now hindermost retainer was an elf. The shadow bunched as the giant that cast it bent over. The retainer turned, swinging the leaf-shaped blade of his elven sword in a shimmering arc.

The edge, keen enough to cut a moonbeam, touched nothing. Only the elf s innate grace permitted him to pirouette instead of falling on his face the way a human would probably have done.

The elf suddenly rose a hundred feet in the air, dancing helplessly in the grip of something invisible.

“Well, I don’t know,” muttered Calla Mallanik. “I’m sure I was all right for azimuth, but maybe I wasn’t allowing enough elevation.”

His silver bow twanged. The arrow, blazing with right, justice and the elven way, shrieked through empty air on an apparent track to lunar orbit.

The eighth retainer wheeled and blew his way through the chapel’s doorway. The interior of the fane took on a pearly glow. Music as soothing as a bath in warm syrup whispered on the night air.

The elf hanging in the air spun a little higher, tossed by the invisible hand. The shadow shook itself in the two-dimensional projection of an unintelligible three-dimensional reality.

Invisible club met visible retainer in a loud whock ! that sent the elf in a screaming drive toward the sunset. Bits of equipment and, well, other things, dribbled along the route of passage the way a meteor fragments on hitting the atmosphere.

“Are you ready, ring?” Jancy demanded. She raised her right fist toward the air above the base of the shadow.

“Me?” Sombrisio said. “I’ve been ready all bloody day, haven’t I? It’s you who haven’t—”

“By the power of this ring!” Jancy shouted. ‘Thou art a rabbit!“

The invisible giant had paused just outside the glow of the ruined church, though Jancy for one wouldn’t have bet he was going to stay there. For a moment, the looming shadow froze. Then it turned, hunched, jumped back in the direction from which it had come.

Dirt exploded at the base of the slope where the creature touched down. He leaped again, then again. The line of dust geysers continued into the fallen night, each impact a good hundred yards from the previous one.

“Sif,” Jancy muttered.

“Not bad, if I do say so myself,” said Sombrisio. “And not before time, I might add.”

“Don’t expect an argument from me,” said Jancy.

They’d wait till morning to gather the supplies strewn up the hillslope, but there ought to be something in the horses’ loads. Jancy figured food right now to settle her stomach might be a good idea.

Brushwood gathered from the hillside blazed hot and cleanly on the bonfire in front of the ruined chapel. The lack of wind meant that the smoke, which smelled as if sulphur was being cooked on a bed of cat turds, wasn’t generally a problem to those sitting around the fire.

The surviving retainers were going to be pretty busy feeding the blaze. The hair-fine thorns on many of the plants around here burned like the coals themselves, but that wasn’t one of Jancy’s problems. Rank hath its privileges.

Jancy’s most pressing problem was that she very clearly saw figures in the flame. Including the figure of die Princess Rissa. Rissa wasn’t being tortured — quite the contrary; but the glimpses Jancy got when she forgot and looked into the fire were torture for her.

Jancy was sure the images were demonic sendings, not a real view of what was going on in the Princess’s suite in Caltus. She didn’t even consider asking anybody else what they saw in the flames. Sombrisio had already had a field day with jancy’s daydreams: Jancy wasn’t about to reopen the subject.

Calla Mallanik stared grimly at the contents of the can he’d just opened. “This is supposed to be pound cake,” he said. “I think I really could pound nails with it. If the Commissary Service is so determined to punish us, couldn’t they just have arranged for a plague of boils? Meals were always a happy occasion for me in the past.”

“I’m not going to say Athos let down the side…” a human retainer remarked morosely. He was carrying toward the fire a bush which thrashed feebly and called for its, mother. “But the truth is, I was hoping for a more inspired performance than he gave us.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said one of the elves dragging a matronly shrub which was, in fact, the mother of the other one. “I rather liked the splash. Sometimes the simplest effects are the most memorable.”

“Give Athos his due, Aramis,” said a human across the fire from Jancy. “The giant didn’t give him a lot to work with. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“Why not?” said an elf retainer in surprise. “It’s a pretty simple protein conversion. If it was me, I’d start with the collagen and…”

The conversation drifted off into technicalities. A retainer tossed the small bush on the fire. The crackle with which it flared up drew Jancy’s reflexive attention.

She looked down hurriedly. She was absolutely sure that the Princess Rissa wasn’t on such affectionate terms with an aardvark.

Squill was in the spire of the church. The ladder didn’t look safe or even possible, but the artio had finally managed to clamber up when he found he couldn’t reach Caltus from anywhere else on the hilltop.

He must have finally gotten through, because Jancy heard in intervals between the howls of atmospherics the words, “… figures two KIA but hostile forces beaten off.. ”

Maybe this church really was in a vale. It’d sure seemed like a hill when Jancy was trying to reach the church before the giant reached her .