Роберт Асприн - Forever After

A shimmering image caught Janc/s eye again. She deliberately got up and walked to the other side of the fire. She seated herself with her back to the flames, looking out into the night.

Something sparkled in the distant darkness. She couldn’t tell whether it was on the horizon or closer, since the moon and stars had vanished behind a cloudbank as black as the ground beneath.

The soil trembled, though of course it usually did here.

“Now, I don’t expect aspic-preserved duck a Porange in the field,” Calla Mallanik said to the round of pound cake. It was probably as interested in his comments as the rest of the party was. “Not from humans, at any rate. But I don’t see any reason chicken Marengo couldn’t be supplied. Chicken Marengo was developed as a field collation, for pity’s sake!”

Jancy saw the sparkles again. As a matter of fact, when she squinted she realized that the slowly moving effect dimmed and brightened, but never completely vanished.

“Hermit!” Jancy called.

“I think he dossed down inside,” one of the retainers offered.

“Well, bring him out here,” Jancy said.

“Your boy did pretty well,” a human retainer said to the elf beside him.

“Melaril?” the elf said. ‘Teah, that was a nice job, wasn’t it, especially for a kid who’d just turned seven hundred last Thursday.“

“Mind you,” said another elf, “for a real disintegrating arc, there was Count Diamondbringer the Undaunted, when love of the nymph Arachneida caused him to hurl himself into the vent of the volcano Earthsfire.”

“Well, I don’t know,” argued a human. “Diamondbringer turned bright yellow from the sulphur. Well, the bits of him did, anyway. I always thought that detracted from the majesty of the occasion.”

“Not at all!” an elf insisted. “Why, that just added to the uniqueness. How many yellow disintegrating arcs can you name? Name one other!”

“Well, there was Charles the Cowardly,” a human offered with a snigger. “When he sneaked out the sally port of Castle Dangerous without noticing that the besiegers had already set a lighted petard against it.”

A retainer dropped the mother shrub on the fire. Sparks and flame exploded from the tinder-dry wood. Everybody nearby had to jump away. Jancy slapped a smoldering spot on her doublet with her bare hand and cursed.

“Ah,” said Sombrisio, “how I’m looking forward to the intellectual conversations I’ll soon be having with dung beetles and petrified trees in Anthurus.”

Jancy turned and bellowed, “ Her —”

The hermit was settling into a squat beside her. His face had been about three inches away when Jancy twisted to bellow toward the church where she thought he was still sleeping. He yelped and fell over.

Retainers paused in their conversations. Calla Mallanik raised an eyebrow from across the fire.

“Sorry,” Jancy muttered as she helped the hermit to sit up. Sombrisio tittered like a psychotic bat. The male members of the flame tableau Jancy glimpsed this time were dressed as sanitation workers, to the extent that they were dressed at all.

“Yes, well,” the hermit said. “What is it, Mistress Gaine?”

He seemed humble rather than his usual madder-than-hops manner. Handled with normal decency, the fellow was unbearable. He had to be treated like dirt to behave himself. Well, Jancy was in a mood to make him behave.

“That,” she said, pointing to the faint glimmer in the night. “What’s that?”

When Jancy concentrated, she thought she heard a groan from the same general direction of the darkness; though that could have been wind, her imagination, or the muttering of a queue of commuters waiting for a streetcar on the Thaumidor line. She didn’t know what was out there.

“Oh,” said the hermit. ‘That’s just the mountain. Don’t worry about that.“

“A lot you know,” Sombrisio chirped.

Jancy leaned forward. “What mountain?” she said, loud enough to fluff the scraggly beard. “A mountain like the one we’re on?”

“Or a vale,” the hermit said, hobbling his head like a chicken drinking. He wasn’t being obstructive, just speaking precisely as a result of his“ healthy fear. ”Ah, no, that’s a real mountain.“

He frowned. “Or it was. It’s been wandering around the Desolation for centuries, looking for some guy named Mohammet, and it’s pretty well worn itself down to a nubbin by now.”

Jancy looked off to the east again. Probably the east. “Who in blazes—”

She shouldn’t have said “blazes,” because it turned her mind to the fire.

“—is Mohammet?”

The hermit shrugged. “I’ve no idea,” he said. “Mountains don’t have any brains at all, of course. I suspect this one got into entirely the wrong space-time and has been cruising around here since.”

“The Desolation of Thaumidor attracts all sorts of folk who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground,” Sombrisio said. She added flatulent emphasis.

“All right, but what’s the… the glow, the light?” Jancy asked. She was emotionally convinced that the glimmer was weaving itself closer as she watched. Intellectually she knew that the light’s faint waxing and waning made realistic distance calculations impossible.

“Well,” said the hermit, “it’s a mountain, so it’s made of rock. When you stress rock, the phlogiston entrapped in the crystal matrix is first driven out, then reabsorbed. When the phlogiston content of the surrounding atmosphere increases, it causes the ether to glow.”

“Ah,” Jancy said, pretending that the explanation made sense to her. She had no more acquaintance with phlogiston than she did with honest politicians.

“He got through third-year alchemy before he scooted out of Quiberon ahead of the bailiffs,” Sombrisio said.

“It just roves back and forth across the Desolation,” the hermit said, pretending he hadn’t heard the ring. “The mountain does. Quite harmless. Unless, of course, you don’t get out of its way.”

Now that Jancy had been told what was happening, it sounded like a mass of rock grinding its way slowly over… well, grinding over anything that happened to be in its way.

“Is that all, mistress?” the hermit asked humbly.

“Right,” said Jancy. “Get some sleep.”

If she listened hard, the growl of rock had a plaintive undertone that could have been the name Mohammet….

To the (putative) east, the ridge was dry and clothed with no vegetation save glass-spiked, poisonous cacti. On the other side of the ridge was a swamp.

‘Traditionalists claim a buried aquifer follows folded layers of the underlying rock strata,“ the hermit said. ”My researchers, however, indicate that the Desolation is sweating.“

Water black as a banker’s heart gurgled at the base of tussocks. The reeds were gray with death, and the creatures which flitted among them were feathered skeletons instead of living birds.

“It was a place like this where I saved Princess Rissa from the Dragonspawn of Loathly Fen,” Jancy said, reminiscing aloud.

“ You saved?” said Sombrisio. “Oh, right, I suppose it was you hanging on the Princess’s finger, turning dragonspawn into bullfrogs so fast your head spun for the next three days!”

“I don’t believe there are any dragonspawn here,” the hermit said, peering over the swamp with a look of concern. “There’s been some talk of a tribe of toadmen, but I don’t believe the contract details have been worked out.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” said one of the retainers. “Mistress, that is. What sort of retainers did you have with you there? In the Loathly Fen, that is?”

“Ah,” said Jancy. “We’d run into a bit of a problem earlier, you see. With the Killer Vines of Siloam.”, ‘The truth is,“ Calla Mallanik admitted, ”we’d expended all our retainers before we reached the Loathly Swamp.“