Роберт Асприн - Forever After

The mummy who’d cut off the retainer’s feet hunched his shoulders and leaned into another whistling stroke with his guisarme. He really put his back into it this time. The broad blade, decorated with a scene of professors eating the brains of a colleague who had failed to use inclusive language, whacked the elf s legs off at the knees.

“I have not yet begun to fight!” cried the retainer, stumping another short stride onward. His kris eviscerated a mummified soldier. The mummy bent over to view the damage, thus bringing his neck within range of a following slice of the kris.

The guisarme made another enormous sweep, slinging ropes of golden droplets off its blade’s hooked tip. Jancy had too much on her own plate to consider the outcome, but she’d have bet that the retainer would manage to remove at least one more mummy while teetering on. his pelvis.

For her own part, Jancy howled as she spun on the ball of her right foot, whirling Castrator in a figure eight. On the high side of the arc the ax beheaded a pair of Voroshek’s soldiers. When the blade dipped low, it clipped one mummy off at the knees and the next at the ankles.

The latter two were still dangerous to a degree. When the mummies hit the ground, Jancy crushed their skulls to powder with the heels of her hobnailed boots.

A guisarme clanged from her helmet and ripped a gouge down her back. Jancy’s vision blurred for a moment. She spun and sliced horizontally through the mummy’s brittle skull at eye-socket level.

“I got it!” a human retainer shouted. Jancy looked over her shoulder. The retainer leaped sideways, waving his arms wildly to distract the mummy who was thrusting the spike-topped blade of his halberd toward Jancy’s back. “I got—”

Sklurk!

The retainer wore a cuirass of boiled leather. The spike, which was square in cross-section and so cut with four ninety-degree edges, stuck out a hand’s breadth through the backplate.

“A far, far better thing I do—” said the retainer.

Jancy beheaded the mummy who was trying to withdraw the halberd from the fellow’s chest.

“—than I have ever done before.”

Calla and Sombrisio struck a mummified soldier dead. It collapsed to rags, rusty armor, and a whiff of cedar oils. That one was the last of those in a blocking position, though the entire ridgeline behind the party of humans now crawled with Voroshek’s soldiery. Mammoths were striding toward the ridge as well. Their palanquins had fallen when the rotted leather of their cinches broke.

“Come on, come on,” Janey muttered. The rest of her party was already jogging forward at a pace mummified muscles couldn’t match. Calla Mallanik offered Jancy his arm, knowing that the aftermath of berserk rage was a sleep near death — and that sleep now would be death for fair.

They stumbled along the hard-packed surface of the ridgeline. Everything but what was directly ahead vanished into a gray blur of fatigue. Jancy’s world view was the ass of a roan packhorse whose occasional tail lift better not mean the beast was about to take a dump.

“Now a lot of people…” keened Sombrisio in a voice that grated like a silver chalk-sharpener, “… when their lives had been saved by a magic ring would be saying, ‘Gee, how could we reward this ring?’ Others, of course, would figure, what the hell, let’s dump our benefactor in the deepest lost city we can find…”

The fallen tree had been buried in loess when the climate changed, but it wasn’t petrified. In fact, judging from the way the tree groaned as the party’s fire burned into the innards of the bole, the tree wasn’t even really dead.

Well, it would be by morning, except maybe for the tips of some limbs.

Squill was perched on the root ball now, swaying slightly as rootlets twisted around him in agony. Dust devils, perhaps the same swarm that lighted on Voroshek’s army, had cleared the tree in the recent past. That was good luck for the questing humans. There’s no wind but blows ill for somebody, however: the tree wasn’t in the least happy about the turn of events.

“Knowed Wyvern Two to Knowed Wyvern Base,” the artio repeated. “Come in, over.” Only wailing atmospherics answered him.

“Damn the man!” Jancy snarled under her breath. “This isn’t a place I want to listen to souls howling in the darkness!”

“Squill says he has to call at night,” Calla Mallanik said mildly, “or they wouldn’t hear him in Caltus. His spells don’t propagate properly when the sun shines. The communications demons are embarrassed to make love in daylight.”

“Who in Hel’s house cares if his spells propagate?” Jancy said. “It’d be all right with me if he stuffed that twelve-foot wand of his straight up his specialized ass!”

“Don’t bury me there…” sang the four surviving retainers in good barbershop harmony, “… on the lone prairie…”

“Sif, I wonder if we’re going to run out of retainers?” Jancy muttered. Her mind was bouncing from generalized gloom to specific problems that were beyond her practical control.

“Where the coyotes howl…” sang the retainers as lost souls keened from the comspec’s receiver. “… so-o mournfully.”

“Oh, I think we’ll be all right,” soothed Calla.

“Do you suppose there’s an inn nearby where we could fill up if we need to?” Jancy said. “Hermit! Is there an inn around here with retainers? I don’t care if they’re off-brand.”

“Well, not really very close,” the hermit admitted doubtfully. “ Really not very close, to tell the truth.”

Jancy swore. She wrung her hands together as a way of working off some of her bleak anger without hurting anybody.

Almost anybody.

“Hey!” said‘ Sombrisio.“ ”This is the way you treat a ring that’s saved your miserable life, is it?“

“Sorry,” said Jancy, jerking her hands apart.

“You can’t hurt her by squeezing,” Calla Mallanik pointed out reasonably. “You couldn’t hurt her by pounding her all day on an anvil.”

“Oh, nice!” said the ring. “Sombrisio doesn’t have any feelings, is that it? Let’s grind our dirty hands over her. Or better yet, we can hit her with a hammer!”

“I said I’m sorry!” Jancy said.

“… come in, Knowed Wyvern Base, o—”

“Squill!” Jancy roared. “Will you shut the hell up, or do you want me to feed that knapsack to you, crystals and all?”

“Jancy, he’s got to report back,” Calla said. “Otherwise there’ll be no record for future generations.”

“Future generations can go bugger themselves,” Jancy said, but she spoke in a low voice that indicated she was embarrassed at her outburst.

“Go ahead, Squill,” Calla called. “But try to wrap the business up quickly, won’t you?”

“Knowed Wyvern Two to Knowed Wyvern Base,” the artio said. He spoke this time in a voice of quiet desperation. Squill’s repeated call was less irritating than the fingernail squealing of the atmospherics, but he was at least doing what he could.

‘There has to be a record,“ Calla said. He patted the back of Jancy’s scarred, powerful hand. ”In case in later days they have to retrace our path in order to retrieve Sombrisio against a terrible new danger.“

“Or you could just keep Sombrisio in a comfortable jewelry box in Caltus,” the ring said bitterly. “But no, that’d be too simple, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t see why,” Jancy said. “I mean, a quest is a quest. If unimaginable evil breaks forth in the world again, then some hero will struggle through perils, temptations, and the foul sleights of evil wizards. That’s all there is to it.”

It was her grim state of mind speaking, though she hadn’t said anything that she hadn’t thought oftentimes before.