Роберт Асприн - Forever After

“Well, yes, but the quest will be guided by—”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap again,” Jancy snapped. “I don’t care if the route’s written on a half-charred palimpsest found in a ruined palace, stamped on a torque of unknown metal taken from the tomb of a forgotten king, or drawn in blazing letters on stone by the finger of an unseen spirit. The quest is all that matters.”

‘Tradition matters, Mistress Gaine,“ Calla Mallanik said huffily. Elves, because of their long lifespans (except for elves who took up the profession of retainer to puissant heroes, of course), were great respecters of tradition.

“It’s traditional that heroes go on quests,” Jancy said stubbornly. ‘They either triumph or they leave their bones to whiten in dire warning to those who come later. All the rest is just window dressing.“

“Feckless Teuton,” Calla muttered with a sigh. It obviously wasn’t a conversation that was going anywhere useful, so he dropped the subject. The pair sat for a time in silence punctuated by the snores of the hermit nearby.

The retainers on the other side of the tree bole had stopped singing. They now picked at cans of sea rations with an understandable lack of enthusiasm.

“I’m really disappointed in Porthos,” said a grizzled veteran. He was the unofficial leader of the human contingent, now reduced to himself and a kid who said he was from Brooklyn.

“Say, I thought he did a great job,” said the senior elven retainer. “In human terms, of course. Did you see the way he spread his legs so that he stayed upright with the halberd as a brace when his body went rigid in death?”

“Sure,” said the grizzled veteran, “that’s fine. But he used ‘A far, far better thing I do’ out of context.”

“An act is its own context!” said the leading elf. “You can’t go importing context from outside the environment of the deed.”

“And besides,” said the kid from Brooklyn, “knowing Porthos, it probably was a better thing. I’m sorry now he’s gone that I called him a hanging plant, though.”

“ That ,” said the veteran, waggling his finger in the kid’s face, “is a clear example of the Autobiographical Fallacy! And—”

He returned his attention to the elf.

“—the environment of a deed is the entire universe. Who among us can claim to have separated himself from the world?”

“Well, in absolute terms, I agree,” said the retainer who had been silent until now. “But in terms of elven realities…”

The kid from Brooklyn got out his harmonica. He began to play “Lorena” in soft accompaniment to the groans of the burning tree.

Jancy interlaced her fingers, careful not to cover Som-brisio, and said to her hands, “You know what really frosts me? It’s the injustice of it all.”

“Umm?” said Calla Mallanik. He’d learned long since that if you ignored Jancy Gaine, she’d go off and do something that would damned well get her noticed. A passive aggressive with a big ax was nothing to joke about.

“I saved Princess Rissa’s life and virtue, why, it must have been dozens of times,” Jancy continued bitterly. “And here I am, out in the Desolation of Thaumidor, eating sea rations.”

“Right,” said Sombrisio unexpectedly. “And just when did the Princess say to you, ‘Jancy, m’girl, I’m going to need a whole shitload of saving. I’m hiring you to do it in consideration of my hand in marriage when we’ve won through these terrible dangers.’ Hey?”

“Well, that’s not what happened, no,” Jancy said uncomfortably. “But I did —”

“And as far as saving went,” Sombrisio continued in a voice that would have roused dogs three miles away if there’d been any dogs in the Desolation, “I seem to recall there was about as much of that on the one side as the other. Not least because it was the Princess mostly who was wearing me .”

“Well, I grant that,” Jancy admitted. “But still, we were companions in peril, and here she’s sent me—”

She waved her hands.

“—here!”

“Actually,” Calla said, now that the ring had broken Jancy’s icy self-absorption, “the orders came from Prince Rango. And it seemed to me that it was more an understanding than, well, a formal order.”

“Right!” Sombrisio agreed; “You know, elf, sometimes I think you might have the brains of a rutabaga after all. You. Axgirl! You’re a hero, right?”

“You’re bloody well told I am,” Jancy said grimly. She glared at the ring in obvious contemplation of determining whether the meteoritic silver was really impervious to Castrator’s edge.

“So if Princess Rissa really was your friend,” Sombrisio said, “what’s she going to say? ‘My fianc£ has a dangerous quest that’ll bring eternal honor to some hero, but I told him I’d rather keep you around the palace and wrap you in angora fluff.’ Is that what she’s going to say, dumdum?”

“Ah,” said Jancy Gaine.

“Damned right, ‘Ah,’” the ring agreed. “Now, get some sleep, will you? I’m tired of looking at your ugly face.”

Squill must have finally reached Caltus, because he climbed down from the root ball and wrapped himself in his cloak on the other side of the fire. Two of the retainers took station at the edge of the firelight to guard the camp. The other pair began to sing “There’s a Long Long Trail A-Winding” quietly.

Neither the song, nor the ache of her bandaged arm and shoulder, kept Jancy awake. She fell into fatigued sleep like a stone wobbling down an ocean abyss.

“Hey, lover girl!” a voice squealed. “Wake up! Your dreams are disgusting me!”

“What?” said Jancy. “What—”

By the second syllable she was standing with Castrator cocked to swing. Two quick snaps had wrapped Jancy’s left arm in the cape in which she’d been sleeping. Only then was she sufficiently alert to realize that Sombrisio had called her from dreams that were anything but loving.

“You and Rissa,” the ring said. “Phew!”

“That’s a lie!” Jancy shouted. “That’s—”

“Guards!” cried Calla Mallanik. Everyone was awake now, from fancy’s shout if not from Sombrisio’s shrill demand. The stalwart elf aimed his half-drawn bow toward the ground at his feet. “Where in the name of the All-Nurturing Mother-Force are you?”

Breezes parted the high overcast, allowing the moon to cast its baleful light over the landscape. The guards, an elf and a human, were a hundred yards from the fire log’s sunken glow. The human waved. Nothing else moved in the night.

“We thought we heard something!” the retainer called. “But there’s nothing here.”

The ground shivered, a movement no less disquieting for having become familiar while the party crossed the Desolation. The hobbled packhorses were restive.

“Run!” the hermit shrieked. “It’s the mountain!”

The landscape at the feet of the two retainers on guard hunched itself up like a giant inchworm.

The human turned, shouting, “Woops!” The rising cliff flowed over him, sparkling with piezoelectrical radiance. The many kilotons of rock reduced the retainer and his equipment to a molecular film.

“Save the supplies!” Calla Mallanik ordered. He knew as well as any of them that there was no time to do anything more than flee, but he also knew that depending on the bounty of the Desolation of Thaumidor was a recipe for lingering death.

Jancy shifted Castrator to her left hand. She held Som-brisio out toward the mountain in a clenched-fist salute and cried, “Thou art petrified!”

The spell had no effect on the mountain.

“Death and—” the elf on guard cried as he took two clean-limbed strides back toward the camp. A rock almost exactly the size of the retainer’s head fell from the top of the advancing cliff. It precisely intersected the course of the running elf.