Роберт Асприн - Forever After

The helmet of boars’ tusks and gold wire disintegrated, as did the retainer’s skull. The elf waltzed in widening circles like those of a child’s top slowing to the point it will soon fall over. In the uncertain light there was nothing unusual about the figure, though of course he’d stopped shouting when the rock brained him.

The packhorses neighed and kicked their bound forelegs high. The hobbles were of elven working, fashioned from children’s mercy, maidens’ constancy, and suchlike materials. The horses would never be able to break free of their mythical bonds. Even if they did, the off-loaded supplies would be lost beneath the mountain’s advance.

“I said, thou art petrified!” Jancy bellowed. Telling mummified soldiers they were dead had been a striking success. Telling a rock it was rock ought to be an equally natural win.

The cliff had stopped rising. Now it began to slump forward again at increasing velocity.

“You idiot!” Sombrisio said. “The mountain doesn’t have any more brains than you do, so how do you expect me to affect its beliefs? Blast the ground, yoyo!”

The ring’s directions didn’t make a lot of sense, but Jancy didn’t have a better idea. Waiting for the cliff to arrive was a terrible idea.

‘Thou art in pain!“ she said, aiming her fist toward the soil at the base of the glittering mountain. By now the rock was moving really fast with gravity adding its considerable increment to force of the spell which animated the mountain.

“ Eeeeeeek !” screamed the world, or at least as much of it as Jancy Gaine and her party were occupying at the moment. The ground drew back in agony, forming a lip of fine loess which scooted Jancy, her fellows, and the entire bouncing paraphernalia of their camp away from the mountain’s line of advance.

‘ The Desolation is a living entity ,“ the hermit had said, or something very like that, early on in the quest….

When the scarified soil drew back, it formed a huge hole. The mountain, plunging down at an enormous rate intended to carry it by inertia a thousand yards out across the moonlit wasteland, streamed into the chasm.

Crevices gaped and closed across the granite. The entire surface of the mountain glowed with expelled phlogiston.

The jiggling tail of the mountain followed the rest of the rock into the hole. There was a shuddering impact a very long way down. The Desolation of Thaumidor was a being of unsuspected depths.

Jancy got to her feet. Calla and the surviving pair of retainers had started to gather up the supplies. The mountain would probably tunnel its way to the surface again, but that wouldn’t be for a while.

“Now, that,” said Sombrisio in tones of exhausted satisfaction, “is the sort of spell magical implements will still be talking about well into the Fifth Age of the Middle World!”

Bushes tumbled across the landscape, dragging the tips of their branches in desperate but vain attempts to halt their progress. Occasionally one of the whirling weeds hit an unseen barrier and splattered to a stop, leaking its life juices into the dry soil.

There was no wind. Trees deformed by leprous scale stood leafless, waiting for dust to bury them. This was as doomed and barren a place as Jancy’d seen since, since the most recent time she’d opened her eyes in the Desolation of Thaumidor.

“Do you want to camp here?” Calla Mallanik suggested, obviously solicitous because of Jancy’s physical state.

She grimaced. She probably looked like walking death. She certainly felt like walking death; but right now the best way to avoid Death in his real skeletal majesty was to keep on walking until they reached Anthurus.

“No,” she said. “We need to keep moving as long as it’s daylight. Besides, the more distance we put between ourselves and that mountain, the better I’ll like it.”

“The mountain isn’t really hostile, you know,” the hermit said “We just happened to be in its path.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Sombrisio said. “You’d think you’d have learned something about the Desolation, as many years as you’ve spent here.”

“As big as the mountain is,” Calla said, “it doesn’t have to be hostile.”

“That’s right,” said the surviving elf retainer. “I remember Elavil of the Rock and his riding brontosaur. He claimed it was the best-tempered creature alive. Maybe it was, but one cold night it decided to curl up witn Elavil to stay warm. Some heroic death that was, hey?‘

The kid from Brooklyn put down the harmonica on which he’d been softly playing “In the Baggage Car Ahead.” His visage was sad.

“It’s too bad about the old man,” the kid said in a broken voice. “He was… he was the one we all looked up to for guidance. And then, squirt, he’s gone. What land of craftsmanship does that show, getting squirted like a tube of toothpaste?”

“Umm,” Calla said. “More like a tube of red paint, from what I could see. Of course, with the moonlight you’ve got to extrapolate.”

The elfin retainer put an arm around the kid’s shoulders and said, “Don’t take it so hard, kid. He didn’t have a chance. It’s not in our hands to choose whether we’ll be Tibbalts or just so many kems and gallowglasses.”

“What I was saying,” Sombrisio said, “not that any of you lot seem to be interested in something that your very lives depend on…”

The ring let her voice trail out in a painful whine.

Jancy looked down at her finger. “Ah, sorry, Sombrisio,” she said. “I was…”

“Walking around in a daze,” the ring said. “After all, why should today be different? What I was going to say, though, is that the mountain isn’t just wandering anymore. It’s following me.”

“Nonsense!” said the hermit.

“Oh?” said the ring. “Like it’s nonsense that the last thing you did before leaving Caltus was to rob the poor box of the Hospice of Sisters of Fallen Virtue?”

“Ah,” said the hermit. ‘That makes sense, I was saying.“

“ And ,” Sombrisio continued, never one to be turned when she scented psychic blood, “you only got three pewter buttons and a slug for your trouble.”

Jancy glanced back toward the retainers. “Hey, ldd?” she called.

“And when the slug crawled out of your purse that night, it wrote thief across the back of your robe in slime,” the ring concluded triumphantly.

The kid from Brooklyn looked up. “Mistress?” he said, palming his harmonica nervously.

“Seems to me that the Old Man took worse punishment than even Hormazd the Centurion,” Jancy said. “I mean, what’s seventy-eight separate wounds compared to having a whole mountain fall on you, huh?”

“Gee, mistress,” said the retainer. His eyes widened in dawning pleasure. “Do you really think so?”

“Anybody’d think so, kid,” Jancy assured him.

“Wow,” said the kid. To the elf retainer he went on, “Say, did you notice the way the Old Man threw his arms and legs wide as he fell forward? He was making sure that he’d be smashed absolutely flat. Now, that’s craftsmanship if I ever saw it!”

Calla Mallanik looked at Jancy. ‘That was a good thing to do,“ the elf said quietly.

“I can’t stand that damned song about the mother’s corpse up in the baggage car,” Jancy replied, also under her breath.

“Ready to learn why the mountain’s chasing me, noble hero?” Sombrisio demanded.

“Yeah,” said Calla. “We’d—”

‘’It’s because I’m the closest thing it’s ever found to an all-powerful prophet on his way to heaven by direct translation,“ Sombrisio said, deliberately interrupting the elf. ”Unless one of your lot think you qualify better?“