Роберт Асприн - Forever After

Jancy shrugged. That motion reminded her of the cut across her shoulder. The pain disappeared behind a curtain of adrenaline when danger threatened, but it sure wasn’t gone for good.

“Makes sense to me,” Calla said. “What do you think, hermit?”

The hermit cleared his throat. ‘That’s an extremely wise ring you have there,“ he said carefully. ”I certainly wouldn’t argue with any assessment it made of a situation. No, sir, not me.“

The ring farted at surprising length.

Jancy Gaine raised her right fist and rubbed the corner of her mouth with her thumb knuckle. “Hey, Sombrisio?” she whispered.

“Yeah, numskull?” the ring replied.

“Thanks for waking us up last night,” said Jancy.

“Huh!” Sombrisio said. “I told you — I was listening to you talk in your sleep and it turned my stomach.”

‘Thanks anyway,“ said Jancy as she lowered her hand to the head of Castrator.

She no longer worried about how long it would take them to find Anthurus. After all, the quest was the thing.

Shadows lengthened, abruptly and much sooner than sunset should have been threatening. The sudden dimness drew Jancy’s mind from thoughts that were considerably darker yet.

The hermit was a few steps in the lead of the rest of the party. He stopped with his palms forward, as though he’d hit an invisible wall.

Jancy tugged Sombrisio from her finger. She held the massive silver ring out toward Calla Mallanik.

“My bow will—” the elf protested. He’d already nocked an arrow.

“ Take the ring ,” Jancy said in a voice more terrifying than words alone could have been.

The party had entered a shallow valley. From above, the Desolation of Thaumidor would have looked as flat as a marine recruit’s bunk. Swales and rises that were minute in geomorphic terms were nonetheless enough to limit the vision of humans at ground level to a few score yards.

That didn’t explain the darkness. The packhorses, led in two long trains by the surviving retainers, whickered nervously. Though the beasts were only ten or a dozen yards behind the elf and humans at the head of the party, they were already lost in gloom.

“I may have made the wrong turning,” said the hermit in a voice of controlled terror. “When the mountain… You know. I think we’d better—”

“All right,” Jancy ordered in a voice trembling with hormones. “Turn the pack train. I’ll wait.”

Light gleamed on the shadowed hillside, faint but increasing slowly to illuminate the ruined fane from which it sprang. Pillars, most of them broken, were set in a circle. At their bases lay a rubble of blocks and tiles, remnants of the architraves and a domed roof.

The light was all the colors of the rainbow. It should have been beautiful. Instead it reminded Jancy of the shimmer of a snake’s cast skin.

The hermit backed slowly around Jancy. “I’m very sorry to have brought us this way,” he whispered. “We seem to have found the temple of IRiS, the rainbow goddess of evil and misfortune.”

Squill’s eyes rolled in fear. He formed his handset and began speaking desperately into it. Jancy doubted the artio would be able to punch a spell out of a valley with the magical resonance of this one, but at present there was almost no question on Middle Earth that she cared less about.

She held Castrator and her spiked shield out at angles before her, trying to cover as broad an area as possible. Jancy Gaine wasn’t a team player, had never been that. She was a straight-ahead berserk, keep slashing so long as. there’s anybody else still on his feet.

That was fine when she was alone, but Jancy wasn’t alone now and the people with her couldn’t take care of themselves the way the old gang did. Spotty Gulick, whose idea of a good time on stand-down was to get into drunken brawls; Dominik-Blaid, who saw everything on a battlefield and then fixed the problems with his own saber; even Gar Quithnick, a creep but our creep. You never had to worry about anybody else stabbing you in the back if Gar was there.

But now…

Something moved in the darkness. At first she thought it was a dog, but it was too big for that. A bear, perhaps…

“The minions of IRiS were once human,” the hermit said. There was a singsong intonation to his voice. He spoke to keep Jrom dissolving in panic, not because he had any necessary information to impart. “But now—”

The necessary information was the degree of fear with which this place had struck the hermit when he recognized it.

The figure rose up on its hind legs. It stepped toward Jancy, giggling loudly. The light suffusing the fane brightened. There were more of the figures, many more of them, standing now and pacing forward.

They were spotted hyenas, but they walked like men. The slavering jaws through which they laughed at their victims had teeth that could crush bones too big for a lion to devour.

“Run!” the hermit cried.

The whole valley was now bright with the rainbow radiance of IRiS and her ruthless minions. There was no escape, to the rear or in any direction.

Scores of the hyenas shrieked their joy as they pulled down the kid from Brooklyn and the stalwart elf retainer beside him. Over the monsters’ laughter and the snap of crunching bones, their leaders cried, “Disallowed! Disallowed!” in nearly human voices.

Horses screamed in their final terror. The minions of IRiS wasted everything in their frenzies of slaughter.

“Princess!” Jancy called as she lunged at the leading hyena. She could focus the pack’s attention on her and save the others for perhaps a few seconds. “Princess! Princess!”

The hyenas came at her from all sides, but this Jancy Game understood. The bearded ax slashed down through a minion’s upper chest. Broken ribs, lengths of blood vessels, and much of the right lung spilled onto the soil as the monster’s sternum flopped in two pieces.

Not only hyena jaws could crush bones.

The spike in Jancy’s shield boss drove through a hyena’s thin nasal bones, into the brain case or near enough. Another minion hunched to tear the tendons from Jancy’s knee, met her hobnailed boot instead, and collapsed wailing as she broke its spine with a downward chop of her buckler’s rim.

There was a hyena behind her. Jancy killed it with a quick, unthinking stab of Castrator’s ball pommel, not even bothering to look. She thrust the ax forward again like an epe’e, putting the upper tip into a monster’s thick throat and through the neck vertebrae behind it.

Calla Mallanik shouted something. It couldn’t affect Jancy’s present situation, so her ears didn’t hear it. The part of her mind that processed language didn’t operate at times like these.

She was drenched in blood. Some of it was her own, from her right side. She hadn’t been conscious of teeth ripping along her ribs, but she’d split a hyena’s skull with Castrator’s edge in the same motion that smashed the pommel through the chest of the creature on her back.

She started forward. The minions were fleeing, all those that survived. They were running for their lairs, noisome holes dug into the ruins of the temple, and the rainbow light was fading.

“Sifs hair,” Jancy muttered. She turned. She almost fell because the adrenaline rush had left her as suddenly as it arrived. She had very little remaining from her normal reserves of strength.

A few horses had survived the hyenas’ single-minded bloodlust. They pitched and bucked in terror. Squill knelt over his pack with his handset, uninjured but bunded by fear. The hermit stood transfixed, staring at—

Jancy blinked. Staring at what looked like a much younger edition of Jancy Gaine: herself as a young girl, just before she made the decision to go on her first war party as a shield maiden instead of staying home to marry in the village at the edge of the ice fields.