Роберт Асприн - Forever After

The figure, her figure, wore Sombrisio on its right hand, so it must be Calla who stood there.

The illusion trembled and vanished like a picture projected on smoke. Calla Mallanik shook himself. “Let’s get out of this damned place,” he said.

The hermit moved like an automaton until the party reached daylight again at the head of the valley, and he gave only monosyllabic directions for the remainder of the afternoon until they camped.

Jancy awakened. Every muscle hurt. Where the flesh had been severed by steel or the hyenas’ teeth, it hurt more; but that was a matter of degree rather than type.

“Sif!” she muttered. Two figures were still sitting up, across the coals of the campfire. “How late is it, Calla? You should’ve gotten me up for my watch before now.”

The constellations above the Desolation of Thaumidor weren’t the familiar ones. Normally Jancy didn’t see shapes in the stars, but she did see things here. Unfortunately.

“You needed the sleep,” Calla Mallanik said. “You’ve been one of the walking dead all day. Except when it counted.”

“Sif’s hair ,” Jancy said; but as she moved, her muscles warmed and the pain sank to what normal people would consider bearable levels. She squinted across the fire. “Hermit, is that you?‘ she asked.

“Yes, Mistress Gaine,” the hermit said.

“Let’s throw another log on,” Jancy said. She thought about the possible implications and added, “Ah, there’s no… The fire doesn’t make pictures here, does it?” Calla shrugged. “Not that I’ve seen,” he said. Instead of adding wood, he prodded the end of a thick branch from the edge into the heart of the coals. “Not a lot of heat, either, but that may be me.”

“I never asked you what you did to drive off those hyenas,” Jancy said. “I thought, I thought we were gone geese.”

“What you thought,” said Sombrisio, who was back on her finger, “was that you’d screwed up even at heroic endeavor. When you already knew you were no good at any other damn thing.”

Jancy looked down at the ring. “If you want to know the real truth,” she said, “I was thinking about which hyena to stick next. After things slowed down, I thought I’d blown it, yeah.”

“It was what the hermit said,” Calla explained. He nodded toward the man beside him, but the hermit was sunk in an open-eyed daze. Maybe he was the one seeing things in the wan firelight this time.

“That the minions of IRiS had once been men,” the elf resumed. “I find it odd, but most human evil isn’t done by evil humans.”

“Huh?” said Jancy. It could be that she’d been whacked on the head so hard that everything she heard sounded like double-talk. And again, it could be that Calla’d been whacked on the head.

“No, I mean that,” the elf said. “Most humans slip into evil deeds with the best intentions in the world. They slide down the road to destruction, thinking what they’re doing is necessary or even good. If they could really see what they were doing, why, they’d stop.”

“They wouldn’t stop,” said Sombrisio. “They’d just find some other excuse. Humans are even more despicable than elves, elf.”

“And the ones who are already lost irretrievably…” Calla continued. They’d all learned by now that the best way to deal with the ring’s gibes was to ignore them. “If you show them what they’ve become, they, well, they can’t stand it. They’d run away. As the minions of IRiS ran away.”

“I still don’t get it,” Jancy said. Not that that was news. Don’t worry, Jancy, we’ve got it all under control. Go sharpen your ax, why don’t you ? How often had she heard that or a close equivalent of that? “You showed a pack of hyenas that they were hyenas?”

“No,” said the elf with pardonable pride. “I showed them that they had once been men. I turned the power of Sombrisio on myself. I projected to everyone watching the image of the watcher before the fatal decisions that led to where they were now.”

The hermit looked at Calla Mallanik with dismal, haunted eyes. “It seems to me,” the hermit said, the first words he’d volunteered since the battle at the fane of IRiS, “that’s using the ring on many at once. While I understood its powers were limited to one person at a time.”

“So I stretched a point, buster,” Sombrisio said. “Sue mel If you can find a jurisdiction this side of the Outer Sea where there aren’t bad debt warrants still out for you, I mean.”

“I really meant to make the money good,” the hermit said. He didn’t appear to be talking to anyone present, except perhaps to his younger self in judgment. “Every time. Every single time.”

“You didn’t look at me until after the effect had worn off, I suppose, Jancy?” Calla Mallanik said with studied nonchalance.

“Huh?” Jancy repeated. “No, I glanced back when the hyenas started running. I saw myself looking like I did when I was a kid and wondered what in Sif s name was going on. I still don’t see what it has to do with the price of fox fur.”

Calla looked at her sharply. “You didn’t feel regret,” he said, “for the choices you made, for the path you didn’t follow?”

She shrugged. Damn, she needed to remember not to do that until the cut had knitted together better. “What’s to regret?” she said. “I made choices, everybody makes choices. People who choose to serve an evil goddess — Sif, everybody knows IRiS is evil. People who choose to serve evil, for whatever reasons, are evil. It’s just that simple.”

Calla Mallanik shook his head in wonderment. “Ah, what an elf was lost in you, Mistress Gaine,” he said.

“Oh, you bet,” said Sombrisio. “And she’d have been a right triumph when her creche cycle was taught aesthetic appreciation, wouldn’t she?”

“It’s not far to Anthurus now,” the hermit said. He was still speaking to himself, or at any rate to a portion of himself! “I’ll guide them the rest of the way.”

Either the fire or Sombrisio interjected a BLAT/hissing sound.

“I really meant to repay the money,” the hermit added in a whisper.

The stretch of waste on which the hermit halted was unusual only in that it was so completely barren. A few gangling plants were scattered on the slope. They bent down their stems and buried their seed heads in the dirt when they saw members of Jancy’s party glancing in their direction. Larger examples of the noisome vegetation which ranged the Desolation were conspicuous by their absence.

Calla Mallanik glanced back in the direction by which they’d come. There was a plume of dust on the horizon. “The mountain’s after us again,” he said glumly.

Jancy shrugged. “It doesn’t move very fast,” she said. “How much farther is it to Anthurus, hermit?”

“We’ve arrived,” the hermit said. He pointed to the ground. “It’s right here.”

“Hel take you if we’re here!” Jancy snarled. “I’ve been to Anthurus, remember? That’s where I found the damned ring!”

“Where Princess Rissa found my puissant self,” Sombrisio said in an arch tone. “And of course Hel, or at least some civilized equivalent of your barbaric death goddess, will take the hermit. Happens to all humans.”

“I’m sure you did,” the hermit Said. “But unfortunately, it seems that the Desolation has covered the city again during the interim. Anthurus is down here, somewhere, under this sand dune.”

He scuffed the soil. “Dirt dune, that is.”

“And not nearly soon enough, in most cases,” Sombrisio muttered as a coda to her previous comment.

The hermit had lost all the cranky bluster with which he’d joined the quest. It wasn’t because he was afraid of what Jancy might — might very well — do to him, either. He faced her anger with what could only be described as an attitude of quiet resignation.