Роберт Асприн - Forever After

“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Calk demanded.

The elf looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the mountain. Sure, it didn’t move very fast, and it wasn’t even making a beeline toward the questing party. More like the line a bee really makes, jagged casts back and forth across the landscape, laboriously orienting itself.

But Calla wasn’t going to forget any time soon the sight of flat ground humping itself up into a cliff a thousand feet high.

“I’m sorry,” the hermit said. “I truly don’t know. Perhaps you could leave the ring here and the loess would bury it eventually?”

“Or not,” Sombrisio said. “Umm, you know, I could right fancy being plucked from the ground by a condor and dropped into the hands of some powerful and no doubt wicked wizard.”

“Hel’s bloody toenails,” Jancy muttered. She was in charge of the expedition, so she had to decide what to do. Thinking through intractable problems wasn’t the sort of thing she was best at, to put it mildly.

A scrawny gooseberry bush bent slowly toward her foot. The tip of a needle-sharp thorn pecked abruptly at her bootlace.

Jancy kicked the plant away with a divot of light soil. The gooseberry squawked when it landed and scurried farther away from the party.

Jancy gazed around. Her eyes lighted on the artio. “Squill!” she said.

“Mistress?” the eomspec replied, wincing. He’d spent much of the past several days with his eyes closed. He was justifiably certain that they weren’t going to show him anything he really wanted to see.

“I want you to contact Caltus,” Jancy ordered. ‘Tell them the city’s gone — buried till who knows when. Ask them if we ought to bring Sombrisio back with us. Got that?“

“Yes, mistress,” the artio said. He squatted down and formed his handset. He’d closed his eyes again.

“Mistress Gaine?” the hermit said.

She looked at him again, startled that he was still standing before her with a look of significance. “Do you have something useful to say after all?” she demanded.

“Not the way you mean it, mistress,” the hermit said. He cleared his throat, then went on, “I have fulfilled your request of me in the best fashion I could. There’s nothing more for me to do here. I therefore ask your leave to, ah, leave.”

“We’ll be going back to Caltus as soon as…” said Calla Mallanik. He glanced at the artio, speaking into his handset. “Well, pretty quick, anyway. We’ll drop you off at your hut.”

“If I may,” the hermit said, “I’ll go on my own. I’m headed in the opposite direction, you see. Toward Quiberon. I have some debts to clear up there.”

“There,” said Sombrisio. “And debts all across the North Coast. And in Caltus.”

‘Tes, I’m afraid that’s correct,“ the hermit said, nibbling his lower lip. To Jancy, the old man looked worn and frightened and more determined than she’d ever imagined he could be.

“A doddering old fool like you won’t ever be able to pay off all you owe!” Sombrisio said.

Jancy waved her left palm over the ring, though without actually touching the metal. “Hush, hush,” she murmured.

“I will not hush,” Sombrisio said. “Why, he’s not even employable. Unless maybe somebody wants a doorstop!”

“And there’s my wife, of course,” the hermit added. “Well, one does what one can.”

“I understood that your wife…” the elf said, giving Sombrisio a speculative look. “Had left you. Not the other way around.”

The hermit shrugged. “Nothing happens in a vacuum,” he said. “I suppose I always knew that. My wife is responsible for her actions, but that doesn’t diminish my own responsibility for mine.”

“There was a boyfriend?”Jancy said, looking toward the empty horizon beyond the hermit’s left shoulder rather man meeting his eyes directly as she asked the question.

The hermit smiled faintly. “ ‘Pull your face off n then stick your head where the sun don’t shine,’ I believe were his exact words,” he said. “Well, he won’t be as young as he was, either. And in any case, I need to apologize to her, whatever happens afterwards.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Jancy Gaine.

“Perhaps,” said the hermit. “But I’m no longer sure damnation is a necessary part of the human condition.”

They gave him a packhorse and more than a sufficient share of the remaining food. As the hermit said as he began trekking westward over the steep leading edge of the dune, if he had any of the sea rations left when he arrived in Quiberon, he might be able to sell the cans to a shipmaster as ballast.

The sky to the west was almost as black as Jancy Gaine’s mood. Lightning flickered within the clouds. If there was thunder, it was lost against a background of the Desolation’s normal rumbles and sighing.

They’d set up their exiguous camp midway on the long slope. Squill squatted at the top of the encampment that formed the dune’s leading edge, the highest ground available. The artio’s apparatus squealed in hopeless despair as he attempted to contact his superiors in Caltus. Every time the distant lightning flashed, a demon roared at the doomed souls.

Calla Mallanik picked grimly at a can of sea rations. There wasn’t a fire because there was nothing bigger than a gooseberry bush to burn on this bleak stretch. The best you could say for the situation was that the food in the olive drab cans was so unappetizing hot that eating it cold didn’t degrade the experience significantly.

“Well,” the elf said, “we could try blasting a hole in the soil, the way you did to trip up the mountain.”

“Great thought!” Sombrisio said. “The first time you prod the Desolation that way, the hole will close before you can get me off your finger and throw me in. The second time, though, you’ll bury me I don’t want to guess how deep.”

“We will?” Jancy said in surprise.

“You bet,” Sombrisio said. “The second time, the Des-olation’ll be ready for you. It’ll swallow us all down like a trout takes a fly. That’ll give me some company for the next three millennia. Or however long.”

“I thought it was too easy,” Calla said. He took another forkful of sea ration, punishing himself for having let his hopes rise.

“Look, it’s fine with me,” said the ring. “I figure you both’ll be about as bright after you’re buried as you are now.”

“The best choice,” Jancy said in a loud voice, “is to take Sombrisio back to Caltus. One item won’t be enough to disturb the magical balance.”

She cleared her throat and added, “Besides, the ring might be useful to have around for, you know, useful things.”

Jancy had spoken forcefully because she knew that whenever she had an idea which didn’t involve lopping somebody to bits with Castrator, she was out of her depth. If she put enough emphasis on a statement, listeners might forget that Jancy Gaine was basically as dumb as a post.

Alternatively, they might remember Castrator, and that could be an even better way of getting them to agree with her.

She and Calla heard a gabble from the top of the dune. They couldn’t understand the words, but they could tell that the artio had made actual contact instead of flinging his spells vainly into the howling atmospherics.

“If we’re going to head back,” Calla said, checking the cover of his silver-strung bow, “I’d like to start before the storm hits. The rain’ll come down this slope like the front of Deucalion’s flood.”

Squill trotted toward them. His wand, still extended, wobbled above him like the baton of a maestro conducting the sky.

“I got through!” the artio called. “They say, ‘Lose it good!’”