Роберт Асприн - Forever After

Jancy stood with threatening deliberation. She placed her hands on her hips. “Lose it good,” she repeated. “Do they say how in the name of Sif s blond cunt we’re supposed to do that when the city’s buried?”

Squill skidded to a halt so abruptly that he almost lost his footing. His cloak flapped around him and back. “Ah,” he said. “No, Mistress Gaine, they didn’t say that. I explained the situation clearly, very clearly, Mistress Gaine—”

The artio noticed the way Jancy’s right hand clenched on the helve of Castrator. He closed his eyes.

“—and they just said, ah, what they said. Mistress.”

“It’s not his fault,” said Calla Mallanik mildly. “Though of course it’s traditional in many human cultures to kill the messenger, so I suppose we — if you’d like to, that is — could—”

“Put a sock in it,” Jancy said grimly. She turned away from the artio before she did something she wouldn’t regret but knew she ought to.

“Hel’s teeth,” she said. There were a variety of ways to handle frustration. The only one that worked worth a damn for her was to go berserk for a few minutes, but she supposed she’d have to make do here with being depressed.

Light glimmered in the middle distance. “Has the storm got all the way around us now?” she asked, kneading her hands together to relax the cramp threatening as a result of her grip on the bearded ax.

Calla squinted. “No,” he said, “that’s the mountain again. The phlogiston being expelled when the rock cracks and closes, the hermit said.”

“Does a light dawn?” Sombrisio demanded.

‘The mountain!“ Jancy and Calla shouted together.

“You know,” said the ring, “I think the intellectual dominance of this age is in the hands of the cockroaches. Or whatever cockroaches use instead of hands.”

It wasn’t raining yet, but when it did it was going to come down like a cow pissing on a flat rock. Not that there was a lot of rock in the Desolation of Thaumidor. Or any cows, of course, so far as Jancy could tell.

The mountain roared to the foot of the dune like an avalanche; which it basically was, though the rocks had to bootstrap themselves upward each time in order to fall.

The ground shook like a hammered drumhead. Light shot in every direction from the collapsing granite, sparkles and sheets and faintly colored balls as large as haystacks. These last hung trembling in the air, dreaming of a paradise in which ghost trains ran down phantom tracks.

The forward flow of stone exhausted itself for the moment. The silence that followed the sound was only relative, but it seemed complete because of the crashing amplitude of the cataclysm it succeeded.

Jancy Gaine and her elf companion stood at the top of the slope. They’d chosen a spot half a mile from the camp where Squill huddled with the horses. No point in leading a mountain straight over their supplies; though if things went wrong, it wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference.

The dune’s leading edge fell away at a sixty-degree angle behind the pair of them. The mountain’s thunder shook veils of fine soil from the escarpment. The dust twisted into the shape of tortured women as it settled toward the ground three hundred feet below.

“Let’s start moving apart,” Calla Mallanik said. He took two steps away from Jancy, looking back over his shoulder to make sure that the ax woman intended to follow the plan they’d worked out while the mountain was still miles away.

She didn’t intend to.

“Get on out of the way,” Jancy ordered. Her eyes were fixed on the mountain as it inched upward again; she held Sombrisio between her cupped palms. “I think I’ll take care of it myself.”

“ You think?” Sombrisio piped. “You think ? Sure, you would think that your getting mushed into the dirt was just as good as burying me in living rock!”

“Jancy,” Calla said. He spoke with the sort of controlled earnestness with which one coaxes a toddler who’s managed to lock himself alone in the bathroom. “Toss me the ring, move a few steps, and I’ll toss it back. We’ve got to keep the mountain from focusing on one point. It’s got too broad a front to survive if it comes straight at one of us.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

She tossed Sombrisio underhand to the elf, then walked away from him along the escarpment in seeming nonchalance. This would either work or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, it was very damned unlikely that Jancy Gaine would be around to answer questions about what went wrong.

The mountain, dark and quiescent for a moment at the foot of the slope, seemed to have gotten its figurative breath. The crystalline entity humped itself taller at a steady rate, preparing for the final gravity-driven rush to the goal it sensed.

As Calla walked north along the crumbling dune edge with the ring, the rising layers of rock shifted slightly in his direction. The mountain’s progress had been increasingly direct as it neared Sombrisio. If the mass of rock were a Plott hound, it would be yelping in climactic enthusiasm by now. As it was, the pop and crunch of stone sliding on itself took on a sort of tail-wagging joyousness.

“You can toss her back to me now,” Jancy called, raising her voice to be heard over the background of geological preparation. She’d left her buckler and helmet in the camp, since they were obviously useless against present needs.

Castrator was useless also, but the big ax swung at Jancy’s right hip. She’d always figured to be buried with Castrator. If things went wrong in the next few seconds, mingled would be a better word than buried to describe her future relationship with the ax.

“Here she comes!” Calla shouted. He was nearly a hundred feet away by now, but the mountain covered several times that width of the lower dune.

The elf put his whole body into an overhand throw. The motion was as graceful as that of a cat leaping to tear some small bird to bloody feathers. Sombrisio, spinning and lighted pastel by the discharges from the straining mountain, described a perfect catenary arc which ended in Jancy’s clasping hands.

Jancy began to run along the edge of the escarpment. Castrator slapped her thigh. The base of the mountain skidded slightly toward her as the wall of rock staggered swiftly up. Friction against the loose soil wasn’t sufficient to completely brake the enormous mass pouring itself into a tower from the rear forward.

As the mountain moved, it flexed beyond the elastic modulus of the crystals which comprised it. Caps like mouths opened and shut between layers of rock. Granite teetered over Jancy in a vertical sheet. The roar echoed from the clouds in thunder beyond human imagination.

“Throw me now , you brainless cunt!” Sombrisio screamed.

The face of the rock wavered only twenty feet from Jancy. A momentary split appeared in the surface, like a shake in drying wood. Jancy flung Sombrisio between plates of granite. The gap slammed shut as the entire mountain plunged downward in a rush nothing could have stopped.

Jancy dived with her arms outstretched in the direction she’d been running. The friable soil lost cohesion under the impact of megatons of granite. The dune’s edge exploded in a plume of dust that cloaked and preceded the river of cold stone on its dive to the flat landscape three hundred feet below. The noise continued for a quite remarkable time.

Jancy lay on the escarpment. The mountain had missed her, but her boots dangled out in the air where the cliff of dirt had collapsed when the rock slid past. Five hundred feet of the dune’s face had been chiseled from sixty degrees to half that.

Well beyond the bottom of the slope, the mountain was shivering to a halt. Calla Mallanik got to his feet on the far side of the notch in the dune. He waved. Squill, barely visible in the beclouded twilight, was climbing up the slope. The artio needed high ground to report back to Caltus.