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“Then use the gun!”
“The—you brought a gun?” I opened the pack, and sure enough, toward the bottom was a shiny new Beretta. “Why did you bring a gun? We can’t shoot anybody—”
“The hell we can’t.”
“We can’t! It would change time! I told you—”
“And I told you to shoot the damned pigs! Or will that change time, too?”
I put the gun away before I was tempted to use it on Rosier.
More tempted.
“Shoot them!” he yelled.
“That mountain just tried to bury us,” I reminded him, trying to speak calmly. “Do you want another avalanche?”
“We don’t have a choice!”
“It’s only been a few minutes. If you stop screeching—”
“I don’t screech. I have never screeched!”
“—maybe they’ll get bored and go away.”
“Perhaps if I hadn’t just thrown food at them! They’ll never leave now!”
“You don’t know that,” I said, just as several more pigs started trunk jumping. “And can I remind you that it takes all of a second for a Pythia to pop in?” I added, over his renewed screeches. “Once they know where we are—”
“Shut up and get me down, you appalling woman! Get me down, get me down, get me down!”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, you know; I really—”
“Augghhh!”
I would have put the infernal noise down to Rosier’s tendency for hysterics, but then I heard something else. Something like the creak-crack-pop of splintering wood. And, okay, it was just barely possible that this tree wasn’t in the greatest of shape.
Annnnnd now the pigs were ramming it.
I started rooting around in the bag. “What else do you have in here?”
“Use the yellow ones. The yellow ones!”
“The yellow what?” There were only about a thousand things in here. “Pills, potions, amulets—”
“Augghhh! Augghhh! Augghhh!”
I turned the bag upside down and scrabbled around in the snowy, muddy slush. And found a bunch of individually wrapped little yellow rubbery things falling out of a small bag. Great, now I had to get one open. And thanks to recent events, my nails were shot.
But I managed, and a moment later looked up. And saw Rosier’s tree swaying back and forth madly, like it was trying to do the hula. Or, you know, like it was about to topple over into a herd of crazed wild boar.
I licked my lips. “Okay, now what?”
“Their throats!”
“What?”
“Their throats! Their throats! You have to get them down their—augghhh!”
