This one’s tough. All I remember is one tiny fragment and it seems more like a video-game sequence than a novel (but I’m sure it was a novel)
I’d guess it was from the '80s, but…don’t quote me on that. It was a fantasy novel and while I’m pretty sure it’s not Lyndon Hardy, I’m associating the story with him (maybe it came out in the same time frame?).
And what I remember is
Our hero and his rival (or the enemy–I think it was a rival though) are searching for a deserted city high, high in the mountains on a snowy peak. He finally finds it, but his rival(?) has gotten there first! All the loot is taken, but our hero figures “What the hell” and loads up his porters with the furniture, and they have to carry it down the mountain ledge (when they get back to civilization, it turns out of course, that the furniture is valuable). He might meet his rival on the ledge.
Seriously: that’s ALL I remember of the whole thing.
If it’s Hardy, it’s certainly not the first book which I just reread.
And I vaguely recall some sort of “right of way” issue on the narrow mountain ledge. Our hero is going down and our rival/villain (I think rival) is coming back up, and for some reason, the rival has the right of way, but our hero has a ton of sherpas loaded with the furniture and maybe books or something and there’s no way for them to back up or get by.
Probably not it, but I think there was an issue of Knights of the Dinner Table with basically that plot. The characters battle to the ancient city only to find it has already been looted, then one of them realizes that all of the furniture in the city are valuable antiques.
This is exactly what I thought when I read the OP (and since it was my very first issue of KOTD, number twenty one or two IIRC). But it could totally have been a rip off of a previous fantasy novel. There really wasnt a rival. But the characters did have to face some serious opposition, but I wont spoil.
ETA: the city hadnt been looted actually, it just that it was an ancient place of knowledge and not another dungeon with treasures (as part of a ploy by the GM to make the players realize there were greature treasures than money). Then the rule lawyer of the game remembers that some parts of the “monastery” could be sold for incredible value, by using a lot of badly edited rules combined together.
All the loot is taken, but our hero figures “What the hell” and loads up his porters with the furniture, and they have to carry it down the mountain ledge (when they get back to civilization, it turns out of course, that the furniture is valuable). He might meet his rival on the ledge.