After the Downfall

you showed the barbarians the trick of your thunder weapon, it won’t matter, because the goddess is on our side.”

God wills it! the Crusaders shouted. And sometimes He did, and sometimes He didn’t, and after a while no more Crusaders were left in the Middle East. Velona was smarter than Aderno, though. She’d figured out what the booms were, and he hadn’t.

“We should have killed you the last time,” she went on. “We’ll just have to try again now.”

“This is what I get for loving you?” Hasso asked, though all the while he knew the answer was yes.

“No one who beds Grenye women can truly love the goddess in me,” Velona said. “And if you don’t care about the goddess, then you don’t care about me, either. Now the goddess cares about you, Hasso Pemsel.” She was still beautiful – beautiful and terrible and terrifying. “I warned you long ago that there was more danger to loving me than the chance of a broken heart. Now you begin to see, and now you begin to pay!”

She gestured to Aderno. Hasso didn’t think she would have let him see that if she could have helped it. But the other side evidently had trouble lying in the dreamscape, too. That was something of a relief. And Hasso sorcerously braced himself as well as he could.

The blow wasn’t so strong as the one a few nights earlier. His being farther east likely had something to do with that. He woke with a shriek, yes, but by now he was almost used to doing that. He didn’t heave his guts out or foul himself, so he reckoned the encounter a success.

Rautat was less delighted. “Do you have to make so much noise?” he asked crossly. “You sound like you’re dying, and you scare me to death.”

“Sorry,” Hasso said. “What do you want me to do when a wizard’s after me?”

“Go after him instead. Make him wake up screaming instead. You can do that shit, right? So do it.”

“I wish I could,” Hasso said, but the Bucovinan underofficer wasn’t listening to him anymore. He swore under his breath. He had no idea how to track Aderno through the Lenello wizard’s dreams, or what to do if he caught him. Having the ability and having the knowledge were two different things. Expecting Rautat to understand that was … hopeless.

Not a sword. A shield. Hasso was a mediocre chess player, but he’d learned enough to know defending was easier than putting together a strong attack. If the other guy needed to work hard to beat you, maybe he’d get sick of trying and go away. Maybe.

“What do you people do against sendings of bad dreams?” he inquired.

“Why ask me?” Rautat said. “Whatever we do, it isn’t real magic.” The common Grenye mixture of fear and bitterness edged his voice. Coming up against magic that did work must have been as horrible a shock for the natives here as the Spaniards’ gunpowder was to the Indians.

“Just curious,” Hasso said. Whatever the Grenye did wasn’t real magic for them. For him, with the right spell cast by the right kind of mind, it might be. Their notions would give him a place to start, anyhow. And he knew he couldn’t screw every night till he got to Falticeni. He didn’t want to screw in Muresh. It would remind him of all the rapes here during the sack.

With the air of a man humoring an eccentric – a lunatic? – Rautat answered, “Well, we use nettle and yarrow and prayer.”

Hasso discovered that he was smiling. What did Shakespeare say? Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety – that was it. Maybe old Will knew more than he let on. He often seemed to.

“Can you get me some of each?” Hasso asked. He knew nettles when he saw them. Yarrow, to him, was only a name.

“I’ll send someone out to get you the plants, yes.” Rautat gave him a crooked smile. “You’ll have to find our own prayer, though. I don’t know where that grows around here.”

After what the Lenelli did to Muresh, Hasso guessed all the prayer in these parts had been torn up by the roots. He laughed anyway, to show Rautat he got the joke. And, a couple of hours later, a gray-haired Bucovinan woman brought in a nettle and another plant – Hasso supposed it was yarrow. The woman eyed him. “Do you speak our language?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yes – not too well, though.”

“Were you in Muresh when the Lenelli ravished it?”

“Yes,” Hasso said again.

She nodded, too, as if he’d proved some point. And he must have, because she said, “No wonder you have bad dreams.” She knew what the yarrow and nettle were for, then. Well, who likelier to believe an old wives’ tale than an old wife?

“I take any oath you want – I fought clean here.” Hasso was amazed by how glad he was to be telling the truth. He couldn’t have said the same thing about what he’d done in Russia. Well, how many Russians had clean hands in Germany?

And, truthteller or not, he failed to impress the Bucovinan woman. “Even so,” she said, and walked away without waiting for an answer. What had happened to her when Bottero’s army came through Muresh? What had happened to the people she loved? Hasso didn’t have the nerve to ask.

Yarrow had fine, tiny leaves and a spicy scent. As the woman had, Hasso handled the nettle by the root to keep from getting stung. He held the yarrow in the other hand and chanted in German. He was sure the natives would rather he’d used Bucovinan. But he had no idea whether magic here paid any attention to the natives’ language. He knew damn well he could cast a spell in German that worked: he’d done it before. So he tried it again.

And what would happen when Aderno and Velona tried to afflict him again? That’s why you’re casting the spell, jerk – to find out what’ll happen. With luck, Aderno wouldn’t be able to get through at all. I’m sorry, sir. You seem to have reached a disconnected brain. Hasso snorted. Yeah, his brain seemed disconnected, all right, even to him.

The only way to discover what would happen was to fall asleep. Hasso approached the night with all the enthusiasm of a soldier about to have a wound tended by a drunken, stupid medic. When it came to wizardry, that was about what he was, and he knew it. The only reason he looked like a doctor in a clean white coat to the Bucovinans was that they were even worse off than he was.

He lay down. After a while, he slept. Next thing he knew, it was morning. He approved. Of course, he had no idea whether Aderno had tried a spell of his own during the night. But no news seemed good news.

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. “You didn’t scream. Your magic must have worked,” Rautat said. “It’s a lot more restful when you don’t scream, you know?”

“For me, too,” Hasso said, and the underofncer chuckled, for all the world as if he were kidding. Nobody’d ever tried to blow Rautat’s head off from the inside out. The Bucovinan didn’t know how lucky he was. If he stayed lucky, he would never find out, either.

Hasso did feel a pang at riding away from the remaining pots of gunpowder: they ended up stowing them in the castle on the east bank of the Oltet, which, like Muresh, had been – somewhat – repaired. There was bound to be more explosive in Falticeni. The Bucovinans knew how to make the stuff now, and they wouldn’t have stopped because he’d ridden west.

He did wonder whether Zgomot would have the chopper waiting. If the ruler decided he’d learned enough from the dangerous blond … Hasso shrugged. He just had to hope that wasn’t so. Bottero’s men wanted to kill him. If Zgomot’s did, too… He’d damn well die in that case, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.

“Catapults,” he said out of the blue. He said it in Lenello, but the Bucovinan name was almost the same; the natives had taken the word as well as the thing. It was what Drepteaza called a bastard word, with long and short vowels.

“What about them?” Rautat asked.

“We need light ones on wheeled carts,” Hasso said. “Then they can throw pots of gunpowder at the Lenelli.”

“Oh, yeah?” A slow grin spread over Rautat’s face. “I like that, Lavtrig give me boils on my ass if I don’t. What other sneaky ideas have you got?”

“That would be telling,” Hasso answered. Rautat laughed. So did Hasso, but he wasn’t kidding. What kept him alive was being the goose that laid golden eggs. As long as he could keep laying them, and as long as none of them turned out to be gilded lead, he figured he was all right. If he screwed up, Lord Zgomot would start