After the Downfall

“It was a misunderstanding, I tell you.” Aderno seemed to look back over his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Velona?”

She hadn’t been there before. She was now. Dreams could do some crazy things – Hasso knew that. Seeing her strongly sculpted features sent a lance of pain through his heart. “I am sorry,” she said. “I was upset when I found out. But it makes sense, where you are.” She sounded like someone having trouble getting an apology out. Hasso didn’t think she sounded like someone who had to lie to get an apology out.

But, when you got right down to it, so what? She’d done her level best to kill him, and it damn near turned out to be good enough. If he weren’t some sort of half-assed wizard himself, chances were he’d be holding up a lily right now.

“Thanks a lot,” he told her, as sardonically as he could.

He watched Aderno’s dream-projection of her blush. She got the message, all right – unless Aderno was playing with her image to fool him. The only thing Hasso was sure of was that he couldn’t trust anybody. He had no one to watch his back. He had had the Lenelli, but no more. Now he was … what?

The loneliest man in the world, that was what. Lots of people said that; for him, in this world, it was literally true. No doubt it had been ever since he got here, but he hadn’t wanted to look at it. For quite a while, he hadn’t had to. Now he saw no other choice.

“We worried about you,” Velona said. “For a while, we didn’t know if you were alive or dead. Then we got word the savages had you in Falticeni. We didn’t know what they were doing to you, so – ”

“You decide to do it yourself, in case they don’t do a good enough job,” Hasso broke in.

“No!” Velona said. But, Hasso noted, she didn’t say, By the goddess, no! She took swearing by the goddess seriously; she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t mean it. Since the goddess, as it were, kept a flat inside her head, that made sense. The absence of the oath saddened Hasso without much surprising him. Velona went on, “We think we can bring you out of there, bring you back to Drammen, by magic.”

“Oh?” Was that hope inside Hasso, or suspicion? “Why don’t you do that before, instead of trying to boil my brain?”

“I was angry,” Velona said simply – the first thing Hasso heard from her he was sure he believed. “I thought the Grenye would use their sluts to seduce you away from the cause of civilization. And I wanted you all for myself. By the goddess, I still do.” She meant that, then. It was flattering, no doubt about it. She was one hell of a woman. She was one hell of a hellcat, too.

“I think we can do it, Hasso,” Aderno said before the Wehrmacht officer could answer her. “If you open your will to mine – ”

“No,” Hasso said at once. If he opened himself to Aderno, he left himself vulnerable to the Lenello sorcerer. He might be a half-assed wizard, but he could see that much. And if you left yourself vulnerable to somebody who’d just tried to do you in – well, how big a fool were you if you did that? A bigger fool than I am, Hasso thought.

“You don’t trust me.” Aderno sounded affronted.

“Bet your balls I don’t,” Hasso said. The Fuhrer had got an awful lot of mileage out of making promises he didn’t mean to keep. Anyone who watched him in action had to wonder about promises forever after. Words, after all, were worth their weight in gold.

“Would you trust me, sweetheart?” Velona’s dream-image looked almost, or maybe not just almost, supernaturally beautiful. Was she calling the goddess into herself to overwhelm his senses? But for what she’d done a few nights earlier, it likely would have worked. Now … He was inoculated against such things.

“I don’t trust anybody any more,” he said. “How can I?”

Even in the dream, he saw he startled her. Would anybody from this world have been able to resist her when she did something like that? He wouldn’t have been surprised if the answer was no. But he wasn’t from here. He knew there was something to the goddess – he’d seen as much – but he didn’t automatically accept her as his deity.

After Velona’s amazement, anger came back. And it wasn’t just hers: it was also the goddess’. “Would you turn your face against me, Hasso Pemsel?” Velona asked, only something more rang in her voice.

“I don’t want to turn against anybody,” he said. “I just want people to leave me alone for a while.”

He might as well not have spoken. “You will pay,” Velona intoned – or rather, the goddess intoned through her. “You will pay, and Bucovin will pay for harboring you. Do you think you can thwart my will?”

“Well, the Bucovinans are still doing it,” Hasso said. If anyone had talked to Hitler that way after Operation Barbarossa failed, the Fuhrer would have handed him his head. But it might have done the Reich some good.