After the Downfall

He worked his way forward through the woods for a while, then stepped out into the road. He hadn’t gone more than about a hundred meters before a Lenello stepped out from behind some thick bushes, sword in hand. Hasso’s right hand fell automatically to the hilt of his own blade. He stopped where he was, perhaps twenty meters from the blond, who overtopped him by five or six centimeters.

“Who the demon are you? Where’d you sprout from?” the Lenello demanded.

“My name’s Hasso Pemsel. I just escape – escaped – from the Bucovinans.”

Hasso hadn’t spoken much Lenello lately. It felt awkward on his tongue. Well, so did Bucovinan.

“Funny handle you’ve got. You talk weird, too,” the big blond said. “Where are you from, anyway?”

“Another world,” Hasso answered. “I am the fellow who comes – uh, came – here by magic. I am the goddess’ lover for a while.” And I want to be again, too. Whether Velona wants me to … Well, I’ll just have to see, that’s all.

The Lenello picket’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “It’s the traitor! It’s the goddess-cursed renegade!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. Then he swung up his sword and charged Hasso.

For a second, the German just stood there like an idiot. A millimeter from too late, he drew his own sword. He managed to turn a stroke that would have cut him in half from crown to crotch. Then he dropped the sword. The Lenello was still caught in his aborted follow-through. Hasso jumped in close. He grabbed the big blond’s wrist and twisted. The Lenello dropped the blade.

“You can’t do that!” he gasped.

“Says who?” Hasso twisted once more, cruelly this time. The Lenello gasped again, on a different note, above the sound of breaking bone. As he went white, Hasso brought a knee up into his crotch. He folded up on himself like a straight razor. Hasso kicked him in the face while he was falling. If you got into a fight like this, you didn’t dick around.

Shouts came from the west. So did the thumps of men running in heavy boots. Hasso didn’t wait to find out whether they had crossbows. Wherever he was going, it wasn’t back to Bottero’s kingdom. He grabbed his sword, dashed for the bushes, and did his unmagical best to vanish.

XXI

They did have crossbows, the bastards. Quarrels rustled through the leaves and branches and thudded into – sometimes right through – trunks. The Lenelli wanted to put them right through Hasso. He couldn’t go as quietly as he wanted because they were pushing hard after him. The more noise he made, the more foliage he disturbed, the better the target he handed the archers.

He had to give the Lenelli something to think about, or they’d catch him and kill him. He picked up a rock and flung it off to one side. Luck was with him – it crashed off a trunk or a thick branch.

“There he goes!” Bottero’s men yelled to one another. “After him! Don’t let him get away!”

They crashed toward whatever the rock had hit. Hasso moved that way, too. Now he was trying to be quiet. The Lenello behind whom he suddenly appeared had no idea he was there till a callused hand covered his mouth and jerked his head back. The blond did no more than gurgle as a knife sliced across his throat.

Hasso slipped off. The other Lenelli took longer than they should have to realize they were following a trail that led nowhere. “Sondrio!” one of them called as they regathered. “Where’d you go, Sondrio?”

If Sondrio was who Hasso thought he was, he wouldn’t answer till Judgment Day. The Lenelli all started calling for him. “He was over this way, wasn’t he?” somebody said.

By then, Hasso wasn’t over that way anymore. Now he’d gained a little separation from his pursuers, and he could use all the skill at skulking he had. If they were going to catch him, they would have to earn it. They weren’t such hot stuff in the woods themselves. He was glad he wasn’t up against the trackers and poachers Orosei had given him by the Aryesh.

At last, one of these guys stumbled over Sondrio, perhaps literally. “Dead!” the Lenello yelled, horror in his voice. “He’s dead! Bled like a goddess-cursed hog!”

All the soldiers started shouting and carrying on then, which was just what Hasso had hoped for. “He must have Grenye in the woods with him,” one of them said. “Sondrio ran across them, and look what they did to him!” They didn’t imagine that Hasso might have doubled back. That must have seemed too crazy even to contemplate. Maybe it was, too. Hasso wondered how dumb he’d been.

Dumb or not, he got what he wanted – they quit chasing him. If they thought the undergrowth was full of lurking little swarthy men with knives … well, they could do that. They could do whatever they damn well wanted, as long as they didn’t mess with him.