After the Downfall

The one he named satisfied Rautat. “Revenge is good,” the native said seriously. “If anyone wrongs you, pay him back a hundredfold. We say that, and you’re doing it.”

“Yes. I’m doing it. How about that?” Hasso loved How about that? Along with Isn’t that interesting?, it was one of the few things you could say that were almost guaranteed not to get you in trouble.

And I’m already in enough trouble, thank you very much.

He ended up in more trouble when they got to Muresh. His name pursued him through his dreams. He knew what that meant: Aderno and Velona were after him again. He tried to wake himself up, but couldn’t do it. And here in the west of Bucovin, magic worked better than it did farther east.

So Aderno caught up with him in the corridors of sleep. “What did you do?” the Lenello wizard demanded.

“I pay you back for trying to kill me, that’s what,” Hasso said savagely. He found he liked Rautat’s proverb. “You try to kill me three times now. You think I kiss you after that?” He told Aderno where the wizard could kiss him.

“And you pay us back by working magic for the savages?” Aderno said. “You don’t know how filthy that is.”

Lying in these dream quarrels wasn’t easy – Hasso remembered that. So he didn’t say anything at all. He just laughed his ass off. Let Aderno make whatever he wanted out of that. And if he thought Hasso’d routed Bottero’s army with spells, he would only have a harder time figuring out what was really going on.

“Why should I worry?” Aderno said. “If we don’t get you, the Grenye are bound to. They don’t trust renegades, you know.”

“They don’t try to murder me,” Hasso answered. “That’s you.”

“Yes, and we’d do it again in a heartbeat,” Velona said, appearing beside Aderno out of thin air – or, more likely, out of thin dreamstuff. “You deserve it. Anyone who goes over to the savages deserves it. And everyone who goes over to the Grenye will get it. The goddess has told me so.”

“Telling things is easy. Backing up what you say is a lot harder.” How many promises did Hitler make? How many did he keep? “Is the goddess really big enough to swallow all of Bucovin?”

“Of course she is.” Velona had no doubts – when did she ever? “This land will be ours – all of it. So even if 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.