After the Downfall

Bottero, predictably, was furious. “They have no business doing that!” he shouted. “They have no right to do that! How did they get there? They came out of nowhere!”

“They must have crossed the river, your Majesty,” said the infantry commander, a stolid soldier named Friddi.

“Brilliant!” The king was savagely sarcastic. “And how did they do that? No bridge in these parts, and it’s too deep to ford. Maybe they had catapults fling them across!”

“Maybe magic flung them across, sire,” Friddi said.

“Don’t be any dumber than you can help,” Bottero said. “They’re Grenye, by the goddess! They can’t do that. And we don’t think they’ve got any renegades doing it for them. If they do, those bastards’ll be a long, hard time dying, I promise you that.”

Hasso thought of Scanno, back in Drammen. Scanno liked Grenye better than his own folk, and made no bones about it. Dammit, we never did pick him up and grill him about how he beat Aderno’s spell, he thought – there was something that slipped through the cracks as the campaign revved up. But he was a drunk, a ruin of his former self. He wouldn’t make a wizard if he lived to be a thousand, and Hasso wouldn’t have bet on him to last another five years.

Stubbornly, Friddi said, “Well, your Majesty, unless it was wizardry, I don’t know how the demon they got there.”

However the men of Bucovin managed to cross the Aryesh, they threw the Lenello army into enough confusion to make it halt for the day. Hasso hunted up Orosei. “You know some men who are good trackers?” he asked.

“Oh, I might. I just might.” The master-at-arms’ eyes gleamed. “You’ve got an idea.”

“Oh, I might. I just might.” Hasso mimicked Orosei’s tone well enough to send the Lenello into gales of laughter.

The half-dozen soldiers Orosei told off had the look of hunters, or more likely poachers. “You do what our foreign friend says,” Orosei told them. “We’ve got some tricks he doesn’t know about, but I expect he’s got some we don’t know about, too.”

“What’s on your mind, lord?” By one tracker’s tone of voice, he was suspicious of Hasso on general principles first, then because the German was trying to order him around.

“Take me to where the Bucovinans cross the river. Track them back to there for me,” Hasso said.

“If they did cross it,” the Lenello said. “If they didn’t just show up, like. I don’t suppose Grenye can do magic, but you never can tell, now can you?” He seemed a lot less convinced than King Bottero. What that meant… Well, who the hell knew what that meant? Hasso had more urgent things to worry about.

“Track them back,” he said. “Then we see. Till we try to find out, we can’t really know.” That was true in his world. Here …It had better be true here, he thought.

“You don’t need us for this,” another tracker said as they all set out. “A blind man could follow these hoofprints.”

“A blind man, nothing,” still another Lenello put in. “A dead man could.”

“Fine. Pretend I am blind. Pretend I am dead,” Hasso said. “But remember one thing, please. If you make a mistake, I haunt you.” That got some grins from the men Orosei had picked, and one or two nervous chuckles. Back in Germany, he would have been joking. Here, as the first Lenello tracker said, you never could tell.

Back through the bushes and saplings the train led, back to the Aryesh. The trackers were right; Hasso could have done this himself. He shrugged. He hadn’t known ahead of time. But now he had witnesses if his hunch turned out to be right. And if it turned out to be wrong, they would see him looking like a jerk.

He shrugged again. If you’re going to try things, sometimes you damn well will look like a jerk, that’s all.

The Aryesh was muddy and foamy. It looked almost like Viennese coffee. Hasso sighed. Along with tobacco, that was something he would never enjoy again. Nothing he could do about it. No, there was one thing: he could do without.

He unsheathed his belt knife and trimmed a sapling into a pole about a meter and a half long. “Nice blade,” one of the trackers said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I have it with me when I come from my world,” Hasso answered.

“How about that?” the Lenello said, and then, in a low voice to one of his pals,

“Never seen one like it before. Almost makes you believe that cock-and-bull story, doesn’t it?” Hasso didn’t think he was supposed to overhear that, but he did.

“What’s he going to do now?” the other tracker said, his voce also not quite sotto enough. “Dowse with that stick? We already know where the cursed river is.”

Hasso hadn’t even thought of dowsing. In Germany, that was an old wives’ tale. It probably wasn’t here. If any kind of magic was practical, finding water fit the bill. But, as the tracker said, he already knew where the water was here. He was after something else.