After the downfall

XVI

He must have done some impressive shrieking. Next thing he knew, three guards were in the room with him, each man with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. Their shadows swooped around and behind them like something out of a scary movie. Nobody in this whole goddamn world knows what that means, Hasso thought miserably. Nobody but me.

"What happened?" the first guard asked.

"Why did you yell?" said the second.

"Did somebody try to do something to you?" asked the third.

"Don't be stupid, Elyash," the first guard said. "Nobody in here but him — and us. Anybody who wants to get at him has to come through us, right? Nobody did, right?"

It wasn't necessarily so. Hasso wished it were. "Princess Drepteaza come see me?" he asked in his rudimentary Bucovinan.

The guards looked at one another. They didn't want to bother her in the middle of the night. It wasn't quite the raw fear that would have made flunkies hesitate before disturbing Velona. That could be dangerous in all kinds of ways, including physically. Drepteaza wouldn't — couldn't — blast you where you stood. That didn't make the little swarthy men eager to wake her up.

But the second guard said, "That shriek he let out… Maybe we'd better. We can blame it on him."

Hasso didn't think he was supposed to catch that. He held his face still. Knowing more of the language than they thought he did couldn't hurt. After a little more guttural wrangling, the trooper called Elyash went off to see if Drepteaza would come. One of the others used his torch to light a lamp for Hasso. Then they withdrew from the room, leaving him alone in the dim, flickering light.

He could have gone back to sleep… if he'd had the nerve. How many times during the war had he heard a bullet crack past him? More than he could count — he knew that. His scars spoke of times that hadn't been misses, but he wasn't thinking about those. He was thinking he might have dodged something worse than a bullet, something on the order of a 155mm shell. And, unlike a 155, it might still be waiting for him if he lay down and closed his eyes.

Will I ever be able to sleep again? he wondered. Soldiers on the Russian front always talked about sleeping with one eye open so the Ivans couldn't sneak up and cut their throats. But what happened when somebody could sneak up on you from inside your own head? Hasso shivered. Nothing good, that was what.

"Velona," he whispered sadly. Why couldn't she understand about Leneshul, even a little bit? But the answer to that formed as fast as the question. Because she was who and what she was, that was why. She wouldn't let a native girl upstage her, even if she wasn't there to be upstaged.

What did they call using a woman to get information out of a prisoner? A honey trap. The Bucovinans could have been tearing his toenails out. They could still start any time they pleased, too. Bless them, the fools, they'd given him a woman instead. And he hadn't even told Leneshul anything. He'd just used her as a nicely rounded sleeping pill to evade bad dreams.

The door opened. In came Drepteaza, her hair all awry and her face twisted from fighting against a yawn. "More trouble in the night?" she asked in Lenello.

"Ja," Hasso said. She nodded; she'd come to understand that. He wished he could go on in German; even in Lenello, he couldn't speak smoothly. But German, like memories of movies, was his alone here. Lenello, then: "Those dreams in the night — now I know what makes them."

"And?" Drepteaza waited for him to tell her what she needed to know. The feeble lamplight left her eyes enormous.

"A wizard from Bottero's kingdom sends to me in my sleep," Hasso said.

Her jaw set, as if she were taking a blow she hoped she was braced for. "I wondered whether that was so," she said softly, as much to herself, Hasso judged, as to him. She made herself stand straight. "And what does the wizard want?"

"To get me back for the Lenelli." Hasso answered with the truth. That was what Aderno had wanted, anyway, till Velona found out Hasso was laying a Grenye woman. Now they probably both wanted him trussed and roasted and served up with an apple in his mouth like a suckling pig.

"They think you know things," Drepteaza remarked. Hasso kept quiet, which struck him as the safest thing he could do just then — not that anything seemed very safe at the moment. The priestess eyed him. "But these are bad dreams for you. Elyash said you screamed tonight: screamed like a man over hot coals, he told me."

And how did Elyash know what a man sounded like when he hung over hot coals? Better not to inquire, chances were. "This is a bad dream tonight, yes," Hasso said.

"Why?" Drepteaza asked.

Hasso wondered whether he ought to evade that question. As much as Velona didn't like native women, Drepteaza didn't like Velona. The Lenello woman had already tried to fry his brains from the inside out. What would the Bucovinan woman do? Did he want to find out?

On the other hand, what exactly did he scream when he woke up? Did the guards hear it? Did it have Velona's name in it? If he lied and Drepteaza found out, what would she do then? Again, did he want to find out?

He decided he didn't. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned? How about a woman hoodwinked? And so, carefully, he said, "Velona is — was — in this dream."

"Oh, really?" No, the Bucovinan priestess didn't like that, not even a little bit. She didn't like anything that had anything to do with Velona. But her frown was more one of concentration than of fury — Hasso hoped so, anyhow. "You like Velona, though. You love Velona." Drepteaza made it sound indescribably perverse. "Why do you say seeing her was bad? And why did she appear in the dream in the first place?"

Drepteaza might be a native woman who only came halfway up Hasso's chest. That didn't mean she was a fool. Oh, no — on the contrary. How many people in Hasso's world had come to grief by equating the two? The Fuhrer had in Russia. The Wehrmacht officer hoped he wouldn't make the same mistake himself, not when she'd picked two vital questions.

He answered them in the opposite order from which she'd asked them: "She appears because she wants — wanted — to get me back to Drammen." The past tense mattered here. He kept using it: "And seeing her was bad because she… got angry because of Leneshul."

"She did, did she?" Drepteaza laughed. "That's the funniest thing I ever heard. What does she expect you to do when you're here and not with her and you won't be going back to her? Sit around and play with your dick all the time?"

Hasso didn't care for the sound of and you won't be going back to her. Nothing he could do about it, though. And Velona probably did expect him to do just that, or else to live in the glorious memories of her. Life didn't work that way, but he thought it was what she expected.

Maybe Drepteaza did, too, for she shook her head and exclaimed, "The nerve of that woman!" She really did sound indignant.

"Sorry to bother you," Hasso said.

"Don't worry about it. I wouldn't have missed this for the world." Drepteaza paused, just when Hasso thought she would get in her last little dig and go back to bed. Maybe it was only a trick of the dim, unreliable lamplight, but suddenly she looked much older and much more worried. In a voice that tried to stay casual but didn't quite succeed, she asked, "You don't have anything to do with magic, do you?"

Rautat had asked him that before, but this time the question took him by surprise. If he'd been expecting it, he could have said, Of course not, and that would have been that. But what came out of his mouth was, again, the exact and literal truth: "I can do a little, but I don't know much about it."

"You… can… do… a… little." He never forgot how Drepteaza spaced out the words, or how enormous her eyes seemed. That was also partly a trick of the light, yes, but it seemed somehow more. She stabbed out a finger at him. "Why didn't you say so before?"

"What good does it do you? You can't trust me. Even if you could trust me, I'm not a quarter trained. I'm not a quarter of a quarter trained. What I know is this." Hasso held his thumb and index finger close together. "What the Lenelli know is this" He threw his arms wide.

Drepteaza's eyes narrowed now, narrowed dangerously. She didn't believe him. "But they wouldn't care about you if you didn't know things we don't."

"Neither would you," he pointed out.

"Of course we wouldn't — are we fools?" She didn't waste time denying it. "But if they want you back so much, that means — " She broke off. Hasso could fill in the blank. That means you're worth something after all.

If he denied it, they'd knock him over the head. No more Leneshul. It would be toenail-tearing time. "In the world I come from, there is no magic," Hasso said. "What I know has nothing to do with magic. It has to do with, uh, arts and craft." No way to say technology or engineering in Lenello.

"So we could use it as well as the blonds?" Drepteaza said. Hasso didn't say yes or no. She went on, "You had better show us some of this."

"You know why I don't. I have an oath to King Bottero." Hasso liked the Lenelli. He felt he could almost become one of them if he stayed here long enough and got used to their ways. In Bucovin his looks, if nothing else, would leave him a stranger the rest of his life. He would be as bad off as a Jew in Germany. Maybe worse — some Jews looked like Aryans. He sure as hell didn't look like a Grenye. A good thing they took oaths more seriously here than in his own world.

"Velona tried to harm you, yes?" Drepteaza said. "The wizard tried to harm you, yes? What is your oath to their king worth to you if it's worth nothing to them? Or do you think they struck at you without his knowledge, without his let?"

"I don't know," Hasso said slowly. "I have to think about that." It was worth thinking about, too. Priestesses were supposed to have answers, weren't they? He didn't know whether Drepteaza did. She sure had some good questions, though.

"We have to think about you, too," she said. "You can't do much! Oh, Lavtrig preserve us!" She walked out of the room shaking her head.

When Hasso got breakfast the next morning, the serving girl who gave him his tray looked at him as if he had horns and a tail and she thought he'd start breathing fire any minute. The morning before, she'd laughed and joked with him. She'd taken him for granted. She didn't any more. He knew what that had to mean.

"Only I," he said, knowing he'd botched the Bucovinan grammar as soon as the words were out of his mouth. But Jiril didn't speak Lenello — or at least she'd never let on that she did.

She might have just found a scorpion in her sock. "Wizard!" she said, and aimed at him a pronged gesture that couldn't possibly do her any good.

He sighed. Either Drepteaza had blabbed — which didn't seem likely, but wasn't even close to impossible — or the guards had overheard and started running their mouths. It made no real difference. Any which way, the cat was out of the bag.

The Lenelli admitted that some of their renegades had used magic for the natives. The Bucovinans had said the same thing. They'd also talked about the trouble they had keeping Lenello wizards using the magic for them and not to rule them… Or worse, Hasso thought. If the SS had had magic to help it clear out the ghettos in Poland and Russia, wouldn't it have used every spell it could? In a heartbeat. Hasso had no doubts about that at all.

What could he do? He muttered to himself. What he could do and what he might do were two different creatures. Could he run a panzer without training? Not bloody likely. So why should he expect to work magic without learning how?

But the Bucovinans probably thought he could. All they knew about magic was that they couldn't work any. That might be useful.

Or it might get him killed, if they decided it made him too dangerous to leave alive. And he couldn't do a damn thing about it. Some wizard that made him!

How Jiril looked at him wasn't the only sign that things had changed. Nobody else came in all morning. The guards didn't want to let him out, either. He was half surprised that they didn't come in and take away his furniture. The maid who brought him lunch seemed less frightened than Jiril had, but she also wasn't easy with him.

No sign of Leneshul at all, dammit.

Drepteaza didn't visit till late afternoon. When she did, a full complement of tough-looking guards came in with her. The natives hadn't bothered with that for a while. They looked ready to ventilate him if he breathed funny, too. Maybe not back to square one, but square two? It seemed that way, worse luck.

Drepteaza didn't act afraid, but she didn't act even halfway friendly any more, either. What did her expression mean? Something on the order of more in sorrow than in anger, Hasso judged. And, sure enough, the first words out of her mouth were, "What are we supposed to do with you, Hasso Pemsel?"

The way she used his full name reminded him of Velona, a sudden stab he really didn't need just then. She spoke in her own language, but he answered in Lenello: "Priestess, you should set me free and give me a big estate and servants and plenty of gold and silver to pay for them."

She blinked. Whatever she'd expected, that wasn't it. One of the guards glowered at him. Another one laughed. They knew Lenello, then. After a moment, Drepteaza said, "Maybe that would keep us safe from you. If we were sure it would, it might be worthwhile. Killing you is surer — and cheaper."

She wasn't kidding. She didn't joke very often, and he always knew when she did. Much too conscious that he was talking for his life, he said, "I am a captive for some time now. You could kill me whenever you want."

"Before, we knew you were a snake. Now we know you are a viper," Drepteaza said. "You can do more and worse to us than we thought."

"Or I can do more and better for you," Hasso said.

"Maybe you can. But you still have your famous oath to King Bottero — Bottero the invader, Bottero the robber, Bottero the murderer, Bottero the torturer." No, Drepteaza wasn't joking. "The goddess who does not care what a man is, the wizard who tries to slay his own lord's sworn man. Do they deserve your oath, Hasso Pemsel?"

That was a different way of asking what she'd asked the night before. Unhappily, Hasso said, "They're worried about what I can do, what I know. So are you, remember."

"There is a difference," Drepteaza said.

"What?" Hasso asked.

She gave him a look that said he was either disingenuous or very, very stupid. "You already helped them. That attacking column you showed them, and whatever magic you worked for Bottero…"

Not to mention rescuing Velona, Hasso thought. The Bucovinans didn't know about that, which was a good thing for him. He uncomfortably recalled the spell he'd made to find the underwater bridges. The natives didn't know about that, either, and Hasso wasn't a bit sorry they didn't.

"In my world, a prisoner only has to give his name, his rank, and his pay number to his enemies," he said. Never mind that people broke the rules all the time when they needed to squeeze something out of somebody. The rules were what they were.

"You give your soldiers numbers?" Drepteaza frowned. "Why aren't names enough?"

"We have more soldiers than we have names — many more," Hasso answered. When he told her how many men the Wehrmacht held, she didn't want to believe him. Neither had the Lenelli when he talked about such things.

Unlike the Lenelli, who usually thought they knew it all, Drepteaza didn't argue with him. She just said, "Well, let that be as it may," and went on, "You are not in your world now, Hasso Pemsel. You are here, and you have to live by our rules."

"Don't I know it!" he exclaimed.

"We could have killed you. We could have killed you the width of a millet grain at a time. We could have sent you to the mines — a living death. Did we do any of that? No. We treated you well. Don't you want that to go on?"

"Of course I do. But you don't do it for me. You do it for you," Hasso said.

"And Bottero helped you just because he liked you." The priestess could be formidably sarcastic. Hasso didn't know what to say, so he kept his big mouth shut. Drepteaza looked through him. "So you still need to think, do you? If you must, you can do that — for a little while, anyway." Out she went.

Nothing much changed for the next few days. One thing did, though: Leneshul stopped coming to him. He knew what that meant: the Bucovinans weren't going to let anything stand in the way of whatever magic Aderno and Velona aimed at him. Whose clever idea was that? Drepteaza's? Lord Zgomot's? The trouble was, it was clever. If the people he called his friends kept trying to kill him, how long would he, could he, stay friendly to them?

If they did kill him, not very long.

If they didn't… Hasso hoped Drepteaza was counting on his living through whatever the Lenelli aimed at him. He hoped so, yes, but he couldn't be sure.

Since he didn't have a woman, he took matters into his own hands, so to speak. But, as he'd found with Leneshul, he couldn't get it up every day. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was older than that, dammit. Had he been twenty-one… One night, he fell asleep unshielded by self-abuse. He'd seen Velona in his dreams before, but not the way he had when she and Aderno assailed him.

He'd had dreams the past few nights that made him think he would have company when he slept unwarded by pleasure of any sort: dreams that reminded him of someone knocking on a distant door.

Tonight, the door wasn't distant. Tonight, Aderno didn't bother to knock — he just walked on in. "Ah, there you are," he said, as if he and Hasso were picking up a conversation after breaking off to eat lunch.

Hasso suggested that the wizard and his unicorn enjoyed a relationship different from mount and rider. It was a male unicorn.

"Naughty, naughty," Aderno said, his voice surprisingly mild. "That was a — a misunderstanding, you might say."

"You might say," Hasso retorted. "The only thing that misses is, I don't end up dead." Yes, he went right on sticking to the present tense when he could.

"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.

Velona didn't want to listen, any more than Hitler would have. Hasso might have known — hell, he had known — she wouldn't. People obviously weren't in the habit of telling the goddess no. "Insolent mortal! If you would sooner live among swine than men, you deserve the choice you made."

She hit him with something that made what Aderno and Velona did the last time seem a love tap by comparison. It wasn't quite enough to do him in, though, because he woke up screaming again.

Drepteaza eyed Hasso, God only knew what in her eyes. "This could grow tedious," she said in stern Lenello, and then yawned.

"I don't like it any better than you do," the Wehrmacht officer mumbled. "Less, I bet."

He'd already summarized his latest encounter with Velona and Aderno. The Bucovinan priestess sighed. "Well, Leneshul can come back to your bed, if that makes you any happier. She may do you some good, anyhow."

Hasso inclined his head. "I thank you," he said in Bucovinan, thinking, I'd rather go to bed with you. Not for the first time, he wondered how smart — no, how dumb — he was. His goddess-filled lover had just tried to do him in twice, so now he wanted to sleep with a priestess instead. Maybe he ought to have his head examined to see if it held any working parts.

Drepteaza nodded absently. "I do this more for us than for you," she said. "Whatever you know, the Lenelli don't want you showing it to us. That seems plain enough, doesn't it?"

"I suppose so." Hasso figured that was part of it, too. But he would have bet marks against mud pies that Velona's rage weighed more in the scales.

"But, of course, you don't want to show it to us, either, whatever it is," Drepteaza said. "You have sworn an oath to the people who want to kill you, and it counts for more than anything else."

That was irony honed to a point sharp enough to slip between the ribs, pierce the heart, and leave behind hardly a drop of blood. Hasso's ears heated. "I try to be loyal," he said.

"Loyalty is a wonderful thing. It is also a road people travel in both directions — or it should be," Drepteaza said. "If you are loyal and your lord is not…"

What had Bottero promised when Hasso swore homage to him? He'd vowed he would do nothing that made him not deserve it. Had he kept his half of the oath? When you got right down to it, no.

He's forsworn, all right. I can do whatever I want, and do it with a clear conscience.

The thought made Hasso no happier. He didn't want to take service with the Grenye, to pledge allegiance to Lord Zgomot of Bucovin. It reminded him too much of Wehrmacht men joining the Red Army and going to war against their old comrades. Some few had done it, he knew. And great swarms of Russians fought for the swastika and against the hammer and sickle.

Yes, they did. And Hasso knew what he thought of them. "You can use a turncoat," he said miserably. "You can use him, but you can never like him or trust him or respect him."

"You do have honor." Drepteaza sounded surprised when she said it. Somehow, that seemed the most unkindest cut of all. After a moment, she went on, "Tell me this, Hasso Pemsel: do the Lenelli like you or trust you or respect you?"

"They… did." Hasso made himself pause and use the past tense. The present wasn't true, however much he wished it were.

"They did, yes, when you were useful to them. Then they threw you away like a bone with the meat gnawed off it," Drepteaza said. "So why hold back now? Don't you want your revenge? Don't you deserve it?"

Hasso didn't answer right away. He had to look inside himself to find where the truth lay. When he did, it only made him even more uneasy, and here he hadn't thought he could be. Joining Bucovin, joining the Grenye, wasn't like going over to the Slavic Untermenschen. No, it was worse than that. Every time he looked at them, he thought of Jews, a whole great country full of grasping, swarthy Jews.

And he slept with Leneshul. And he wanted to sleep with Drepteaza. But that was his sport. Helping this folk against the Aryan-seeming warriors from across the sea…

"I don't know," he whispered. "I just don't know."

"Well, you had better make up your mind, Hasso Pemsel." Drepteaza didn't know what was bothering him. He didn't think he could explain it, either, not so it made sense to her. "You'd better make up your mind," she repeated. "And you'd better hurry up about it, too. You don't have much time left." And away she went, taking with her the captor's privilege of the last word.

Somebody pounded on Hasso's door, much too early in the morning. Next to the Wehrmacht officer, Leneshul groaned. "Who's that?" she muttered. "Why doesn't he go away?"

"Shall I find out?" Hasso asked. Leneshul only shrugged and pulled the blankets over her head, not that that did any good against the racket. Whoever was out there was bound and determined to come in.

Yawning and cursing in German, Hasso pulled on his trousers and walked to the door. He threw it open, then stopped in surprise. That wasn't a dark little Bucovinan out there, but a blond taller than himself. And, he realized a heartbeat later, someone he knew, too.

"Scanno!" he exclaimed. "What the demon are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same question, buddy," the Lenello from Drammen answered. "They wanted me to come here and talk some sense into your pointed head, that's why I'm here. Nechemat's cursed glad to get away from all the Lenelli, too."

Nechemat, Hasso gathered, was Scanno's Grenye wife or lover. The German had seen her but never met her. "But you're a Lenello," he pointed out.

"On the outside, sure." Scanno breathed beer fumes into Hasso's face. Whether in Drammen or Falticeni, he liked to drink. He liked to talk, too. "I don't act like those dumb buggers, though. You think Grenye aren't people just on account of they're mindblind? Shit, I'm mindblind. Most Lenelli are. What's the big deal?" He eyed Hasso with more shrewdness than the Wehrmacht officer would have thought he owned. "I hear you're not. That could be a big deal. And you know other stuff, whatever the demon it is. So could that."

"They tell you everything?" Hasso asked. "Back in Drammen, they tell you everything?"

"All kinds of crap goes on under Bottero's big, pointy beak," said Scanno, who had a big, pointy beak himself. "A little harder to slip away than it used to be — I bet that's your fault, huh?"

"I suppose so." Hasso hadn't had time to do a really good job of training the Lenelli in security and counterespionage. If the likes of Scanno could beat his setup… He knew what that meant. Bottero's men hadn't had time to figure it all out and make it their own yet. They were doing it because he'd told them to, not because they saw all the benefits and ins and outs for themselves. Hasso made himself ask, "How is the king?"

Scanno laughed, a big, booming laugh that made the Bucovinan guards stare. "Well, it's not like he invites me to the palace for roast duck and wine with sugar in it," the Lenello renegade said. "If he knows who I am at all, he figures I'm that drunken stumblebum who'd sooner slum it with the Grenye than stick to my own kind. And he's right, too."

He said that even as the same thought formed in Hasso's mind. If Scanno could see himself so clearly, the rest of what he said carried more weight.

"But anyway, Bottero's not happy right now. I don't need to eat his duck and drink his sugarwine to know that," Scanno went on. "Any time one of the kings loses to Bucovin, he's ready to spit nails. It's embarrassing, that's what it is. And he's got to worry that his loving neighbors will jump on his back. He took a real licking this time. You took a licking. What's this strike column I heard about?" Briefly, Hasso explained. Scanno grunted. "That's pretty sly, all right. But it didn't work this time."

"No, it didn't," Hasso agreed. "So why do you throw in with the Grenye and not your own folk?"

"I like 'em better," Scanno answered. "I mean, pussy's pussy — who cares if the hair on it's yellow or brown? And the Grenye, they don't brag and strut and carry on all the stinking time. They're people you can get along with. Besides, isn't it about time somebody gave the poor sorry cocksuckers a fair shake?"

Scanno bragged and strutted and carried on as much as any Lenello Hasso had ever known. Maybe he didn't know himself so well as the German had thought he did. Or maybe his size and his noise — and his yellow hair — made him stand out more among the natives than he ever would among his own people. Maybe he liked that. If he did, well, so what? What did it mean? That he was human. Who wasn't?

But that question had another answer, one it wouldn't have had in Hasso's old world. Scanno, plainly, had never gone to bed with Velona or anybody like her. True, the difference wasn't that she was a blonde, not a brunette. The difference was the goddess.

Yes, and the other difference is that she wants you dead now, Hasso reminded himself. Details, details.

"Here — I've got another question for you," Scanno said. "Were you at that place called — what the demon was the name of it? Muresh, that was it. The one where Bottero's boys went hog wild?"

"Yes, I was there."

"Did you play their games?"

"No." Hasso didn't say he'd seen such things before in Russia. He'd played those games then — the Ivans were enemies he hated, unlike the Bucovinans, who were foes merely in a professional sense. And the Russians had taken their revenge once the Red Army crossed the Reich's borders. Oh, hadn't they just?

Scanno grunted again. "Didn't think so. Bucovin doesn't massacre for the fun of it, either." Bucovin isn't strong enough to, Hasso thought. The guys chasing Velona sure weren't out to play skat with her. Scanno went on, "Why don't you throw in with the Bucovinans? They're a better mob than the ones out west." He jerked a thumb in the direction of Drammen.

That… might or might not be true. Hasso sighed. He really didn't have an answer, not one Scanno would get. They look like a bunch of filthy kikes, dammit. He sighed again. "I don't know. Why don't I?"