After the downfall

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.

He didn't breathe easy till he got back over the rise that shielded the Bucovinan encampment. No, he didn't feel easy then, either. If Rautat and the rest of Lord Zgomot's merry men were waiting for him with blood in their eye… Well, what happened then? If both sides wanted to kill him, he was dead meat. Why didn't you think of that sooner, you dumb asshole?

But he knew why. Down below his belly, down in his balls and his dick, he didn't want to believe Velona didn't want him anymore, didn't love him anymore, didn't want to lay him anymore. However you put it, he didn't want to believe it, even if it was true. No. Especially if it was true.

Want to or not, he didn't see that he had much choice any more. With Aderno's help, she'd tried to fry him twice at long range. Even that hadn't convinced him, which only proved he was a jerk or he was thinking with his cock — assuming those two weren't one and the same. No way in hell, though, that Bottero's soldiers would have done their best to massacre him unless their goddess told them it was all right. Since they had, she must have. Damn!

He looked back over his shoulder. He stopped so he could listen. Nothing either way. He breathed a sigh of relief, which differed only in his own mind from the panting he was also doing. The Lenelli behind had given up chasing him. Now — what was going on with the Bucovinans ahead?

However much he didn't want to, he had to find out. He couldn't very well stay right here and carve out a one-man realm sandwiched between Bottero's and Zgomot's. Since the Lenelli wanted him dead for sure, he had to hope the Bucovinans didn't. How much fancy talking would he need to do?

The answer turned out to be — none. When he got back to the camp, he found Rautat and the rest of the natives still sawing wood. They'd hardly moved from where they were lying when he slipped away. He hadn't expected his magic to work that well. Of course, he hadn't expected it to clobber him, either.

Next interesting question was, could he wake them up again? If he couldn't, he would have to throw them into the wagon and get out of there as best he could. But Rautat's eyes opened when Hasso shook him.

"What's going on?" the Bucovinan said, and then, seeing how light the sky was, "Lavtrig! Is it daytime? I was supposed to take a watch in the night, wasn't I?"

"I don't know. I don't keep track of that," Hasso said. They didn't give him night watches. They didn't trust him not to desert to the Lenelli — and they had reason not to. Fortunately, they didn't know for sure what good reason they had.

Rautat scrambled to his feet. "Did anybody keep watch in the night? Doesn't look like it. We're all asleep!" He started shaking his countrymen. As he did, he went on, "Did the Lenello doglegs use a spell on us? You could've just walked off, and we never would've known the difference. Or were you asleep, too?"

"Till a little while ago," Hasso answered. The spell had got him, too. That it was his own spell hadn't occurred to Rautat. Damn good thing, too, the German thought.

The other Bucovinans woke up as readily as Rautat had. But how long would they have gone on sleeping if Hasso hadn't got Rautat moving? He had no idea. "Where are the Lenelli, anyway?" Dumnez asked as he ambled off to take a leak behind a tree.

"Somewhere over that rise," Hasso and Rautat answered together.

"Then we don't have to worry about them right away," Peretsh said. "Let's eat breakfast." That was such a good idea, nobody said a word against it. Hasso ate hard bread and an onion — a funny breakfast, but any food was better than none, as he'd found out too often in Russia. He washed it down with lousy Bucovinan beer. If he knew anything at all about brewing, he could have made a fortune among the Lenelli or a bigger fortune in Bucovin.

He started digging holes in the road, filling them in, and running lengths of fuse off to the side. Yeah, he'd tried to desert, but his magic seemed to have covered his tracks. The other side didn't want him. This side did. Even if he didn't much want it, it looked like his best bet — his only bet — right now.

"What are you doing?" Rautat asked. "You aren't putting any gunpowder in those holes."

"I know." Hasso started digging another one.

"A hole in the ground won't hurt anybody, even with a fuse running off from it."

"I know," Hasso said again.

"I should have cut your throat in the pit and saved myself the aggravation," Rautat opined. "Do you have some kind of reason for doing this the way you are?"

"Ja." Hasso went on digging without another word.

The air Rautat blew out through his lips made a whuffling noise. "Will you tell a poor dumb Grenye savage what your brilliant reason is?"

Hasso realized he'd pushed it as far as he could. When Bucovinans talked like that, they were only half kidding. The other half was all pain and rage. They didn't want to think they were as stupid and backward as the Lenelli made them out to be. They didn't want to, but they had trouble thinking anything else. When they made those jokes about themselves, you'd better not agree, not if you were big and blond.

So Hasso said, "You aren't dumb. But the Lenelli think Grenye are. You know that. I saw that." He wanted to remind Rautat he wasn't what he looked like.

"Well, sure," the underofficer said. "But what's the point of the holes?"

"I want the Lenelli to see dug-up places in the road. I want them to see fuses, even burning fuses," Hasso answered. "I want them to see that none of that does anything. Then they forget about it. They think, Stupid Grenye try to make magic, and of course it doesn't work. Then they don't worry about dug-up places or fuses any more. You follow?"

He wasn't just kissing Rautat's ass — the Bucovinan was plenty smart. And, after frowning for a few seconds, Rautat started to laugh. "Yeah, I get it! Bugger me blind if I don't! One of these times, they won't be just dug-up places. They'll be jars of gunpowder. And the Lenelli won't even care — till too late!"

"That's it," Hasso agreed.

Rautat came over to him, pulled him down so their faces were on a level, and kissed him on both cheeks like a Frenchman. Rautat had been eating onions, too, and hadn't cleaned his teeth any more recently than Hasso had. They were odorous kisses. Hasso didn't care. He was glad to get them. But if he'd kissed the Bucovinan, he would have felt like Judas.

"So we don't drive forward, then?" Dumnez had the wagon ready to go. "We drive back instead?"

"That's right," Hasso said.

"They'll think we were scouts or something, or maybe a crazy merchant because of the wagon," Rautat said.

One of the other Bucovinans pointed west, toward the rise. "Here come some of the bastards!" he called.

"Let's get out of here!" Rautat said.

That was a wonderful order. Hasso was sure he couldn't have put it better himself. "When we get over the next rise, we can make some more fake holes," he said. "Someone ought to stay behind to light fuses for them. I do it if you want — there are bushes to hide in."

"No, I'll let Gunoiul take care of it." Rautat pointed to one of the Bucovinan escorts. "We can't afford to lose you if anything goes wrong."

We can't afford to have you go back to the Lenelli, either. Rautat didn't say that. Hasso thought he heard it even so. Rautat was right to worry, too; Hasso would have gone back to Bottero's men if only they would have taken him. Since they wouldn't, he was stuck on this side.

He was, he feared, stuck on the losing side. No matter what he showed the Bucovinans, there was only one of him. All the Lenelli had several hundred years' worth of technology the natives didn't — no matter how hard they were working to get it.

And the Lenelli had magic, and the Grenye couldn't match that no matter what they did. So the big blonds insisted, and Hasso hadn't seen anything to make him think they were wrong.

"Well? So what?" he muttered in German. Rautat gave him a quizzical look. He pretended he didn't notice. It wasn't as if he hadn't fought in a losing war before. Any German who'd been on the Eastern Front knew all about a losing war: knew more about it than anybody in this world was likely to. Hell, any German who'd lived under a rain of Allied bombs that only got worse and worse knew all about a losing war.

Maybe the Bucovinans were doomed to go under. The Reich had turned out to be. But, like the Reich, they could sure make their foes remember they'd been in a fight.

All of his escorts joined him in digging holes in the road east of the next rise. They had fun running lengths of fuse into the undergrowth off to either side of the dirt track. Gunoiul grinned because he was the one who got to stay behind and light some of those fuses.

"Don't let 'em catch you, now," Rautat warned him. "We don't want them knowing what we know." Hasso beamed at him in pleased surprise. Somebody who understood what security was all about!

"Don't worry about me," Gunoiul said. "I don't want those whoresons nabbing me, either — and they won't. I'll catch up with you tonight if I can't do it any quicker than that."

The wagon and the riders with it retreated farther east still. Hasso kept looking back over his shoulder. His companions and he were moving faster than the Lenelli. The filled-in holes in the road and the lengths of cord that ran from them confused the invaders out of the west, anyhow. Maybe they made them wary. Hasso could hope so. He and the natives had done all that digging to give the Lenelli the willies.

To give them the willies for a little while, anyhow. Then the big blonds would decide it was all a big bluff, one more weird, useless thing the barbarians did to try to scare them. And they would stop paying attention to filled-in holes and to cords that ran from them, even if the cords sizzled and smoked. Once they stopped paying attention — well, that was the time to show them they shouldn't have.

And once a bunch of Lenelli went sky-high, they would never be able to trust any filled-in hole in the ground with a cord again. They would have to treat all of them as real, even if most of them wouldn't be. Dummy minefields served the same purpose in Hasso's world. A few lying signs could slow down a whole armored division. He'd seen it happen.

"Grenye peasants back in the Lenello kingdoms can make these holes, too," he remarked to Rautat. "The Lenelli cannot — will not — trust their own roads."

Rautat laughed. "You're full of evil notions, aren't you?"

"I try," Hasso said modestly.

"Yes, you do." Rautat eyed him again. "If you aren't careful, you know, you'll have us trusting you in spite of everything."

"No! You wouldn't do that!" Hasso exclaimed, as if it were the worst thing he could think of. All the Bucovinans thought he was a funny fellow. How much would they be laughing if they knew he'd tried to bail out the night before? Not so very much, he feared.

Rautat ordered a halt after they made it over the next low swell of ground. "If the blonds come after us, we'll go on," he said. "But if they don't, we'll wait here for Gunoiul."

None of the Bucovinans argued. "Sounds good," Hasso said. Rautat gave him a hooded look that he understood too late. His position in the chain of command was ambiguous, to put it mildly. What kind of rank badge did an important collaborator wear? When it came to gunpowder, Rautat had to listen to him — he was the expert. When it came to tactics, the way it did here, the native could choose for himself. He didn't need Hasso butting in.

They waited. No Lenelli came over the crest of the hill to the west. After an hour or so, Gunoiul popped out of the bushes. The little dark man was grinning from ear to ear. "You should have heard them! You should have seen them!" he said.

"Well? Tell us the story," Rautat urged, as he must have known he was supposed to.

"The big blond bastards just kind of poked at the holes at first — made sure they weren't horse traps, you know," Gunoiul said. "Then I started lighting the, uh, fuses." He glanced toward Hasso, who'd given him his technical vocabulary. "The Lenelli saw the fire and smoke going through the grass, and they started having puppies. It was the funniest thing you ever saw. They were yelling and pointing and carrying on like you wouldn't believe."

All the Bucovinans laughed. Nothing they liked better than discomfited Lenelli. "Did they send soldiers after you?" Dumnez asked.

"They sure did," Gunoiul said. "I could have shot a couple of them, too, easy as you please. But I made a scary noise instead" — he went "Woooo!" on a high, wailing note — "and got out of there."

"Good!" Hasso punched him in the shoulder, the way he would have with a soldier on the Eastern Front who'd done something unexpected and clever. They wanted to spook the Lenelli here, and Gunoiul had found a new way to do it.

"Well, after that they didn't want to go very fast, let me tell you," the Bucovinan continued. "I didn't have any trouble staying ahead of them and lighting more fuses."

"That's what we wanted, by Lavtrig's curly beard," Rautat said. "And now that you're back, we want to get out of here in case you stirred up an even bigger hornets' nest than you think."

Hasso would have said that if Rautat hadn't. The Wehrmacht officer figured there was a pretty good chance the Lenelli were well and truly stirred. He also figured the filled-in holes and smoking, crackling fuses had only so much to do with it. Bottero's men knew he was around, even if Rautat didn't know they knew. And the Lenelli wanted him… no, not dead or alive. They wanted him dead or dead.

As he rode off toward the northeast, he wondered whether he could escape to some other Lenello kingdom than Bottero's. That way, he would have a chance to live among folk who looked like him and who thought more like him than the Bucovinans did. But when would he get that kind of chance? And even if he did, weren't all the Lenelli likely to reckon him a renegade now?

Besides, some other Lenello kingdom wouldn't have Velona in it. There was only one of her. That there was one of her seemed more than miracle enough.

If he couldn't have Velona, how much difference did it make whether he lived among Lenelli or Grenye? And so…

"I think maybe you truly are Lord Zgomot's man," Rautat said out of the blue. Hasso started to laugh — who said the small, swarthy men couldn't work magic? Rautat, not surprisingly, didn't get it. "What's so funny?" he demanded.

"Nothing," Hasso said — nothing he wanted to talk about, anyhow. "I think I am truly Lord Zgomot's man, too." Dammit, he added, but only to himself.

The dreams came back two nights later. He'd been free of them for months, and thought they were gone for good. No such luck. As he lay asleep, wrapped in a blanket by a fire that had guttered down to crimson embers, he felt someone stalking him through the inside of his own head. I ought to work out a spell to put a stop to this, he thought, which would have been wonderful one of these days — but not now.

Patient as a wolf chasing an elk, the Lenello wizard pursued him through slumber and finally caught him. Hasso was anything but surprised to find it was Aderno. "What do you want?" the German asked.

"What are you up to?" Aderno returned.

"None of your business, not after you try to kill me twice," Hasso said.

"It's my king's business, by the goddess." When Aderno named her, Hasso saw Velona behind him. "It's my folk's business."

"I am no part of your folk. You make that plain enough. When I come to you, all you want to do is murder me."

"What are we supposed to do with you?" Yes, that was Velona. Seeing her, hearing her even in dreams tore at Hasso from the inside out. "You're up to something with the cursed Grenye."

"You Lenelli don't want me anymore." Hasso didn't waste time denying it.

"King Bottero tried to ransom you. The savage who runs Bucovin wouldn't take his money," Velona replied.

What she said was true — and also missed the point. Lord Zgomot was a decent, capable, worried, rather gray little man doing the best job he knew how in a predicament Hasso wouldn't have wished on his worst enemy. To the Lenelli, he was only a Grenye. He would have been only a Grenye to Hasso, too, but for the fortunes — and misfortunes — of war.

"Sorry. I can't do anything about it," Hasso said. "Then you try to kill me. Should I love you after that?" He started bleeding inside again. He still wanted to love Velona, and wanted her to love him.

"We were denying you to the enemy," Aderno said.

He made perfect military sense. He also made Hasso want to wring his neck. The combination reminded the German of some of his own country's less clever policies during the war. He said, "When you try to kill me you turn me into an enemy."

"If you're a dead enemy, it doesn't matter," the wizard said.

If the Reich had knocked the Russians out in six weeks, nothing else would have mattered. Since they hadn't, they had to try to deal with the consequences of that failure — only to discover they couldn't. Now Aderno and Velona were trying to deal with the consequences of failing to kill Hasso. They could try again — and they might succeed if they did.

"You are up to something with the Grenye." Velona made that sound even more disgusting and outrageous than sleeping with a little swarthy woman.

"They could kill me, and they don't," Hasso answered stolidly. "More than I can say for some people."

"Killing is better than renegades deserve. Killing is much better than renegade wizards deserve." Velona was as implacable as an earthquake. Her dream-self turned to Aderno. "Now!"

Hasso had thought his own modest sorcerous abilities were what had kept him from harm when the two of them struck at him in Falticeni. Maybe those abilities helped, but he'd forgotten Falticeni lay at the heart of Bucovin: the place where, for whatever reason, Lenello magic was weakest. Here near the western border…

He didn't just scream himself awake, as he had in Lord Zgomot's palace. He puked his guts out, as if he'd eaten bad fish. He shat himself, too. He thought his ears were bleeding, but he was in too much more immediate torment to stick a finger in one of them and find out. When he had to piss, he pissed dark. What had they done to him? Everything but kill him, plainly. While the fit was going on, he almost wished they had.

Rautat and the other Bucovinans stared at him while he writhed and heaved. "I'd heard about this at the palace," the underofficer said to his comrades — Hasso heard his voice as if from a million kilometers away. "It wasn't so bad there." He was right. Nothing could have been as bad as this. Hasso would rather have stood out in the open during a volley of Katyushas than go through this — and if that didn't say everything that needed saying, what could?

The only good thing about the fit was that it didn't last long. Once it passed, Hasso lay on the ground, spent and gasping like a fish out of water. "Give me a little beer," he choked out. Dumnez poured him some. He didn't swallow it, but used it to rinse his mouth. It couldn't get rid of all the foul taste; some of his vomit had gone up his nose. "Where is a stream?" he asked. "Need to wash."

"Back over there." Rautat pointed. "Will anything more happen to you?"

"I hope not," Hasso said.

His drawers were ruined beyond hope. He used them to wipe himself as clean as he could, then threw them away. From now on, he would be bare-assed under his trousers. Well, the world wouldn't end. He was battered but almost unbowed when he came back to the embers of the fire.

"Look at the moon. It's still the middle of the night," Rautat said. "We're going back to sleep. Can you do the same?"

"I don't know. I find out," Hasso answered grimly. Aderno and Velona hadn't attacked him twice in one night. Did that mean they couldn't? He could only hope so.

In what was plainly meant for consolation, Rautat said, "Soon, now, you'll give the Lenelli worse than they just gave you."

And it did console, where it wouldn't have before. That only went to show how badly abused Hasso was. "I will," he said, and he really meant it for the first time since his capture.

"Get moving, you fools!" a soldier shouted. The word for fools literally meant donkey heads; Bucovinan was not without its charms. The small, swarthy warrior went on, "The accursed Lenelli are on their way — lots of them!"

"How about that?" Rautat said, and then, to Hasso, "If lots of those big blond bastards are coming, this is the time to use the gunpowder for real, yes?"

"Yes," Hasso answered. He hadn't exactly chosen Bucovin. He'd had the choice made for him. Bottero's followers wanted him dead. Well, if they thought that was what they wanted now, he was going to give them some real reasons to feel that way. "We dig real holes. We put jars of gunpowder into them. We light the fuses."

"Boom!" Rautat said. Hasso nodded. Rautat continued, "And they won't be expecting it. They think it's all a bunch of Grenye crap." He laughed. "We'll show them what's crap, all right."

"One thing," Hasso said. Rautat raised a questioning eyebrow. Hasso pointed at himself. "I light the fuses this time."

He waited for Rautat to swell up and turn purple. He waited for the Bucovinan to say he was too valuable to do something like that — which meant he couldn't be trusted to do it. He had all his arguments ready. He was braced to threaten to put a spell on the powder so it wouldn't go off unless he lit it himself. If they provoked him enough, he was ready to try to cast that spell.

But Rautat only nodded. "You've earned the right. We'll find a good spot, with thick growth by the side of the road. That way, you'll have an easy time getting away, same as Gunoiul did."

"You really aim to let me do this?" Hasso couldn't hide his surprise.

Rautat nodded again. "I really do. If you aren't loyal to us now, you never will be. Either way, it's about time we found out." He turned to the rest of the Bucovinans who'd traveled west from Falticeni. "Come on, you lazy lugs! This is what we came here for. We've played all the games. Now we give it to the Lenelli, the way we've wanted to give it to them ever since they got here. So dig, curse you!"

They dug like moles. If he'd told them to dig to China, or whatever lay on the other side of this world, Hasso thought they would have done that. The hope of getting their own back against the Lenelli fired them like burning gasoline.

Was this how the Russians felt when they started winning after the Wehrmacht pushed them back more than a thousand kilometers across their own country?

Maybe this was even fiercer, because the Grenye had been retreating not for a year and a half but for generations. They must have wondered if they would ever get the chance to go forward. But here it was… if the gunpowder worked.

Rautat talked to the soldier who warned of the advancing Lenelli. Not too much later, he talked to another Bucovinan, this one an officer sweating in a helmet and mailshirt. Rautat pointed toward Hasso several times. He pounded his fist into his palm once. He might be only a Feldwebel, but he acted like a general.

He got away with it, too — damned if he didn't. The Bucovinan officer nodded, sketched a salute, and hurried away. Rautat grinned till the top of his head threatened to fall off. He also nodded to Hasso. If he hadn't been the Official Bucovinan in Charge of the Dangerous and Important Blond Person, he never could have pulled that one off, and he knew it.

Hasso placed the fuses in the jars. Next time, he would come with jars already fused. You couldn't think of everything at once, not when you were reinventing a whole art all by yourself. The Bucovinans watched him intently. If they got away and he didn't, they would at least be able to go on with what he'd already shown them. Whether they'd be able to do anything more… wouldn't be his worry, not in that case.

He hid in some bushes off to the side of the road. A lot of the fuses ran toward those bushes, but he wasn't too worried about that. For one thing, there were some dummies that went other places. And, for another, by now the Lenelli ought to think all the fuses were nothing but a big bluff. They wouldn't pay any attention to them — till too late.

Rautat left him some hard bread and dried meat, a jar of beer, and, most important of all, a couple of sticks of something a lot like punk. It glowed red and slowly smoldered without burning away in nothing flat. "Good luck," the Bucovinan said, and then, "Want me to hang around with you?"

"Whatever you want." After what had happened while they slept, Hasso didn't have any trouble sounding casual when he answered the question. "I'm not running back to the Lenelli." No matter how much he might regret it, he was telling the truth there, too.

Rautat plucked a hair from his beard, considering. At last, he said, "Maybe I'd better. I don't think you're any trouble, but if it turns out I'm wrong I don't want to have to explain to Drepteaza and Lord Zgomot how I left you all by yourself."

"Fair enough," Hasso said. From the underofficer's perspective, it was. You did need to be careful about relying on a turncoat. The German felt he had to ask, "Can you stay down and keep quiet?" Those talents were more useful in warfare in his world than they were here. Most fighting in this world was right out in the open. How long would that last if gunpowder caught on?

"I'll do it. I already thought about that," Rautat said.

"Good. Start now, because here they come," Hasso said, and hunkered down in the bushes. The first Lenello scouts had just topped the swell of ground to the west. Rautat got as flat as if a Stalin panzer had run over him. He didn't let out a peep. He barely even breathed.

Hasso didn't get quite so low as that: he needed to see out. One of the blond outriders stared at a dummy hole with a dummy fuse running from it. Another one said something to him. They both laughed and rode on. They were convinced it was just the Grenye savages trying to play games with their minds. Hasso wished he'd left somebody to light some of the dummy fuses. Too late to worry about it now.

Much too late — here came Bottero's main body, red flags flying. This had to be a bigger force than the one that was plundering Bucovinan villages. Hasso wondered why, but he didn't wonder for long. They're after me, he thought. It was a compliment of sorts, but one he would gladly have done without.

On rode the Lenelli: big fair men in mail and surcoats on horses big enough to bear their weight. Soon Hasso could hear the thud of hoofbeats, the jingle of harness and armor, and even the odd snatch of conversation: "Oh, that? Don't worry about it. Just the Bucovinans, trying to make us jumpy."

"Dumbass barbarians," another Lenello said.

"When?" Rautat's question was a tiny thread of whisper, inaudible from more than a couple of meters away.

"Soon," Hasso whispered back. He wanted about a third of the enemy army to pass over the real gunpowder pots before he lit the fuses. His guess was that that would cause the most confusion — and the most casualties.

He swung a stick of punk through the air to get it to glow red. Then he touched it to the fuses, one after another. From the ground beside him, Rautat grinned wolfishly. Trails of smoke streaked toward the burning pots.

A couple of Lenelli pointed to them. Others snickered and shook their heads, as if to say those didn't mean anything, either. Up till today, they would have been right. The pots buried in the road blew up, one after another.

They didn't just hold gunpowder. They had rocks and sharp bits of metal in there, too — homemade shrapnel. They gutted horses and flayed knights' lightly armored legs. Some fragments hit men in the face. Some managed to punch right through mail.

And the noise was like the end of the world, especially to men and beasts who'd never heard the like and weren't expecting it. Hasso was closer than he might have been, but still used to much worse. But even Rautat, who'd heard gunpowder go off before, let out an involuntary yip of alarm. The Lenelli and their horses screamed as if damned.

The big blonds in back of the explosions wheeled their mounts and rode off to the west as fast as they could go. The ones in front… They don't know whether to shit or go blind, Hasso thought happily. They milled about, afraid to advance and even more afraid to retreat.

Then Bucovinans started sliding forward and shooting at them. Normally, Bottero's men would have driven off the archers annoying them without even breaking a sweat. Here, the bowmen were just enough to tip the Lenelli into panic.

"Magic!" somebody screamed. "The goddess-cursed Grenye do have magic!"

They fled then, with no shame and in no order at all. Had more Bucovinans and better-mounted Bucovinans pursued, they might have bagged most of that leading detachment of the army. Next time, Hasso thought. No matter how much you wanted to, you couldn't do everything perfectly the first time around.

But he'd done plenty. The way Rautat sprang up and kissed him on both cheeks proved that. So did the way the Lenelli ran. From now on, they'd piss themselves whenever they saw a cord running to some freshly turned earth. Professionally, Hasso was happy. Personally… He'd worry about that later. When he had time. If he ever did.