After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove Page A

here,” Scanno said. “By the goddess, it is! I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I said a plague on it - and here I am.”
    “What about Bucovin?” Hasso said. “Bucovin not so small. Not so...” He looked for a word, and was glad to find one without needing help from the wizard: “Not so easy.”
    “Bucovin had time to figure things out, see?” Scanno said. “The little Grenye kingdoms, the ones by the sea, they went down bam, bam, bam like nobody’s business. They never knew what hit ‘em. But Bucovin watched and started figuring stuff out.”
    “Like what?” Hasso asked. “Bucovin full of Grenye. No magic in Bucovin. How to fight against Lenello wizards?”
    “Magic? Magic - “ Scanno spat on the straw-strewn dirt floor. “That for magic! That’s about what it’s worth.”
    “Shall I sing you up a case of boils, wretch?” No, Aderno wouldn’t keep his mouth shut even when he needed to. “Shall I show you what magic’s worth?”
    “You’ve got emerods on your tongue, Turdface,” Scanno said. Hasso had spent enough time in Lenello barracks to have no trouble with the insult. Scanno aimed a shaky finger in Aderno’s direction. “I knew what you were before you started bragging. I could smell it, I could. Do your worst. You’re not such a big pile of shit as you think you are.”
    Holding Aderno back after that would have been impossible. Hasso didn’t even try. The wizard snarled his spell - plainly one he knew well - rather than singing it. “Skin break, skin bubble, skin burn!” he cried, and aimed his finger the way Hasso would have aimed his Schmeisser: with purpose and with malice.
    “Transform! Transform! Transform!”
    And nothing happened.
    Aderno stared at Scanno, who was drunk and surly but not disfigured. He stared at his finger as Hasso would have stared at the submachine gun after a misfire. Hasso could hope to clear a jam. What did you do when magic misfired?
    The first thing Aderno did was try the spell he’d used on Hasso when they met in the courtyard of Castle Svarag. He sketched a star in the air between himself and Scanno. Hasso saw him do it, but didn’t see the star glow on its own, as it had when the wizard did it with him.
    Aderno did some more staring, this time at his own index finger. He tried the spell with Hasso, who saw the same golden star he had before. After Aderno made sure he had, the wizard shook his head. “The magic seems to be in order. But - “
    “It doesn’t work,” Hasso finished for him.
    “It doesn’t work,” Aderno agreed. “And I don’t know why not. This miserable sot has no magic, used no magic. And yet my spell would not bite. And I don’t know why.” A German engineer couldn’t have sounded any more upset if he’d watched a book fall up instead of down.
    “Told you so, know-it-all,” Scanno jeered.
    Lenello magic, from what Hasso had heard, grew weak and erratic in Bucovin. Scanno was right here, but Aderno’s magic didn’t want to work against him, either. What did that mean? Hasso had no idea. Plainly, neither did Aderno.
    V
    Aderno wanted to take Scanno back to Castle Drammen to experiment on him. The wizard didn’t put it in quite those words, but that was what it boiled down to. Scanno, not surprisingly, didn’t want to go.
    “You aren’t going to play games with me,” he said.
    “It’s for the good of the Lenelli,” Aderno said.
    Scanno blew beer fumes in his face as he laughed. “Like I care!”
    “Come on,” Aderno said to Hasso. “We can get him there.”
    Hasso didn’t feel like fighting a drunk who was unlikely even to notice if he got hurt. He also didn’t want to wreck whatever chance they had of getting voluntary cooperation from Scanno. “Forget it,” he said in Lenello, so Scanno could follow. “We come back a different time.”
    “I wouldn’t come back here for half the gold in the treasury!” the wizard exclaimed.
    “Fine,” Hasso said. ‘ I come back a different time.”
    “You’re