"What are the bones for, if not manuring?" Yurgam asked.
Before Hasso could speak, Zgomot did: "I do not want to tell you, not yet. The fewer people who know, the better. The more things we learn, it seems, the more secrets we need to keep."
Hasso beamed. Sure as hell, Zgomot was starting to see what security was all about. He might be a mindblind Grenye, but he was one damn sly mindblind Grenye. There'd almost been some security hiccups about gunpowder and dragon bones. If the Lord of Bucovin had anything to do with it, there would be no more. He learned from his mistakes.
That's more than Hitler ever did, Hasso thought.
And, if the dragon-bone amulets worked, how much would being mindblind matter in a few years? Oh, some. Magic would still be able to do things to the world, if not directly to people. Wizards would still be able to ride unicorns. Hasso grinned. He could ride one himself, as he'd proved. The Grenye still wouldn't be able to.
Yeah, magic would matter some. But it wouldn't mark enormous distinctions between one folk and another, the way it did now.
Equality. This is equality. Hasso hadn't had much use for it when he saw it in action — and in inaction — during the Weimar Republic. But he'd also seen that the Fuhrerprinzip had some flaws in practice. The Fuhrer led, the people followed — right over a goddamn cliff. Maybe making everybody as good as everybody else worked better.
He could hope so. In fact, he had to hope so. If the Lenelli had magic and the Grenye didn't, and if that magic stayed important, he feared the big blonds would win in the end no matter what he did.
Someone called his name through the echoing corridors of dreams: "Hasso! Hasso Pemsel!"
He tried to shape the ward spell again, this time in his sleep. He had some luck with that, anyhow: enough to let him wake up without waking up screaming. Once awake, he went to the door of his room and told one of the guards, "Ask Drepteaza to come here, please."
The winter before, a Bucovinan guardsman would have laughed in his face at the idea of bothering her in the middle of the night. This fellow nodded and said, "All right. If she chooses not to come, though, don't blame me."
"Fair enough," Hasso said. The guard set off down the corridor.
Drepteaza was yawning and rubbing her eyes when she came back with the soldier. "What is it?" she asked blurrily, around another yawn. "Something important, I expect." It had better be. She didn't say that — or need to.
"Maybe. I hope you are not angry at me." He led her into the room and shut the door behind them. "The Lenello wizard and the goddess are hunting me in dreams again."
"And so? What has that got to do with me?" No, Drepteaza wasn't awake yet, or thinking very fast. Then she remembered. The dim lamplight shadowing her face only made her smile look more crooked. "Oh. A woman will hold that away from you, for a night at least. A new way to tell me you care, eh?"
"Sorry," Hasso said. "Should I get someone like Leneshul? I don't much want her, but if you want me to use her for medicine and not bother you, I can do that."
Drepteaza started to laugh. "The really funny part is, I believe you when you say you don't much want her," she said. "What kind of fool am I, though, if I give you the chance to change your mind? I may not be at my best, but I'll try."
Hasso feared he wasn't at his best, either. Maybe they matched each other, because it turned out all right, or better than all right. "You are the best medicine," he said afterwards, stroking her cheek. "They should make you into syrup and put you in bottles."
She laughed again, on a startled note. "That's the most ridiculous sweet thing — or maybe the sweetest ridiculous thing — anyone ever told me."
"It's true," Hasso said.
"Ha!" Drepteaza replied, which wasn't a laugh at all. She yawned once more. "Try not to wiggle too much. I don't feel like going back to my room."
"You wiggle more than I do," Hasso said. From where the two of them ended up when they slept together, he thought that was true. He added, "Besides, tonight I don't wiggle at all," and mimed limp exhaustion.
"A likely story," Drepteaza said, but she closed her eyes and soon fell asleep. So did Hasso, and Aderno's wizardry didn't trouble him for the rest of the night.
The wagon full of dragon bones came into Falticeni the next morning. The driver had to fight his way through the narrow, winding, crowded streets to the palace. None of the locals knew what an important cargo he had. Thanks to the way the bone-hunters were chosen, the driver didn't fully understand that himself.
One look at some of the teeth and claws in the wagon told Hasso the bones were real. "Good," he said. "Now we go to work. We cut them up small, we make them into amulets."
"What are the amulets good for?" one of the Bucovinans asked.
Instead of answering straight out, Hasso came back with a question of his own: "Is King Bottero marching yet? Does anybody know?"
The wagon driver nodded. "He's marching, all right. He wasn't that far behind us when we left his realm. One of the border guards who passed us through said it was nice of us to manure our fields — the big blond pricks would get good crops out of them." The little swarthy man aimed an obscene gesture back toward the west. Then he noticed Hasso watching him. "Uh, no offense."
"It's all right. They are a bunch of big blond pricks," Hasso said.
"Then what does that make you?" Cheeky as a park sparrow, the Bucovinan grinned at him.
"Oh, I'm a big blond prick, too," Hasso answered easily. "But I'm a big blond prick with two differences."
"Yeah? What are they?" the driver asked, a split second in front of one of his pals.
"For one thing, I'm a foreign big blond prick, not a Lenello big blond prick. And I'm a big blond prick who's on your side."
When Lord Zgomot heard the invasion had begun, he started assembling his own army. Bucovin was a big, sprawling kingdom or lordship or whatever the hell the right name was. The natives sensibly laid up supplies here and there on the main routes around the realm so soldiers wouldn't starve as they came in to Falticeni. But, without the telegraph, without trains, without trucks, nothing happened as fast as Hasso wished it would.
He got a surprise of his own not long after the mobilization order went out. Into the tent city that was sprouting in front of Falticeni came perhaps a thousand men who marched with long pikes held straight up and down. They marched well, too — the pikes stayed vertical, and didn't dip and foul one another.
After seeing them come in, Hasso hurried back to Lord Zgomot. "They look good," he said. "Can they fight?"
"They have all fought before," the Lord of Bucovin answered. "They have never fought like this, but they have been drilling hard. They like being called Hedgehogs, by the way — that is what they named the regiment."
"Good for them," Hasso said. "If they don't keep Lenello knights off the catapults, no one does." That last was always possible, even if he would have preferred not to dwell on it. He went on, "How long are they working?"
"I pulled them together before you went off to my estate to try the catapults and the gunpowder shells," Zgomot answered. "When you described them, I thought, This is something we really can do. It does not take anything we did not already have — it is only a new way to use tools we already knew about."
"You did it without me, too." Hasso didn't know whether to be proud or worried. If the natives decided they could get along without him, would they knock him over the head and do just that?
"You were busy with other things. I thought we could manage this ourselves, and I turned out to be right," Zgomot said. "I hope they stay steady when the fighting starts, that is all."