The Golden Shrine

the vapors, or is this something we need to worry about?”

Marcovefa looked as thoughtful as if she were fully clothed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t feel this, but I haven’t looked for it, either.”

“Maybe you should,” Hamnet said.

“Yes.” She nodded, which made her jiggle. Hamnet couldn’t pretend not to notice, but he didn’t dwell on it, either. There was a time and a place for everything. Ulric’s face might have been carved from stone. Marcovefa swung around in a circle, as if she too were casting about for a scent. When she came to the northwest, she stopped, looking startled.

“Something?” Hamnet and Ulric asked together.

“Something,” she agreed. “Something not good. Something very not good.”

Her grammar was shaky, but Hamnet understood what she meant. “What are those bastards trying to do to us?” he growled. Suddenly even the damp heat of the day seemed suspicious and unnatural. Maybe he was starting at shadows—but maybe he wasn’t. With the Rulers, he couldn’t be sure.

Before Marcovefa could answer, a Bizogot woman named Faileuba came up to the shaman from atop the Ice and said, “I don’t feel good.” She didn’t sound good; her voice was a sickly whine. She didn’t look good, either. Her face had a hectic flush, and she swayed on her feet.

Marcovefa set the palm of her hand on Faileuba’s forehead, then jerked it away again. “Fever,” she said. “Very much fever.”

A big blond man called Eberulf lurched toward Marcovefa, too. “Something’s wrong with me,” he muttered. Before Marcovefa could touch him, he keeled over. He looked the way Faileuba did, only worse.

“Disease?” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Or sending?”

“Sending,” Ulric answered without the least hesitation. “Has to be. Everything fits together too well. And . . . Do you remember the Rock Ptarmigans?”

“Yes.” Hamnet wished he didn’t. The Rulers had destroyed the whole western clan with a sorcerous pestilence the year before. What their dead encampment looked like when Trasamund’s band found it was the stuff of nightmares.

Marcovefa said, “Yes,” too. She nodded to Count Hamnet. “Go get Liv and Audun. I don’t care if they’re screwing—go get them. I need their help. This is as very bad a magic as I have seen from the Rulers.”

“Right,” Hamnet muttered. He didn’t know why Marcovefa had picked him to run her errand—to rub salt in his wounds? But whatever he felt would have to wait . . . unless he wanted to start feeling the way Faileuba and Eberulf did. He hurried back to the hut his former lover and the Raumsdalian wizard shared.

They were both outside it now, looking worried as they tried to tend to a couple of sick Bizogots. “I don’t care what Marcovefa wants—we can’t come right now.” Liv sounded harried. “I don’t know what these poor people have. Whatever it is, it’s nasty.”

“It’s worse than nasty. It’s sorcery from the Rulers,” Hamnet said. “Ulric thinks it’s the same sorcery that wiped out the Rock Ptarmigans. So does Marcovefa. She says she needs your help.”

“Good God!” Audun Gilli exclaimed. Was he shocked by remembering what had happened to the Rock Ptarmigans or by the idea that Marcovefa might need anybody’s help? Count Hamnet wasn’t sure which was more startling, either.

“Well . . .” Liv seemed to think that was a complete sentence. She nodded to Audun. “What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing,” he answered. The Bizogots they were trying to treat protested feebly. Audun spoke to Hamnet in Raumsdalian, which they were unlikely to understand: “Best thing we can do for these poor buggers is block that sorcery . . . if we’re able to. Marcovefa needs help? God!” So that was what was on his mind. Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t pretend he was surprised.

Several Bizogots called out to Liv and Audun as they hurried along. The pangs seemed to be hitting more mammoth-herders. Seeing people around him suffering, Count Hamnet examined himself for symptoms. How could you help doing something like that? He felt fine. A heartbeat later, he felt guilty for feeling fine.

Liv blinked when she saw Marcovefa. Hamnet had forgotten she wore no tunic—and if that didn’t prove the Rulers’ magic had him worried, what the demon would? Ulric Skakki was still on his feet, and seemed fine. Maybe the Rulers were aiming at Bizogots alone. Maybe it was nothing but coincidence.

“What do you need from us?” Liv asked Marcovefa.

“Do you know the yellow stone called lynxpiss?” Marcovefa answered.

“Yes,” Liv said, at the same time as Audun answered, “It isn’t really lynx piss, you know. It’s a stone like any other.”

Marcovefa’s nostrils flared. “I asked of it by its name, not by its nature. Use that lynxpiss stone against the fever. And if you have a lodestone, it will also help ward against perils of death. Quick, now—no time to waste.”

“What will you be doing?” Liv asked.

“I will punish those who send this wicked shamanry,” Marcovefa replied. Then, for one of the rare times since Hamnet had known her, she hesitated. “If I can,” she added. “Here, for once, the Rulers are almost as strong as they think they are. This is shamanry different from anything I ever saw up above the Glacier.”

Liv and Audun started arguing about where they might have stowed the lynxpiss stone. Audun dashed off. He returned in triumph with a transparent yellow crystal. Liv kissed him. Hamnet Thyssen did a slow burn. Didn’t she have more self-respect than that? His own current lover stood there bare-breasted, but that was different. Hamnet might not have thought so till Liv kissed Audun, but he did from then on.

“A lodestone,” Liv said. “Does anyone have a lodestone?”

“I have a little one,” Ulric Skakki said. “Here.” He pulled a small, rusty-looking stone from a pouch on his belt and tossed it to Liv. The shaman deftly caught it.

“Why have you got a lodestone?” Hamnet asked.

Ulric only shrugged. “Well, they’re fun to play with. And they’re interesting. And you never can tell when something will come in handy. It’s like a holdout knife, you know? You can go for years and years without ever needing a holdout knife. But when you need one, you’ll need it bad.”

Liv and Audun were using the lodestone and the yellow crystal—what was it really? tourmaline?—on a sick Bizogot. The Rock Ptarmigans’ shamans must have tried something like that when their people fell ill. Much good it had done them. Count Hamnet wished that last handful of words hadn’t crossed his mind.

But he couldn’t pay attention to Liv and Audun, or even to his own worries, for long, because Marcovefa said, “Hamnet—I need your help.”

He started. “Whatever I can give you,” he said.

“Your strength. Come stand by me. Set your hand on my bare skin. . . .”Marcovefa suddenly laughed. “There? Well, if you want. It will do. I can draw from you. I try not to take too much.”

What happens if you do? Hamnet wondered. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe, if she took too much, he would just quietly fall over dead. He shrugged. So what? It was an easier end than most of the ones he could imagine.

He could, or thought he could, feel strength flowing out of him and into her. No—out of him and through her. Her right arm speared out toward the northwest. She might have been aiming at an enemy warrior. She might have been, but the range here was far longer and the effort required far more.

Because she was drawing on Hamnet’s strength, he could sense some of what she was doing with it. The link between them was stranger but in a way more intimate than when their bodies joined in the usual fashion. He felt her long-range grapple with the Rulers’ wizards. They were trying to down her with the same sickness that had felled so many Bizogots. In his mind’s eye, he saw the sickness as a greenish miasma. Whether that had anything to do with reality, he couldn’t have said.

Marcovefa herself might have been the sun: not the sun of the Bizogot steppe, not even the sun of Nidaros, but the hot, fierce sun of the southwestern desert where the Manche bandits skulked. If she could burn through that ugly, roiling miasma . . . It would be like a fresh breeze blowing away the nasty, humid air that oppressed the encampment.

He wondered if the vile weather and the vile sickness were connected. One more thing that wouldn’t have surprised him.

But the roiling green stuff he imagined he saw didn’t want to burn away. Indeed, it clung ever tighter to Marcovefa. If it could seize her before she could dispel it . . . He didn’t know what would happen then. He did know it wouldn’t be good.

Without being asked, Ulric Skakki took his left hand. The adventurer’s strength flowed through Hamnet and into Marcovefa. No, the shaman from atop the Glacier wasn’t mocking the Rulers and their wizardry any more. Maybe this wasn’t the fight of her life, but it was the toughest one she’d had since descending to the plains the Bizogots roamed.

Maybe Ulric’s strength tilted the balance. Before, Marcovefa had struggled to hold her own against the Rulers’ sorcery. Now she blazed brighter and brighter in Hamnet’s imagination—if that was what it was. The choking fog surrounding her, clutching at her . . . Did it start to fade, or did it draw back as if in fear of the spiritual glow that came from her? Hamnet had trouble putting it into words, but both amounted to the same thing.

“Ha!” she cried aloud. Across however many miles it was, Hamnet Thyssen felt the Rulers’ wizards flinch away from her. That cry might have been Trasamund’s fearsome two-handed sword, swung with all the furious power the Bizogot jarl had in him. “Ha!” Marcovefa said again. The enemy wizards broke and fled her strength—those who could. In much more mundane tones, Marcovefa told Hamnet, “You can let go of my tit now, thank you very much.”

He did. “You broke them,” he said.

“Yes. I did.” But she didn’t take it for granted, the way she once had. “You gave me good help—both of you did. And I thank you for it.” Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she crumpled to the ground.

VII

ONLY TWO BIZOGOTS died of the sorcerous plague. Audun Gilli and Liv did all they could; Count Hamnet thought they succeeded better than anyone could have expected. They weren’t satisfied. Wizards seldom were satisfied with anything short of perfection.

Marcovefa was not only dissatisfied, she was also furious—and more than a little frightened. “They could have killed me,” she told Hamnet that evening in the hut the two of them shared. “They should have killed me. If they made their plague strike me first, maybe they kill us all, the way they killed the Rock Ptarmigans.”

He nodded. “That’s what enemies try to do, you know. I’m glad they didn’t think to make you sick first—or maybe they couldn’t at long range.”

“Maybe.” She sounded dubious, and still very angry. “They aren’t supposed to be able to do that to me!”

Hamnet Thyssen sighed. “Everybody except you has been saying, ‘The Rulers are dangerous,’ all along. You’re the one who’s been going, ‘No, no, they’re easy. I can beat them with one hand tied behind my back.’ ”

“And I’ve done it, too!” Marcovefa’s pride flared. “Except when I got hit in the head, I’ve done it every time.”

“A good thing, too. We’d be ruined if you hadn’t,” Count Hamnet said. “But even if you have beaten them every time, it won’t always be easy. There are lots of them, and only