He translated for them. Then he spoke to Ulric: “We’ve got a new complication, or an old complication back again.”
“Oldest cursed complication in the world—except for men and women diddling where they aren’t supposed to,” Ulric agreed. He paused. Seemingly of its own accord, his left eyebrow quirked upward. “Nothing personal, Your Grace.”
“Right. Nothing personal,” Count Hamnet said tightly. Was it his fault two of his women had diddled where they weren’t supposed to? (If you listened to them, the answer was yes. If you listened to Ulric Skakki, it was also yes. Hamnet didn’t want to listen to any of them, either in person or inside his own mind. With the enemy out there in front of him, he didn’t have to, either.)
That Ruler wasn’t alone. He was an outrider from a small troop of men. Seeing so many foes bearing down on them, they found no disgrace in fleeing. Their warrior’s code was stern, but not always senselessly so.
Riding deer were admirable beasts in many ways. They showed great endurance. Their antlers, even if blunter-tined than those of the deer near Hamnet’s castle, made useful weapons. All that said, they remained slower than horses. The mounted Bizogots and Raumsdalians soon gained on them.
The Rulers had found out about horses since coming down through the Gap into the world Hamnet knew—the world he’d long believed to be all the world there was. They kept looking back over their shoulders to gauge how much trouble they were in.
Before long, they started reaching for arrows. Their formidable bows outranged the ones Raumsdalians and Bizogots carried. That wasn’t the worry uppermost in Hamnet’s thoughts, though. “Have they got a wizard with them?” he called to Marcovefa.
“What?” she shouted back.
“Have—they—got—a—wizard—with—them?”
“Oh,” Marcovefa said, and then, “I don’t think so.”
Hamnet had to be content—or rather, discontented—with that. He strung his own bow and nocked an arrow. The Rulers began to shoot first. Even loosing arrows backward, they could hit from a distance their foes found impossible to match. A Bizogot swore when a shaft pierced the palm of his hand.
But, because horses were faster than riding deer, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians soon started shooting back with some hope of success. A wounded deer bounded away from the rest of the troop, its rider unable to control it. Another deer crashed to the ground. With luck, the Ruler it carried wouldn’t come through that unscathed. And an invader, hit in the neck as he turned back to shoot, slid off his mount and lay motionless.
Marcovefa began to sing in the saddle. Not so very long before, she wouldn’t have tried that. She was a better, more confident rider than she had been. And no wonder—till she came down from the top of the Glacier, she’d never imagined animals like horses and riding deer, let alone mounted ones.
The shaman pointed in the Rulers’ direction. She might not have known anything about riding deer till she came down onto the Bizogot steppe, but her magic now was plenty to send them mad. They started bucking and bounding over the dreary landscape, regardless of what the men on them wanted. The Rulers couldn’t get away, and they couldn’t fight back—the worst of both worlds.
But they wouldn’t give up. Several of the men who’d been bucked off their deer drew swords and stood back-to-back, ready to make the best fight they could. A couple of warriors who’d managed to hang on to their bows went on shooting at the Bizogots and Raumsdalians as if nothing were wrong.
“They’re tough buggers,” Ulric Skakki said, not without admiration, as he shot an enemy bowman from behind. He was not a sporting fighter, but he was a very effective one. “Almost makes you wish they were on our side.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Hamnet Thyssen growled. “It only makes me wish they were all back on the far side of the Gap where they belong.”
“Don’t hold your breath. Even if we somehow beat them down here, don’t hold your breath,” Ulric said. “They’re part of the mix now, I’m afraid. And the Gap won’t be what it is now for very much longer, either.”
“Huh?” Hamnet didn’t get an answer right away. He urged his horse up into a gallop so he could cut down an embattled warrior of the Rulers. But Ulric’s odd comment stayed in his mind. He asked the adventurer about it again after the fighting ended.
“What? D’you think I’m wrong?” Ulric said.
“How can I tell? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hamnet replied.
“No, eh? You’re dense today, aren’t you?” As usual, Ulric had charm.
“I must be,” Hamnet said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t waste time on you.”
That won him a grin. “You say the sweetest things,” Ulric Skakki told him. “Well, think about it a little. The Glacier is melting. That’s why we’ve got the Gap at all. What happens when the Glacier melts some more? The Gap won’t be this little thing where you can pee from one side to the other.” He exaggerated, but not enormously. “Pretty soon, it’ll be ten miles wide. Before too long, it’ll be a hundred miles wide. And when it is, we might as well call it the Highway instead of the Gap, because we won’t have a God-cursed chance of keeping anything from the other side out.”
“Oh,” Hamnet said. He plunged his sword into the soft loam to get more blood off the blade. That made much too much sense. He’d had the same thought himself, but he hadn’t followed it to see where it might lead. “Maybe the Golden Shrine is under the Glacier somewhere, and it’ll come out once the ice melts some more.”
“Maybe you’re an idiot, but I hadn’t thought so till now,” Ulric said cheerfully. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Golden Shrine to show up. There. That’s the best advice you ever got, unless somebody was smart enough to tell you to keep away from Gudrid before it was too late.”
“Leave Gudrid out of this.” As always, anger filled Count Hamnet’s voice when he talked about his former wife.
This time, Ulric gave the anger nothing to light on. “All right,” he said. He didn’t even add that, if this ragtag army with the strange sorceress beat the Rulers, it would prop up not only Gudrid but also Sigvat II. Why mention it, when Hamnet could figure it out for himself? Hamnet not only could, he dutifully did. Ulric sent him a benign smile, watching him do it. The adventurer could be dangerous all kinds of ways.
Trasamund walked by, carrying the head of a dead Ruler by the curly beard. None of the invaders had surrendered. They had the courage of their convictions—and much good it had done them. Trasamund seemed happy enough. He wasn’t dangerous in so many ways as Ulric Skakki was, which didn’t mean he wasn’t a dangerous man.
“Well, we whipped this bunch of them, anyway,” he said, pausing for a moment.
“So we did,” Ulric agreed. “Now—how many more bunches do we have to whip before we’re done?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Trasamund asked suspiciously.
“Somebody should, don’t you think?” Ulric asked.
“Don’t bait him,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Who, me?” The adventurer was the picture of innocence. That had to mean he was most likely to be guilty. Hamnet didn’t know how he knew that, but know it he did.
IX
THE BIZOGOTS AND Raumsdalians rode through the fertile farmland that had been the bed of Hevring Lake till its ice dam melted through and spilled its waters over the scabrous badlands farther west. Hamnet Thyssen sighed. “I don’t know if I want to see sacked Nidaros or not,” he said.
“Sigvat’s the one who ought to see it,” Ulric Skakki said. “We ought to rub his nose in it, so he gets some idea of how many mistakes he made and how big they were.”
Count Hamnet laughed at him. “Sigvat’s more likely to get pregnant than to get an idea.”
“That hurts too much to be funny,” Ulric said, but he laughed anyhow.
“Things don’t look so bad here,” Trasamund remarked.
A few houses and barns had been burned. Hamnet supposed those were places where the locals showed fight against the Rulers. He didn’t see much in the way of livestock. Either Raumsdalians had escaped with their horses and cattle and sheep or the invaders had stolen or slaughtered them. But grain still ripened in the fields. Hardly any fruit trees had been cut down. Trasamund might not be the best judge of what the Raumsdalian countryside was supposed to look like, but he didn’t sound like a crazy man, either.
Local farmers, the ones who still survived, had learned their lesson. As soon as they saw armed men in the distance, they fled. They didn’t wait around to find out whose side the warriors were on. As far as they were concerned, no warriors were on their side. Hamnet would have had a demon of a time persuading them they were wrong.
“You got rich. You got fat. You got lazy.” Marcovefa sounded like a judge passing sentence. “You Bizogots, you Raumsdalians. Fat and lazy.”
“Us, rich?” Trasamund said. “Honh! Not likely!”
But his bluster lacked its usual passionate conviction. He’d seen what things were like up on top of the Glacier and in the mountain refuges that stuck up above the ice. By Marcovefa’s standards, even the poorest Bizogots on the frozen steppe were rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
“How much of Nidaros is left, do you think?” Audun Gilli said. “Can we go around the place, or do we need to go through?”
Some small part of Hamnet did want to see the capital in ruins. Nidaros was Sigvat’s city, and Gudrid’s, not his. Back when he was living in his own castle down in the southeast, he wouldn’t have minded if something horrible happened to the place. So he’d told himself then, anyhow. As he’d found before in other ways, getting what you thought you wanted didn’t always make you happy.
Hamnet wondered if anything would ever make him happy. His former wife and the Emperor groveling at his feet? A slow, sour smile crossed his face, like sunshine briefly breaking through on a drizzly day. He might not win lasting happiness from that, but it would do for a little while.
“Well?” Audun persisted. “Do we have to go through Nidaros?”
“We’ll decide when we get closer,” Hamnet said. “We’ll see how things are around the place—that’ll tell us whether we need to go in.”
The wizard nodded. “All right. Good enough. It’s not as if I’ve got family there to worry about.” His mouth twisted. Hamnet remembered that he himself wasn’t the only one to know hard times. Audun had lost house and wife and children in a fire, and spent years after that drinking so he didn’t have to think about it.
Per Anders pointed ahead. “Is that serai still open, or did the Rulers sack it?”
“No smoke from the chimney,” Ulric Skakki said. “That’s never a good sign.”
Sure enough, the serai was deserted. The stench of death lingered in the taproom. A corpse, mostly skeletal, lay behind the bar. “Looks like we’re on our own for supper and drinks,” Hamnet observed.
“Does kind of, doesn’t it?” Ulric said. “Unless this poor bugger died of old age waiting to get served. I’ve known a few serais like that.”
“So have I—but this isn’t one of them.” Hamnet Thyssen pointed to the skull. It bore a dreadful wound, most likely from an axe but perhaps from a sword. The fellow who’d
