The Golden Shrine

Ulric Skakki’s knowing smirk said it did. “She may not know everything, but she knows a demon of a lot more about this business than you do. Go on—tell me she doesn’t. Make me believe it.” He folded his arms and waited.

However much Count Hamnet wished he could, he didn’t even try. He couldn’t make Ulric believe it . . . and he couldn’t make himself believe it, either. Whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted to or not, he did carry weight. He wondered if he would have any say in how it got used.

You won’t if the Rulers kill you, he thought. That was as true for him as it was for Marcovefa. Her safety mattered to him. His own didn’t seem to.

Try as he would, he couldn’t get very excited about it. With a slow shrug, he said, “We needed to ride a while ago. We’re still gabbing instead.”

“Yes, your Grace,” Ulric said—mockery in the guise of respect, one of his favorite barbs. Hamnet didn’t rise to it. Ulric sighed. “Sure as the demons, Trasamund gives better sport.”

“Pity.” Hamnet methodically checked his horse’s cinches and girths. When he was satisfied, he swung up into the saddle. Ulric was only a moment behind him. The Raumsdalians and Bizogots rode in a mass compact enough to let them keep an eye on their outriders. The Rulers wouldn’t have an easy time picking off a few men, anyhow.

Hamnet’s eyes went this way and that, this way and that. They kept coming back to Marcovefa. She might think he was important in the fight against the Rulers. He knew she was.

FAGERSTA WAS A town of no particular importance. Hamnet Thyssen had a hard time believing even the people who lived there would have said anything else. It wasn’t very big or very small. It wasn’t very rich. It sat by a stream deep and wide enough for small boats, but not for ships. Because it was right in the middle of the Empire and no foreign foes had come anywhere near it for at least two hundred years, people had torn down the wall that once surrounded it and used the timber and stone for buildings.

The Rulers had gone through Fagersta some time earlier in the year. They hadn’t razed it; why bother? They’d plundered some, they’d stolen livestock from the surrounding farms, they’d killed and raped enough to keep themselves both safe and amused, and then they’d gone on their way.

As soon as the locals saw the mix of Raumsdalians and Bizogots approaching from the north, they sent out a man with a flag of truce. That was about the only thing they could have done. The Breath of God swirled snow all around, so Fagersta didn’t discover it had new visitors—and the visitors didn’t discover there was such a place as Fagersta—till they were almost on top of it.

“Oh!” the herald exclaimed in glad surprise when he got a better look at the newcomers. “You aren’t . . . those people.” He didn’t say what he really thought of the Rulers, perhaps in case he proved wrong about who these strangers were.

“No, we aren’t,” Hamnet agreed gravely.

“In fact, we want to kill those people,” Trasamund added.

His accent and his long, golden beard announced that, while he wasn’t a Ruler, he wasn’t a Raumsdalian, either. The local herald eyed him as warily as a shepherd might eye a sabertooth. That was sensible of the man, as Trasamund was at least as deadly as one of the big cats. The local soon noticed other big blond warriors among those who might be of his own kind.

“You aren’t those people,” he said again. This time, he added, “But who the demon are you?” Under the circumstances, it was a more than reasonable question.

“I am Trasamund, jarl of the Three Tusk clan.” Trasamund struck a pose on his horse. He was wasting his time; the Raumsdalian knew more of Bizogot clans and their jarls than he did about riding a war mammoth. After a moment, Trasamund saw as much. He simplified things: “I’m with you Raumsdalians. The Rulers are my enemies.”

“Oh.” The man from Fagersta seemed to understand that, anyhow. Whether he believed it was liable to be another question. “But you’re a foreigner,” he said, and waited, as if hoping Trasamund would deny it. When Trasamund didn’t, the local sighed. “Didn’t know much about foreigners till a couple of weeks ago. Don’t much fancy what we found out, neither.”

“There are different kinds of foreigners,” Hamnet Thyssen said. The local only grunted. He wasn’t disagreeing, but he also wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect. Hamnet asked, “What did the Rulers do to this place? And who are you, anyway?”

“Well, my name’s Hrafn Maering,” said the man from Fagersta. He let out a bleak chuckle. “What did they do to this place? Anything they pleased, pretty much. You can see Fagersta’s got some chunks bit out of it.” His wave took in the burned and overthrown buildings all over town. Glumly, he went on, “Me, I was lucky, if you want to call it luck. They killed one of my second cousins, and they forced my wife’s sister—but only two or three of ’em, and they weren’t especially trying to hurt her, just to have a good time. She’ll be all right, we expect, soon as she gets over the worst of the horrors, and she isn’t with child.”

Count Hamnet nodded soberly. Hrafn was right: as these things went, his family was lucky. One death, one not too brutal rape—you could pick up the pieces and go on after something like that. There still was a family to pick up the pieces and go on. Some lines in Fagersta would be destroyed altogether. Others would have a handful of people trying to recover after much worse disasters.

“When did the Rulers ride out of here?” Ulric Skakki asked. “Which way did they go?”

Hrafn Maering eyed him doubtfully, too; his sharp features weren’t those of a typical Raumsdalian. But he spoke the imperial language without accent, and he also spoke with the air of a man entitled to get answers from other people. “It was only maybe ten days ago,” Hrafn said. “They went that way.” He pointed somewhere between south and southeast.

“Have any idea how many of them there were?” Runolf Skallagrim inquired.

“Not for sure,” Hrafn said. “They rode these funny deer, you know?” By the way he said it, the deer were harder to count than horses would have been. But then he added, “They had eight, maybe ten, war mastodons with ’em.”

Chances were he’d never seen a mammoth in his life till the Rulers rode theirs down into the Empire. Mammoths were creatures of the frozen steppe, beyond the evergreen woods to the north. Mastodons, by contrast, roamed the forests of the Empire and the lands on its borders; they were common in the mixed woods near Hamnet’s castle. No wonder, then, that Hrafn called the Rulers’ great mounts by the wrong name.

Somebody none too familiar with sabertooths might easily call them lions by mistake. He’d be wrong, but he wouldn’t be very wrong. You could end up dead as easily, and in most of the same ways, from a saber-tooth as from a lion. And the Rulers would have been just as much trouble riding mastodons as they were on mammothback.

Hamnet wondered what the invaders thought of mastodons. They would surely have found some by now. He also wondered whether the Rulers could turn mastodons into riding animals. They would have a new supply of mounts if they did.

When he asked the first question out loud, Ulric said, “They probably think mastodons are delicious.”

And Hamnet couldn’t even tell him he was wrong, because a mastodon, like a mammoth, was a lot of meat ambling around in one con ve nient package. Taming mastodons would take a long time. Killing and cooking them, on the other hand . . .

“Well, let’s go after the buggers,” Trasamund said.

Hrafn Maering surely spoke for all the survivors in Fagersta: “What about giving us a hand?”

“You’re here. You’re alive. You can put the town back together yourselves,” Hamnet said. “The best thing we can do for you is kill the Rulers—if we can.”

“Sigvat would do better by us,” Hrafn said.

He looked very surprised when all the Raumsdalians and Bizogots within earshot started laughing fit to burst. He got mad when none of them would explain why.

“I’m going to report this to the mayor,” Hrafn said. “He’ll tell the chief of the diocese, and he’ll tell the provincial governor. Then the governor will report you to the Emperor, and then you’ll be in trouble.”

Hamnet and his companions laughed harder than ever. Hrafn Maering looked bewildered. He’d come out with the most fearsome threat he knew how to make, and these people . . . took it for a joke? Count Hamnet didn’t know whether to envy the local or feel sorry for him. He still lived in his secure little world, or thought he did.

The great virtue of the Raumsdalian Empire was that it had let generations of people just like Hrafn live out their lives without needing to worry about barbarians coming down over the border. Its drawback was that, when order broke down, the locals had no idea what to do.

“Good luck to you,” Hamnet told him, and meant every word of it.

“God keep you,” Ulric Skakki added, also in tones of great sincerity.

“You poor, sorry bastard.” Even Trasamund sounded sympathetic, no matter how rough his words were.

They left Hrafn staring after them as they rode past Fagersta. “He is a sorry bugger,” Ulric said. “He doesn’t know whether to crap or go blind.”

“He’s already blind,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “The question is whether he’s better off that way. What he has to see these days isn’t pretty, and he only got a glimpse of it when the Rulers went through there.”

“He would have seen more if they stayed longer,” Trasamund said.

“That’s Hamnet’s point,” Ulric told him. “Yours, on the other hand, is under your hat.” Trasamund needed a moment to understand what he meant. When the jarl did, he and Ulric had a fine time sniping at each other as they rode south in pursuit of the Rulers.

AFTER A WHILE, Ulric came up with something new to talk about. “All right,” he said. “We’ve driven the Rulers away. Raumsdalia is free again.”

“What about the Bizogots?” Trasamund demanded.

“Oh, the Rulers slaughtered them all. They aren’t there any more,” Ulric said. Trasamund bellowed irately. The adventurer held up a hand. “Fine. Fine. The Bizogots are free again, too.”

“That’s more like it,” Trasamund said.

“But I’m still talking about Raumsdalia,” Ulric Skakki said. He turned to Hamnet. “The Rulers are gone. The Empire is free.”

“Yes, you already said that,” Hamnet said. “What am I supposed to do? Shout huzzah?”

“Suppose you already did,” Ulric said. “What happens next? How do we make something that’s broken stand on its own two feet again?”

“Sigvat won’t think there’s any trouble,” Hamnet answered. “He’ll just start giving orders and expect everybody else to follow them. And anybody who doesn’t want to will end up in a dungeon.”

“If Sigvat tries that now, he’ll end up in a dungeon—if he’s lucky,” Ulric said. “More likely, he’ll end up dead.” He nodded toward Runolf Skallagrim. “Or am I wrong?”

“Depends on which orders he gives,” Runolf said uncomfortably. He was as loyal as they came—if not to Sigvat, then to the idea of the Raumsdalian Empire. “If he starts throwing his weight around, he’s in a lot of trouble. You aren’t wrong about that, Skakki. I can hope he’s too smart to try it.”

Ulric and Count Hamnet both guffawed. So did Trasamund. “Tell us what’s so funny,” Eyvind Torfinn said, walking up. “We could all enjoy a joke like that.”

Laughing still, Ulric did tell him. “Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous in all your born days?” he finished.

“One could do worse than His Majesty has done,” Earl Eyvind said.

“Sure. He could have killed me outright instead of leaving me to rot in that hole under the palace,” Count Hamnet said. Eyvind Torfinn turned red. Hamnet went on, “I was