Would he care at all? Or would he be so busy with his pleasures in the capital that it wouldn’t matter a bit to him?
One thing didn’t happen: they didn’t pass couriers galloping out from Nidaros with orders for the imperial armies to assemble. Maybe that was a good sign – maybe it meant the Rulers weren’t close to the border. Or maybe it meant that Sigvat wasn’t going to worry about them even if they were. Again, Count Hamnet had the feeling he’d know the answer before long.
The scarred badlands that stretched out west from what had been Hevring Lake slowed the journey to the capital. Shrubs and clumps of grass sprouted here and there; birds and rabbits and other small game prowled the pocked landscape. The road had to make its way around and through all the scabby ravines and canyons, often doubling back on itself like a snake with a twisted spine. No farmers worked that land; it was far too rough to be broken to the plow. Some of the handful of people who did live there were hunters. Others were men and women who hoped everyone outside the badlands had forgotten they were alive.
Ulric Skakki raised a sardonic eyebrow in Hamnet Thyssen’s direction. “Always good to get a look at your future home, isn’t it?”
“I won’t end up here, by God,” Hamnet said.
“On the gibbet, maybe, but not here,” Ulric said.
Hamnet only shrugged. “The gibbet would be better.”
“What makes land like this?” Marcovefa asked. “We didn’t see any other land – how do you say it? – torn up like this before.”
As best he could, Hamnet Thyssen explained about how the flood that burst from Hevring Lake when its dam of dirt and ice finally failed scarred the land over which it poured. “Sudertorp Lake, farther north, has the same kind of cork in the jug – you saw that,” he added. “One day it will open up, too, and pour across the Bizogot country. When everything is done up there, more badlands will stretch out to the west.”
She thought about that, then nodded. “Could happen,” she agreed. “Yes, could happen. Did magic make this, uh, dam go down?”
“No.” Hamnet pointed north. “Once, a couple of thousand years ago, this was the edge of the Glacier. Yes, all the way down here. But it moved back, the weather got warmer, and the ice in the dam melted through. Sometimes big things happen all by themselves.”
“Maybe.” Marcovefa sounded more as if she were humoring him than as if she believed it.
They saw Nidaros’ smoke rising into the sky days before they came to the capital. “People. Lots of people,” Marcovefa said, pointing towards the dark smudge, and she was right. Any town let travelers know it was there well before they came to its walls because of the smoke that poured from hearths and cookfires and torches and lamps and all the other useful flames men and women kindled. An experienced traveler could gauge the size of a town from the smoke plume it sent up. The shaman from atop the Glacier was anything but an experienced traveler, but she saw that this smoke rose up from anything but an ordinary town.
“Are you glad to be coming home?” Kormak Bersi asked Count Hamnet.
The Raumsdalian noble didn’t laugh in the agent’s face, which to his mind only proved his restraint. “This is not my home. I wouldn’t be glad to come here even if I weren’t in hot water with the Emperor,” he answered. “My home, such as it is, is a castle in the southeast, not far from where the woods begin. I wouldn’t mind going there and forgetting about everything else, but I don’t think everything else will forget about me. Sooner or later – likely sooner – the Rulers would end up besieging the place, and I doubt I could fight off the whoresons with my own retainers.”
Kormak stared at him. “You think those barbarous savages can beat our glorious soldiers? For shame!”
“For one thing, our glorious soldiers have never fought lancers on mammothback,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “For another, I’m not really worried about our glorious soldiers. I’m worried about the Rulers’ wizards. Ask . .” He ran down with a growl deep in his throat. He’d started to say,
“I don’t think much of the kind of magic Bizogots can muster.” Kormak sounded smug and patronizing. Raumsdalians often looked down their noses at their northern neighbors. They often had good reason to look down their noses at them, too. Here. .
“Their shamans are good enough. And they work magic the same way we do. I’ve heard that from the shamans and from our sorcerers,” Hamnet said. “The Rulers don’t. They have their own way. Not surprising, not when they’ve been separate from us since the last time the Glacier came down, whenever that was.”
Kormak Bersi surprised him by saying, “Since the days when we could go to the Golden Shrine.”
“Yes, that’s right. Since those days, or maybe even longer – who knows where their ancestors were back then?” Hamnet said. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is, their sorcerers are stronger than ours.”
Kormak looked anything but convinced. He had no reason to believe Hamnet – he’d never faced the invaders’ wizardry. Before he could say anything, Marcovefa asked, “What are you going on about?” She was getting ever more fluent in the ordinary Bizogot tongue, but Raumsdalian remained a closed codex to her – except when her sense of understanding spilled out like Hevring Lake after the dam broke down. That didn’t seem to be happening now.
“About the Rulers’ shamans,” Hamnet Thyssen answered in the Bizogot language.
Many a Raumsdalian noblewoman would have envied Marcovefas sniff. “Oh.
“Maybe not to you,” Hamnet said. “They’re better than anything we have. They’ve proved that, even if we wish they hadn’t.”
“Too many things,” Marcovefa said impatiently. “You, these Bizogots … Too many
“The Rulers have as many things as the Bizogots,” Hamnet pointed out.
Marcovefa only sniffed again. “They don’t pay enough attention to their shamanry, either. Maybe a little more than these Bizogots, a little more than you Raumsdalians. But not enough. Not close to enough. Up where I come from, they would be nothing. Nothing!” She snapped her fingers to show how much of a nothing they would be.
No one in his right mind wanted to go up where she came from. The clans atop the Glacier had no easy time climbing down, either. Did their poverty in all material things really make them such formidable wizards? Hamnet hadn’t seen that when he was up there himself, but he hadn’t looked for it, either. Down here, Marcovefa did seem uncommonly accomplished. Did that mean she was a powerful shaman, or that she came from a powerful school of sorcery? Hamnet didn’t know, and he wasn’t convinced she did, either.
“Maybe you’ll just have to beat them all singlehanded,” he said.
She looked at him, then back up towards the north. “Maybe I will.”
The badlands ended as abruptly as they’d begun. All at once, the winding road ran straight and true towards Nidaros’ western gate. What had been the muddy bottom of Hevring Lake was now some of the richest cropland in the Raumsdalian Empire. The travelers rode past orchards and fields and meadows finer than any they’d seen to the north and west. The farmers reacted to the sight of so many Bizogots on the road by hiding their livestock and shutting up their houses. They were brave and stupid at the same time: if these Bizogots really were invaders, only fleeing might have saved the locals.
“It would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” Trasamund said. “They haven’t seen raiders in a long time, and they don’t know what to do any more. God help them when they have to find out.”
“First time I’ve heard you sound like you care about Raumsdalians,” Ulric Skakki drawled.
The Bizogot jarl screwed up his face, then let his anger go in a long, loud sigh. “I care about anybody the Rulers hurt,” he said. “Will you tell me I haven’t earned the right?”
Not even Ulric had the crust to claim he hadn’t.
All the Bizogots and Marcovefa exclaimed at the quality of the serai where they stayed that night. The roast pork
