answered. Osvif gaped. Hamnet displayed his commission again.
“Is he a fraud, sir?” the sergeant asked. “If he is, we’ll give him what-for like he wouldn’t believe.”
Osvif Grisi stared at the impressive parchment. He reached Sigvat’s peremptory commands, his lips moving. Count Hamnet didn’t think the less of him for that; he read the same way himself, as did most people who could read at all. The more Osvif read, the wider his mouth fell open. By the time he finished, his thinly bearded chin was hanging on his chest.
“Well?” Hamnet said.
The youngster’s jaw shut with an audible click. He stiffened to a parade-ground attention. “Give me whatever orders you think right, Your, uh, Grace,” he said. “I am at your service in all ways, as is Kjelvik.”
“He’s real?” Now the sergeant’s jaw dropped.
“He’s real, all right,” Osvif said grimly. “If he told me to hang you from a pole off the battlements, you’d be hanging there now.” The sergeant gaped. Osvif Grisi turned back to Hamnet. “What do you want from Kjelvik, sir?”
“Every soldier you can put on a horse,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “We’re going to have to scrape together some kind of army to fight the Rulers, you know.”
“I suppose so, yes.” The young officer licked his lips. “I think you’d better talk to the town’s commandant.”
“Yes, I think so, too,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “I’ve been trying to do that, and people keep getting in my way.” He eyed the sergeant, who did his best to hide in plain sight. Maybe he imagined himself kicking his life away up on the battlements. Hamnet wouldn’t have ordered him hanged, but he didn’t have to know that. The noble nodded to Osvif. “Take me to him.”
Kjelvik’s garrison wasn’t big enough to hold the walls for long against a determined foe. The keep wasn’t strong enough to keep out an invader once he’d broken into the city. So Hamnet s professional eye told him, anyhow. The guards outside the keep’s portcullis stared at the Bizogots behind him.
“I thought some different barbarians were loose in the north,” one of them said to his friend.
“Me, too. Shows what we know,” the other guard said. Then he noticed Osvif with Hamnet’s party. “What’s going on, sir?”
“This noble” – Osvif pointed to Hamnet – ”is in charge of all defenses in the north, by His Majesty’s command.” That made all the guards spring to attention. Osvif went on, “I am taking him to Baron Runolf.”
“Is that Runolf Skallagrim?” Hamnet asked. He hoped so – if the local commander was a man he knew, things would go smoother.
And Osvif nodded. “That’s right. You’ve met him?”
“Awhile ago, but yes,” Hamnet replied.
Runolf Skallagrim was about his own age, a little heavier, a little softer – a little happier-looking, if you wanted to get right down to it. “By God,” he said when Osvif led Count Hamnet into his chamber. “Look what the hound dragged in!” As he rose to clasp Hamnet s hand, he went on, “What the demon are you doing here? Last I heard, you’d got jugged.”
“That’s old news now.” Hamnet Thyssen displayed his commission.
Runolf looked it over. In due course, he nodded. “Well, that’s better than sitting in a dungeon, I must say.”
“Is it?” Hamnet asked bleakly. “In the dungeon, I don’t have to worry about a mammoth stepping on my head.”
“There is that,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “So what do you want from me?”
“As many men as you’ve got, as many fugitives from the armies that have already lost to the Rulers as you can round up, and enough food for them to take north.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Runolf said.
“If you’ve got three times that many men in your pocket, I’ll gladly take em,” Hamnet said. “Oh – any wizards in town? We need them, too.”
“A supply train’ll be hard enough to come by.”
That was much too likely to be true. Kjelvik wasn’t a town from which anyone in the Empire had expected an army to sortie. If Raumsdalia needed to move against invaders from a town this far south, they’d penetrated farther and done worse than anybody would have guessed possible. Well, so they had. “Do what you can, Runolf, please,” Count Hamnet said. “I’ve met these Rulers before. They come from beyond the Glacier, and they’re more trouble than you can imagine.”
“Beyond the Glacier?” The garrison commander looked and sounded intrigued. “So those stories about a way melting through don’t just come from merchants off the Bizogot steppe getting drunk and telling tales in taverns, eh?”
“No, they’re true, all right. I’ve been up there. It’s a different world. We haven’t had anything to do with it since the Glacier walled it off, God only knows how many thousand years ago. But we do now.”
Runolf Skallagrim grunted. “I
“My bet is, you’re right,” Count Hamnet said. “Fair enough. Do that first. After they comb them out of the fields and the taprooms and the whorehouses, we’ll see what we’ve got. Don’t waste time on it, though. The way it looks to me is, we’ve wasted all the time we can afford, or maybe a little more than that.”
The soldiers lined up in front of Hamnet Thyssen and Baron Runolf were a sorry-looking lot. Some of them were obviously hung over. Some were still drunk. Several were wounded, though none seemed seriously hurt – a man with a bad wound wouldn’t have been able to come so far so fast. They all glared at him. They knew he wanted them to fight the Rulers again, and they were anything but keen on the idea.
Most of them still had swords. If he hadn’t had the Bizogots and some of Runolf’s archers backing him, he wouldn’t have been surprised if they tried to mob him and mutiny. His guess was that bad odds were the only thing holding them back.
“So you’ve met the mammoth-riders,” he said.
“What do you know about it, you blue-blooded son of a whore?” one of the soldiers said. “Somebody told you they could do that, did he? Do you know what it
“I fought them half a dozen times, up on the Bizogot plains,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He waved back towards Trasamund and the other big blonds. “So did they.”
The soldier blinked and shut up. Another one found a bitter question: “Why the demon didn’t you whip them? Then they wouldn’t have set on us.”
“We didn’t because we couldn’t.” As usual, Hamnet used the truth, however unpalatable it was.
“How come you think you’ll do any better this time, then, curse you?” the second soldier demanded.
“Because this time we have a wizard who can beat anything the Rulers throw at her.” Count Hamnet waved to Marcovefa. She took a step forward and nodded to the soldiers as if they were first-rate fighting men, not the flotsam and jetsam of a campaign gone wrong.
“Another Bizogot twat – huzzah,” the second soldier said, slathering on his scorn with a trowel.
Maybe he thought Marcovefa didn’t speak his language. Maybe he just didn’t care. If he didn’t, he made a bad mistake. As Gudrid could have told him, angering a wizard you couldn’t kill on the instant was commonly a mistake.
It was here. Marcovefa murmured to herself. The soldier developed a sudden, uncontrollable urge to disrobe. Once he was naked in front of his staring comrades, he acted like a jackass – literally. He brayed, got down on all fours, and started pulling scraps of dead grass up from between cobbles with his teeth. He also relieved himself like an animal, calmly and without shame.
Marcovefa murmured again. The soldier came back to himself – and cried out in horror as he realized what he’d done. Marcovefa suffered him to dress and return to the ranks with no further afflictions.
“Any other donkeys here?” Hamnet Thyssen inquired.
Nobody said anything. The unhappy survivors of one encounter with the Rulers looked apprehensively from him to Marcovefa and back again. Something like a sigh rippled through their ragged ranks.
Count Hamnet understood the sigh all too well. His nod was precisely calibrated between scorn and sympathy.
