Beyong the Gap

XXII

nor all the survivors from the Three Tusk clan even wanted to linger long enough to talk with Trasamund and his comrades. The Bizogots wanted to flee, lest worse befall them. They had been struck, and they had been broken. They’d never imagined such a blow could fall on them, not from that direction. Even though Trasamund spoke of the Rulers on the far side ot the Glacier, the danger must have seemed no more real to his folk than to Sigvat.

"Why didn't you patrol the Gap?" the anguished jarl asked Gelimer.

"We did-for a while. But the hunting is bad up there, so the men came back," Gelimer answered. He had a new cut across his forehead and a bandage on his left arm. "We didn't look for invaders, not at this season of the year." He grimaced. "I wish we would have."

"The Rulers . . . can do all kinds of unpleasant things," Hamnet said. Gelimer nodded, and then bit his lip. Moving his head had to hurt.

"How far behind you are they?" Ulric Skakki asked-a good, relevant question.

"Not far enough, by God!" the Bizogot exclaimed. "But they aren't chasing as hard as they might be. Why should they bother? What's left of us can't do them any harm, and they have to know it."

"My clan!" Trasamund howled. "You threw away my clan because you wouldn't listen to me. What I ought to do to you . . ."

"What's the point, your Ferocity?" Hamnet Thyssen said wearily. "Whatever you want to do, the Rulers have already done worse."

"If I'd stayed-"

"It might not have mattered," Ulric said. "They still would have surprised you, eh?"

"I would have beaten them anyhow." Even in disaster, Trasamund clung to his arrogance.

"They had-riding mammoths. Riding mammoths with lancers on them!" Gelimer said, for all the world as if the travelers hadn't told him about that when they came south from the Gap, as if he hadn't wanted to ride mammoths himself. "How could we hope to stand against them? And the ones who weren't on mammoths rode deer. They might as well have been horses! And their shamans-their shamans blasted our camp with lightning."

Liv put her face in her hands. "I might have stopped that if I were there," she said in a broken voice. "I've met the Rulers. I have some notion of what they can do. Anyone who didn't.. . would have been easy meat for them." She swiped at her eyes. "I can't even cry, not now. My eyelids will freeze shut."

"What… do we do?" Audun Gilli asked in a very small voice.

"We can't keep riding north-that seems plain enough. If we do, we run into the Rulers, and then …" Ulric Skakki didn't go on, but he didn't have to. The rest of the travelers could draw their own pictures.

"How many other clansfolk got away?" Trasamund asked Gelimer. "Are there parties in back of you, or did they flee in different directions?"

"I don't know, your Ferocity," Gelimer said miserably. "I think the only ones behind us are those horrible, God-cursed demons from beyond the Glacier."

"I wish I could know for sure," the jarl said. "I don't like to leave anyone behind who might somehow get away. If I go forward-"

"You throw yourself away," Hamnet Thyssen broke in. "Will you charge a squadron of war mammoths singlehanded? Some people would call that brave. But isn't it stupid? What would you do afterwards? Nothing, because you'd be dead."

"With my clan murdered, I deserve to be," Trasamund said.

"No." Count Hamnet shook his head. "This war is all the Bizogots, all the folk below the Glacier, against these invaders. The Three Tusk clan has lost a fight. But the Bizogots are still your folk. They need you. They need what you can do. They need what you know. Ulric's right. If we charge now, we lose. We have to regroup and figure out what to do next, how to fight the Rulers."

"Talk, talk, talk. This is what Raumsdalians do," Trasamund said. "Not Bizogots. Bizogots go out and fight."

"And then wish later that they'd done some talking instead," Ulric Skakki said. Trasamund scowled at him-and at the world.

"The Raumsdalians are right, your Ferocity," Liv said.

"Not you, too!" the jarl howled.

She nodded. "I'm sorry, but yes. Going forward, charging ahead, is useless now. We need to save ourselves for a fight we can hope to win."

"Our grazing grounds! The mammoths! The musk oxen!" Trasamund beat his fists against his legs in misery.

"They're lost now, your Ferocity," Ulric said. "If we win, you can reclaim them. If you lose now, will you ever see them again? How likely is it? Tell me the truth, not what your heart wants to hear."

Trasamund growled like a wild beast, down deep in his throat. "Better to die than to live the exile's life!" he cried.

"If you really want to die, it won't be hard," Ulric said. "If you're just making noise because things hurt so much right now, that's a different story. But be careful what you say, because you may decide to do something your mouth means but your heart doesn't."

"He is right," Liv said again. "What we really need is vengeance. Don't throw yourself away before we can take it."

Trasamund turned his ravaged gaze on Hamnet Thyssen. "Well, Raumsdalian? Are you going to preach me a sermon, too?" He spoke in the Empire's language; his own had no word for sermon.

"No," Count Hamnet answered. "The only thing I'll tell you is, I know what watching your world crash down on you feels like. It's happened to me, too. You have a hole where your heart used to be, and you go on anyway. What else can you do?"

"Kill!" Trasamund roared.

"If you kill a little now, your Ferocity, you will die right afterwards." Audun Gilli was almost maddeningly precise. "If you wait for your moment, you can work a great killing on the foe, and still live to hear him mourn. Which would you rather?"

"I want to kill now, and I want to kill later," the jarl answered. "I want to kill and kill and kill. If I drowned the world in blood, it wouldn't glut me. Do you understand, you and your talk of killing? What do you know of death?"

Audun Gilli bit his lip. "I came home one night to watch my family burn.

Is that enough, your Ferocity, or do you want something more? Did you ever smell your wife's charred flesh when you lay down to try to sleep?" He almost quivered with fury. Little weedy man that he was, he was on the point of hurling himself at the burly Bizogot, magic forgot, simply man against man. And Hamnet Thyssen might not have been astonished if he prevailed.

Trasamund stared. In his own moment of agony, he seemed to have forgot that others could know, had known, torment, too. Where Ulric's sarcasm and Hamnet s stolidity failed to remind him of it, the wizard's rage did. Trasamund seemed to slump in on himself like a pingo melting in an uncommonly hot summer. "I will live," he mumbled. "I will avenge. And I will hate myself every heartbeat till I do."

Hamnet Thyssen and Audun Gilli both nodded. "Oh, yes, your Ferocity," Hamnet said. "Oh, yes. That comes with the territory. For now, though, we see about living."

Dully, Trasamund nodded as well.

Audun Gilli knew a weatherworking spell that seemed stronger than any Liv had. He used it to call snow down on the travelers' tracks. Maybe that would let them and the survivors from the Three Tusk clan give the Rulers the slip. Or, then again, maybe it wouldn't.

"If you like, I'll ride off by myself," Hamnet said. "The wizards from the Rulers seem to want to kill me in particular, fools that they are. I don't want to bring my troubles down on anyone else."

"You'll do no such thing!" Liv's voice went high and shrill. She does care for me, Hamnet thought. That seemed a stranger, stronger magic than the one Audun used to fill their trail with snowflakes.

"Stay with us, Thyssen," Trasamund said. "Stay with us. If the Rulers want you so much, it follows that you can hurt them if you live. And so we'd better keep you alive if we can." He cared for Hamnet, too, cared for him the same way he cared for his own weapons. Anything he could aim at the Rulers, he would.

Count Hamnet didn't want to leave Liv. And he didn't want to leave Trasamund, either. The Bizogot jarl wanted to hit back at the invaders. That was more than Sigvat II did. Hamnet Thyssen was in the right place, and in the right company. "If you don't think my coming along will endanger you, I'll gladly stay."

"Good. That's good. We need all the enemies of those lion turds to ride together." Trasamund could see that, even if Sigvat couldn't. "And we need to hit back at them as soon as we can without throwing ourselves away."

"How?" Once more, Ulric Skakki asked a bluntly practical question.

He asked it, and the Bizogot waved it aside. "I don't know yet. But we need to do it when we see the chance. We need to show the rest of my folk that we can hit back. If we don't, what's to stop them from rolling on their backs like a dire wolf that's lost a fight and giving the cursed Rulers whatever they want?"

"A point." Ulric didn't sound happy about admitting it, but he did. He was no more honest than he had to be, but was in his own way scrupulous.

"Gelimer!" Trasamund boomed. The other Bizogot nodded miserably. Trasamund went on, "You will know where the herds are, not so?"

"I know where they were, your Ferocity. Where they were before the thunderbolt from the north hit us, I should say," Gelimer answered.

"We warned you. By God, you should have listened." But Trasamund let that go-for a Bizogot, a rare show of magnanimity. "The Rulers will be feeding off the beasts closest to your camp. Guide us to a herd farther away. It will feed us for a while. And, sooner or later, the invaders will come to steal. When they do"-he smacked his hands together-"we strike!" He made it sound simple. Whether it would be …

Gelimer seemed to gain a little life at the thought of hitting back. "Off to the west is where most of the musk oxen were. The mammoths roamed closer to our camp. I don't know if those .. . Rulers are breaking them to ride. Even after you said they could do that, who would have thought it was true?"

"You should have," Hamnet Thyssen answered before Trasamund could speak. "Did you think we were making up stories to pass the time?"

"With Raumsdalians, who knows?" Gelimer said. "All you people lie all the time, so how can we tell what to believe?"

Hamnet looked at Liv. She was looking back at him. They both remembered Eyvind Torfinn's paradox. Hamnet wished the Bizogots here hadn't taken it so literally; it might have cost them dear. Or, then again, it might not have mattered. Who could say whether the Rulers would have beaten them anyhow?

"Am I a Raumsdalian? Is the jarl a Raumsdalian?" Liv asked Gelimer. "When we say something is true, you can rely on it. You can, but you didn't. And now you see what happened."

"You don't need to make me feel any worse, Lady," Gelimer said. "I'm already lower than a maggot's belly."

"Killing the enemy will make a man of you again," Trasamund declared. "West, you said the musk-ox herds were? Then west we shall ride, west and north, back into our own lands again."

Enough fatty roast meat made the cold all around much easier to bear. The furnace inside Hamnet Thyssen, stoked with such fuel, burned harder and hotter. He seemed warmer, and supposed he really was.

The Bizogots had no trouble cutting an old bull musk ox, half lame and slow, out of the herd and leading it downwind so the smell of blood wouldn't panic the other animals. Killing it took a lot of arrows, but they had them. When it went down at last, bawling in pain and incomprehension, Trasamund finished it with a headsman's stroke from his great two-handed blade.

Gore crimsoned the snow. Some of the hungry Bizogots snatched up that bloody snow and stuffed it into their mouths. They couldn't wait for butchery, let alone a fire. Bodies needed food of any sort in this weather. The nomads grinned with blood on their lips and running down their chins.

Hamnet Thyssen, having eaten better lately, left the blood alone. After the dung fire began to burn, he roasted his meat and gulped it down- burnt on the outside, raw in the middle. He didn't care. You couldn't be very fussy in the Bizogot country, not if you wanted to go on living. He supposed he would eat bloody snow if he got hungry enough. He didn't think he would grin afterwards, though.

Trasamund seemed to gain strength with food, too. "Where are the Rulers?" he roared. "Let them come now. Yes, let them come, by God! We will kill them by the hundreds, by the thousands!" The remnant of his clan had no more than twenty warriors, counting the newcomers up from the south.

"Let them come, yes-but not too many of them." Wherever you put him, Ulric Skakki had good sense.

"Let them leave their wizards behind, too." That wasn't Trasamund scorning Liv and Audun Gilli. That was Audun himself. "They are stronger than we are, however much I hate to admit it."

"Maybe we can take them by surprise," Liv said. "They'll think we're weak." And they'll be right, too, Hamnet Thyssen thought. The shaman went on, "And they'll think we're afraid. And we will show them they're wrong."

"We're not afraid of them. We were never afraid of them." Gelimer's voice was blurry, because he talked with his mouth full. He was too busy eating to pause very much. "But they beat us. They were too many and too strong."

"They won't come against us with everything they have. That's bound to be true. They won't think they'll need to. And they'll be gathering strength for a raid farther south. That's what I would do if I were one of them, anyhow. They'll push through the Bizogot country so they can attack the Empire."

"What makes you so special?" demanded one of the Bizogots who'd lived through the Rulers' onslaught. "What are you doing here, if you think you're better than we are?"

"I didn't say anything about better. I don't say anything about that," Ul-ric answered. "But we're richer than you are. Our lands are richer than yours. Our weather is warmer than yours. The Rulers will strike south." He defied the Bizogot to disagree with him.

The man wanted to. Hamnet Thyssen could see as much. But the fellow only muttered into his gingery beard and went back to stuffing himself with meat.

Down in Raumsdalia, the musk ox's stones would have been called prairie oysters. Trasamund toasted them over the fire and ate them. "As the bull battered down his rivals and won his mates, so will I beat down the Rulers," he vowed.

"So may it be," Liv said softly.

Ulric Skakki had to remind Trasamund to put scouts out to the east. The jarl still wasn't at his best, or anything close to it. "If we had another leader here to follow, I would," Ulric told Hamnet Thyssen.

The way the adventurer looked at Count Hamnet alarmed him. "I don't want to lead anybody," Hamnet said. "I didn't want to do it down in Raumsdalia with my own folk. I really don't want to do it here. The Bizogots wouldn't follow me anyhow."

"You might be surprised," Ulric said. "You're large and you're tough and you don't spend all your time going on about how wonderful you are."

"I'm a foreigner," Hamnet said with a patience not far from desperation. " 'All Raumsdalians are liars,' remember?"

"And Bizogots aren't?" Ulric Skakki threw back his head and laughed. "That's the funniest thing I've heard since I don't know when."

"It's their country. They can do whatever they want in it," Count Hamnet said. "And one of the things they'd want to do is knock any Raumsdalian who tries to tell them what to do over the head with a lump of frozen mammoth dung."

Liv came up to the two of them, the snow crunching under her felt boots. "What are you arguing about?" she asked. They spelled it out for her. She didn't need long to make up her mind. "Count Hamnet is right," she said. "We Bizogots must have our own to lead us. Do you plot against the jarl?"

"No, but I want someone who isn't sunk in grief in charge," Ulric answered. "If Trasamund can't do it, who can?"

"Who says Trasamund can't?" Liv returned. "When the Rulers come, his spirit will rouse. You wait and see."

"What if the Rulers came and we didn't even know they were on the way?" Ulric asked. But Liv didn't want to listen to him, and neither did Hamnet Thyssen. Ulric sighed out a small cloud of fog, threw his hands in the air, and gave up.

Whoever persuaded Trasamund to set scouts out, it was as well that he did, because two days later one of them rode back to the musk-ox herd so hard that his horse steamed in the frigid air. "They're coming!" he shouted. "Those murderous thieves are coming!"

Liv proved to know her jarl. He might have been sunk in gloom before he got the news, but he revived with a roar. "Oh, they are, are they?" he boomed. "By God, we'll teach them this isn't their country!"

When he gave orders, he seemed to know which ones to give. He sent a few Bizogots out as herd watchers, to give the Rulers something to focus on. The rest, along with the Raumsdalians, he stationed at the edge of the herd, ready to ride out and strike as the chance offered. He put Liv and Audun Gilli with that group.

"If you find a spell to confound the Rulers, use it," he said. "If you find they're using spells against us, block them. Is that plain?"

"If we fail. .. ?" Audun asked.

"You won't. You can't," Trasamund said. "Too much riding on it. No place to run away any more. No place to hide. We beat them here or we die here. Is that plain?" Biting his lip, the Raumsdalian wizard nodded.

"They're coming!" The shout came from several throats at once.

Count Hamnet looked east. Those moving dots… At first, he took them for horses, or for the large deer the Rulers rode instead. Then he realized they were bigger and farther away than that. Mammoths, he thought. The chill that ran through him had nothing to do with the icy weather. He was honest enough to call it by its right name-fear.

"Can we really fight them?" The same noxious beast filled Gelimer's voice.

"By God, we can. We will." Trasamund sounded confident, or at least unafraid. "If we die, what do we lose? Nothing, for the clan is shattered and we are nothing without it. But if we win, we have the start of our vengeance. And so we shall win. We have nothing else left to do."

"I don't think Eyvind Torfinn would like the logic," Ulric Skakki murmured to Hamnet.

"Bugger Eyvind Torfinn. He's down where it's warmer," Hamnet answered. "We're doing his work for him up here, so let's do it."

Behind him, Audun Gilli began a soft chant. "A masking spell-just a small one," he said into a pause. "So they don't look at the musk oxen too closely and don't notice whatever they happen to see along with them."

"Good. Good," Trasamund rumbled. "Let us surprise them if we can."

The Rulers had stronger magic than folk on this side of the Glacier. But Audun's spell didn't have to be strong. It didn't aim to draw attention to itself. The opposite, in fact. Hamnet Thyssen hoped that meant the invaders wouldn't notice it-and wouldn't notice him and the rest of the warriors.

He strung his bow and nocked an arrow. Here came the mammoths. Now he could see the deer-riders flanking them. "So you want some more, do you?" a lancer atop one tusker shouted in the Bizogot tongue. "We'll give you more, all right-see if we don't!"

The Bizogots who seemed to be ordinary herders did what Hamnet Thyssen would have done in their place-they wheeled their horses and fled. Laughing and jeering, the Rulers came after them. Hamnet discovered something he didn't know-mammoths could move at least as fast as horses with snow on the ground.

Some of the Bizogots turned and shot over their shoulders at their pursuers. Most of those arrows went wild. The Manches and other tribes in the far southwest practiced that shot and made it deadly. They would have laughed themselves sick at how little use the Bizogots got from it.

When a mammoth caught up with a horse, by contrast, the Rulers knew just what to do. They speared one Bizogot out of the saddle, then another. And they went on laughing while they did it.

"Now!" Trasamund bellowed. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians concealed by the musk-ox herd and by Audun Gilli's magic thundered forward.

Bowstrings thrummed. These archers weren't making an unaccustomed shot, but one they used all the time. They aimed for the mammoths' eyes and ears and trunks-the sensitive spots where wounds would pain even those gigantic beasts. And they aimed for the warriors atop them.

One thing mammoths couldn't do was turn as quickly as horses. The Rulers cried out in surprise and dismay at the unexpected flank assault. Their enormous mounts went wild when wounded, just as horses would have. One plucked a rider off its back with its trunk, dashed him to the ground, and stepped on him. His scream cut off abruptly. Red stained the snow.

With shouts of rage, men of the Rulers on deer tried to close with the horsemen. The deer lowered their heads and charged, ready to use their antlers as secondary weapons. But ferocious archery kept most of them at a distance, and the horses overbore those that did manage to close. Hamnet and Ulric and the Bizogots chopped down at the enemy riders with their swords.

"Revenge!" Trasamund shouted over and over again. "The Three Tusk clan! Revenge!"

Ulric Skakki made a lucky shot: he hit a mammoth not just near the eye but in it. No, Hamnet decided-it was a great shot, not lucky; Ulric had done that before. The arrow must have pierced the thin, fragile bone behind the eyeball and reached the brain, for the mammoth crashed to the ground, stone dead. One of the men atop it survived the tumble, but not for long. A Bizogot ran up and dashed out his brains with a hatchet.

"Revenge!" Trasamund yelled once more, and all the Bizogots took up the cry. "Revenge!"

Seeing the mammoth topple seemed to suck the spirit from the Rulers. They still outnumbered their foes, but they lost stomach for a fight that wasn't a walkover. The ones who could rode back toward the east as fast as they could go.

"They don't look like such heroes when you see their arses, do they?" Ulric Skakki remarked.

"Not a bit of it," Hamnet Thyssen answered, thrusting his blade into the snow to get blood off it. "We ought to round up the ones who are still breathing but couldn't get away."

"Yes, the Bizogots will have fun with them, won't they?" Ulric said.

Count Hamnet's mouth twisted. The adventurer was bound to be right about that, and what happened then wouldn't be pretty. Revenge, yes. Hamnet thought. "They shouldn't just be sport," he said. "We ought to squeeze answers out of them, too. Some of them speak the Bizogot tongue."

"Who knows what kind of noises they'll make by the time the Bizogots get through with them?" Ulric said. "Do you want to be the one to tell Trasamund he can't have all the revenge he craves?"

"I'll do it." After a moment, Count Hamnet amended that: "I'll see if he wants to listen, anyhow."

Trasamund wasn't paying much attention to captives when Hamnet came up to him. He was directing the butchery of the mammoth Ulric had slain, and of the deer and horses that had fallen in the fight. "When we go off to join up with another clan, by God, we won't come empty-handed," he shouted. "We'll have meat for their larders, so much meat that they'll want us worse than we want them."

That was bravado. He had to know as much, too. But it was a bravado the surviving Three Tusk clansfolk needed. Along with the fallen men of the Rulers, Bizogots lay in the snow, cold and dead and rapidly getting stiff. The ones who yet lived had to be convinced the others didn't die for nothing.

The Bizogots were already starting to abuse the prisoners they'd taken. "We should question them, not torment them," Hamnet said.

Trasamund looked as if he hated him. "Easy for you to talk like that," the jarl growled. "They didn't wreck your clan."

"Not yet," Hamnet Thyssen answered, which brought the Bizogot up short. He went on, "If we learn all we can, we'll save other Bizogot clans, too. Or we can hope we will. Would you rather waste them? Think of them as food-for the sword."

That got home to Trasamund. Considering how the Bizogots ate every bit of every animal they killed, from snout to tail, Count Hamnet had hoped it would. The jarl went on scowling at him, but then turned aside and started bellowing orders.

And he needed to bellow. Having started in on some of their captives, the Bizogots had the rest trussed and waiting and watching. They didn't want to be deprived of the pleasures of vengeance.

Trasamund said, "If they tell us the truth, maybe we let them live, or at least give them a quick end. That will give them a reason to talk to us. If we catch them lying, then we do as we please."

"Some of them don't know any of our tongue," Gelimer said. "We might as well slay them-we can't talk to them."

"Keep them breathing for now," Trasamund said. "Maybe we can ransom them or make the Rulers do something to keep us from hurting them."

"You've spent too much time in the south," Gelimer said. "You're getting soft."

Trasamund hit him in the face. The jarl's mitten cushioned the blow, but it knocked Gelimer down even so. He got up smiling-Trasamund had proved himself still ferocious. Hamnet Thyssen would have thought that a perfect Bizogot attitude if he hadn't known Raumsdalians who worked the same way.

He went over and squatted down by one of the captives. "Tell me your name," he said in the Bizogot tongue.

"I am a dead man," the warrior of the Rulers answered in the same language.

Count Hamnet drew back a fist. "Tell me your name, I said." He wouldn't take nonsense from the prisoner no matter what.

Wearily, the shaggy, hatchet-faced warrior replied, "You can call me Karassops."

That wasn't quite the same as telling Hamnet Thyssen his name. But Hamnet accepted it; Karassops likely feared his real name, if he gave it, would be used in magic against him. "Why did you invade this land, Karassops?" Hamnet asked.

Wounded, battered, and captive though he was, Karassops eyed the Raumsdalian as he would have eyed any other fool. "Because we could, of course."

"It doesn't belong to you."

"Some of it does now. All of it will." The warrior spoke with frightening confidence.

"Much good coming here did you. You will die here," Hamnet said.

"I told you-I am already dead. All of us you captured are dead. You surprised us. You caught us. You disgraced us. We are dead. We cannot show our faces around the fires of our folk ever again. Give me a weapon, and I will end myself now." Karassops sounded eager for the chance.

"If you are dead, you won't mind answering my questions," Count Hamnet said. "What harm can answering do the dead?"

Karassops made an argumentative corpse. Eyeing Hamnet, he said,

"Who are you? You are no Bizogot. You must be one from that other herd."

"Never mind who I am. You don't ask questions. You answer them," Hamnet said.

"One from that other herd . . ." Karassops followed his own line of thought. "Which one? We knew some of you were stupid enough to come back and stir up more trouble." He laughed. "I know! You must be the one who kept mooning over the woman he couldn't have any more."

Hamnet Thyssen hit him two or three times before even realizing what he was doing. Blood ran from Karassops's nose and started freezing in his mustache and beard. Hamnet looked at his hands in some surprise. They seemed to have minds of their own.

"My women are none of your business," he growled.

"I got the idea." Karassops turned his head and spat red into the snow. "And you were the one who didn't want to torture us."

"I didn't want you mouthing off, either," Hamnet said. "You'd better remember who won this fight and who lost."

"I am not likely to forget. I am disgraced forever." Karassops couldn't have looked any more forlorn. "I am outcast. I am outlawed. I can never take my place among the Rulers again. I am dead."

Now Hamnet wished he hadn't lost his temper and hit the man. If Karassops was dead to the Rulers, he might decide he could be alive and have a place among the Bizogots. But as things were, Hamnet didn't try to turn him. Even if Karassops said he would join the folk who'd defeated and captured him, how far could he be trusted? Not far enough, not now, the Raumsdalian thought regretfully. Maybe he or the Bizogots would have better luck with some of the other men from the Rulers.

Meanwhile, though, Hamnet could still learn from Karassops, even if he didn't try to get him to turn his coat. "How many of your folk came through the Gap?" he asked.

Despite the blood on his face, Karassops bared his teeth in a saucy grin. "Enough."

When Count Hamnet made as if to hit him again, he didn't flinch. He had courage. The Rulers seemed to. They were enemies, but far from cowards. "How many of your folk still dwell off to the north?"

Karassops's grin got wider. "More than enough. We are tigers. You are prey."

"It could be," Hamnet Thyssen said. That startled the warrior from beyond the Glacier. Hamnet went on, "We can build tiger traps, though.

Would you be here if we couldn't? You would be trying to squeeze answers out of me instead."

"You got lucky this time," Karassops said. Hamnet Thyssen feared he was right, but didn't say so. Karassops added, "How long do you think you can go on being lucky?"

"How long do you think it will be before the Bizogots join together and hurl you out through the Gap?" Hamnet returned. The warrior from the Rulers laughed in his face.

Shrugging, Count Hamnet got to his feet. Startled again, Karassops asked, "Aren't you going to kill me?"

Hamnet thought of Parsh after he lost the stand-down with Trasamund. He had killed himself to efface the shame of losing to a foreigner, to someone who didn't belong to the Rulers. The Raumsdalian noble grinned, too, as unpleasantly as he could. "Live," he said. "Live with knowing how you failed. What worse thing could we do to you? Live long, and brood on what you should have done."

That struck home where nothing else had. The Rulers might disdain physical torment, but Hamnet knew he'd found a vulnerable spot even so. Karassops yammered at him in his own harsh, guttural language. Hamnet didn't understand him, but knew rage and fear when he heard them.

"You don't deserve to use that tongue any more, do you?" Hamnet said sweetly.

He thought he was only mocking the warrior, but Karassops took him literally. The captive bit down hard. He groaned in agony, then spat something pink and red into the snow. Blood poured out of his mouth. He gulped frantically, swallowing more so he wouldn't drown.

"You idiot!" Hamnet Thyssen cried.

You could bandage and close off a gash on an arm or a leg, maybe in the neck, maybe even, if you were very lucky, in the chest or belly. But on the tongue? How? Count Hamnet stared helplessly as Karassops's face went gray. The warrior slumped over. His eyes sagged shut. In a few minutes, he'd bled to death.

Ulric Skakki eyed the corpse, and the chunk of meat next to it. "I don't think I could make myself do that," he said, shaking his head. "Why did he?" After Hamnet explained, Ulric shook his head. "If you'd just told him to watch his tongue, he'd still be here?"

"Who knows?" Hamnet pointed to the severed organ. "He died watching it."

"Heh," Ulric Skakki said. "Either I laugh or I heave. And you were the one who said to go easy on the Rulers we'd caught."

"I thought I was," Hamnet Thyssen answered. "I didn't mean for him to do … that." His stomach wanted to turn over, too. He'd never been seasick, but this helpless nausea had to come close to that feeling.

"Well, we're rid of him now," Ulric said. Was that callousness, practicality, or, most likely, both at once? The adventurer went on, "If he was the kind who would do something like that, he was the kind who would have caused us all sorts of trouble. Meanwhile, we can take the prisoners we do have and head on down to the Red Dire Wolves. They'll prove the invasion is real, and they'll make Totila get off his backside and fight the Rulers."

That was pure practicality. Count Hamnet found himself nodding. "Good enough. And we’d better use Audun's magic to cover our tracks again, or we'll have lancers on mammoths right behind us. They won't be so easy to surprise twice."

"I wasn't sure we could surprise them once," Ulric Skakki said. "But it turns out they can be overconfident fools just like anybody else. That's good news, of a sort."

"Huzzah," Hamnet said, and Ulric laughed. But it was worth remembering. The Rulers were powerful and dangerous, but they were also human. They made mistakes. They could be made to make mistakes.

So could Trasamund. He was wild to storm to the attack after his small victory. He didn't want to wait and gather strength before hitting back. He didn't want to listen to Count Hamnet, either. Then Liv said, "Your Ferocity, this is bigger than the Three Tusk clan."

"Nothing is bigger than the clan! Nothing!" the jarl shouted.

"The Bizogot folk is. The Empire is. All the lands on this side of the Glacier are," Liv said. "Hamnet does not tell you not to fight back. He tells you to pick your time."

Trasamund snorted. "He worries more about Gudrid and Eyvind Torfinn and Sigvat more than he does about us."

"For better or worse-for better and worse-they are my folk. So are the rest of the Raumsdalians," Hamnet Thyssen said steadily. "No matter what Sigvat thinks, they'll join this fight before too long. They'll have to."

"So you say," the Bizogot rumbled. After a moment, though, he gave a grudging nod. "To the Red Dire Wolves, then. We will. . . pick our moment." He made it sound like picking his nose. But when he said, "The fight goes on," Liv and Hamnet Thyssen both nodded with him.