Breath of God

XV

Kormak Bersi rode out of Burtrask with the travelers. “Are you our nursemaid, our shepherd, or our jailer?” Count Hamnet asked him.

“Not your jailer,” the agent answered. “Plenty of others to tend to that. If you’re lucky, I may keep you out of their clutches.”

“And if we aren’t?” Hamnet persisted.

“If you aren’t, I may not.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say to that, so Hamnet Thyssen didn’t try. Short of murder, they weren’t going to shake Kormak. And murder seemed pointless when he went at least halfway towards believing them. Plenty of others in the Empire, from Sigvat II on down, didn’t. Was riding on towards Nidaros pointless, then? Hamnet could only hope it wasn’t, and wouldn’t be.

As if to remind him of why he was taking the chance of returning, Raumsdalia spread itself out to best advantage before him. The weather stayed fine and mild. Fields of barley and rye ripened under that watery but steady sunshine. Horses and cattle and sheep grazed on the meadows. When the Raumsdalians and Bizogots rode through woods, red and gray squirrels frisked through the trees above, chattering and scolding as the horses clopped past.

With their soft fur, large eyes, and clever, handlike paws, squirrels charmed the Bizogots. Ulric Skakki, who knew them better, liked them less. “Nothing but rats with fluffy tails,” he sneered.

“And people are nothing but dire wolves who comb their hair,” Hamnet said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ulric said. “We’d go to war less often if we could lick our own privates.”

They eyed each other. Hamnet wondered which of them was more cynical. By the look on Ulric’s face, the adventurer was wondering the same thing. Better that, better admiring the scenery, than brooding about what would happen when he came to Nidaros. The Emperors displeasure awaited him there. So did Gudrid’s.

Thinking of her made him think of Liv. He’d hoped he would never think of the two of them together. But, like Gudrid, Liv was proving herself happier with someone else than with him. How Gudrid would laugh when she found out about that! She’d bedded Audun Gilli, too, before setting out from Nidaros. Hamnet wondered why. Probably so as not to leave anyone out.

Thinking about Sigvat or Gudrid or Liv hurt. Yes, better to watch squirrels in the pines and beeches and maples, better to watch wind rippling through growing grain, better to watch beasts fattening on long, green grass than to think of his own personal and political follies.

He’d just ridden out of a stretch of woods when he spotted vultures and teratorns and ravens spiraling down out of the sky ahead. “Well, well,” he said. “Is that a sabertooth’s work, or dire wolves’, or bandits’?”

“All we have to do is ride on, and we’ll find out . . . one way or another,” Ulric Skakki said.

“Let it be bandits,” Trasamund rumbled. “My sword has rested too long in its sheath. It grows thirsty.” He reached back over his shoulder to stroke the hilt of the great two-handed blade.

“Fighting is too important to make a sport of it,” Ulric said.

Count Hamnet was inclined to agree. Trasamund shook his head. “What better sport than scattering your enemies before you?” he said.

“What happens when they scatter you instead?” Ulric returned. “Where’s the rest of your clan, jarl of the Three Tusk Bizogots?” Trasamund gave him a horrible look, one that proved looks couldn’t kill, for Ulric stayed upright and smiling his usual mocking smile in return. Trasamund started to reach for the sword again, but arrested the gesture before his hand reached it. Ulric Skakki hadn’t told him anything but the truth. Of course, the truth often hurt worse than any lies. Hamnet Thyssen knew that too well – and if he hadn’t, one look at Liv riding alongside of Audun Gilli would have flayed the lesson into him forever.

Instead of looking at her, he grimly stared straight ahead. After he rode to the top of a low rise, he could see what the carrion birds were waiting for. A sabertooth had pulled down a cow in a meadow, and was tearing great chunks of flesh from the carcass. The big cat’s short, stumpy tail quivered in delight as it ate.

The rest of the cattle in the herd had run off. They were starting to graze again, a couple of bowshots away. Every so often, their heads would rise – they knew where the sabertooth was, all right. But they also knew the killer wasn’t likely to go after them now that it had other meat.

And what it didn’t eat, the birds would. They waited in an expectant ring around the cat and the carcass. A raven hopped up and grabbed a gobbet of meat. Two more ravens tried to steal the dainty. The first one flew off, croaking angrily. One of the others chased it; the second seemed to decide its chances were better by the dead cow.

The sabertooth had ignored the thieving raven. Maybe it wasn’t big enough to seem a competitor. Teratorns were another story. A bird with a body bigger than a turkey’s and a wingspan as wide as three or four tall men – more to the point, a bird that size with a hooked beak in proportion – was enough to draw even a sabertooth’s notice. This one lashed out with a mitten-sized front paw, warning the teratorn back. The oversized vulture squawked irately and retreated. Teratorns had a name for being stupid, but this one wasn’t dumb enough to take on a sabertooth.

And the sabertooth wasn’t dumb enough to take on three dozen people on horseback. Its short tail quivered again, this time in fury, as they approached. It roared, baring its formidable teeth. When it saw it couldn’t scare them off, it slunk away. Its short hind legs gave it a peculiar gait, different from any other big cat’s.

As soon as the sabertooth scuttled off towards the woods, the teratorns and lesser vultures and ravens – and a couple of opportunistic foxes – swarmed over the dead cow. There was plenty of meat for all of them, but they snapped and screeched at one another just the same.

Eyeing them with wry distaste, Ulric Skakki asked, “Remind you of anything you’ve seen before?”

“What? You mean Nidaros?” Count Hamnet replied, and Ulric nodded. Hamnet went on, “I think they have better manners here.”

Kormak Bersi looked from one of them to the other. Hamnet had the feeling he was remembering everything they said, and he would use it against them when they got to the capital. How can I land in worse trouble, though? he wondered, and smiled a little. Being in bad odor at the court had advantages he hadn’t suspected.

As the travelers made their long, crablike progress towards Nidaros, Hamnet Thyssen wondered what news was coming straight to the imperial city from the Bizogot plains. Were couriers pounding down from some border post farther east with news that the Rulers had shattered the Leaping Lynxes? Did they have word that the Rulers were closer to the tree line than that? Were the Rulers already over the border themselves?

If Sigvat II got news like that, what would he think? Would he decide he’d been hasty when he looked down his nose at Hamnet and his warnings? Would he set Raumsdalia in motion to fight the danger pressing down from the north?

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 way or the other, Hamnet thought, I’ll find out pretty soon.

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, Ask Audun Gilli. Ask Liv. Now he didn’t even want to think about talking to them, though he knew he would have to. Growling still, he went on, “Bizogot shamans couldn’t beat them – couldn’t come close. And neither could our wizard.” He pointed towards Audun. He wasn’t aiming an arrow at the man who’d stolen Liv from him. It only felt that way.

“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. Them. They’re not so much,” she said.

“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 things.” She freighted the word with scorn. “You have so many things, you don’t pay enough attention to your shamanry.”

“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 was better than most, but the serai itself was nothing out of the ordinary to anyone who’d seen Nidaros itself and what the hostels there boasted. Hamnet found his bed wide and soft and inviting – far too much for someone sleeping in it by himself. He tossed and turned all night.

Ulric and Arnora had the room next door. The walls weren’t thick enough to mute their screaming row – or the way they made up afterwards. Hamnet Thyssen plopped his pillow over his head. It didn’t block out the sounds of lovemaking, which did nothing to help him drop off.

He came downstairs the next morning pouchy-eyed and grumpy. Beer and bacon made a good breakfast, but couldn’t get him moving very fast. That Liv and Audun Gilli came down right after him only made things worse. They sat at a table halfway across the taproom – they weren’t trying to torment him, as Gudrid would have – but his eyes kept sliding towards them.

Audun faced him. The wizard was smiling and happy and voluble. Hamnet knew the feeling; he’d enjoyed it himself not long before. He could see only the back of Liv’s head. The way she held it made him sure she was happy, too. Maybe he was imagining things, but he didn’t think so.

Ulric Skakki walked in and sat across from Hamnet. That kept him from seeing Liv unless he peered around the adventurer, which was probably part of what Ulric had in mind. It didn’t help much, though. He didn’t need to see Liv with his body’s eyes to see her inside his mind.

To try to blot out that bright, shining image, he glowered at Ulric and said, “You’re bloody noisy – you know that?”

“Not all my fault,” Ulric said. “Arnora gets her share of the blame. More than her share, to tell you the truth – she enjoys quarreling over nothing, and I don’t.”

“Cursed walls are thin,” Count Hamnet said, sipping from his mug. “By now, I know just about everything she enjoys – and you, too.”

“I told you you needed to get laid,” Ulric said with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “All that stuff is turning sour inside of you. It can’t be healthy. You’ll end up like one of those bull mastodons in” – he snapped his fingers, looking for a word -”what the demon do they call it?”

“Musth,” Hamnet answered.

“That’s it!” Ulric agreed. A serving girl came over to the table. He ordered breakfast, then turned back to Hamnet Thyssen. “They’d be a lot happier if they found a friendly female, and so, by God, would you.”

“There’s no such thing as a friendly female,” Hamnet said stonily. “Not if you’re looking for something that lasts.”

“Not always true. A lot of the time, maybe, but not always,” Ulric Skakki said. “Besides, if all you’re trying to do is steer clear of musth, you don’t care whether it lasts or not. You musth believe me, my deer fellow.” He lisped with malice aforethought.

Count Hamnet grimaced at the pun and at the sentiment. “It wouldn’t mean anything,” he insisted.

“It would mean you could sleep at night. Is that so bad?”

“It would take more than that,” Hamnet said.

“That would be a good start.” Ulric looked back towards the stairs to make sure Arnora wasn’t coming. He lowered his voice: “If you want to take my not quite beloved off my hands, I won’t say a word. I’ll be glad I don’t have to worry about her, to tell you the truth. And since you say you know what she enjoys. .”

“No, thanks.” Hamnet s ears heated. “I know what I’d enjoy, too, and she isn’t it.”

“Too bad.” The adventurer eyed him, one corner of his mouth canted up in rueful amusement. “I always remembered you were a hard case, but I didn’t think you’d be quite so hard as this.”

“Well, I am,” Hamnet said, not without a certain somber pride.

“All right. Fine.” Ulric made flapping motions with his arms, as if he were trying to get a duck to go where he wanted it to. “Some people are stupid enough to enjoy being miserable. I didn’t think you were one of those, but if you are, you are.”

The girl brought him breakfast then. He settled in and began to eat. He ignored Hamnet Thyssen altogether, or seemed to. Hamnet grumbled to himself; he didn’t think he enjoyed being miserable. He hated it. He would much rather not have been miserable – but who’d given him a choice? Not Gudrid. Not Liv, either. That was how it looked to him, anyway.

Kormak Bersi came down just then. He sat down next to Ulric and nodded across the table to Count Hamnet. “You look cheerful this morning,” he remarked.

“Oh, drop dead,” Hamnet snarled.

Some men would have drawn sword on him. Kormak only turned to Ulric and said, “He sounds as happy as he looks, too.”

“Somewhere down inside, I think he is,” Ulric answered. “Only he hasn’t told his face about it yet.”

“You should go up on stage and tell jokes,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “You could set a bowl at the edge, and everybody who laughed would throw money into it. You’d get rich in nothing flat. Then you wouldn’t need to go adventuring.”

“Matter of fact, I’ve done that,” Ulric said. “If you think this is a hard way to make a living, you ought to try it. And mostly they don’t throw money. What they do throw. .” He held his nose.

Hamnet had helped jeer bad comics and jugglers off the stage. He’d never thought about what they were feeling when the audience booed them and flung old vegetables or rotten eggs. They were doing the best they could, even if it wasn’t good enough. All at once, he understood that much too well.

When the travelers came to the western gate, they had to wait behind carts filled with produce and donkeys carrying baskets of fruit. The old lake bottom was Nidaros’ larder these days. A peasant woman with a young porker under each arm sassed the gate guards. By the way they gave back her cheek, they’d been harassing one another a couple of times a week for years.

A mounted party made up mostly of fierce-looking Bizogots was something else again. Aside from likely being dangerous in their own right, the travelers broke routine. That was plenty to make the gate guards suspicious all by itself.

“Give me your names,” ordered the fat, sloppy-looking sergeant in charge of the guards. One by one, the newcomers did. When Hamnet Thyssen announced himself, the sergeant jerked as if a wasp had stung him. “You can’t be here! I’m supposed to arrest you if you show your face around here!”

“Good luck,” Hamnet said. Not only did his companions outnumber the guards about four to one, each of them was probably worth at least two of these soft timeservers in a fight.

“He’s in my custody. No arrest needed,” Kormak Bersi said.

The sergeant sent him a fishy stare. “And who the demon are you!”

Kormak Bersi told him who, and what, he was. The agent displayed a bronze badge that proved he wasn’t lying. “Any more questions?” he asked, his voice ominously mild.

“No, sir.” The sergeant seemed to shrink into himself, and to shrink away from Kormak. He waved. The travelers rode into Nidaros.

Even Trasamund and Liv, who had been to the imperial capital before, stared in wonder. For the other Bizogots, Nidaros raised more than wonder – it raised slack-jawed astonishment. And for Marcovefa . . . What went beyond astonishment. Hamnet Thyssen had no word for it, but he knew it when he saw it.

“So many people,” she whispered. She used her own dialect, but he managed to understand it.

Nidaros’ streets ran from southeast to northwest, from northeast to southwest. A few ran from east to west. None went from north to south. If they had, they would have given the Breath of God a running start. Houses stood close together, so as not to let too much of the wind squeeze between them. They all had high-pitched roofs that would shed snow. All but the poorest had two walls on their north-facing side, the space between filled with air that helped blunt the cold. Doorways, without exception, faced south.

People from all over the Raumsdalian Empire, and from beyond, crowded the streets. Some of them looked to be tourists, gawking at the tall buildings and at the shoals of mankind of which they made up a part. Others hawked everything from mammoth ivory to fine swords to sabertooth fangs to tobacco from the far south.

Ulric Skakki bought some tobacco first chance he got. He charged his pipe, lit it with a twig he ignited at a sausage-seller’s brazier, and puffed out happy clouds of smoke. Marcovefa said, “I have seen you do that before. What good is it?”

“I like it,” Ulric answered. “I don’t need any more reason than that.”

She wrinkled her nose. “It stinks.”

“I don’t think so,” Ulric said. “But even if it does, so what, by God? Plenty of other stinks in a city the size of this one.”

Marcovefa couldn’t very well argue with that. The odors of all sorts of smokes rode the air. So did the stenches of sewage and garbage. Horse and horse manure were two more strong notes, unwashed humanity yet another. Hot, greasy food had a place in there, too. Whether that was a stench or an appetizing smell depended on your point of view – and, perhaps, on the quality of the cooking.

“If we stay here long and the Emperor just ignores us, we’ll run low on money,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Everything here costs more than in the provinces.”

“Whatever Sigvat does, he won’t ignore us,” Ulric predicted. “He may listen to us. He may take our heads for being rude enough to show he was wrong. But he won’t ignore us.”

Count Hamnet thought that over. After a few heartbeats, he nodded. By riding north when Sigvat II wanted him to forget about the Rulers and the Bizogot steppe, he’d forced himself on the Emperor’s attention. Sigvat wouldn’t have forgotten about something like that.

“There.” Kormak Bersi spoke in the Bizogot language. Pointing straight ahead, he went on, “You can see the palace over the closer buildings.”

Someone in that high spire who looked out over Nidaros could see the approaching travelers, too. Could that someone make out that most of them were Bizogots? Would he know they were refugees fleeing the invaders from beyond the Glacier? If he doesn’t know it, it’s not because nobody told him, Hamnet thought.

“Try our hostel! Best in town!” a tout yelled.

Trasamund and Ulric Skakki and Count Hamnet and Kormak Bersi looked at one another. They all nodded at the same time. “Take us there,” Hamnet called. The best hostel in Nidaros would cost more than an ordinary one, but he would have bet the tout didn’t really work for one of the fancy places the capital boasted.

The man looked astonished and delighted and dismayed, all at the same time. “What? The lot of you?” he said.

“Yes, the lot of us, by God,” Hamnet answered. “You’re not the best hostel in town if you can’t make us fit.”

“Well, we’ll try,” the tout said. “Come with me, and I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

Merchants had to stop their wagons and pack trains as the travelers turned off the main thoroughfare and onto a little side street. The traders sent some hard looks their way, but no one seemed inclined to quarrel with a small army of mounted and armed Bizogots – and the handful of Raumsdalians with the northern barbarians looked like dangerous customers, too.

The hostel turned out to be better than Hamnet Thyssen had expected, but it was still a long way from the best. No southern wines graced the taproom, only beer and ale and mead. The rooms were cleaner than most, but small and plain, not as opulent as chambers in the palace, the way they would have been at a first-class establishment. And the proprietor proved willing to haggle, which he wouldn’t have in a fancy place. In one of those, you went somewhere else if you couldn’t afford what the landlord asked.

Hamnet made sure he didn’t get a room next to Ulric and Arnora. The Bizogots between whom he tried to sleep didn’t rut their way through the night. Instead, the big blond man on one side invited in friends, and they all started to sing. The racket was appalling, but Count Hamnet wasn’t appalled. It wasn’t the kind of noise he had to pay attention to, the way lovemaking would have been. Even though drunken discords woke him a couple of times, they didn’t infuriate him or leave him quivering with unslaked lust. He had no trouble dropping off again.

After breakfast the next morning, he nodded to Kormak Bersi. “Well, you’ve captured me, or near enough,” he said. “Take me to the palace. Let’s get this over with.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” the imperial agent asked.

“No, but then neither does Sigvat, and it doesn’t stop him. It doesn’t even slow him down,” Hamnet answered. “We’ll see what he says when he finds out I’ve come back in spite of everything.”

“Yes, we will, won’t we?” On that encouraging note, Kormak rose from the table. Hamnet Thyssen followed him.

They walked to the palace. Count Hamnet would have ridden, but Kormak Bersi didn’t seem to think it was a good idea. Hamnet thought about arguing, but let it go. Approaching anyway at all was arrogant enough. Sigvat II was bound to see it like that, anyhow.

A Raumsdalian in Bizogot furs and leather walking through the streets of the capital got his share of curious looks and more. Hamnet Thyssen stolidly ignored them. He hadn’t trimmed his hair and beard, either.

When he and Kormak came to the palace, the gate guards gaped at him, too. Kormak displayed his emblem for them. That got him respect, at least. “Who’s the wild man with you, sir?” a guard asked.

“I am Count Hamnet Thyssen,” Hamnet growled, sounding like the proudest of nobles. “And who the demon are you?”

The guard’s jaw dropped. His eyes all but bugged out of his head. “By God, you are him,” he choked out. “What are you doing here?”

Kormak Bersi had asked him the same question in different words. Couldn’t anybody in Nidaros see out past the city walls? It didn’t look that way. “Reporting to His Majesty,” Hamnet answered. “I know more about what’s going on in the Bizogot country than anybody he’s talked to lately. I hope he’ll listen to me, for the Empire’s sake.”

“But he’s angry at you. Didn’t you know that?” the guard said.

Count Hamnet shrugged. “I’ll take the chance. I have to. If I can come back for the Empire’s sake, he can listen to me.”

“Go report that Count Hamnet has returned to the palace,” Kormak Bersi said.

The guard didn’t do it himself. Instead, he told off a couple of his men and sent them hotfooting it down the corridor. Hamnet Thyssen knew what that meant: this fellow didn’t want to be associated with bad news. Had Hamnet been in good odor here, the squad leader would have done the job himself.

A couple of disbelieving courtiers came back with the guards. They stared at Count Hamnet as if at some fierce animal unaccountably running loose instead of being caged in a zoological garden. “Good day, gentlemen,” he said, as if to show them he could be civilized after all.

They flinched from the sound of his voice. “What the demon did you come back here for, Thyssen?” one of them said. “Don’t you know the Emperor would just as soon kill you as look at you?”

“Well, he can do that,” Hamnet said. “The Empire won’t be better off if he does, but he can.”

“You don’t care whether you live or die, do you?” the courtier croaked.

After examining what lay inside himself, Count Hamnet shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no.”

That made the courtiers back away in a hurry. He didn’t suppose he could blame them. Self-preservation did matter to most people, and especially to people who had anything to do with princes and potentates. It would have mattered to him, too, if Liv weren’t giving herself to a no-account wizard.

But she was. Next to that, anything Sigvat or his torturers could do hardly seemed worth getting excited about.

Another courtier came out, this one with a fat gold chain around his neck to show what an important fellow he was. “So you want to see the Emperor, do you?” he said in a voice that sounded barely alive.

“That’s right,” Hamnet answered. “Can you take me to him?”

“I can. I doubt I would be doing you a favor, but I can.”

“Let me worry about that,” Count Hamnet said.

“I intend to. And you have more to worry about than you can imagine,” the courtier replied. “But, if you must, come with me.”

Hamnet Thyssen did. The palace seemed badly overdecorated; he was too used to serais and to Bizogot tents. It also seemed too warm. How much wood did Sigvat and his servitors go through every day? Is that why I came back? To preserve such waste? Hamnet wondered.

The courtier with the gold chain led him to the throne room. There he and Kormak Bersi had to stand and wait for a while. Sigvat II was busy talking to an elderly merchant whose fur robe celebrated his wealth. At last, the fellow bowed and tottered away. The courtier stepped forward. In ringing tones, he announced Count Hamnet.

“Your Majesty.” Hamnet went to one knee before the Emperor. Beside him, Kormak, who was not a noble, dropped to both knees.

“So. You came back to mock me, did you?” Sigvat’s voice was too thin and light to give him a proper growl. He was at least ten years younger than Hamnet Thyssen, and perhaps had more than his share of a young man’s worry about whether his elders respected him as much as he thought they ought to.

“No, Your Majesty.” Count Hamnet shook his head. “I came back to warn you. The Rulers turn out to be even more dangerous than I thought they were last year.”

“So you say,” Sigvat jeered. “I say one set of barbarians up beyond the woods is the same as another. And I say you disobeyed me when you went north last fall. You weren’t supposed to do that. How do you propose to defend yourself, eh?”

“By telling you it was necessary,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “I understood the frozen plains better than you did, since I’ve been there and you haven’t.”

“Your Majesty, what’s happening on the plains now shows that Count Hamnet has a point,” Kormak Bersi said. “He -”

“He is a traitor,” the Emperor broke in. “If you back him – and I see you do – then you’re another.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Guards! Take this wretch – take both these wretches – to the dungeons!”