Liv pointed in the direction from which the lightning bolt had come. "There!" she said. "We will find him there! Quick!" She ran forward.
She was lightfooted, and fast as most men. Hamnet Thyssen lumbered after her, doing his best to keep up. She let out what sounded like a lynx's cry—what sounded so much like one, Hamnet wondered whether one of the beasts really spoke from her throat. He wouldn't have been surprised; Bizogot shamans and wild beasts had mystical connections he understood only dimly.
Peer as he would, Hamnet Thyssen saw no man standing or even crouching there on the frozen plain. But suddenly he heard a great thunder of wings. Some large bird—in the glow from the Northern Lights, he saw it was an owl as white as an arctic fox or hare in winter—streaked off to the north.
Liv dug in her heels and skidded to a stop. Count Hamnet charged past her, then stopped himself. The plain was empty now. He could feel it. "Our man has flown," Liv said sadly.
"Flown?" Hamnet's echo sounded foolish even in his own ears.
"Flown," the shaman repeated. "Did you not see the snowy owl just then?"
"I saw the owl," Hamnet Thyssen said. "I saw no man."
"Oh, yes, you did," Liv told him. "The owl was the man—is the man. Well, he is flown now. Wherever he lands, so long as it is far from us, he will take back his own shape. He will tell his friends, whoever they are, whatever he learned of us."
"His friends." Again, Hamnet used her words for his own. "Who are his friends? Is he another Bizogot shaman? Why would he fly north if he is?"
"He is not a Bizogot. I was not sure before. Now I am." Liv sounded very sure. She went on, "I do not know what he is. I do not think he comes from your folk, either—at least, his magic feels nothing like Audun Gilli's. Are there people beyond the Glacier? Maybe there are."
"Yes, maybe." Hamnet couldn't say more without telling her that Ulric Skakki had come this way before. For that matter, how could he be sure himself that Ulric was telling the truth? He couldn't, and he knew it. For him, if not for the adventurer, maybe was nothing but the truth.
The shaman looked north, in the direction the snowy owl had flown, toward the narrow part of the Gap, toward whatever—and whoever—lay beyond. "If there are people beyond the Glacier, they are not God's people." She sounded disappointed. "God's people wouldn't need to spy."
Count Hamnet hadn't thought of it like that. When he did, he nodded. "And if they are not God's people, if they are people like the rest of us, what does that say?"
"That they will steal whatever they can and take whatever they can," Liv replied at once. Startled, Hamnet nodded again. He wouldn't have put it that way, which didn't mean he thought the Bizogot shaman was wrong. Liv had a habit of saying exactly what was on her mind. Hamnet Thyssen tried to do that, too, which was one reason so many Raumsdalians were perfectly content to see him stay in his castle off on the edge of nowhere.
He laughed softly as he and Liv walked back to the encampment. He was much closer to the edge of nowhere here in the Gap than he could be anywhere inside the Empire. And, with the Gap melted through, he and his companions could go beyond the edge of nowhere, go into lands no one from the south could have reached for thousands of years.
The people on the other side couldn't have come down into the south for thousands of years, either. Sigvat II didn't seem worried about that. Neither did Trasamund. Hamnet Thyssen wondered why not. He knew he was.
"When the spy flew away, what did you sense?" he asked Audun Gilli when he got back.
"Is that what happened?" the wizard said, as if much was now explained.
"That's what happened," Hamnet said. He translated for Liv, who nodded.
"Liv made the very pretty shadow spell—I know that," Audun said. "It fooled him, too, or he wouldn't have thrown the lightning at the doubles. He would have sent it against you. But then when he realized you were still coming forward .. . Yes, it must have been a shapeshifting spell, but not one I ever met before. Nothing like any I ever met before, in fact."
"He is right," Liv said after Hamnet Thyssen translated again. "Shamans can take the seeming of a bear or a dire wolf or a lion or a musk ox or a mammoth. Sometimes it is more than a seeming—even you folk from the hot lands will know this." Count Hamnet didn't think of the Raumsdalian Empire as a hot country, but it was when measured against the Bizogot plains. Liv went on, "This magic was new to me, too. It was quicker and more complete than any I have known before. The spy did not take on the seeming of an owl. He was an owl."
After Hamnet turned that into Raumsdalian for Audun Gilli, he asked, "How will he stop being an owl, then?" He used both languages.
"Someone will have to make him into a man again," Liv said. "Even in owl shape, he will know enough to go back where he came from."
"What does she say?" Audun asked. When Hamnet told him, he said, "Yes, it would have to work like that. And the spy will have to hope he knows enough to go back where he came from. Otherwise, he'll catch rabbits and voles and lemmings for the rest of his days."
Now Liv had to wait for the translation. When she had it, she sketched a salute to Audun Gilli. "That can happen to Bizogot shamans, too," she said. "Some people say short-faced bears are as sly as they are because they have men's blood in them, blood from shamans who never went back to men's shape."
Count Hamnet's shiver had nothing to do with the chilly night. He tried to imagine living the rest of his life as a beast, slowly forgetting he was ever a man. Only one thought occurred to him. How Gudrid would laugh!
Trasamund grunted when he heard the folk from beyond the Glacier had spies on this side of the Gap. After a bit, he unbent enough to say, "If we catch them, we'll kill them." His large, hard hands opened and closed several times; he seemed to look forward to it.
"We're going up to spy on them," Ulric Skakki murmured when he and Hamnet rode a little apart from the rest of the travelers. "Why shouldn't they come down to spy on us?"
Put that way, it seemed logical enough, fair enough. But it didn't feel fair to Hamnet Thyssen. What the Empire was doing—with some help from the Bizogots—was only fitting and proper. So it looked to him, anyhow. For other folk to come down into those familiar lands, though ... If that wasn't an invasion, what was it?
When Count Hamnet said as much, Ulric Skakki smiled one of his sardonic smiles. "Of course, we're not invading their lands when we go north of the Gap—eh, your Grace?"
"We're not invading." Hamnet waved an arm at the Bizogots and Raumsdalians riding north. "Does this look like an army to you?"
Ulric laughed. "Well, no," he said. "But does one man who turns himself into an owl look like an army to you?"
"That's different," Hamnet Thyssen insisted.
"How?" Ulric sounded genuinely curious.
Try as Hamnet would, he couldn't come up with a good answer. The only one that came to him was, Because it's on this side of the Gap. It was an answer plenty good enough for him. He was sure as sure could be, though, that Ulric Skakki would only laugh some more if he brought it out. And so he rode along in glum silence—and Ulric Skakki laughed at him anyway.
After a while, Ulric said, "They'll have a demon of a time trying to bring an army through here."