“Will it make them any better?” Ulric Skakki inquired, a heartbeat before Count Hamnet could ask the same question.
Audun and Liv and Marcovefa seemed equally surprised. They put their heads together one more time. When they broke apart again, Liv gave the answer for them alclass="underline" “We don’t know. That isn’t plain.”
“Well?” Hamnet asked Ulric. “What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go,” Ulric said. “I’m a ghoul at heart. I do want to see what Nidaros is like after a sack. Maybe it’ll give us something new to tell Sigvat.”
“The only thing I want to tell him is where to head in,” Hamnet said grimly.
“When the Rulers chased him out of Nidaros, he found out where he was heading in, by God,” Ulric replied. “I won’t say it didn’t serve him right.”
“He’ll say that,” Hamnet predicted. “Nothing’s ever his fault. If you don’t believe me, just ask him.”
Per Anders also wanted to go into Nidaros, to see what had become of it. They recruited a squad’s worth of Bizogots to go with them and help keep them safe from whatever happened to be loose in the city. If the Bizogots did some plundering while they were there, Hamnet was willing to look the other way. Ulric seemed more than willing. He looked ready to do some plundering of his own.
They made the final approach to the fallen capital on foot. “No surly gate guards to persuade that we’re worthy to go in,” Hamnet remarked.
“I wonder if those whoresons tried asking the Rulers their snooty questions,” Ulric said. “If they did, they deserved whatever happened to them.”
Listening to them, Per Anders looked pained. “You men are not proper Raumsdalian patriots,” he said stiffly.
Ulric Skakki gave back a raucous laugh. “You just noticed?”
“What are you going to do about it?” Hamnet added.
“I’m going to wonder why His Majesty wants anything to do with the likes of you,” the courier replied.
“Simple,” Hamnet said. “He needs us. We can do something he wants done. We can give the Rulers a hard time-or he thinks we can.”
“And then he’ll figure out some fancy way to screw us,” Ulric said. “That’s the other thing he’s good for-putting it to people who ought to be his friends.”
“That’s not fair,” Per said.
“You’re right,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. The Emperor’s man looked vindicated till Hamnet finished, “Sometimes he’s a lot worse than that. I wonder if the Rulers freed everybody they found in his dungeons.”
“Not likely,” Ulric said. “Nidaros would look a lot more crowded if they were running around loose.”
Nidaros didn’t look crowded-it looked all but deserted. Like any big city, it depended on constant deliveries of food from outside for survival. When those deliveries stopped, the people in the city could do one of two things: they could leave, or they could starve. If most of them left-or died-what was left and what modest supplies remained might keep a much smaller population going.
When Hamnet and Ulric and their companions strode into the city, somebody took a look at them and then dashed around a corner. “Well, what does that mean?” Ulric wondered. “Are we too tough to mess with? Or is he getting reinforcements? We’ll find out-soon, I expect.”
“Let them come,” a Bizogot said. “Been a while since I killed anything.”
“You’re a friendly fellow, aren’t you?” Hamnet said.
“I am, by God-to my friends,” the blond barbarian said seriously.
Along with the magic that melted the walls, Nidaros had seen several fires. The wind must have been quiet: they hadn’t spread very far, and they hadn’t come together in a firestorm. Still, the sour scent of stale smoke lingered in the air. The Bizogots grumbled-charred rubble offered scant loot.
“What if this happened to Eyvind’s house?” Hamnet worried.
“Then we go back,” Ulric said. “Then we wasted our time coming in. That’s all anybody can say. We didn’t know till we tried. If the house is gone, we think about what we ought to do next.”
That made sense. And what else could anyone say? They would know when they got there. Till they got there, they wouldn’t.
If they got there. The Bizogots hadn’t gone more than a few steps into Nidaros before they drew their swords and nocked arrows. No one had attacked them. No one but that one fellow had even shown himself. But the air shouted danger.
Hamnet took what he thought was the most direct route. And it would have been-if not for the barricade across it. Something moved behind the barricade. “Feel like a fight?” Ulric asked.
“No,” Hamnet said.
He waited for the Bizogots to say they wanted nothing more. They didn’t, not even the “friendly” warrior. Along with the others, he shook his big blond head. Hamnet didn’t think they were afraid of whatever robbers had set up the barricade. Nidaros-all the buildings in Nidaros-was what intimidated them.
Ulric Skakki didn’t feel like a fight, either. “Good,” he said. “Let’s see if we can slide around instead. If I remember how these alleys work . . .”
He soon proved he knew Nidaros far better than Count Hamnet had ever dreamt of doing. “Why were you following me?” Hamnet asked him.
“Why not? You were heading in the right direction. If we could do it the easy way, I didn’t mind,” the adventurer answered. “Since we can’t-”
“You should have been a burglar.”
“I have been, a time or three,” Ulric said equably. He raised his voice a little: “Keep an eye on the doors, you Bizogots. If we run into trouble, it’ll pop out of them.” To Hamnet alone, he added, “I wouldn’t have to say that to Raumsdalians. They’d know. But most of these boys never saw a door before they rode down into the Empire.”
Not five minutes after he delivered his warning, three men leaped into the alley in front of his group. Two of them carried swords. The other had an axe. They were skinny and tough-and looked horrified, like a cougar that suddenly discovered it was facing a sabertooth.
Bowstrings thrummed behind Hamnet. Two arrows hit the axeman. One got one of the swordsmen. Another flew past the second swordsman. The Bizogot who’d loosed it cursed-a short shot, but he’d missed it.
The brigand with the axe crumpled. The swordsmen ran back into the building from which they’d emerged. One was swift as a weasel. The other-the wounded man-hobbled through the door. They slammed it behind them.
“That was easy,” a Bizogot said. “Even if Kolli can’t shoot straight.” Kolli let out an indignant yelp.
“It was easy,” Hamnet agreed. “But it wouldn’t have been if four or five more of those bastards had jumped out behind us, too.”
The Bizogot was thoughtfully silent. Ulric went up and prodded the axeman with his boot. The robber groaned, lost in his own wilderness of pain. He wouldn’t get up again. Ulric took his weapon. “Anybody want this?” he asked. “You can make a lot of trouble with it.”
Two Bizogots played a finger game to see who got it. “Are you going to finish him?” Hamnet asked while the winner brandished his new toy.
“No,” Ulric said. “He wouldn’t have done it for me, so demons take him. If his friends haven’t run away, let them take care of it. Come on.”
They all strode past the axeman. A little to Hamnet’s surprise, nobody kicked him or did anything else to make him hurt worse. He was dying anyhow, so that was only a small mercy.