“Why, what I know, of course.” She sounded surprised he needed to ask.
“And that is?” he persisted.
“It certainly is,” Marcovefa agreed. For a moment, he was furious. Then, slowly, he realized it was one of those things she might know but had no words for. He’d seen that before, with her and with other shamans and wizards. Sometimes it all came together at the proper moment.
Sometimes, of course, it didn’t. If it didn’t this time, he couldn’t imagine their getting another chance.
Several men on riding deer moved out in front of the Rulers’ war mammoths. “Their wizards,” Marcovefa said. “They think that, if they can kill me first, everything else is easy.”
“Are they right?” Hamnet blurted.
“Yes. This time, yes.” She nodded with as little fuss as if he’d asked her whether the sun was shining.
“Can they do it?” Trasamund found a more urgent question still.
“I don’t know,” Marcovefa answered, still calmly. With what seemed like irrelevance to Count Hamnet, she added, “The Glacier is melting.” Then she said, “If they do not kill me, I will kill them.” Hamnet liked the sound of that much better.
But the Rulers were going to have their try first. Marcovefa gestured to the men around her, as if to say they would be none too safe if they stayed close to her. Neither Hamnet nor any of the others moved more than a pace or two.
The enemy wizards put their heads together. They might have been talking about some game. And so they were, but to the victors here went life. The wizards separated again. One of them pointed not at Marcovefa but at the sky above her head.
Lightning crashed down, though the day was bright and sunny and clear. But it didn’t strike Marcovefa. Instead, it smote the earthen dam a couple of bowshots north of where she stood. Steam rose from the riven ground. Another bolt of lightning struck. Again, Marcovefa deflected it. More steam spurted from the dam enclosing Sudertorp Lake.
And Marcovefa laughed-not a mirth-filled laugh, but one that made Hamnet’s hackles rise. God might have laughed that way, thinking of a particularly nasty joke. Marcovefa pointed down toward the Rulers’ wizards. “Fools!” she shouted in her own dialect. “You dig your own graves, fools!”
They couldn’t have heard her-they were too far away. Even if they had heard her, they wouldn’t have understood her. Hamnet Thyssen barely did. Ulric Skakki saw the same thing. “What is she going to do?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” Hamnet whispered back. “I’m not sure she knows herself. But whatever it is, I wouldn’t want it aimed at me.”
The Rulers’ wizards must have felt the same way. The one who’d pointed at the sky extended his hand again, not above Marcovefa this time but straight toward her. Fire spurted from his outstretched finger, fire that Hamnet somehow realized was powered by all the enemy magicians together.
That spear of flame took only a couple of heartbeats to fly from the Ruler to Marcovefa. She gestured with her right hand. Instead of cremating her, the fire also smashed against the earthen dam. The sound of that impact was like red-hot iron dropped into a bucket of water, but magnified a hundredfold.
When the fiery gout also went wide, the Rulers’ wizards seemed to slump on their riding deer. They’d tried two strong weapons and failed with both. Now, their manner said, it was Marcovefa’s turn.
She looked toward the dam of earth and rock and ice, the dam toward which she’d deflected their spells. When she did, the Rulers’ lead wizard let out an anguished howl Count Hamnet heard clearly no matter how far away the man was. The wizard knew what would happen next, even if Hamnet didn’t.
Marcovefa chanted in her own dialect. Hamnet understood a word here and there-no more. Ulric knew more of the speech of the folk who lived atop the Glacier. He lost his usual air of studied calm. “She can’t do that!” he yelped. “. . . Can she?”
“Do what?” Hamnet asked.
Then Marcovefa did it. She swept both hands upward, then theatrically brought them down. “Now!” she cried-Hamnet understood that with no trouble at all.
And the earthen dam erupted. All the ice within it either melted or turned to steam. Boulders flew high into the air. One of them came down just a few yards in front of the Rulers’ wizards. Only frantic passes from Marcovefa kept the stones from squashing her and her companions.
Hamnet Thyssen noticed all that, but only peripherally. Once, a couple of thousand years before, Nidaros, the imperial capital, had stood by the eastern edge of Hevring Lake. Then the Glacier retreated and the weather warmed. The dam of earth and ice that held in Hevring Lake melted and collapsed-and the lake poured out. What had been its bottom was some of the most fertile farmland in the Empire . . . and the lands to the west, for mile after mile after mile, were scabby, wrecked badlands-all that remained after a flood bigger than human imagination could grasp poured through.
Count Hamnet didn’t have to imagine a flood like that. He watched one with his own eyes. As Marcovefa’s magic melted the dam that had restrained Sudertorp Lake for so long, it burst free. The roar of those rushing waters dwarfed anything Hamnet had ever heard from the throat of lion or bear.
How high was that frothy, muddy, stone-filled wall of water? As tall as ten men? Twenty? More? He didn’t know, not exactly. He knew it was tall enough and to spare.
Somehow-sorcerously?-he heard the Rulers’ wizards scream even through that immense roaring. Their leader tried to do something to deflect the doom thundering down on them. Marcovefa clapped her hands once in what had to be admiration for the effort.
The lead wizard wasn’t strong enough, even with all his friends behind him. Even if he would have had the strength, he didn’t have the time he needed to shape the kind of spell that might have done some good. The wall of water struck him, struck the rest of the wizards, and swept them away.
In less than the blink of an eye, it smashed into the war mammoths behind the wizards. A few minutes earlier, Hamnet had thought that the line of great beasts was one of the most fearsome things he’d ever seen. Now he had to change his opinion. He got a few brief glimpses of mammoths tossed like bathtub toys on the flood. Other than those, the heart of the Rulers’ armed might vanished without a trace.
So did all the warriors on riding deer and horses. So did the neat squares of tents that were the Rulers’ encampments. So did . . . well, everything in the path of what had been Sudertorp Lake.
“God!” Trasamund said-the most reverent Hamnet Thyssen had ever heard him sound.
Even Marcovefa was impressed. “I didn’t think it would do that,” she murmured.
“What did you think it would do?” Ulric Skakki inquired.
“Drown them. That, yes,” Marcovefa said. “But all this? This is more than I bargained for.”
Hamnet suspected it was more than anyone would have bargained for. There off to his right, less than a bowshot away, Sudertorp Lake was emptying like a pot with a hole in its side. All of them still had to shout to make themselves heard over the roar of the water.
“God!” Trasamund said again, this time on a different note.
“What is it?” Count Hamnet asked.
“The lake will run dry, yes?” the Bizogot said. “No more water here. No more marsh around the edge. What will the waterfowl do when they come here to breed?”