Then the hilt of his sword and the hilt of the dagger next to it on his belt started chattering to each other. “He says he believes us.” The dagger hilt’s voice was a high, squeaky version of Audun Gilli’s.
“He says all kinds of things. What do I care?” The sword hilt sounded a little like the way Hamnet had before his voice broke.
He didn’t think he was losing his mind. Audun Gilli had a gift for endowing inanimate objects with sarcastic personalities. It was a small magic, but one that sometimes had its uses. “Well, if he says he believes us, why doesn’t he sound like he believes us?” the dagger hilt asked peevishly.
If Hamnet looked down, he suspected he would see his face on the sword hilt, Audun’s on the dagger. He didn’t look down. The shrill voice that sounded like his said, “He’s not that good a liar, I guess.”
Hamnet Thyssen snorted. He tried to hold it in, but he couldn’t. Then he tried not to laugh out loud, and found he couldn’t do that, either. “Tell my cutlery to shut up, will you, please?” he said to Audun Gilli.
“He wants us to shut up!” The voice that sounded like Audun’s sounded properly indignant.
“He’s got his nerve, he does!” said the voice that sounded like Hamnet himself. “If he thinks I’m going to shut up, he’s—” It cut off.
“Right,” Audun Gilli finished for it.
“You have an interesting way of making your points sometimes,” Count Hamnet said.
The wizard’s narrow shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “People who wouldn’t pay attention to me on a bet start listening when their tools do the talking. I’m not your enemy, Your Grace. I don’t want to be your enemy. We already have the same enemy. All this other business was getting in the way of that.”
After a considerable pause, Hamnet said, “You shame me.”
“I don’t want to do that, either,” Audun answered. “You don’t have to love me—you’re not going to love me, and who could blame you? But for God’s sake will you stop treating me like I’m not there?” Hamnet hit him, not quite hard enough to knock him down. “What was that for?” the wizard squawked.
“Well, you can’t say I was treating you like you weren’t there,” Hamnet answered stolidly.
“No, I can’t—and I bloody well wish I could,” Audun said.
“Hrmp.” Now Count Hamnet seemed affronted. “First you want it one way, then you want it the other.”
“I wanted you to talk to me, not punch me!”
“What should I say to you after you took my woman away? A lot of people talk with their fists after something like that.”
Audun Gilli sighed. “Your Grace, I didn’t take Liv away from you. Nobody can do anything like that with her. If you don’t know I’m telling the truth, you never knew her at all. She decided she didn’t want to stay with you. After that”—he kicked at the dirt—“she took me, not the other way round.”
He hadn’t tried not to get taken—Hamnet Thyssen was sure of that. What man in his right mind would try not to get taken if a woman like Liv decided she wanted him? The wizard wasn’t wrong. The wizard was much too poignantly right.
“You aren’t talking again,” Audun pointed out.
“Afraid not,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Trying to count all the different ways I’m a jackass. There are a lot of them.”
“Welcome to humanity, Your Grace,” Audun said. “I often wonder why God bothered with us in the first place.”
“Maybe we’ll know if we ever find the Golden Shrine.” Hamnet looked out across Sudertorp Lake, as if he expected the legendary temple to rise from its waters. Whether he expected it or not, he didn’t get it.
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” the wizard exclaimed. “We went to the ends of the earth—by God, we went past the ends of the earth—and we never saw a trace or heard a rumor. The Rulers don’t seem to know anything about it.”
“Maybe that means it’s on this side of the Glacier after all.” Count Hamnet shrugged. “Or maybe it means the Shrine was never anything but a pipe dream. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does, either—if I had to guess, I’d say nobody ever will.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say you were right,” Audun replied. “We’ll find out—or, more likely, we won’t.”
Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “I imagine men a thousand years from now will still go chasing the Golden Shrine. By then, this will all be forest, and only fragments will be left of the Glacier.” He glanced over to Audun Gilli. “There. I’m talking to you, by God. Are you happier?”
“Yes, Your Grace. Are you?”
“Mm—maybe. Yes, I suppose I am.” Hamnet gnawed at the inside of his lower lip. “If you like, you can tell Liv I’m sorry.”
“You can do that yourself, too,” Audun said.
“I’d rather you did. I might . . . say some other things besides, and chances are that wouldn’t help. Besides, something like that, it won’t matter if it comes from me or from you. Not now it won’t.”
“No, not now,” Audun said. “Earlier . . . Well, no wizard’s ever found a spell to let you fix now what you made a hash of back then. Probably just as well. Things would get knotted up worse than a musk-ox-wool cape knitted by somebody who never learned to knit.”
“Can’t quarrel with you there. And people would make mistakes ‘fixing’ mistakes. . . . What a mess!” Hamnet said.
“Life is complicated enough. Too complicated, sometimes,” Audun Gilli said.
“Can’t quarrel with you there, either.” Count Hamnet turned away. He supposed he could deal with the Raumsdalian wizard. He even thought he might be able to talk to Liv again one of these days, though he didn’t want to do it any time soon. Showing enthusiasm for either prospect was more than he had in him.
“YOU KNOW WHAT you look like?” Ulric Skakki asked as he and Hamnet rode across the steppe with a band of Bizogots out searching for the Rulers.
“No. What?” Hamnet asked, as he was surely meant to do.
“You look like somebody who wants to kill something.”
“Oh.” Count Hamnet looked around. His eye carefully didn’t light on Audun Gilli, who was along to help if the Rulers they ran into had a wizard along. “Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Ulric didn’t look Audun’s way, either. Maybe he was too polite—anything was possible—or maybe he really didn’t know what was making Hamnet’s stomach hurt. Either way, he went on, “If you go out there looking to slaughter the first thing you see, sometimes you don’t worry about staying alive while you’re bashing and smashing.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Hamnet said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Right.” Ulric plainly didn’t believe him. Since Hamnet knew he was lying, he didn’t try to insist.
One of the Bizogots pointed east. “Look at the teratorns circling over there. Lots of them—something big is dead,” he said. “Maybe we should find out what.”
No one said no. If something big was dead, or if more smaller somethings were, very likely it or they had got killed. And if things had got killed, there was a good chance the Rulers had killed them.
Hamnet Thyssen steered his horse with knees and reins. He did watch Audun Gilli as they all rode toward the carrion birds. The wizard seemed rather birdlike himself, the way he flapped his arms every time the horse strode. Audun would never make a picture rider; any equestrian trainer down at Nidaros would have screamed his head off at such bad form. But nobody on the frozen steppe cared about style. Audun got the job done, and that was all that mattered.
They took longer to get to the teratorns’ feast than Count Hamnet had thought they would. Teratorns were so big—big enough to dwarf even condors, let along lesser vultures—that they tricked the eye into thinking they flew closer than they really did.
When they did see why the teratorns were spiraling down out of the sky, they discovered it had nothing—nothing obvious, at least—to do with the Rulers. A mammoth had fallen over and died. Teratorns and smaller scavengers stalked around that mountain of meat. Even on the ground, the teratorns stood out, and not only for their size: their bare-skinned heads were wattled and hideously gaudy.