“Enough!” Trasamund shouted. He could sound authoritative even naked—no mean feat. “You gave him what he deserved. He still needs to be able to fight.”
When Hamnet came out of Sudertorp Lake, he let the sun and the southerly breeze dry him. Then he climbed back into his clothes. They seemed even nastier now than he’d thought they would. And, of course, they were crawling with lice. Before long, he would be once more, too. And, before long, he wouldn’t notice the sour stink that clung to them any more.
As Ulric dressed, he made a face and said, “Some people weren’t very good at keeping clean.” No one would ever have imagined he might be one of those people.
The Leaping Lynxes’ stone huts weren’t far from the eastern end of Sudertorp Lake. They’d built them by the marshes where the waterfowl nested most thickly. Some of the refugee Leaping Lynxes sighed to be coming home under such sorry circumstances. Other Bizogots seemed surprised and impressed that their countrymen had built any kind of permanent housing.
Then a man came out of one of the stone huts. He wasn’t especially tall, but thick in the chest and wide through the shoulders. He had black hair and a long, thick, elaborately curled beard. In short, he belonged to the Rulers. He carried a bone staff in his right hand. Fire leaped from it as he pointed it at the Bizogots.
III
FLAME ENGULFED A mammoth-herder and his horse. The man screamed. So did the animal, and galloped across the steppe. Fire still clung to it, and to its rider. The horse ran on long after it should have dropped. Hamnet wondered whether the sorcerous conflagration burned and preserved at the same time, to make torment last and last.
Laughing, the wizard raised the bone staff and pointed it at another Bizogot. The man ducked, not that that would have done him any good. Flame sprang forth from the staff once more.
Marcovefa raised a hand and spoke sharply in her own dialect. The flame stopped before it reached the Bizogot. The wizard from the Rulers stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then the streak of fire started to slide back toward him, faster and faster. He stared again, this time plainly in horror, and shouted something in his guttural language.
More Rulers came out of other huts. Some of them must have been wizards, too, for they carried staves like the first man’s. When they added their strength to his, they stopped the fire just before it recoiled on him.
Marcovefa bit her lip as the flame ever so slowly began to move out again, this time toward her. Audun Gilli and Liv began incanting, too, to give her what aid they could. All together, though, they were not quite a match for the sorcerous power the Rulers had gathered here.
But there were ways around that. Hamnet Thyssen needed a few heartbeats longer than he might have to realize as much. When he did, he wasted no more time. He strung his bow, aimed at the closest enemy wizard, and let fly. The Rulers’ sorcerers normally brushed arrows aside with some small spell or another. Putting forth all their strength against Marcovefa, they had no time or energy for such minor wizardries.
The arrow caught the sorcerer square in the chest. He looked absurdly surprised as he clutched at himself. His knees buckled; he slumped to the ground. Ulric Skakki and the Bizogots started shooting right after Hamnet did. Two or three other sorcerers fell, wounded or killed. That meant the lot of them couldn’t concentrate on Marcovefa any more. And she proved more than equal to anything but the lot of them.
They might have paid less attention to the fire one of them had first unleashed. She didn’t. When they shielded themselves against arrows, they left themselves vulnerable to the flames. They screamed when their bone staves caught fire, and screamed again when they did.
They dashed this way and that, trying to quell the flames. Some of them had the presence of mind to plunge into Sudertorp Lake. But not even water quenched the fire. Like sulfurous oil, they went right on burning. Steam rose from the lake.
The fire didn’t touch the Rulers who weren’t wizards. They tried to flee. The Bizogots rode after them. Slaying enemies who ran from them made ever so much better sport than fleeing themselves.
“I thank you,” Marcovefa said, riding up alongside Hamnet. She leaned toward him and brushed her lips across his. “Even for me, a few too many there at first.” Something kindled in her eyes. “Later on, I thank you properly. We have to make do with words right now.”
“Best thing I’ve heard today,” Hamnet answered, deadpan. Marcovefa laughed. He went on, “Why had so many of their wizards gathered here?”
“Better to ask them than me—except I don’t think any of them are left alive.” Her nostrils flared. “And most are too cooked—too charred, that is the word you use—to be worth eating.”
“Yes.” Count Hamnet left it right there. That stink had invaded his nose, too. At least he didn’t confuse it with the smell of roasting pork, the way he had up atop the Glacier. Remembering how he’d hungered for man’s flesh before realizing what it was still raised his hackles.
“Well, these huts are ours now, by God—ours by right of conquest,” Trasamund said proudly. “The Rulers ran off the Leaping Lynxes, and now we’ve run off the Rulers. We may not be a neat, tidy clan of the old-fashioned kind, but we’ll have to do. Times aren’t what they were before the Rulers came, either.”
Ulric Skakki stared at him in artfully simulated disbelief. “A Bizogot jarl admits the times are changing? What is this sorry old world coming to?”
“I don’t know. By the past couple of years, nothing good,” Trasamund said. “But I’m not dead yet, and some more of those maggoty musk-ox turds are. That, I like. And I know the world is changing. Was I not the first man through the Gap?” He struck a pose, there on horse back.
Ulric didn’t tell him no. But the adventurer had gone through the Gap the winter before him. None of the Three Tusk Bizogots knew Ulric had crossed their grazing grounds, and he didn’t want it known.
Trasamund pointed to the wizards’ blackened corpses. “A good thing these burning bastards didn’t start grass fires. That could have been a nuisance.”
“I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re not wrong,” Count Hamnet said.
“Grass fires can be very bad,” Trasamund said. “Not now, but later in the year—at the end of summer and the start of fall, before the first snows. We don’t get much summer rain here, and things dry out. When fires start, they can spread and spread. They can ruin grazing grounds. When that happens, wars follow. You have to have somewhere to take your herds. Or, if the fires catch the animals, you have to grab someone else’s. When it’s that or die, you do what needs doing.”
“I suppose so,” Hamnet said. He’d fought in plenty of wars with less behind them than life and death.
Trasamund pointed to the stone huts. “Let’s make sure we haven’t got any more vermin skulking in there.” A Raumsdalian would have spoken of serpents or scorpions. The frozen steppe lacked a few unpleasant things, anyhow. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan went on, “We can live off the fat—by God, the goose grease—of the land . . . for a while, anyhow. Then things get hard again. They always do, curse them.”
No more Rulers remained. Hamnet Thyssen did wonder why so many wizards had come together. When he wondered out loud once more, Ulric said, “To plot mischief against us. Why else?”
“I can’t think of any other reason, either,” Hamnet replied. “I wish I could.”
“Maybe your lady friends and Audun will figure out what they were up to from the stuff they left behind,” Ulric said.
Hamnet gave him a stony look. “Liv is not my lady friend these days. You may perhaps have noticed.”