The Breath of God (46 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

G
ETTING ANY OF
the soldiers fleeing from disaster in the woods to stop long enough to say exactly what had gone wrong up in the north was Hamnet's biggest problem. The men who'd escaped wanted nothing more than to put distance between themselves and the Rulers. They didn't want to talk: that slowed them down.

Some of them warned of mammoths. Some babbled about magic. None of that told Hamnet Thyssen anything he didn't already know. He finally had to capture a Raumsdalian soldier as if the man belonged to an enemy army, not the one Hamnet was going to command.

“Who the demon are you? What do you think you're doing?” the cavalry trooper demanded. He stared at the Bizogots who made up most of Hamnet's strength. Seeing that they were northerners, he went on, “Are you in league with the devils in the woods?”

“No, you idiot,” Hamnet said. “The Rulers attacked the Bizogots before they ever got down here.”
Not that I could make anybody pay attention to what was going on north of the tree line.
But the trooper wouldn't care about that. Hamnet went on, “I am Count Hamnet Thyssen. The Emperor has given me command in the north against the invaders.” He flourished his orders without unrolling them. “Now who are you? Why are you running away?”

“I won't get in trouble?” the trooper asked warily.

“Not if you give me straight answers and stop wasting my time,” Hamnet said.

“Well, my name's Ingolf Rokkvi,” the rider said. “I was part of Count Steinvor's army. We heard the barbarians had done something nasty up
near where the trees stop, but we didn't know just what was going on. We figured it was Bizogots kicking up their heels like they do sometimes.”

“Oh, good,” Ulric Skakki said. “That's the way to guarantee you win your battles—make sure your soldiers know exactly what they need to do.”

Ingolf scratched his head. “Is he joking, uh, Your Grace?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.

“I wish he were,” Hamnet said, while Ulric snorted. Waving the adventurer to silence, Count Hamnet nodded to the trooper. “Go on.”

“Well, I was trying to,” Ingolf Rokkvi said. “We rode north up the forest tracks, looking for the savages. We figured we'd give them a hiding, and they'd run like they usually do, and then we could go home.”

Trasamund and Marcomer and several other Bizogots growled at that scornful assessment of their prowess. Count Hamnet waved them to silence, too. His glare was enough to keep them from reaching for their weapons. He told Ingolf Rokkvi, “Go on,” again.

“I will, if you let me,” Ingolf said. “We were riding along, and all of a sudden the worst blizzard in the world blows up, right in the middle of the woods. You wouldn't think something like that could happen, but it did.”

Hamnet glanced at Liv and Audun Gilli and Marcovefa. They all nodded. Liv and Audun looked worried, which meant they wouldn't have wanted to try a spell like that—Hamnet supposed that was what it meant, anyhow. Marcovefa looked amused, which could have meant . . . anything at all. “Then what happened?” Hamnet asked Ingolf Rokkvi.

“Mammoths happened, that's what!” Ingolf said. “By God, they did. Mammoths with soldiers on 'em. They were built like bricks, with big curly beards.”

“The mammoths?” Ulric Skakki asked.

“The soldiers,” Ingolf Rokkvi said reproachfully. “They speared us, they trampled us—you can't make a horse stand against a mammoth, on account of he's just not big enough—and they laughed while they did it.”

“What happened then?” Count Hamnet asked.

“What do you think happened?” Ingolf's look told him he was short on brains. “We tried to get away from them. That's what you do when you haven't got a chance of winning, and we cursed well didn't. There was more horrible weather in the woods, and short-faced bears and dire wolves jumping out at us like they had no business doing, and all the time it was like we heard those savages laughing at us, like they thought we were the biggest joke in the world.”

“Would you fight them again?” Hamnet asked.

Ingolf Rokkvi needed some time to think about that. “Maybe I would,” he said at last, “if I thought we had some kind of prayer of winning. A lot of the ones who weren't on mammoths were on these funny deer, and they weren't anything special. A regular horseman doesn't hardly need to worry about 'em. But the mammoths, and the magic . . .” He scowled. “That's a pretty scary business.”

“We can beat them. By God, we can,” Hamnet said. Ingolf Rokkvi's scowl got deeper. He didn't believe a word of it. After what he'd been through, Hamnet had a hard time blaming him. A little desperately, the Raumsdalian nobleman went on, “We have a wizard who can match anything they do.” He pointed to Marcovefa.

Ingolf eyed her the way a man will eye a good-looking woman, not like a soldier eyeing someone who might help his cause. “Well, if you say so,” he said after a moment: he didn't believe a word of it.

His horse looked back at him and said, “Don't be dumber than you can help. She really can. She's not running from them the way you are, is she?”

That wasn't Marcovefa's style of magic. Audun Gilli enjoyed putting words in the mouths of things that didn't normally have mouths, or at least had no business talking. Audun looked innocent when Hamnet Thyssen glanced his way—ostentatiously innocent, as a matter of fact. Hamnet didn't love him and never would, but for the time being decided he wasn't sorry to have him along.

Ingolf's eyes almost bugged out of his head. “How did you do that?” he demanded of Marcovefa.

She really was innocent—of this, anyway. In her accented Raumsdalian, she said, “Is my fault if beast has more sense than you do?”

The cavalry trooper gathered himself. Hamnet had feared he might go to pieces—he'd been through a lot lately. But he didn't. “All right. I'll try,” he said. “If I end up dead . . . I reckon the lot of you will be there beside me. Have I got that right?”

“Yes,” Hamnet said simply. “The next town ahead is Kjelvik, isn't it? Does it have a decent garrison?”

“Not too bad,” Ingolf answered. “I don't know whether they'll want to fight or bug out, though.”

“We'll see,” Hamnet Thyssen said. They all rode north.

 

T
HEY CAME ACROSS
more soldiers fleeing the Rulers before they got into Kjelvik. Some of them they persuaded to turn around and resume the
fight. Others, seeing a body of armed men coming their way from out of the south, rode around them no matter how far out of their way that took them. Hamnet didn't try to round up those soldiers; they were too far gone to be of much use.

Kjelvik sat on a low hill. There were no tall hills or steep slopes in the northern part of the Empire. The Glacier had lain here too recently, and had ground such things down under its immense weight. As Count Hamnet neared the top of the hill, he could look ahead and see the dark smudge of the north woods out on the horizon. He was getting close. So were the Rulers.

He got a less than overwhelming reception from the gate guards. “Who the blazes are you, and why are you coming the wrong way?” a sergeant asked.

Instead of answering with words, Count Hamnet displayed Sigvat's commission, all adorned with seals and gorgeous with ornate calligraphy. “What's it say, Sergeant?” one of the guards asked. “I can't read for beans.”

“What? You think I can?” the underofficer said. “I went to work when I was a brat, same as most people. I didn't have the time to waste on my letters.”

“This is an order from His Majesty, the Emperor,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “It gives me command in the north against the new invasion of the barbarians.”

“Right. And rain makes applesauce,” the sergeant jeered. “Nobody in his right mind'd
want
to go fight these savages. They ride mammoths, I hear.
Ride
'em—would you believe it?” Ingolf Rokkvi shuddered—
he
believed it, all right.

And so did Count Hamnet, who had also seen it with his own eyes. He growled, “Go get an officer—someone who actually can read. He'll tell you whether I'm lying or not, by God.”

Grudgingly, the sergeant sent off one of his guards. In due course, the man returned with a young officer. “I am Osvif Grisi,” he said. “What do you want, stranger? What do you need?”

“I want to drive the barbarians out of the Empire. I need Kjelvik's garrison to help me do it,” Hamnet answered. Osvif gaped. Hamnet displayed his commission again.

“Is he a fraud, sir?” the sergeant asked. “If he is, we'll give him what-for like he wouldn't believe.”

Osvif Grisi stared at the impressive parchment. He reached Sigvat's
peremptory commands, his lips moving. Count Hamnet didn't think the less of him for that; he read the same way himself, as did most people who could read at all. The more Osvif read, the wider his mouth fell open. By the time he finished, his thinly bearded chin was hanging on his chest.

“Well?” Hamnet said.

The youngster's jaw shut with an audible click. He stiffened to a parade-ground attention. “Give me whatever orders you think right, Your, uh, Grace,” he said. “I am at your service in all ways, as is Kjelvik.”

“He's real?” Now the sergeant's jaw dropped.

“He's real, all right,” Osvif said grimly. “If he told me to hang you from a pole off the battlements, you'd be hanging there now.” The sergeant gaped. Osvif Grisi turned back to Hamnet. “What do you want from Kjelvik, sir?”

“Every soldier you can put on a horse,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “We're going to have to scrape together some kind of army to fight the Rulers, you know.”

“I suppose so, yes.” The young officer licked his lips. “I think you'd better talk to the town's commandant.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “I've been trying to do that, and people keep getting in my way.” He eyed the sergeant, who did his best to hide in plain sight. Maybe he imagined himself kicking his life away up on the battlements. Hamnet wouldn't have ordered him hanged, but he didn't have to know that. The noble nodded to Osvif. “Take me to him.”

Kjelvik's garrison wasn't big enough to hold the walls for long against a determined foe. The keep wasn't strong enough to keep out an invader once he'd broken into the city. So Hamnet's professional eye told him, anyhow. The guards outside the keep's portcullis stared at the Bizogots behind him.

“I thought some different barbarians were loose in the north,” one of them said to his friend.

“Me, too. Shows what we know,” the other guard said. Then he noticed Osvif with Hamnet's party. “What's going on, sir?”

“This noble”—Osvif pointed to Hamnet—“is in charge of all defenses in the north, by His Majesty's command.” That made all the guards spring to attention. Osvif went on, “I am taking him to Baron Runolf.”

“Is that Runolf Skallagrim?” Hamnet asked. He hoped so—if the local commander was a man he knew, things would go smoother.

And Osvif nodded. “That's right. You've met him?”

“A while ago, but yes,” Hamnet replied.

Runolf Skallagrim was about his own age, a little heavier, a little softer—a little happier-looking, if you wanted to get right down to it. “By God,” he said when Osvif led Count Hamnet into his chamber. “Look what the hound dragged in!” As he rose to clasp Hamnet's hand, he went on, “What the demon are you doing here? Last I heard, you'd got jugged.”

“That's old news now.” Hamnet Thyssen displayed his commission.

Runolf looked it over. In due course, he nodded. “Well, that's better than sitting in a dungeon, I must say.”

“Is it?” Hamnet asked bleakly. “In the dungeon, I don't have to worry about a mammoth stepping on my head.”

“There is that,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “So what do you want from me?”

“As many men as you've got, as many fugitives from the armies that have already lost to the Rulers as you can round up, and enough food for them to take north.”

“You don't ask for much, do you?” Runolf said.

“If you've got three times that many men in your pocket, I'll gladly take 'em,” Hamnet said. “Oh—any wizards in town? We need them, too.”

“A supply train'll be hard enough to come by.”

That was much too likely to be true. Kjelvik wasn't a town from which anyone in the Empire had expected an army to sortie. If Raumsdalia needed to move against invaders from a town this far south, they'd penetrated farther and done worse than anybody would have guessed possible. Well, so they had. “Do what you can, Runolf, please,” Count Hamnet said. “I've met these Rulers before. They come from beyond the Glacier, and they're more trouble than you can imagine.”

“Beyond the Glacier?” The garrison commander looked and sounded intrigued. “So those stories about a way melting through don't just come from merchants off the Bizogot steppe getting drunk and telling tales in taverns, eh?”

“No, they're true, all right. I've been up there. It's a different world. We haven't had anything to do with it since the Glacier walled it off, God only knows how many thousand years ago. But we do now.”

Runolf Skallagrim grunted. “I
will
do what I can, Thyssen. And I think the first thing I'll do is set my men to rounding up the soldiers who've come south out of the woods. My bet is, we'll need a show of force before a lot of those buggers'll want to remember why the Emperor pays them.”

“My bet is, you're right,” Count Hamnet said. “Fair enough. Do that first. After they comb them out of the fields and the taprooms and the
whore houses, we'll see what we've got. Don't waste time on it, though. The way it looks to me is, we've wasted all the time we can afford, or maybe a little more than that.”