The Golden Shrine Read online

  Ulric Skakki looked artfully astonished. “You mean that isn’t a plum stuck on to the front of your face?”

  Like a lot of Bizogots, Trasamund had been down in Raumsdalia often enough to know what a plum was. His whole face turned red, if not purple. “One day you will talk too bloody much, Skakki. You’ll be sorry for it when you are—you’d best believe you will.”

  “People keep telling me so,” the adventurer said. “It hasn’t happened yet, though. One day I’m going to get tired of waiting.”

  Trasamund muttered into his beard. Whatever he said, he didn’t say it loud enough to get through the facial shrubbery. Trading insults with Ulric was a losing game; he gave worse than he got. As Count Hamnet had seen—and discovered, painfully, for himself—fighting Ulric was also a losing game. Which left . . . what? Loving him, maybe? Hamnet Thyssen scowled. That also struck him as an unappetizing choice.

  HAMNET FOUND HIMSELF looking east as he rode across what had been Hevring Lake’s bottomland. He saw Per Anders doing the same thing. Catching Sigvat’s courier at it made him realize he was doing it, too. A little sheepishly, he said, “If the Rulers sacked Nidaros, not much point looking for the city smoke rising from it, is there?”

  Per blinked. “No, I guess not,” he answered, also sounding sheepish. “Force of habit.”

  “I know. I was doing the same thing,” Hamnet said. “And I’ll probably start doing it six or eight more times, till I get it through my thick head that that smoke cursed well won’t be there.”

  He did, too. Late the next afternoon, they came close enough to Nidaros to get a good look at what the Rulers had done to the Raumsdalian capital. Hamnet could have done without it. It was almost as hard on him as seeing Gudrid’s naked corpse would have been. And Nidaros itself hadn’t betrayed him, even if important people inside the city had.

  Nidaros’ gray granite walls could have held out every Bizogot ever born for a thousand years. So Raumsdalians said, anyhow, and Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t inclined to argue with the conventional wisdom there. Those stout walls had held out the Rulers . . . for a little while. Not for long enough.

  The granite blocks didn’t seem to have been overthrown. No: what happened to them was worse. It looked as if they’d been melted back into the lava from which they’d formed. Stone had flowed and run like hot fat, if not quite like water. What had happened to the men up on those walls when the granite melted? Nothing good—Count Hamnet was sure of that.

  “Do we want to go in there?” Trasamund wondered aloud.

  “Depends,” Ulric answered. “If only a few people lived through the sack, if only a few people are back, then we can scrounge as much as we need. There’ll be plenty of food and the like. But if a lot of the vultures that walk on two legs are prowling around in there, we’re just wasting our time. Your choice, Your Ferocity.”

  “Let’s go up, get a closer look,” the jarl said. “Then we can figure out whether going in is smart or not.”

  “That’s sensible,” Ulric said. “But what the demon? Let’s do it anyway.” Trasamund sent him a curious look, but didn’t try to parse the adventurer’s comment. Hamnet did, and felt his head start to whirl. He gave it up as a bad job.

  Somewhere not far from the western wall was the house Earl Eyvind and Gudrid had shared, the house that looked out on the Hevring bottomland. Did it still stand? Had the Rulers plundered it? If they hadn’t, was anything about the Golden Shrine still there, or had Eyvind Torfinn managed to pack up all his assembled knowledge when he fled?

  Hamnet remarked on that to Ulric. “Should we go there?” he asked. “Or do you think it’s a waste of time?”

  “Mm . . . You ask interesting questions, and I wish to God you didn’t.” Ulric plucked at his beard. “Maybe we ought to see, eh? It’s not too deep into the city. We can’t get into too much trouble heading over there—I hope.”

  “Oh, we can always get to trouble.” Hamnet Thyssen spoke with mournful conviction. “But will we get into worse trouble going in or staying clear?”

  “Interesting questions, like I said.” Ulric Skakki didn’t make it sound like a compliment. By the way he said it, Count Hamnet might have come down with a rare—and socially embarrassing—disease. After a moment’s thought, the adventurer looked pleased with himself. “Why don’t we ask the wizards? They can tell us what kind of fools we are.”

  “I already know that. We’re big fools, or we wouldn’t be here,” Hamnet said. “I want to know what we can do about it.”

  “Amounts to the same thing in the end,” Ulric answered cheerfully.

  They did talk to the wizards. Marcovefa, Audun Gilli, and Liv put their heads together. Marcovefa looked up at the sun. Liv opened her arms wide and spread her fingers wide, as if to trap a lot of air so she could smell it. Audun Gilli plucked up a pinch of earth and tasted it.

  After that, they put their heads together again. Hamnet got the notion they were deciding on their verdict. Was that good? Bad? Indifferent?

  Audun spoke for all of them: “You can go in if you want. We don’t think it will make things any worse.”

  “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 all: “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 st
arve. 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.

  Hamnet wondered whether the three robbers had friends who would aim to avenge them. His hand tightened on the leather-wrapped hilt of his sword. But the men seemed to have been on their own.

  He and his comrades passed through another block that had burned. The Bizogots muttered among themselves. They’d seen grass fires before, no doubt. Maybe they’d seen a tent or two burn. But, as with doors, big fires, fires that chewed up lots of buildings, were new to them since they’d come to Raumsdalia. They didn’t like them. Well, Hamnet didn’t, either. And, to his sorrow, he’d seen a lot more of them than they had.

  “We’ll look foolish if Eyvind’s house is nothing but charcoal,” he said.

  “Yes, we’ll have made ashes of ourselves, sure enough,” Ulric agreed. Count Hamnet winced.

  “Let’s go find out.” Maybe Per Anders didn’t notice the atrocious pun. Maybe he just didn’t care. If he didn’t, Hamnet admired his detachment.

  Earl Eyvind’s house still stood. But the front door hung open. Hamnet didn’t think that was a good sign. Ulric said, “Don’t worry about it. Can you see some Ruler or local thief staggering out of here with his arms full of books?” He laughed the idea to scorn.

  Hamnet’s hand tightened again on the hilt of his sword. “I keep thinking that, if I go in there, the first thing I’ll do is run into Gudrid.”

  “Well, you bloody well won’t,” Ulric Skakki said impatiently. “She isn’t here, and good riddance to her.”

  Or did he say Gudriddance? Count Hamnet eyed him, but Ulric’s cheery smile was proof against his scrutiny. They went inside. The adventurer proved right: Gudrid wasn’t there.

  Someone had looted the house. Hamnet had no idea whether it was the Rulers or Raumsdalian robbers. Whoever it was seemed to have done a good, thorough job. All the rich ornaments that had adorned the place were gone. So were most of the paintings and woven wall hangings. The rest were slashed, or else thrown on the floor and trampled.

  When Hamnet Thyssen saw them, he got a bad feeling about Earl Eyvind’s books. And sure enough, the scrolls and codices Eyvind had spent a lifetime accumulating lay torn and despoiled on the floor of his bedchamber. Hamnet sadly shook his head, knowing how much labor a scribe needed to copy a book.

  “Sometimes people are no cursed good,” he growled.

  Ulric raised one eyebrow. “You only noticed just now?”

  “As a matter of fact—no,” Hamnet answered.

  “Is anything here worth salvaging?” Per Anders asked.

  “Sure doesn’t look like it.” Ulric started to turn away and head back toward the entrance.

  But Count Hamnet said, “Wait.” Ulric Skakki did, this time with both eyebrows high. Hamnet went on, “When I knew Gudrid, she’d always have secret hiding places for . . . things. They’d be clever ones, too, places where most people wouldn’t think to look. Somewhere in this house, she’ll have more hidey-holes.”

  “Yes, but will they hold anything we want?” Ulric asked.

  “How do we know ahead of time?” Hamnet replied with a shrug.

  “How do we know where to look for these, ah, hidey-holes?” Per Anders said. “Do we tear the whole place to pieces?”

  “A lot of that’s taken care of,” Ulric pointed out.

  “Look at things out of the corner of your eye,” Hamnet said. “I make no promises, but I think it’s worth trying. Gudrid’s . . . sly. She’s not too smart—even if she’d sa
y the same thing about me—but she has her own kind of cleverness.”

  He looked around the bedchamber. Whoever’d ruined Eyvind Torfinn’s books had also slashed the featherbed Eyvind and Gudrid once shared. Feathers floated in the air as Raumsdalians and Bizogots stirred them up. Hamnet didn’t think Gudrid would have secreted anything inside the mattress—too easy, too obvious. The bedframe, on the other hand . . .

  Which side would she have slept on? The right, if she’d kept the same arrangement she’d had with him. He poked and prodded at the bedposts on that side, and rapped them with his knuckles.

  “By God, that’s as hollow as Sigvat’s head!” Ulric exclaimed when the sound suddenly changed. Per Anders let out an irate cough.

  Both Ulric and Hamnet ignored him. “It is, isn’t it?” Hamnet said. Per coughed again. Hamnet went right on ignoring him.

  Gudrid doubtless had some tricky spring or catch set into the post. Hamnet felt for it, but couldn’t find it. “Here, let me try,” Ulric said. “I’ve had practice getting into places where I don’t belong.”

  His hands were smaller and slimmer than Hamnet Thyssen’s. By the way they prodded the bedpost, they were also much more knowledgeable. Well, he’d said he was practiced at the burglar’s trade.

  Something clicked. “Ha!” Ulric said. He reached for the top of the bedpost again. This time, the top three inches or so came off in his hand. “Ha!” he said again. He reached into the hollow and pulled out a rolled sheet of parchment. “Well, well. What have we here?”

  “Open it,” Per Anders said.

  Ulric did. He read a little of it, then grimaced and shook his head. “Letter from an old lover,” he said.

  Hamnet only shrugged. “Why am I not surprised?” He went over to the other side of the bed, stirring up more feathers as he did, and started rapping at the bedposts there. One sneeze later, he found another hollow. “Come here, Ulric. Does this one work the same way?”

  “If it doesn’t, she had to pay extra—you can count on that.” Ulric felt the bedpost. He nodded. “Uh-huh. Now we do this, and. . . .” A click rewarded him. “There you go.”