Breath of God g-2 Page 7

  Liv smiled behind her hand. “That doesn’t stop ordinary men from eating them now and then,” she whispered to Count Hamnet.

  “I’m not surprised,” he answered. “If smetyn were against the law, people would still drink it.” She nodded.

  Totila scowled at the messenger. “Did you manage to persuade em you had all your wits about you?”

  “I showed em this.” The messenger pulled up his sleeve and showed off a long cut on his arm, which was still held closed by several musk-ox-sinew stitches. “Even then, they had the nerve to ask me if I did it to myself when the mushrooms made me crazy. I told em I’d fight the next fool who asked me a question like that. They heard me out after that, anyhow. But even when they listened, they wouldn’t believe.”

  “Why not?” Totila’s face was a study in helpless rage.

  “Almost makes you wonder if the Rulers have a spell in the air to turn Bizogots’ wits to horse manure,” Ulric Skakki said. His usual view was that Bizogots’ wits weren’t far removed from horse manure anyhow, but nothing in his tone or attitude suggested that now.

  “Could it be so?” Trasamund asked.

  “Not likely, Your Ferocity,” Ulric said. “People can be plenty stupid all by themselves. They mostly don’t need magic to help em along.”

  “I wasn’t asking you,” the Three Tusk jarl said. “I was asking the shamans here.” He looked from Liv to Odovacar to Audun Gilli.

  “I don’t think it’s likely, either, Your Ferocity,” Liv said. Audun nodded; he’d finally picked up enough of the Bizogot language to get by in it, though he still butchered the grammar and threw in Raumsdalian words when he spoke it himself. As for Odovacar, he didn’t seem to have heard Trasamund this time.

  Trasamund looked dissatisfied. He’d seldom looked any other way since learning of the disaster that had overwhelmed his clan, but he seemed even less happy than usual now. “I don’t want to know what you think,” he rumbled. “I want to know what your magic tells you.”

  “Don’t take me seriously here, for heaven’s sake,” Ulric Skakki said. “I was only joking.”

  “You Raumsdalians have a saying, don’t you, about true words spoken in jest?” Trasamund said. “I think you did that here. You are a clever Raumsdalian. Sometimes you are too clever for your own good. I know you think Bizogots are nothing but a pack of fools.”

  “I never said that,” Ulric protested.

  “I don’t care what you said. I wasn’t talking about what you said. I know what you think here,” Trasamund said. Ulric Skakki looked innocent. It wasn’t easy, not when he was bound to be guilty as charged, but he brought it off. Hamnet Thyssen thought the Bizogots could be fools, too, and he knew his opinion of them was higher than Ulric’s. Trasamund went on, “You think we are fools, yes. But without magic, could we be fools enough to ignore an enemy already beating our clans and stealing our grazing grounds?”

  By the look on Ulric’s face, he saw nothing too improbable in that, even if he didn’t come right out and say so. But the way Trasamund put the question made Hamnet Thyssen wonder. Yes, the Bizogots could be fools, especially from a Raumsdalian point of view. Were they likely to be idiots?

  “Maybe we ought to find out, if we can,” he said.

  Audun Gilli blinked. Liv said, “Not you, too!” Even Odovacar looked at Count Hamnet in surprise, and Hamnet was convinced the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman had no idea what was going on.

  “It’s possible Ulric’s right without meaning to be,” Hamnet said stubbornly. “If the Bizogots farther south would rather believe in mystic mushrooms than in the Rulers, don’t you think that says something’s wrong with them?”

  Liv looked exasperated. Odovacar went on looking blank. But Audun Gilli looked thoughtful. “It could be so,” he said. “I don’t say it is, but it could be.” He turned to Liv. “Do you know a spell for seeing if someone is using magic?”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered. “We need a charm like that, for we often have claims that someone is bewitching someone else. We need to find out where the truth lies.”

  “If the truth lies, how do you find it?” Ulric Skakki inquired.

  Audun Gilli didn’t get the pun. Liv did, and winced. Trasamund muttered something under his breath. “We use that kind of spell in Nidaros, too,” Audun said, taking no notice of what he couldn’t follow. “Maybe we ought to try it here.”

  Liv sighed. “I think it’s a waste of time, but if it makes you happy.. . .”

  “Happy?” Trasamund spoke before Hamnet, Ulric, or Audun could. “Wise lady, nothing that has passed here since we traveled south into the Empire makes me happy. But if we find here a tool to use against our foes, or a way to keep them from using a tool against us, then I say we have done something worthwhile. Is this so, or is it not so?”

  “If we find something, Your Ferocity, it is so,” Liv answered. “Otherwise, we do nothing but waste time and strength. This last strikes me as more likely.”

  “Sometimes finding out the enemy isn’t doing something counts for as much as finding out he is would,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If he isn’t spreading confusion – ”

  “Then our neighbors truly are as idiotic as you Raumsdalians make them out to be,” Trasamund broke in.

  “You said it. I didn’t,” Hamnet said. “But if the Rulers are fuddling the rest of the Bizogots, we need to know that. And if they are, we need to stop them if we can.”

  “I said I would make the spell. I will,” Liv said. “But I wouldn’t bother if Trasamund hadn’t decided Ulric Skakki meant what he said when he was only making one of his jokes.” She sent the adventurer a severe stare.

  Ulric looked embarrassed, a startling and unnatural expression on his face, whose normal bland expression could conceal anything. “I said I was joking,” he protested. “No one wanted to believe me.”

  “See what happens when you tell so many lies?” Trasamund said. “Nobody wants to hear the truth from you.”

  “I’ll find the truth, whatever it is.” Liv nodded to Audun Gilli. “Tell me about your magic-sniffing spells.” When he did, in a mixture of her tongue and Raumsdalian, she frowned for a moment, considering. Then she nodded to herself. “Those are not bad, but I think I’ll use one I already know. It’s simpler, and I won’t have to worry about slipping with something new and unfamiliar.”

  “That makes sense,” Audun agreed.

  “She’ll do it anyhow,” Ulric Skakki said, as if to prove he didn’t intend all his words to be taken seriously.

  Then Liv explained to Odovacar what she intended to do. That took so much shouting, she might almost have told the Rulers what she had in mind, too. At last, the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman said, “Anybody would think you figured the Rulers were using magic to make us stupid.”

  Liv sighed. “Yes. Anyone would think that.”

  She took from a pouch on her belt an agate, dark brown banded with white. Audun Gilli suddenly grinned when he saw the stone. “Oh, very nice!” he said. “Agate overcomes perils, strengthens the heart, and helps against adversities.”

  “We have them, sure enough,” Trasamund said.

  Her face a mask of concentration, Liv took no notice of either of them. She drew forth the dried foot of a snowshoe hare, bound it to the agate with a length of sinew, and tied them both to her left upper arm. “This to help me go where I will, in our world or that of the spirit, and to return without peril,” she said.

  “May it be so,” Hamnet Thyssen murmured. He worried whenever she worked magic, for he knew the danger it put her in. That it was needful only made him worry more, since that meant he couldn’t stop her.

  She began to chant. Some of the strange little tune was in the Bizogot language. The rest might have been in the speech mammoths used among themselves – if mammoths used any speech among themselves.

  As magic had a way of doing, the spell seemed to reach Odovacar. He pricked up his ears and followed her charm with all the attention he had in him. That his ears pricked was li
terally true; even in human shape, they were unusually large, unusually pointed, and unusually mobile. A bit later, he began to chant. His tune was much like the one Liv used, though not identical. Some of what he sang was in the Bizogot tongue. The rest might have been the speech dire wolves used among themselves – if dire wolves used any speech among themselves.

  “The truth!” Liv and Odovacar sang the same thing at the same time, perhaps by chance, perhaps . . . not. “We must have the truth!” Then their songs went different ways again, into mammoth maunderings for Liv and dire-wolf woolgathering for Odovacar.

  Both shamans began to dance, Liv plodding after the truth and Odovacar chasing with lolling tongue and hungry eyes. Hamnet Thyssen watched Audun Gilli watching them in fascination. The Raumsdalian wizard seemed altogether absorbed in the workings of a sorcery from a tradition different from the Empires. If Liv was a mammoth and Odovacar a dire wolf, he might have been a bright-eyed mouse, taking everything in.

  “We must have the truth!” Odovacar called again.

  “Do lies and deceit stalk the Bizogots?” Liv sang, and then something muffled and mammothy that, Hamnet felt, somehow meant the same thing.

  “Quite a show, isn’t it?” Ulric Skakki whispered to Hamnet. “I never thought a bad joke could go so far.”

  “That should teach you to think before you let your tongue flap,” Hamnet whispered back. “It probably won’t, but it should.” Ulric sent him an aggrieved look. He took no notice of it.

  The two Raumsdalians might have quarreled then, even though the Bizogot shamans were still busy with their magic. But then Odovacar let out a sudden, startled yip. Liv gasped in surprise. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki stared at them, their own disagreement forgotten. Audun Gilli s eyes got wider yet.

  “They do!” Liv said. “By God, they do!” She sounded astonished. She also sounded outraged. “This must not be!”

  “Banish the lies!” Odovacar bayed. “Banish the deception!”

  “Begone!” Liv cried. “Begone! Let them be trampled!”

  “Let them be eaten!” Odovacar bared his teeth. They were uncommonly long and sharp, as if he was beginning to take animal shape. The howl he let out argued that he was.

  Hamnet felt something that had hovered over the Bizogot encampment – that had, for all he knew, hung over the whole of the frozen steppe – lift and pull back. He hadn’t known it was there; it manifested itself more by its absence than it had by its presence. Was he smarter now that it started to withdraw? Maybe he was. Or maybe he was imagining that he was. How could he tell? He was no wizard, and never would be.

  Audun Gilli gasped. “No!” he said in Raumsdalian, and began incanting frantically.

  Two or three heartbeats later, Liv and Odovacar also gasped. The Red Dire Wolves’ shaman staggered and pitched forward on his face. He lay un-moving, whether dead or smitten with something like an apoplexy Hamnet Thyssen could not have said.

  Hamnet had more urgent things to worry about than the state of Odovacar s health. Liv, stronger – or perhaps just younger – than the other shaman, still stood, swaying as if in a breeze. But there was no breeze. The force of the Rulers’ counterspell was what rocked her. Her lips skinned back from her teeth in a ghastly grimace as she gathered all her strength to resist the magic.

  Audun Gilli clutched an amulet of sea-green beryl. Hamnet knew that was a stone sorcerers used to overcome their enemies and make them meek. Audun gabbled out a spell as fast as he could. Was he trying to save himself alone, or did he also include Liv and even Odovacar in his magic? Count Hamnet couldn’t ask, not without distracting him and perhaps ruining everything he was trying to do.

  Hamnet wondered what he could do by himself, but not for long. He drew his sword and began slashing the air around Liv, as he’d done a couple of times before. Once it had seemed to help, once not. He hoped it would do some good now.

  Hoping, he called, “Do the same for Audun,” to Ulric Skakki. “It can’t hurt – I’m sure of that.”

  “Right.” Ulric wasted no words, but drew his own blade. The adventurer loved to quibble when he found the chance, but he knew there was a time and a place for everything. This was the time for action.

  Trasamund freed his great two-handed sword from its scabbard and passed it through the air above the fallen Odovacar. The Red Dire Wolves’ shaman groaned and stirred – he wasn’t dead, then. But only Trasamund’s powerful wrists let him jerk the blade higher in the nick of time so he didn’t slay the man he was trying to save. Odovacar howled like a wolf. Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether he had anything more than a wolf’s wits in him.

  Liveried, “No!” again. This time rage filled her voice, not fear. “We broke their cursed snare! They won’t set it again!” She clutched the hare’s foot and agate with her right hand. “I throw back your curses!” she shouted. “May they come down on the head of the shamans who sent them forth, and may they fill their witless heads with coals of fire!”

  “So may it be!” Audun Gilli said. Hamnet wouldn’t have bet he could follow Liv’s words, but he did. Maybe the magic she was working helped him understand.

  And Odovacar also called, “So may it be!” His voice seemed scarcely human – it held as much of the dire wolf’s howl as of words. But Hamnet Thyssen understood him even so, and Liv and Audun also seemed to.

  “Coals of fire!” Liveried again, gesturing with her left hand. Was it coincidence that Audun Gilli and Odovacar also made the same pass at the same time? Hamnet Thyssen didn’t think so.

  And he didn’t think it was coincidence that the two Bizogots and Audun cried out again a moment later, this time in triumph. Now Audun shouted, “Coals of fire!” Hamnet didn’t think he was conjuring with the phrase, but was using it to describe what was happening to the enemy wizards.

  “Let them see how they like that, by God!” Liv said. “Let them see they’ve found foes who can strike back!” Odovacar howled like a hungry dire wolf.

  “Is it over?” Hamnet asked.

  “For now,” Liv answered. “There will be other meetings. They are bound to come, and we will have to do our best in them. But this one has gone as we might have wished most.” She looked over to Ulric Skakki. “You see what happens when you joke?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” he said. “I guess that ought to teach me to keep my mouth shut from here on out, the way Hamnet says I should – but it probably won’t.”

  “No, it won’t,” Trasamund agreed. “Raumsdalians never know when to shut up.”

  “Which makes us different from Bizogots how?” Ulric asked politely. The jarl glared at him. Ulric smiled back. But two Bizogot shamans and a Raumsdalian wizard had found and beaten back the spell the Rulers laid over the frozen plains. Instead of quarreling, both men started to laugh. They too were liable to have other run-ins, but no trouble would spring from this one.

  Totila and Trasamundsent out messengers again. Now that the cloud of foolishness that had hung over the Bizogots was gone, the two jarls hoped their comrades would have second thoughts about what they’d heard before. “Maybe,” Totila said hopefully, “we’ll even have people riding into our camp to tell us they’ve decided to take us seriously after all.”

  But they didn’t.

  Hamnet Thyssen kept looking north – not, for once, towards the Glacier but towards the Rulers. They hadn’t tried to restore the spell Liv and Audun and Odovacar had shattered. Hamnet wondered what that meant. Maybe their wizards had taken a serious defeat and lacked the strength to fight back. Or maybe they’d simply decided the spell was worthless now that the Bizogots knew it was there. Who could guess how the Rulers thought?

  Even the captives the Bizogots held weren’t sure. “Who knows how a shaman thinks?” one of them said when Hamnet asked him. “They know what they know, and it is not for the likes of us to learn. Maybe they tell the chieftains, but I am – I was – only an ordinary warrior. I rode, I fought.. . and I failed, for you hold me now.”

  “Do your folk have writi
ng?” Hamnet Thyssen needed to use the Raumsdalian word, for the Bizogots didn’t use letters. Naturally, the prisoner failed to follow him. He explained, as best he could, in the Bizogot language.

  “This is another kind of magic you speak of,” the captive said. His name was Rankarag. “I told you, I know nothing of what shamans do.”

  “No, not magic. Anyone can do it. I can do it, and I’ll never be a shaman in a thousand years,” Count Hamnet said. “Look.” He took a sharp length of bone and wrote Rankarag in the mud. “There is your name.”

  Rankarag promptly reached out with his booted foot and smudged the characters beyond legibility. “No one will make magic with a picture of my name,” he declared.

  Hamnet Thyssen started to write his own name in the dirt to show the captive it was only a name, not magic at all. He started to, yes, but then he didn’t. Who could say what a sorcerer might do with his name – and who could say whether Rankarag knew as little of wizardry as he claimed? Better, maybe, not to take chances.

  Instead, Hamnet wrote mammoth. “These are the signs we use for the name of the great beast,” he said.

  “One of them is the same as one in my name,” Rankarag said suspiciously. He had a quick eye.

  “Rankarag and mammoth have the same sound in them,” Hamnet answered. He said the name and the word again, stressing the first syllable each time. “The same character shows that sound.”

  Rankarag plucked at his thick, curly beard. “With enough – characters, you call them? – you could set down anything you can say, couldn’t you?”

  He was no fool. Nodding, Hamnet said, “We have a character for each sound in my language. We can set down anything we say.”

  “This is a strong magic,” the warrior of the Rulers said. “This is a stronger magic than I looked for folk of the herd to have.” By that he meant any human beings not of the Rulers. His folk looked at all other people as animals to be herded like mammoths and riding deer.

  “It is not magic at all,” Hamnet Thyssen insisted. “It is a craft, like making a bow or fletching an arrow. Anyone can learn it.”