The Golden Shrine Read online

“I’m willing to believe you.” Count Hamnet wished he’d turned his back and walked away when the wizard started talking to him.

  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.

  They let out loud, indignant croaks now, because they couldn’t get at the food they craved. Lions and dire wolves were stuffing themselves with mammoth meat. Whenever a teratorn tried to rush up and steal some, the beasts that could also kill snarled threats. The great birds retreated.

  Every so often, one of them would leap into the air. Foxes prowled around the dead mammoth, too. They also wanted their share of the scraps—or a vulture would do, if they couldn’t get anything else.

  “Well, this was a waste of time,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  “How right you are,” Ulric agreed readily. “We could have written epic poetry or gone to a fine eatery or played a couple of games of draughts while we rode across the steppe if it weren’t for those miserable teratorns.”

  Hamnet’s ears heated. “You know what I mean. We didn’t accomplish anything coming here.”

  “Right again!” Ulric Skakki sounded more enthusiastic than ever, always a bad sign. “If not for this dead mammoth, we could’ve chased the Rulers back beyond the Gap by now.”

  “You’re making yourself annoying on purpose,” Hamnet said.

  “That’s better than doing it by accident, wouldn’t you say?” the adventurer returned. “At least I know what I’m up to.”

  Audun Gilli pointed north across the frozen steppe. “Someone else is heading this way. Maybe we weren’t the only ones to wonder what was dead here and how it got that way.”

  “This way, that way, any way at all,” Ulric Skakki said. “When somebody writes the history of this war nobody will ever write, he can call this fight the Battle of the Dead Mammoth.”

  “Somebody writes the history nobody will . . .” Count Hamnet gave it up as a bad job. He looked to his weapons instead. With them, he had a better notion of what he was doing.

  “Have they got a wizard with them?” Trasamund asked Audun, reaching over his shoulder to draw his two-handed sword.

  That, Hamnet realized, was an important question—maybe the important question. If the Rulers had no wizard along, then Audun Gilli gave the Bizogots the edge. But if the Rulers did . . . If they did, Audun was liable to be in over his head. Marcovefa might scoff at the sorcery the men from beyond the Gap used, but it was stronger than Bizogot shamans or Raumsdalian wizards could match.

  Count Hamnet imagined himself riding back to the Leaping Lynxes’ huts and telling Liv Audun had died valiantly fighting the Rulers. He wouldn’t sound as if he was gloating. He’d give Audun all the credit he deserved, and more besides. And Liv would dissolve in tears, and he would hold her and try to console her. . . .

  He laughed sourly, realizing what an idiot he was. For one thing, Liv would be furious if Audun died while he survived. For another, if the Rulers slew Audun they were much too likely to slay him, too.

  “Well, we found them,” Ulric Skakki said, methodically examining his arrows. “Not quite the way we expect to, but we found them. And now we get to see how sorry we end up that we did.”

  “I thank you.” Hamnet bowed in the saddle. “Whenever I think things are bad, you always remind me they’re really worse.”

  Courteous as a cat, Ulric returned the bow. “Nice to know I’m of some use to you anyhow, Your Grace.”

  “Let’s ride!” Trasamund bellowed. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sorry to follow him. He wasn’t just riding away from the dead mammoth and the scavengers clustered around it. He was riding away from his own imagination . . . and getting away from it might be the best thing he could do.

  The Rulers might have been drawn by the teratorns gliding down to try to steal mammoth flesh, but they didn’t need long to realize they weren’t the only ones who had been. They shook themselves out into a battle line. Some of them were on their riding deer, others on horses they must have seized since coming into the Bizogot country. They didn’t have any live war mammoths with them. That by itself raised Hamnet’s spirits, and probably those of everyone else in the war band.

  Audun Gilli gasped. “They—have a wizard!” he choked out.

  “Hold him off,” Hamnet said urgently. “We’ll see if we can kill him.”

  He glanced over to Ulric, who nodded. They’d done this before, or tried to. Killing enemy wizards was the best way to make sure they couldn’t use their spells against you. The best way if you could do it, that is.

  Surveying the Rulers’ line, he had no trouble picking out the wizard. As usual, he was the one who hung back behind his comrades. Maybe that was cowardice. It was bound to be good sense. Killing the wizard hurt the enemy much more than killing one of their warriors would have.

  As archers on both sides started to shoot, Ulric asked, “Are you game?”

  “Not especially, but I don’t think we’ve got much choice. Do you?” Hamnet said.

  “No. I only wish I did. Well . . .”

  The adventurer spurred his horse forward at a gallop, spurting out ahead of the Bizogots’ line. Hamnet Thyssen went with him. As his horse thundered toward the Rulers, he tried not to think about what a tempting target he made.

  “Three Tusks! The Three Tusk clan!” Trasamund roared, and he joined the charge, too. Hamnet had no idea whether the jarl intended to go after the wizard, too, or whether he just wanted to close with the hated Rulers as fast as he could.

  Wherever the truth lay, Trasamund distracted the foe from Hamnet and Ulric. Trasamund could distract anybody from anything. Count Hamnet had thought the Bizogot was larger than life ever since he first met him two years earlier in Sigvat’s palace down in Nidaros. Two years! Was that all? Hamnet Thyssen had to think about it, but he nodded a moment later. It seemed much longer.

  An arrow thrummed past his head. A moment later, so did another one, even closer. He stopped worrying about how long it had been since he met Trasamund. Worrying about how long he’d keep breathing was more urgent.

  A Ruler on horse back swung to try to block his path. Hamnet cut at the swarthy, curly-bearded man. Their swords belled off each other. Sparks flew as iron grated against iron. Then Count Hamnet was past. His foe looked comically surprised. The Ruler must have thought Hamnet was after him in particular.

  Well, fellow, you’re not as important as you think you are, Hamnet thought. That probably hurts worse than a sword cut would have.

  There was the wizard, astride a riding deer—no newfangled mounts for him. For the moment, he seemed to have no idea Hamnet was closing in on him. His attention was aimed at the Bizogots’ line, and likely at Audun Gilli.

  Then Ulric Skakki shot an arrow into the riding deer’s flank. No doubt he’d aimed for the wizard. But archery from horse back was a tricky business. The riding deer didn’t shriek the way a wounded horse might have. But it did jerk and jump and buck like a wounded horse. And the wizard, who’d expected no such thing, went off the deer and onto the dirt with a thump.

  The deer bounded away. The wizard scrambled to his feet—which might have been a mistake, because it made him an easier target for Hamnet Thyssen’s sword. The sharp edge glittered in the sun as Hamnet swung the blade. It bit into the wizard’s neck with a noise straight from a butcher’s shop. The impact almost tore the sword from his hand.

  Blood sprayed, then fountained. The wizard let out a bubbling scream. Hamnet urged his horse into as tight a turn as it could make, in case he needed to strike again. He saw at once that he didn’t. He had no idea how the wizard stayed on his feet with blood gushing from him that way.

  Stand the wizard did. The Rulers, say what you would of them, seemed as hard to kill as serpents. The man’s eyes speared Hamnet. His lips shaped a word. Hamnet had learned only tiny fragments of the Rulers’ language, but he thought he knew what that word was.

  You.

  To his horror and d
ismay, the wizard’s hands came up. He started to shape a pass. Then Ulric Skakki galloped past and struck with the sword from behind. The wizard’s head leaped from his shoulders. Body convulsing, he toppled and finally died.

  “Tough bugger,” Ulric remarked. “I thought the one you landed would be plenty to do for him.”

  “So did I,” Count Hamnet answered. “Well, he’s gone now.”

  “He looked like he was still trying to cast a spell on you, even with his head already half gone,” Ulric said.

  “He did, didn’t he?” Hamnet said uneasily. You. He’d heard that and things like it too often from the Rulers. For some reason, they worried about him. He wished he knew why. There were plenty of days when he felt more dangerous to himself than to the invaders from beyond the Gap.

  “Must be nice to have them love you like that,” Ulric said.

  “I could live without it.” Count Hamnet’s voice was dry.

  The adventurer chuckled. “Probably quite a bit longer than with it. Which reminds me—how long are we going to live if the bastards turn on us?”

  Not long, was the first thing that occurred to Hamnet. But the Rulers had no chance to do it. They were fighting for their lives, outnumbered by the hard-pressing Bizogots, and suddenly without sorcerous support. And Audun Gilli took advantage of that. The Rulers suddenly started staring at their swords and bows. The weapons must have started talking to them—the same spell Audun had used again and again, but never before, so far as Hamnet knew, on the battlefield.

  Audun didn’t speak the Rulers’ language. He still had trouble with the Bizogots’ tongue. But a sword that suddenly started spouting Raumsdalian might have proved even more alarming. For all the Rulers knew, their blades were cursing them. If Audun Gilli had any sense—never a sure bet—the swords were doing exactly that.

  Hamnet looked for Trasamund. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan was trading lusty sword strokes with an enemy warrior. Trasamund fought for the fun of it, as a lot of Bizogots did: a taste that had always struck Hamnet as perverse.

  He roared in triumph when one of his great strokes got home. Maybe the Ruler’s boiled-leather corselet kept the edge from his vitals. Whether it did or not, though, that blow had to break ribs. The invader reeled on his riding deer. Trasamund’s next hack, undefended, sheared away half his face.