“Congratulations,” Ulric Skakki told him. “Maybe you’re not as stupid as you look.” The underofficer scowled, but he didn’t do anything more than scowl. That might have proved Ulric’s point. The Raumsdalians and Bizogots rode into Nidaros.
Count Hamnet had traveled through Nidaros’ streets after Sigvat fled and the Rulers plundered the city. Nidaros was better off now than it had been then. If he hadn’t seen it then, he would have given up on it in despair now.
Soldiers seemed to stand on every street corner, swords and spears shining in the sun. Nobody did anything much where the armed men could see. But too many houses and shops were still obviously empty. People could prowl alleyways and break into places like that without much trouble. Maybe some of them were locals returning after they escaped the sack of the city. Maybe others were squatters who’d make good neighbors once they settled in. But Hamnet would have bet most were looters and thieves.
A body hung from a makeshift gibbet. A placard around its neck said I STOLE GRAIN. The corpse was fragrant and bloated enough to have hung there for some time. It might make other ambitious gentlemen thoughtful. Or, on the other hand, it might not.
“I wonder what the palace is like,” Ulric remarked.
“What will you bet it looks better than anything else in the city?” Hamnet said. “If Sigvat has any money left in the vaults, he’ll spend it on himself first and everybody else afterwards.”
“I didn’t get to be as rich as I am by taking foolish bets,” Ulric told him.
“How rich are you?” Trasamund asked. Ulric peered inside a belt pouch, sighed, shrugged, and didn’t answer.
Even the gesture was enough to make beggars clamor for coins. The soldiers on guard duty did nothing to hold them back. Begging had never been illegal in Nidaros. If more people were begging now than ever before, times were harder than they’d ever been. And, if the soldiers hadn’t served Sigvat, most of them would have been begging, too.
Hamnet remembered that no banners had flown above the imperial palace when he went through Nidaros after Sigvat fled. Those banners were back now. He nodded to himself when he noticed them. Sure enough, Sigvat looked out for Sigvat, first, last, and always.
Some of the guards in front of the palace had seen Hamnet and Ulric before. “You!” one of them exclaimed.
“Yes, us, by God,” Hamnet answered. “So you ran away with the Emperor and then came back, did you?”
The guardsman turned red. “You can’t talk to me that way!”
“I just did,” Hamnet said. “And I’ll kill you if you annoy me much more. My conscience won’t ache-I’ve killed plenty of men better than you’ll ever be in your wildest dreams.”
That he meant it-and that he could do it-must have been only too plain to the unhappy guard. “What are you doing here, anyway?” the man demanded.
“I’m bringing His Majesty a message from the Golden Shrine.” Hamnet gave back the exact literal truth.
All the guards laughed. “Now tell me another one-one I’ll believe,” the mouthy trooper said.
“He is telling you what you should believe, for it is so,” Eyvind Torfinn said.
“Who are you, granddad, and what the demon do you know about it?” the guardsman snarled.
“I am Earl Eyvind Torfinn, and I know about this because I was inside the Golden Shrine with Count Hamnet here.”
“I am Baron Runolf Skallagrim, and so was I,” Runolf said.
The guards put their heads together. Two authentic noblemen, neither one known to be in bad odor with the Emperor, had vouched for Count Hamnet. Ulric Skakki and Hamnet exchanged small, tight smiles. Which of them Sigvat liked less was an interesting question. Ulric hadn’t spoken up for Hamnet, nor did Hamnet blame him. His word might have done more harm than good.
There was a classic solution to this kind of problem, and the palace guard who’d done the talking found it. “I can’t decide on my own,” he said. “I’ll send one of my men in to see what His Majesty wants.”
“To see what some fancier flunky wants, you mean.” Hamnet Thyssen enjoyed saying what was on his mind. He’d got in trouble for it before. He might again. He enjoyed it anyhow.
Although the guardsman reddened again, he almost shoved one of his troopers toward the doorway they protected. “Go find out His Majesty’s pleasure.”
Sigvat’s pleasure was bound to be something young and pretty and sweetly rounded. A sour nobleman like Hamnet didn’t come close. The ironic glint in Ulric’s eye said he was thinking along those lines, too. This time, neither of them said anything.
After a few minutes, the guard who’d been sent in to enquire came back with astonishment all over his face. “His Majesty wants to see him!” he exclaimed in obvious disbelief.
“He does?” The talky palace guard seemed even more amazed. “Well, fry me in dung and call me a Bizogot’s dinner!”
“What was that?” Trasamund rumbled ominously.
Maybe the guard hadn’t noticed him or Liv till then. If he hadn’t, he wasn’t doing his job as well as he might have. He offered a rather sickly smile. “No offense intended, I’m sure.”
“I’m not,” Trasamund said. “If I thought you were worth killing, I’d argue with Count Hamnet for the privilege. But my guess is you’ll choke to death on your own foot one day before too long.”
Another guardsman snickered at that. The mouthy one gave him a look composed of three parts vitriol and one part flaming pitch. The unlucky guardsman tried to pull into his mailshirt like a turtle pulling into its shell. Hamnet interrupted that little drama, saying, “So-we can go in?”
“I guess you can,” the guard replied.
“Then we will,” Hamnet said, dismounting. And he did, his companions right behind him.
The inside of the palace was more like the rest of Nidaros than Hamnet had expected-which only meant the Rulers had plundered it more thoroughly than he’d thought. Even carpets and wall hangings had disappeared. They’d probably been cut up to help keep the invaders’ tents warm. For all Hamnet knew, the flood from Sudertorp Lake had swept some of them away.
A workman stood on a ladder scrubbing at something on a wall. Most of the big graffito was gone now, but Hamnet could still make out one of the striped beasts of prey the Rulers called tigers. The Rulers might no longer be a menace here below the Gap. Like riding deer and big-horned bison, tigers seemed likely to stay around.
Runolf Skallagrim also eyed the graffito. “I wonder what that tiger was hunting,” he remarked.
“Probably Sigvat,” Hamnet answered.
The servitor leading him and his comrades to the throne stopped in horror. “How dare you say such things?” he squawked. “How dare you?”
“Oh, it’s easy,” Hamnet assured him. “I just open my mouth, and out they come.”
“Yes, and look how much fun you’ve had because of it,” Ulric said.
Eyeing them as if they’d suddenly sprouted fur and stripes and fangs and claws, the servitor said, “His Majesty will not be pleased.”
“That’s all right, son,” Hamnet said cheerfully-Sigvat’s man was much younger than he was. “After the Rulers, after climbing the Glacier, after the Golden Shrine, I’m not going to worry about the Emperor of Raumsdalia.”
“After . . . the Golden Shrine?” the servitor echoed. “But that’s nothing but talk-isn’t it?”
“Sure-the same as the Gap melting through is nothing but talk,” Count Hamnet said.
“It’s as real as roasted armadillo,” Ulric added. Not knowing what to make of that, the servitor fell silent, but his eyes were as nervous as a restive horse’s.
Just outside the throne room, more guards relieved Hamnet and his companions of their weapons-of most of them, anyhow. Hamnet still had a holdout knife in his boot top. By Ulric’s quirked eyebrow, the guards had also searched him less perfectly than they might have. No wizard checked to see if Sigvat’s men had missed anything, as one had when Hamnet and Ulric first met Trasamund here.
Not everything around the Emperor was back to normal yet.
Walking into the throne room underscored that. Sigvat’s throne had been of gold and ivory and glittering jewels. Now a stout wooden chair probably taken from a palace dining room replaced it. All the rest of the rich ornamentation in the throne room was gone, too. Maybe the gold had helped weigh down the Rulers as the unleashed waters of Sudertorp Lake washed over them. But Hamnet Thyssen doubted whether lighter pockets and belt pouches would have made much difference.
The Emperor’s surviving ministers looked leaner and poorer than they had the last time Hamnet saw them. So did Sigvat II. The robe he wore might have suited a tolerably prosperous trader. Before the Rulers chased him out of Nidaros, he wouldn’t have been caught dead in it.
Hamnet grudged a bow. “Your Majesty,” he said gruffly. Ulric Skakki followed his lead. So did Trasamund. And so did Audun Gilli, the man of least account among those who’d begun this adventure.
Sigvat scowled. He was still as sensitive to slights as he’d always been. “What’s this nonsense about Sudertorp Lake and the Golden Shrine?” he snapped.
“Your Majesty, it isn’t nonsense,” Count Hamnet said. Everyone with him nodded except Gudrid. She would never testify about the Golden Shrine. As quickly as he could, Hamnet told the Emperor what had happened.
Sigvat looked down his nose at him. “You expect me to believe this nonsense?”
“You had better believe it-it is true.” That wasn’t Hamnet: the Emperor wouldn’t have believed him. It was Marcovefa. She stared straight into Sigvat’s watery brown eyes. “Believe it-it is true,” she repeated.
Sigvat obviously didn’t want to. Just as obviously, he found himself compelled to. He looked angry and frightened at the same time. Marcovefa might be sure her sorcery didn’t measure up to that of the Golden Shrine, but it outdid anything Raumsdalians could match.
“All right, then. All right,” Sigvat said furiously. “So you did go inside the Golden Shrine. Well, what kind of message did those people in there have for me?” In spite of everything, he preened a little. “It must be important-I must be important-for them to know about me.”
I must be important. Yes, that usually lay at the heart of Sigvat’s thoughts. “I carry the message, Your Majesty,” Count Hamnet answered. “They told me it was very ancient-not from before this last time the Glacier ground south, but from the time before that.”
“Yes, yes.” The Emperor sounded impatient. “Give it to me, then.”
Whatever kind of seed Hamnet was, he would sprout now. “As you say, Your Majesty, so shall it be.” He took a deep breath, then spoke the first strange word the golden-robed priestess had imparted to him: “Mene.”
Suddenly, he no longer seemed to see Sigvat II’s throne room, but another one, one he’d never imagined before, much less seen. And somehow everybody else in this throne room saw that one with him, and saw the fierce, swarthy, curly-bearded man (plainly not a Ruler, even if he had something of their aspect) in the strange robe staring at the writing on the mud-brick wall to the left of the throne on which he sat. Hamnet had never seen those characters before, either, but he knew they said Mene.
As he’d been bidden to do, he said it again: “Mene.”
In his vision-if it was but a vision, if he wasn’t really there-he saw the glowing word appear once more. He saw the curly-bearded king or emperor (for surely the man could hold no lower rank) gasp and turn pale under his dark skin.
“Tekel,” Hamnet Thyssen said, slowly beginning to grasp the words he carried.
Tekel sprang into being on the wall to the swarthy king’s left. He gasped and clapped a horrified hand to his forehead. He was beginning to understand, too.
Was Sigvat? Hamnet couldn’t tell. He dwelt more in that other world, that lost and ancient world, than this one. And, he realized, whether Sigvat followed now hardly mattered. The Raumsdalian Emperor would in a moment. Count Hamnet intoned the priestess’ last word: “Upharsin.”
What had to be that last word appeared on that wall in fiery letters. Suddenly, Hamnet Thyssen-and, he was sure, everyone else in the throne room-saw that wall and that ancient chamber no more. An enormous set of scales presented itself. In one pan lay a heavy stone weight. In the other stood that curly-bearded king in his odd royal robes.
The scales were free to swing. The one with the weight sank down. The one with the king from those unimaginably distant days rose: he could not measure up to that which tested him.
And then, without warning, the figure on the scale’s rising pan changed. It was no longer the nameless, forgotten king from a bygone age. Instead, it wore Sigvat II’s face . . . and his robe.
Hamnet didn’t doubt what he saw, or what it meant. No one who saw that could misunderstand it. You don’t measure up, either, Your Majesty, he thought. No. Your former Majesty.
As abruptly as it had engulfed him, the vision faded. He was back inside the Raumsdalian Emperor’s throne room with all his senses once more. Along with everyone else in there, he stared at the Emperor.
Under that terrible, merciless scrutiny, Sigvat II went red and then white. A ghastly attempt at a smile played across his face; it flickered and went out like a guttering flame. He opened his mouth to say . . . something. But what could a man say after . . . that? Count Hamnet had never imagined a condemnation straight from God, but that came closer to describing what he’d just witnessed than anything else he could conceive. Sigvat’s mouth stayed open, likely for no better reason than that he’d forgotten to close it.
Without a word, one of the imperial ministers turned away, and then another and another and another. Sigvat did make a sound then, a small one: the sound a wounded man might make when he was trying to hide his pain.
Trasamund walked up to him. With rough sympathy, the jarl set a hand on Sigvat’s arm. “You’d better go now, while you still can,” he said, not unkindly. “You hang around here, somebody’s going to stick a knife in you, and quick.”
“What did I do to deserve-that?” Sigvat’s wave took in everything everyone had just seen.
Maybe he thought nobody would give him an answer, but Count Hamnet did: “You didn’t do anything to stop the Rulers, but after other people took care of that for you you came back and tried to pick up the reins you’d dropped. Lots of people would have thought you had no right, but the folk from the Golden Shrine did more than think. They went and showed you.”
“They went and showed everybody else, too,” Ulric Skakki added. Did he sound amused? Hamnet thought so.
Sigvat also must have, because he started to reply. Trasamund forestalled him, saying, “If you hustle, you’ve still got a chance to get out of the palace alive. Leave your robe for whoever needs it next, go somewhere a long way off, change your name, and try and pretend you never heard of Nidaros.”
That struck Hamnet Thyssen as good advice: better than he would have given Sigvat. It must have struck the suddenly ex-Raumsdalian Emperor the same way. He slid down off the poor makeshift throne and made his way toward the entrance to the throne room. By the time he got there, he was trotting.
Eyvind Torfinn bowed to Hamnet. “What is your will, Your Majesty?” he asked.
“No!” Hamnet said sharply. “No, by God! You can’t make me wear the crown, and neither can anybody else. If you try, I’ll go up to the tallest tower and throw myself out on my head-or else I’ll just fall on my sword.” He’d tried that before, and failed. He didn’t think he would if he tried again. “I’d rather die than be Emperor of Raumsdalia, and I mean it. If you want the job, Your Splendor, you can have it.”
Hamnet remembered that would make Gudrid Raumsdalian Empress. He couldn’t think of a better reason to go see what the hot countries in the distant south were like.
But Earl Eyvind shook his head, even if Gudrid looked furious when he did. “Thank you, but no,” the scholarly noble replied. “The Emperor should be-in times like these, had better be-a stronger man than I.”
“May
be we can dice for the crown,” Ulric suggested. “Loser gets it.”
“We should care more about the Empire than that.” Earl Eyvind’s voice was starchy with disapproval, but he said no more. How could he, when he’d just turned it down himself?
“Somebody’ll grab it before too long,” Ulric said. Hamnet nodded, but he was thinking, As long as it isn’t me!
XXII
Hamnet Thyssen didn’t linger long in the imperial palace. True, he’d brought bad news for Sigvat II straight from the Golden Shrine. But he had brought bad news for the Raumsdalian Emperor. The aura of glamour surrounding the first was enough to let him get out of the palace unscathed. He didn’t think he would have lasted more than a few hours at the outside had he tried to hang around.
He didn’t see Sigvat alive or dead. Maybe the Emperor really had got away and was busy memorizing his new name. Stranger things had happened. Before Hamnet first met Trasamund, he would have irately denied the possibility. Since then, he’d gone beyond the Gap. He’d climbed to the top of the Glacier and met the folk who lived up there. He’d gone inside the Golden Shrine. All of those were at least a little stranger than the chance that Sigvat might act like a sensible human being.
Ulric Skakki didn’t overstay his welcome, either. He waited impatiently with Hamnet for grooms to lead their horses out of the stables. “Well, Your Grace, what now?” he asked.
“I’m going home,” Hamnet said simply. “Anybody who tries to drag me out again will have to lay siege to the place . . . if it’s still standing, anyhow.”
“What if it’s not?” The adventurer was as full of annoying questions as ever. His twisted grin said he knew as much.
“God knows, in that case.” Hamnet shrugged. “Maybe I’ll keep on going south, the way I’ve talked about. Or maybe I’ll turn around and go up onto the steppe and see what kind of Bizogot I make.”
He was about to ask what Ulric intended to do, but Ulric beat him to the punch again: “And what about Marcovefa?”
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