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 literally 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 writing?” 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.