Beyong the Gap

VIII

Trasamund was still muttering into his beard when the travelers rode north four days later. Liv, perched on a dun gelding, paid no attention to him. She rode with Audun Gilli and Hamnet Thyssen. A lot of the time, she wanted to talk shop with the Raumsdalian wizard. That left Hamnet as interpreter, and left him fuming quietly. He'd warned them he didn't know how to translate magical terms very well either way, but they both blamed him when they couldn't make themselves clear.

He tried talking with Liv about other things besides sorcery or shamanry or whatever the right name for it was. To him, the scenery was magnificent-the two great cliffs of ice, one to the northwest, the other to the northeast. Once, they'd joined together and crushed all the north under their unimaginable bulk. They were still magnificent, still awesome, still terrifying … to Count Hamnet.

To Liv, they were part of the landscape she'd seen every day of her life, barring fog or rain or blizzard. She took them as much for granted as anyone could. "It's only the Glacier."

"No." Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. "For me, there is no only."

The Bizogot woman laughed. "This is very foolish," she said. "It is always here. It will always be here. Why get excited about it?"

"If it will always be here, why is the Gap open now, when it was closed?" Whenever Hamnet said the name in the Bizogot language, he felt he was being obscene. But Liv took it in stride. Seeing as much, he went on, "Why is there a gap between the eastern Glacier and the western at all? There didn't used to be."

She frowned thoughtfully. "These are good questions. I have no answers for them. Maybe we will find the answers at the Golden Shrine."

"Maybe." Hamnet Thyssen started to ask her something else. Before he could, she asked Audun Gilli a question. Hamnet had to translate as best he could.

"Having fun?" Ulric Skakki asked him a while later.

"How did you guess?" Count Hamnet answered, so sourly that Ulric laughed. "Want to take over for me?" Hamnet asked. "You speak both languages, and you'll probably have more luck with the technical terms than I am."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather pass," Ulric said. It wasn't all the same to Hamnet, but he couldn't do anything about it. Ulric Skakki gave an extravagant wave of the hand. "You never get tired of this scenery, do you?"

"You do if you're a Bizogot," Hamnet answered. It's only the Glacier, Liv had said.

"Well, I'm bloody well not, thank God," Ulric Skakki said. "I've got plenty of things wrong with me, but that isn't one of them." Only then did he eye Liv. "She doesn't speak Raumsdalian, does she? No, of course not. You wouldn't be translating if she did."

"No, but don't forget she's a shaman," Hamnet said. "She may not need to understand what you say to understand what you mean."

"Now there's a cheery thought." Ulric glanced at Liv again. She wasn't paying any attention to him, but keeping flies off her horse with a mammoth-hair whisk. He looked relieved. In a lower voice, he said, "She wouldn't be bad if she cleaned herself up."

That was true of a lot of Bizogot women. Hamnet Thyssen shrugged. It worked out the other way around. The Bizogots never got clean. People who came among them got dirty. Then his own thoughts went in a different direction. "What's it like, passing through the Gap where it's narrowest?"

"It's like being born again," Ulric answered seriously. That startled Count Hamnet, who hadn't thought the much-traveled adventurer had room in him for figures of speech. "It really is," Ulric insisted. "You come out on the other side, and everything is different. Well, lots of things are different, anyhow. And besides, going through . . ."

"Yes, tell me about that," Hamnet said.

Ulric Skakki shook his head. "I can't. There are no words. You'll see for yourself before too long. And you won't be able to tell anybody else about it, either. It's like being in love . . . What the-?"

Hamnet Thyssen pulled savagely at his horse's reins, jerking the animal away from Ulric Skakki-and, incidentally, away from Audun Gilli and Liv. Ulric started to go after him, then saw the black scowl on his face and forbore.

"What did you say to him?" Hamnet heard Liv ask.

"Beats me." Ulric shrugged an elaborate shrug.

"Can you explain about the law of contagion in the Bizogot language?" Audun asked.

"I doubt it," Ulric said. "I can't even explain the law of contagion in Raumsdalian." He rode off, whistling. Audun muttered under his breath. Whatever he said, it didn't change Ulric Skakki into a lemming on the spot. Hamnet thought that was too bad.

He rode by himself. Ulric rode by himself. So did Trasamund. So did Eyvind Torfinn. And so did Gudrid. Audun Gilli and Liv rode together, but they couldn't talk to each other. The knot of Raumsdalian guardsmen followed Gudrid, but far enough away to keep her from screaming at them.

We're a happy bunch, Hamnet thought.

A teratorn circled high above them. With the air blowing down off the Glacier the way it did, what were the wind currents like for birds here? The huge scavenger had no trouble staying airborne, anyhow.

Audun Gilli watched the great bird soar for a while. Then he asked Liv, "Do you suppose it's an omen?"

Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble understanding him. The shaman, however, spoke no Raumsdalian. "What are you talking about?" she asked in her own tongue-which Audun couldn't follow.

The wizard threw up his hands in frustration. Then, after casting a glance of appeal that Count Hamnet stonily ignored, Audun pointed up into the sky at the teratorn. Liv pointed at it, too. They agreed on that much-and on no more. Audun tried to use gestures to explain what he meant. They didn't seem to mean anything to Liv.

To no one in particular, Ulric Skakki said, "We'd better find the Golden Shrine, and we'd better find it soon. We aren't fit to have anything to do with one another unless we find it." Unlike the wizard and the shaman, he spoke the Bizogot language and Raumsdalian, and put his plaintive comment into both languages.

"That is well said," Eyvind Torfinn said, first in one tongue and then in the other.

"Yes, true enough." Trasamund used his own language first, then unbent enough to say the same thing in Raumsdalian.

Several travelers eyed Hamnet Thyssen. He realized he was the other one who knew both the Empires language and the Bizogots'. Liv had only the nomads' tongue. Gudrid might understand some of that, but she showed no signs of speaking it, while Audun and the guardsmen knew only Raumsdalian. Count Hamnet didn't want to say anything; he would rather have ridden along stewing in his own juices. But those stares wore him down faster than he thought they would. "Yes, yes," he said grudgingly, first in one tongue, then in the other.

"Thank you," Audun Gilli said, maybe to him, maybe to Ulric Skakki, maybe to all the men who could use both languages. The wizard added, "Will someone please translate for me?"

At almost the same time, Liv said, "Will someone please tell me what the southern wizard is trying to say about the teratorn?"

“I’ll do it," Hamnet said, heaving a sigh. Ulric Skakki raised an eyebrow in surprise, Hamnet caught his eye. With malice aforethought, he went on, "Better to translate than never."

Ulric flinched. So did Audun Gilli. "What did you tell them?" Liv asked. After a moment's thought, Hamnet was able to duplicate the pun in her language. The Bizogots' tongue and Raumsdalian weren't close enough to let wordplay go back and forth between them all the time, or even very often; he felt a certain somber pride at managing here. By the look on Liv's face, she would have been just as well pleased if he hadn't. Or he thought so, anyhow, till she winked at him. That startled him into a smile of his own. "And now, about the teratorn .. ." she prompted.

"Will you tell her what I meant?" Audun Gilli asked at the same time.

"I can translate, as long as you don't both talk at once," Count Hamnet told each of them in turn. He glanced up toward the teratorn, but it had flown away.

Even so, he explained what the wizard said. Liv considered that, then replied, "If it was an omen, if it was a shadow over us, it is gone now, and we go forward without it." Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding.

Out on the frozen plain, Hamnet Thyssen had felt as if he and his companions were so many ants walking across a plate. Here between the riven halves of the Glacier, he had a different feeling, and one even less pleasant. Those great cold cliffs might have been the sides of two crates . .. and as the travelers went farther and farther north, someone-God, maybe-was pushing the crates closer and closer together. If God shoved once too often .. .

Better not to think about that.

But the thought got harder to avoid as day followed day. At its southern outlet, the Gap was more than fifty miles wide. When the travelers rode into it, they had the Glacier on the horizon to either side of them, but they could look back over their shoulders and see open land behind. And, while the Glacier serrated the horizon to east and west, there was plenty of sky above it.

With each day's travel, though-sometimes with each hour's-the Glacier grew higher and higher. Those sheer, towering cliffs ate more and more of the sky. Days were shorter than they would have been otherwise, for the sun needed extra time to climb above the Glacier to the east and sank below the Glacier to the west all too soon.

And, with each day's travel, the ground got squashier and the bugs got worse. Meltwater poured from the ice on both sides of the Glacier, more and more as days lengthened. Pools and ponds and puddles, creeks and rills and rivulets, were everywhere. Midges and flies and mosquitoes mated madly. Their offspring rose in ravenous, bloodthirsty hordes.

Gudrid veiled herself in fine, almost transparent cloth. That meant she got bitten less often than the others. It didn't mean she kept all the buzzing biters at bay.

"By God, now I know another reason why the Bizogots breed such shaggy horses," Hamnet Thyssen said, smashing a fly on the back of his hand.

"What do you mean?" Ulric Skakki asked. The bites blotching his face made him look as if he'd come down with some horrid disease.

"Well, the longer their hair, the better they do in the winters up here. That's plain," Count Hamnet said, and Ulric nodded. The nobleman went on, "But the longer their hair, the more trouble the bugs have getting at 'em, too."

"Maybe that's another reason woolly mammoths are woolly, too," Ulric said after a moment's thought. "But who bred them? They had to be here long before the Bizogots started herding them. They're still closer to wild than tamed."

"Maybe God bred them," Hamnet said.

"Maybe he did," Ulric agreed. "It would give him something to do with his time, anyway." In another tone of voice, he would have sounded blasphemous. As things were, he seemed to find the idea reasonable. When he slapped a moment later, he did sound blasphemous. And so did Hamnet Thyssen, when something that probably specialized in piercing mammoth hide bit him in the back of the neck. He didn't get the bug, which made his language fouler still.

Finding dry ground to sleep on got harder and harder. Trasamund and Liv had oiled mammoth hides to unroll beneath them as groundsheets. The Raumsdalians weren't so lucky. "If you've been this way before, you should have warned us it was a bog," Hamnet said to Ulric in a low voice.

"I couldn't-I didn't know," Ulric answered. "Everything was nice and hard then." He looked around to make sure Trasamund and Liv couldn't overhear.

"You came through here in the winter?" Hamnet Thyssen asked. "What was it like?"

"Cold," Ulric Skakki said, with feeling. "Colder than . . . Well, cold." What didn't he say? Colder than Gudrid's heart? Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised.

"Does the Glacier grow in the wintertime?" Hamnet asked.

Ulric nodded. "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You can almost watch it happen. The way the Glacier goes forward when it's cold, you wonder how it ever goes back."

"Bad winters, it does come forward and stay there for a while. I know that," Hamnet said. "On balance, though, it's been moving back more than forward. Otherwise, the Bizogots would be herding mammoths where Nidaros stands."

"You mean they don't?" Ulric Skakki's eyebrows arched in artfully simulated surprise. "And all this time I thought. . ."

"All this time, I thought you were a chowderhead," Count Hamnet said. "And here I see I was right."

"Your servant, your Grace." Ulric bowed in the saddle. "And few clammier places have I ever been than this."

"Ow!" Hamnet Thyssen mimed squashing him like a mosquito. Ulric Skakki bowed again. Count Hamnet muttered to himself for the next quarter of an hour. In a way, that was a measure of how bad Ulric's pun was. In another way, it was a measure of how good. Hamnet forgot about the journey, even forgot about Gudrid, for a little while. He supposed that was good, too.

When someone shook Count Hamnet awake in the middle of the night, his first confused thought was that the northern sky had caught fire. Curtains and sheets of coruscating red and yellow and ghostly green danced there. Oh, he realized muzzily. The Northern Lights. They showed themselves only rarely down in Nidaros. He saw them more often as he traveled through the Bizogot country. Here in the Gap, he'd come a long way north indeed, and they burned more brightly than he’d ever seen them before.

All the same, he didn't think whoever was shaking him awake wanted him to enjoy their beauty. The shifting, multicolored light they shed let him see Audun Gilli crouched to one side of him and Liv to the other.

That made him reach for his sword. He didn't think they'd roused him to tell him they were running off with each other. They'd better not be, he thought. That would infuriate him for any number of reasons.

"What is it?" he asked, first in Raumsdalian, then in the Bizogots' language. Needing to ask twice was one more inconvenience.

"Someone," Audun Gilli whispered.

"Out there," Liv agreed, pointing north and east.

Hamnet peered in that direction. He saw nothing. "Who?" he said in a low voice. "How far away?" Again, he repeated himself so both Audun and Liv could understand.

"We don't know who," Audun answered, at the same time as Liv said, "I'm not sure how far away. But out there."

Swearing under his breath, Count Hamnet said, "Well, what do you know? Can you tell me if it's a Bizogot out there? Or is it a Raumsdalian?"

"We don't know." The wizard and the shaman said the same thing at the same time in two different languages. Then they did it again, adding, "Whoever it is, it's a magician."

That made Hamnet Thyssen wonder if the sword would do him any good. He held on to it. It was the only weapon he had handy, and the familiar feel of the leather-wrapped hilt in his hand was reassuring. "How do you know?" he asked.

"The touch of magic woke us." Audun and Liv said the same thing once more.

"Well, is it Bizogot magic or Raumsdalian magic?" Count Hamnet asked testily.

"I don't know," Audun Gilli said, while Liv answered, "I'm not sure." They were different there, if not very.

Then Liv said, "It might not be either one."

That made Hamnet's annoyance at being roused in the middle of the night fall away. Ulric Skakki had said he thought people dwelt beyond the Glacier. Hamnet didn't think Ulric had told that either to Audun or to Liv. And if Trasamund believed the same thing, he was keeping quiet about it. Hamnet had trouble imagining the Bizogot jarl keeping quiet about anything for very long.

Which meant. . . Well, who could tell what it meant?

"What does she say?" Audun asked.

Muttering in annoyance at having to go back and forth, Hamnet translated.

Audun Gilli looked thoughtful. He nodded. "Why are you bothering me if this stranger is a wizard?" Hamnet asked as the new thought occurred to him. "Why didn't you deal with him yourselves?"

"We tried," Liv said in her language.

"We couldn't," Audun said in his.

So it comes clown to the sword after all, Hamnet thought-sweat-stained, wear-smoothed leather against callused palm. "Well, I'll go, if you can guide me toward him," he said-the last thing he wanted was to try to stalk an unfriendly wizard by the flickering, fluttering glow of the Northern Lights.

"I'll come with you," Liv said at once.

Hamnet Thyssen wondered if he wanted a woman beside him. But if the other choice was Audun Gilli, he decided he did. This was the Bizogot shaman's country. If anyone could move through it smoothly and quietly, she could. Audun had shown himself to be a pretty fair wizard, but he couldn't move anywhere without stumbling over his own feet. And that was when he was sober. When he'd had a bit to drink, or more than a bit…

"You stay behind," Hamnet told him. "If you hear anything wrong or sense anything wrong, wake Ulric Skakki and Trasamund." To Hamnet s way of thinking, they were the two men likeliest to do him some good in a pinch. Audun Gilli nodded. Count Hamnet put on his boots and got to his feet. "Let's go," he said to Liv.

They hadn't gone far before she stepped in some mud and pulled her feet out with horrid squelching sounds. So much for smoothly and quietly, Hamnet thought. It would have been funny if it didn't endanger them both. Liv wasn't laughing. She swore as foully in the Bizogot language as Trasamund could have.

"How far away is this wizard or shaman or whatever he is?" Hamnet asked again. With no plants taller than the middle of his calf, he would have a demon of a time sneaking up on the stranger. If the fellow had a bow, he wouldn't need to be a wizard. But at that thought Count Hamnet shook his head. He wouldn't have wanted to try to gauge distances with only God's curtains to help him, and he couldn't believe any other archer would, either.

"Out beyond bowshot-that's as much as I can tell," Liv replied. "Shall I throw our shadows, to confuse him about how we're coming after him?"

"Throw our shadows? What do you mean?" Count Hamnet asked.

Instead of answering, Liv began to chant softly. Hamnet Thyssen started, for it seemed as if two manlike shapes sprang into being about fifty feet off to the left. "He will notice them. He will not notice us," Liv said. But then she added, "Unless he is a better shaman than I think he is." Count Hamnet wouldn't have minded not hearing that.

The sorcerous shadows or doubles paced along to the left of the real Raumsdalian and shaman. "Will they have any better notion of where this strange wizard is than we do?" Hamnet whispered.

Liv grinned wryly. "I wish they would."

Lightning sizzled along the ground-not a great bolt such as God might hurl down from the edge of the Glacier, but enough to fill the air with the smell of thunderstorms and enough to make the magical shadows jerk and twitch like real people caught by that brilliant lash. Hamnet Thyssen admired Liv's artistry. He blinked again and again, trying to will sight back to his dazzled eyes.

Liv pointed in the direction from which the lightning bolt had come. "There!" she said. "We will find him there! Quick!" She ran forward.

She was lightfooted, and fast as most men. Hamnet Thyssen lumbered after her, doing his best to keep up. She let out what sounded like a lynx's cry-what sounded so much like one, Hamnet wondered whether one of the beasts really spoke from her throat. He wouldn't have been surprised; Bizogot shamans and wild beasts had mystical connections he understood only dimly.

Peer as he would, Hamnet Thyssen saw no man standing or even crouching there on the frozen plain. But suddenly he heard a great thunder of wings. Some large bird-in the glow from the Northern Lights, he saw it was an owl as white as an arctic fox or hare in winter-streaked off to the north.

Liv dug in her heels and skidded to a stop. Count Hamnet charged past her, then stopped himself. The plain was empty now. He could feel it. "Our man has flown," Liv said sadly.

"Flown?" Hamnet's echo sounded foolish even in his own ears.

"Flown," the shaman repeated. "Did you not see the snowy owl just then?"

"I saw the owl," Hamnet Thyssen said. "I saw no man."

"Oh, yes, you did," Liv told him. "The owl was the man-is the man. Well, he is flown now. Wherever he lands, so long as it is far from us, he will take back his own shape. He will tell his friends, whoever they are, whatever he learned of us."

"His friends." Again, Hamnet used her words for his own. "Who are his friends? Is he another Bizogot shaman? Why would he fly north if he is?"

"He is not a Bizogot. I was not sure before. Now I am." Liv sounded very sure. She went on, "I do not know what he is. I do not think he comes from your folk, either-at least, his magic feels nothing like Audun Gilli's. Are there people beyond the Glacier? Maybe there are."

"Yes, maybe." Hamnet couldn't say more without telling her that Ulric Skakki had come this way before. For that matter, how could he be sure himself that Ulric was telling the truth? He couldn't, and he knew it. For him, if not for the adventurer, maybe was nothing but the truth.

The shaman looked north, in the direction the snowy owl had flown, toward the narrow part of the Gap, toward whatever-and whoever-lay beyond. "If there are people beyond the Glacier, they are not God's people." She sounded disappointed. "God's people wouldn't need to spy."

Count Hamnet hadn't thought of it like that. When he did, he nodded. "And if they are not God's people, if they are people like the rest of us, what does that say?"

"That they will steal whatever they can and take whatever they can," Liv replied at once. Startled, Hamnet nodded again. He wouldn't have put it that way, which didn't mean he thought the Bizogot shaman was wrong. Liv had a habit of saying exactly what was on her mind. Hamnet Thyssen tried to do that, too, which was one reason so many Raumsdalians were perfectly content to see him stay in his castle off on the edge of nowhere.

He laughed softly as he and Liv walked back to the encampment. He was much closer to the edge of nowhere here in the Gap than he could be anywhere inside the Empire. And, with the Gap melted through, he and his companions could go beyond the edge of nowhere, go into lands no one from the south could have reached for thousands of years.

The people on the other side couldn't have come down into the south for thousands of years, either. Sigvat II didn't seem worried about that. Neither did Trasamund. Hamnet Thyssen wondered why not. He knew he was.

"When the spy flew away, what did you sense?" he asked Audun Gilli when he got back.

"Is that what happened?" the wizard said, as if much was now explained.

"That's what happened," Hamnet said. He translated for Liv, who nodded.

"Liv made the very pretty shadow spell-I know that," Audun said. "It fooled him, too, or he wouldn't have thrown the lightning at the doubles. He would have sent it against you. But then when he realized you were still coming forward .. . Yes, it must have been a shapeshifting spell, but not one I ever met before. Nothing like any I ever met before, in fact."

"He is right," Liv said after Hamnet Thyssen translated again. "Shamans can take the seeming of a bear or a dire wolf or a lion or a musk ox or a mammoth. Sometimes it is more than a seeming-even you folk from the hot lands will know this." Count Hamnet didn't think of the Raumsdalian Empire as a hot country, but it was when measured against the Bizogot plains. Liv went on, "This magic was new to me, too. It was quicker and more complete than any I have known before. The spy did not take on the seeming of an owl. He was an owl."

After Hamnet turned that into Raumsdalian for Audun Gilli, he asked, "How will he stop being an owl, then?" He used both languages.

"Someone will have to make him into a man again," Liv said. "Even in owl shape, he will know enough to go back where he came from."

"What does she say?" Audun asked. When Hamnet told him, he said, "Yes, it would have to work like that. And the spy will have to hope he knows enough to go back where he came from. Otherwise, he'll catch rabbits and voles and lemmings for the rest of his days."

Now Liv had to wait for the translation. When she had it, she sketched a salute to Audun Gilli. "That can happen to Bizogot shamans, too," she said. "Some people say short-faced bears are as sly as they are because they have men's blood in them, blood from shamans who never went back to men's shape."

Count Hamnet's shiver had nothing to do with the chilly night. He tried to imagine living the rest of his life as a beast, slowly forgetting he was ever a man. Only one thought occurred to him. How Gudrid would laugh!

Trasamund grunted when he heard the folk from beyond the Glacier had spies on this side of the Gap. After a bit, he unbent enough to say, "If we catch them, we'll kill them." His large, hard hands opened and closed several times; he seemed to look forward to it.

"We're going up to spy on them," Ulric Skakki murmured when he and Hamnet rode a little apart from the rest of the travelers. "Why shouldn't they come down to spy on us?"

Put that way, it seemed logical enough, fair enough. But it didn't feel fair to Hamnet Thyssen. What the Empire was doing-with some help from the Bizogots-was only fitting and proper. So it looked to him, anyhow. For other folk to come down into those familiar lands, though … If that wasn't an invasion, what was it?

When Count Hamnet said as much, Ulric Skakki smiled one of his sardonic smiles. "Of course, we're not invading their lands when we go north of the Gap-eh, your Grace?"

"We're not invading." Hamnet waved an arm at the Bizogots and Raumsdalians riding north. "Does this look like an army to you?"

Ulric laughed. "Well, no," he said. "But does one man who turns himself into an owl look like an army to you?"

"That's different," Hamnet Thyssen insisted.

"How?" Ulric sounded genuinely curious.

Try as Hamnet would, he couldn't come up with a good answer. The only one that came to him was, Because it's on this side of the Gap. It was an answer plenty good enough for him. He was sure as sure could be, though, that Ulric Skakki would only laugh some more if he brought it out. And so he rode along in glum silence-and Ulric Skakki laughed at him anyway.

After a while, Ulric said, "They'll have a demon of a time trying to bring an army through here."

That touched on Count Hamnet s professional expertise. "Oh, yes," he said without a moment's hesitation. "It's not just the narrow gate they'll have to pass through. How will they keep a host of men and beasts fed?"

"Nobody can raise enough to keep a host fed till you get down into the Empire, where crops will grow," Ulric agreed. "The Bizogots would be a lot more trouble than they are if they were hosts instead of bands-and they're trouble enough as is."

"Really? I never would have noticed." Count Hamnet's voice was dry. When Ulric laughed this time, it was with him, not at him. Hamnet thought so, anyhow.

Closer and closer together came the two cliffs that marked the edges of the Glacier. Once upon a time, within the memory of chroniclers and bards though certainly not within that of living men, the Glacier had had only a southern edge. Would it really keep melting till the Gap was a broad highway-till, perhaps, there was no Glacier at all, only bare ground? Ham-net Thyssen tried to imagine that, tried and felt himself failing. Even somewhat diminished as it was, the Glacier still seemed to him a natural and all but inevitable part of the world.

As those tall cliffs of ice drew closer, they also towered higher into the sky. Count Hamnet was not a nervous man, or not a man who showed his nerves, but his voice wobbled a little when he asked Trasamund, "Are there ever avalanches up here?" He couldn't imagine how many tons of ice might come thundering down on him.

"I'm sure there are-there must be," the Bizogot jarl answered. "I've never been in one, though." He chuckled. "If I ever was, I’d be too flat to talk to you now."

"Er, yes," Hamnet said. That marched too well with what he was thinking.

And then, the next morning, he couldn't see the edges of the ice at all. He couldn't see anything. Mist shrouded the campsite. It was cold and gray and thick, thicker than he’d ever known mist to be down in the Raumsdalian Empire. The air he inhaled felt soggy. When he exhaled, he added his own fog to that which swirled around him.

"Which way is north?" he asked. His voice sounded strangely muffled.

"North?" Ulric Skakki said from not far away-but Count Hamnet couldn't see him. "In this, I have trouble being sure of up and down."

That would have been funny if it didn't hold so much truth. The air above, the air all around-the same shade of gray everywhere. It was like being in the middle of a wet sheep's wool. And when Hamnet Thyssen looked down, he could barely see his own boots.

"I ran into this myself the last time I came north," Trasamund said from somewhere in the fog. "I was stuck for two or three days, because I couldn't tell which end was up. Of course, I didn't have a shaman with me, and now we've got two."

"I know a spell for finding north," Audun Gilli said. "An iron needle floating in a cup of water will show you the way."

"What does he say?" Liv asked from farther away. Count Hamnet translated for her. When he finished, she said, "I know this spell. A Raumsdalian trader showed it to me. It may work down in your country, but not so well up here. He said it lied more and more the farther north he went."

"That's so, by God-I've seen it, too," Trasamund agreed, also in the Bizogot tongue.

Inevitably, Audun Gilli asked what they said. With a mental sigh, Hamnet translated for him, too. The wizard let out an indignant sniff. "How can a spell that works well in one place not work in another? The idea is ridiculous."

Trasamund, of course, understood Raumsdalian. "It may be ridiculous, but it's true. If you go the way you think north is, you'll smack your nose into the Glacier instead of heading on up into the Gap."

"I don't believe it," Audun said.

"Fine," Trasamund told him. "Don't believe it. Work your magic. Go the way you think is north. But watch out for your nose." He laughed. Audun Gilli sniffed more indignantly than ever. Laughing still, Trasamund went on, "Go ahead. Try your spell. We'll come along. Why not? We'll be going somewhere, even if it's in the wrong direction."

Hamnet Thyssen hadn't known a needle would float on water. But Audun was right-the thin one he used did. And it pointed steadily in a direction he insisted was north. Off the travelers went, moving slowly through the impenetrable fog, calling to one another again and again to keep from getting separated.

When the ground under the horses' hooves grew muckier than ever, Hamnet began to suspect Trasamund knew what he was talking about. Wetter ground meant more meltwater, and more meltwater meant they were getting closer to the Glacier. The mist did thin a little as the day wore along, and a swirl of breeze showed the great cliff of ice dead ahead and seeming unimaginably tall.

"You see?" Trasamund sounded as if he would tear Audun Gilli's head off if the wizard denied seeing.

But Audun didn't. "I see," he said sadly. He sounded chastened.

"We went more west than north, did we not?" Eyvind Torfinn said.

"Plainly." Audun Gilli sounded more chastened yet. "But we should have gone north." Was he staring at the needle as if wondering why it betrayed him? He was only a dim outline to Hamnet Thyssen, but the nobleman knew he would have stared at the needle that way.

Eyvind Torfinn, by contrast, sounded cheerful. "If we know the needle points somewhere close to west instead of north, then if we go in the direction the needle says is somewhere closer to east than north, we'll really be heading toward the true north after all, won't we?"

A considerable silence followed, from both Audun Gilli and Trasamund. When Audun said, "By God, your Splendor, I think we will," he seemed amazed.

Trasamund's laugh might almost have blown the fog away by itself. "By God, your Splendor, you've worked a magic to make any shaman jealous!" he boomed. "You've made a liar tell the truth in spite of himself! Well done!"

"What do they say?" Liv asked plaintively. She was the only traveler who knew no Raumsdalian. Count Hamnet translated for her. "Ah," she said when he finished. "The old man is clever."

She forgot Earl Eyvind was fluent in the Bizogot language. "I am not as old as all that, wise woman," he said in her tongue, "or at least I hope I am not."

Hamnet Thyssen couldn't see her turn red, either, but he would have bet she was blushing. "I crave your pardon," she said in a small voice.

"Come on-let's get going," Trasamund told Audun Gilli. "Your precious needle can lie as much as it pleases. You will tease the truth out of it even so."

"Maybe I will. I really think I will." Audun seemed astonished but happy. "A wizard ought to travel about with a charmed needle, and compare what it calls north to what the sky shows at a great many places. Once a chart was made, anyone would be able to use the needle anywhere and have it tell him the truth."

"That sounds like a good idea," the Bizogot jarl said. "It sounds like a good idea for somebody with all the time in the world. As much as I would like to have so much time, I don't-and neither do you."

Audun took the hint. He murmured the charm over the needle once more, perhaps to encourage it. Then he began to ride. "This way," he called. He was dimly visible through the thinning mist, but hearing him did help the others follow.

And Eyvind Torfinn's notion worked. Hamnet Thyssen saw no logical reason why it shouldn't, but plenty of things went wrong even when he saw no reason why they should.