Late in the afternoon, Liv pointed north across the snow-covered plain. "Those are people, I think, heading our way."

They were no more than wiggling dots at the edge of visibility to Count Hamnet. "If you say so," he told her.

"My own folk, coming to greet me." Smug pride rang in Trasamund’s voice.

Before long, he got a closer look at his clansfolk, and pride changed to horror. They weren't welcoming him—they were fleeing disaster. Some were wounded, others terribly burned. "Invaders!" Gelimer gasped when he saw his chieftain. "Invaders from the north!"

XXII

nor all the survivors from the Three Tusk clan even wanted to linger long enough to talk with Trasamund and his comrades. The Bizogots wanted to flee, lest worse befall them. They had been struck, and they had been broken. They’d never imagined such a blow could fall on them, not from that direction. Even though Trasamund spoke of the Rulers on the far side ot the Glacier, the danger must have seemed no more real to his folk than to Sigvat.

"Why didn't you patrol the Gap?" the anguished jarl asked Gelimer.

"We did—for a while. But the hunting is bad up there, so the men came back," Gelimer answered. He had a new cut across his forehead and a bandage on his left arm. "We didn't look for invaders, not at this season of the year." He grimaced. "I wish we would have."

"The Rulers . . . can do all kinds of unpleasant things," Hamnet said. Gelimer nodded, and then bit his lip. Moving his head had to hurt.

"How far behind you are they?" Ulric Skakki asked—a good, relevant question.

"Not far enough, by God!" the Bizogot exclaimed. "But they aren't chasing as hard as they might be. Why should they bother? What's left of us can't do them any harm, and they have to know it."

"My clan!" Trasamund howled. "You threw away my clan because you wouldn't listen to me. What I ought to do to you . . ."

"What's the point, your Ferocity?" Hamnet Thyssen said wearily. "Whatever you want to do, the Rulers have already done worse."

"If I'd stayed—"

"It might not have mattered," Ulric said. "They still would have surprised you, eh?"

"I would have beaten them anyhow." Even in disaster, Trasamund clung to his arrogance.

"They had—riding mammoths. Riding mammoths with lancers on them!" Gelimer said, for all the world as if the travelers hadn't told him about that when they came south from the Gap, as if he hadn't wanted to ride mammoths himself. "How could we hope to stand against them? And the ones who weren't on mammoths rode deer. They might as well have been horses! And their shamans—their shamans blasted our camp with lightning."

Liv put her face in her hands. "I might have stopped that if I were there," she said in a broken voice. "I've met the Rulers. I have some notion of what they can do. Anyone who didn't.. . would have been easy meat for them." She swiped at her eyes. "I can't even cry, not now. My eyelids will freeze shut."

"What... do we do?" Audun Gilli asked in a very small voice.

"We can't keep riding north—that seems plain enough. If we do, we run into the Rulers, and then ..." Ulric Skakki didn't go on, but he didn't have to. The rest of the travelers could draw their own pictures.

"How many other clansfolk got away?" Trasamund asked Gelimer. "Are there parties in back of you, or did they flee in different directions?"

"I don't know, your Ferocity," Gelimer said miserably. "I think the only ones behind us are those horrible, God-cursed demons from beyond the Glacier."

"I wish I could know for sure," the jarl said. "I don't like to leave anyone behind who might somehow get away. If I go forward—"

"You throw yourself away," Hamnet Thyssen broke in. "Will you charge a squadron of war mammoths singlehanded? Some people would call that brave. But isn't it stupid? What would you do afterwards? Nothing, because you'd be dead."

"With my clan murdered, I deserve to be," Trasamund said.

"No." Count Hamnet shook his head. "This war is all the Bizogots, all the folk below the Glacier, against these invaders. The Three Tusk clan has lost a fight. But the Bizogots are still your folk. They need you. They need what you can do. They need what you know. Ulric's right. If we charge now, we lose. We have to regroup and figure out what to do next, how to fight the Rulers."

"Talk, talk, talk. This is what Raumsdalians do," Trasamund said. "Not Bizogots. Bizogots go out and fight."

"And then wish later that they'd done some talking instead," Ulric Skakki said. Trasamund scowled at him—and at the world.

"The Raumsdalians are right, your Ferocity," Liv said.

"Not you, too!" the jarl howled.

She nodded. "I'm sorry, but yes. Going forward, charging ahead, is useless now. We need to save ourselves for a fight we can hope to win."

"Our grazing grounds! The mammoths! The musk oxen!" Trasamund beat his fists against his legs in misery.

"They're lost now, your Ferocity," Ulric said. "If we win, you can reclaim them. If you lose now, will you ever see them again? How likely is it? Tell me the truth, not what your heart wants to hear."

Trasamund growled like a wild beast, down deep in his throat. "Better to die than to live the exile's life!" he cried.

"If you really want to die, it won't be hard," Ulric said. "If you're just making noise because things hurt so much right now, that's a different story. But be careful what you say, because you may decide to do something your mouth means but your heart doesn't."

"He is right," Liv said again. "What we really need is vengeance. Don't throw yourself away before we can take it."

Trasamund turned his ravaged gaze on Hamnet Thyssen. "Well, Raumsdalian? Are you going to preach me a sermon, too?" He spoke in the Empire's language; his own had no word for sermon.

"No," Count Hamnet answered. "The only thing I'll tell you is, I know what watching your world crash down on you feels like. It's happened to me, too. You have a hole where your heart used to be, and you go on anyway. What else can you do?"

"Kill!" Trasamund roared.

"If you kill a little now, your Ferocity, you will die right afterwards." Audun Gilli was almost maddeningly precise. "If you wait for your moment, you can work a great killing on the foe, and still live to hear him mourn. Which would you rather?"

"I want to kill now, and I want to kill later," the jarl answered. "I want to kill and kill and kill. If I drowned the world in blood, it wouldn't glut me. Do you understand, you and your talk of killing? What do you know of death?"

Audun Gilli bit his lip. "I came home one night to watch my family burn.

Is that enough, your Ferocity, or do you want something more? Did you ever smell your wife's charred flesh when you lay down to try to sleep?" He almost quivered with fury. Little weedy man that he was, he was on the point of hurling himself at the burly Bizogot, magic forgot, simply man against man. And Hamnet Thyssen might not have been astonished if he prevailed.

Trasamund stared. In his own moment of agony, he seemed to have forgot that others could know, had known, torment, too. Where Ulric's sarcasm and Hamnet s stolidity failed to remind him of it, the wizard's rage did. Trasamund seemed to slump in on himself like a pingo melting in an uncommonly hot summer. "I will live," he mumbled. "I will avenge. And I will hate myself every heartbeat till I do."

Hamnet Thyssen and Audun Gilli both nodded. "Oh, yes, your Ferocity," Hamnet said. "Oh, yes. That comes with the territory. For now, though, we see about living."

Dully, Trasamund nodded as well.

Audun Gilli knew a weatherworking spell that seemed stronger than any Liv had. He used it to call snow down on the travelers' tracks. Maybe that would let them and the survivors from the Three Tusk clan give the Rulers the slip. Or, then again, maybe it wouldn't.