“My nose isn’t purple!” Trasamund might have been answering a woman, not an enchanted jug.

Ulric Skakki looked artfully astonished. “You mean that isn’t a plum stuck on to the front of your face?”

Like a lot of Bizogots, Trasamund had been down in Raumsdalia often enough to know what a plum was. His whole face turned red, if not purple. “One day you will talk too bloody much, Skakki. You’ll be sorry for it when you are—you’d best believe you will.”

“People keep telling me so,” the adventurer said. “It hasn’t happened yet, though. One day I’m going to get tired of waiting.”

Trasamund muttered into his beard. Whatever he said, he didn’t say it loud enough to get through the facial shrubbery. Trading insults with Ulric was a losing game; he gave worse than he got. As Count Hamnet had seen—and discovered, painfully, for himself—fighting Ulric was also a losing game. Which left . . . what? Loving him, maybe? Hamnet Thyssen scowled. That also struck him as an unappetizing choice.

HAMNET FOUND HIMSELF looking east as he rode across what had been Hevring Lake’s bottomland. He saw Per Anders doing the same thing. Catching Sigvat’s courier at it made him realize he was doing it, too. A little sheepishly, he said, “If the Rulers sacked Nidaros, not much point looking for the city smoke rising from it, is there?”

Per blinked. “No, I guess not,” he answered, also sounding sheepish. “Force of habit.”

“I know. I was doing the same thing,” Hamnet said. “And I’ll probably start doing it six or eight more times, till I get it through my thick head that that smoke cursed well won’t be there.”

He did, too. Late the next afternoon, they came close enough to Nidaros to get a good look at what the Rulers had done to the Raumsdalian capital. Hamnet could have done without it. It was almost as hard on him as seeing Gudrid’s naked corpse would have been. And Nidaros itself hadn’t betrayed him, even if important people inside the city had.

Nidaros’ gray granite walls could have held out every Bizogot ever born for a thousand years. So Raumsdalians said, anyhow, and Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t inclined to argue with the conventional wisdom there. Those stout walls had held out the Rulers . . . for a little while. Not for long enough.

The granite blocks didn’t seem to have been overthrown. No: what happened to them was worse. It looked as if they’d been melted back into the lava from which they’d formed. Stone had flowed and run like hot fat, if not quite like water. What had happened to the men up on those walls when the granite melted? Nothing good—Count Hamnet was sure of that.

“Do we want to go in there?” Trasamund wondered aloud.

“Depends,” Ulric answered. “If only a few people lived through the sack, if only a few people are back, then we can scrounge as much as we need. There’ll be plenty of food and the like. But if a lot of the vultures that walk on two legs are prowling around in there, we’re just wasting our time. Your choice, Your Ferocity.”

“Let’s go up, get a closer look,” the jarl said. “Then we can figure out whether going in is smart or not.”

“That’s sensible,” Ulric said. “But what the demon? Let’s do it anyway.” Trasamund sent him a curious look, but didn’t try to parse the adventurer’s comment. Hamnet did, and felt his head start to whirl. He gave it up as a bad job.

Somewhere not far from the western wall was the house Earl Eyvind and Gudrid had shared, the house that looked out on the Hevring bottomland. Did it still stand? Had the Rulers plundered it? If they hadn’t, was anything about the Golden Shrine still there, or had Eyvind Torfinn managed to pack up all his assembled knowledge when he fled?

Hamnet remarked on that to Ulric. “Should we go there?” he asked. “Or do you think it’s a waste of time?”

“Mm . . . You ask interesting questions, and I wish to God you didn’t.” Ulric plucked at his beard. “Maybe we ought to see, eh? It’s not too deep into the city. We can’t get into too much trouble heading over there—I hope.”

“Oh, we can always get to trouble.” Hamnet Thyssen spoke with mournful conviction. “But will we get into worse trouble going in or staying clear?”

“Interesting questions, like I said.” Ulric Skakki didn’t make it sound like a compliment. By the way he said it, Count Hamnet might have come down with a rare—and socially embarrassing—disease. After a moment’s thought, the adventurer looked pleased with himself. “Why don’t we ask the wizards? They can tell us what kind of fools we are.”

“I already know that. We’re big fools, or we wouldn’t be here,” Hamnet said. “I want to know what we can do about it.”

“Amounts to the same thing in the end,” Ulric answered cheerfully.

They did talk to the wizards. Marcovefa, Audun Gilli, and Liv put their heads together. Marcovefa looked up at the sun. Liv opened her arms wide and spread her fingers wide, as if to trap a lot of air so she could smell it. Audun Gilli plucked up a pinch of earth and tasted it.

After that, they put their heads together again. Hamnet got the notion they were deciding on their verdict. Was that good? Bad? Indifferent?

Audun spoke for all of them: “You can go in if you want. We don’t think it will make things any worse.”

“Will it make them any better?” Ulric Skakki inquired, a heartbeat before Count Hamnet could ask the same question.

Audun and Liv and Marcovefa seemed equally surprised. They put their heads together one more time. When they broke apart again, Liv gave the answer for them all: “We don’t know. That isn’t plain.”

“Well?” Hamnet asked Ulric. “What do you want to do?”

“Let’s go,” Ulric said. “I’m a ghoul at heart. I do want to see what Nidaros is like after a sack. Maybe it’ll give us something new to tell Sigvat.”

“The only thing I want to tell him is where to head in,” Hamnet said grimly.

“When the Rulers chased him out of Nidaros, he found out where he was heading in, by God,” Ulric replied. “I won’t say it didn’t serve him right.”

“He’ll say that,” Hamnet predicted. “Nothing’s ever his fault. If you don’t believe me, just ask him.”

Per Anders also wanted to go into Nidaros, to see what had become of it. They recruited a squad’s worth of Bizogots to go with them and help keep them safe from whatever happened to be loose in the city. If the Bizogots did some plundering while they were there, Hamnet was willing to look the other way. Ulric seemed more than willing. He looked ready to do some plundering of his own.

They made the final approach to the fallen capital on foot. “No surly gate guards to persuade that we’re worthy to go in,” Hamnet remarked.

“I wonder if those whoresons tried asking the Rulers their snooty questions,” Ulric said. “If they did, they deserved whatever happened to them.”

Listening to them, Per Anders looked pained. “You men are not proper Raumsdalian patriots,” he said stiffly.

Ulric Skakki gave back a raucous laugh. “You just noticed?”

“What are you going to do about it?” Hamnet added.

“I’m going to wonder why His Majesty wants anything to do with the likes of you,” the courier replied.

“Simple,” Hamnet said. “He needs us. We can do something he wants done. We can give the Rulers a hard time—or he thinks we can.”

“And then he’ll figure out some fancy way to screw us,” Ulric said. “That’s the other thing he’s good for—putting it to people who ought to be his friends.”

“That’s not fair,” Per said.

“You’re right,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. The Emperor’s man looked vindicated till Hamnet finished, “Sometimes he’s a lot worse than that. I wonder if the Rulers freed everybody they found in his dungeons.”

“Not likely,” Ulric said. “Nidaros would look a lot more crowded if they were running around loose.”

Nidaros didn’t look crowded—it looked all but deserted. Like any big city, it depended on constant deliveries of food from outside for survival. When those deliveries stopped, the people in the city could do one of two things: they could leave, or they could starve. If most of them left—or died—what was left and what modest supplies remained might keep a much smaller population going.