"No," Ulric answered. "It was worse."
"By God!" Hamnet said. "How?"
Ulric Skakki's hat came down over his forehead. A wool muffler covered his mouth and nose. Only his eyes were exposed to the weather. People said eyes by themselves didn't show much. They'd never seen his. "Believe me, your Grace, it had no trouble at all," he said. "The wind doesn't always blow toward the Glacier. Sometimes it comes down off it. Sometimes the wind blowing toward it runs smack into the wind coming down off it. If you think this is bad, imagine a tornado full of snow."
"I'd rather not," Hamnet Thyssen said. Down in the southern part of the Raumsdalian Empire, tornadoes could level a town or scatter a castle's stones across the countryside. Some of those stones had to weigh as much as a mammoth. The savage winds picked them up and flung them anyway.
No wonder weatherworkers have so much trouble, Hamnet thought. How could a mere man hope to control anything so strong?
Ulric Skakki's thoughts ran in a different direction. "When we get down to the right side of the Glacier," he said, "do you think anyone will believe us when we tell people what we've found?"
"The Bizogots will," Hamnet said. "They don't complicate things that don't need to be complicated."
"Or sometimes even things that do," Ulric said. "And the Bizogots move by clan, not as one folk. Even if they do believe, how much good will it do us? They'll spend more time quarreling among themselves than doing anything about the Rulers."
As far as Hamnet Thyssen was concerned, the Bizogots' disunity was a boon for the empire. If they ever found a jarl who could unite them all, they might prove deadly dangerous to Raumsdalia. They might also prove deadly dangerous if they decided to join the Rulers instead of fighting them.
"Will his Majesty pay attention to the word we bring?" Ulric Skakki persisted.
"He sent out this expedition. He let some of his guardsmen come along with it," Hamnet Thyssen said. And how had Gudrid managed that? Did she sleep with Sigvat to persuade him? Hamnet forced his mind back to the question at hand. "If the Emperor isn't convinced-"
"We're all in trouble," Ulric finished for him.
"Maybe. Maybe not, too," Hamnet said. "All we know about the Rulers is from their bragging and the little we saw."
"They don't just herd mammoths. They really tame them, the way we tame horses," Ulric said. "Samoth is a stronger wizard than Audun Gilli dreams of being."
"Well, yes." Hamnet Thyssen looked around to make sure Audun was out of earshot. "But how much does that say about the one, and how much does it say about the other?"
Ulric Skakki gave him a dirty look-and well he might have, when he'd dragged Audun Gilli from the gutter for the journey beyond the Glacier. "Audun will be fine when we really need him."
"I hope so. We all hope so," Count Hamnet said. "But the Rulers are a problem, and you're right-no one who hasn't seen them can understand how big a problem they could be."
"Well, that may take care of itself," Ulric said.
Hamnet frowned. "How do you mean?"
"By next year, chances are that everyone will have seen them, don't you think?" Ulric said. Hamnet only grunted, like a man who takes a fist in the pit of the stomach. Ulric Skakki seemed to think that a full answer. And so perhaps it was.
Before long, Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether he and the other travelers would make it back to the Gap, let alone through the narrow opening that was the only way home. The two sides of the divided Glacier shaped a funnel with that opening as the sole outlet. All the bad weather beyond the Glacier seemed to pour into the funnel-and had no way out.
Snow piled up thick on the ground. This, sages said, was how the Glacier formed in the first place-snow that fell faster than it melted, that never melted from year to year, that hardened into the solid Glacier as the weight of more snow above it squeezed out the air. Finding or forcing a way through got harder by the day.
"Are we going to have to wait till the blizzards stop?" Hamnet asked Trasamund.
"I hope not," the Bizogot answered. Hamnet Thyssen had wanted more. Maybe his face said as much, for Trasamund went on, "This is new for me, too, you know. I'm used to weather that has more, ah, room to move around."
"Think on the bright side," Jesper Fletti said. "If we freeze to death or starve to death up here, chances are the Rulers will, too."
"Oh, joy." Hamnet Thyssen did not like Jesper, and so he took a certain sour pleasure in showing up the other man. "That isn't so, anyhow. The Rulers aren't likely to come through the Gap during winter. Chances are they'll travel when the weather is good-or as good as it gets up here."
Like the rest of the travelers, Jesper was bundled up so only his eyes and a bit of his forehead and the bridge of his nose were exposed to the air. By the way his rime-whitened eyebrows came down and pulled together at the center, Count Hamnet's dart hit home.
"One way or another, we'll manage." Trasamund didn't sound worried- but how a leader sounded and what he really thought could be two different things, as Hamnet knew full well. The Bizogot continued, "If we have to, we'll build shelters from snow blocks and wait it out. We've got plenty of deer flesh on the horses' backs."
"Have we got enough fodder to keep the beasts alive for long?" Hamnet asked, knowing the answer was no. By the way Trasamund grimaced, he knew the same thing. "Can we go forward on foot if the horses die?" Hamnet continued.
"We can, yes," Trasamund said. "It wouldn't be fast, and it would be dangerous. Hunting in thick snow's not easy, and you need to eat a lot, or the weather sucks the strength out of you like a vampire."
"You have a way with words, your Ferocity." By the way Jesper Fletti said it, that wasn't necessarily praise.
"We hope for the weather to get better, that's all." If bluff, hearty Trasamund could offer nothing more, he was worried, or worse than worried.
Hamnet Thyssen let his horse fall back alongside Ulric Skakki's. "You came back through the Gap in the wintertime," he said, making it sound almost like an accusation.
"Guilty," Ulric agreed, so he caught the tone despite the howling wind.
"How?" Hamnet asked.
"I waited for a spell of decent weather, and one came along before I got too hungry," Ulric answered. "Then I squirted through as fast as I could go. The weather on the other side was a lot milder, I will say."
"Well, I believe that." Hamnet Thyssen saw no way for the full fury of this storm to squeeze through that narrow opening. "What were things like where the two halves of the Glacier came closest together?"
Ulric considered. "Windy."
"Thank you so much. I never would have guessed." Hamnet laid on the sarcasm with a shovel. Ulric Skakki only chuckled. He probably grinned, too; the way his eyes narrowed suggested as much. But he too kept himself well covered up, so Hamnet couldn't be sure.
"You'll find out," Ulric said. "Either that or the good weather won't come soon enough-in which case, our meat will stay fresh till the animals find it next spring."
"You always did know how to cheer me up," Hamnet Thyssen said. Ulric laughed. For a moment, the wind howling down from the north let Hamnet hear his mirth. Then the frozen blast seized the laughter and flayed it on knives of ice and swept it away.
Hamnet wished he thought Ulric were joking. They could die up here. If they did, no one would know but the striped cats-the tigers-and the wolves and the little foxes . . . and possibly the Rulers, if they came this way when brief spring and summer set this land ablaze with flowers.
Asking a wizard to work against such weather was asking too much. Count Hamnet already understood that-understood it in his bones, which grew colder by the moment. He did wonder whether Audun Gilli or Liv could work with it, could craft some sort of preserving spell that would keep the travelers not quite frozen to death till the storm eased enough to let them travel some more.