“I didn’t get to be as rich as I am by taking foolish bets,” Ulric told him.
“How rich are you?” Trasamund asked. Ulric peered inside a belt pouch, sighed, shrugged, and didn’t answer.
Even the gesture was enough to make beggars clamor for coins. The soldiers on guard duty did nothing to hold them back. Begging had never been illegal in Nidaros. If more people were begging now than ever before, times were harder than they’d ever been. And, if the soldiers hadn’t served Sigvat, most of them would have been begging, too.
Hamnet remembered that no banners had flown above the imperial palace when he went through Nidaros after Sigvat fled. Those banners were back now. He nodded to himself when he noticed them. Sure enough, Sigvat looked out for Sigvat, first, last, and always.
Some of the guards in front of the palace had seen Hamnet and Ulric before. “You!” one of them exclaimed.
“Yes, us, by God,” Hamnet answered. “So you ran away with the Emperor and then came back, did you?”
The guardsman turned red. “You can’t talk to me that way!”
“I just did,” Hamnet said. “And I’ll kill you if you annoy me much more. My conscience won’t ache—I’ve killed plenty of men better than you’ll ever be in your wildest dreams.”
That he meant it—and that he could do it—must have been only too plain to the unhappy guard. “What are you doing here, anyway?” the man demanded.
“I’m bringing His Majesty a message from the Golden Shrine.” Hamnet gave back the exact literal truth.
All the guards laughed. “Now tell me another one—one I’ll believe,” the mouthy trooper said.
“He is telling you what you should believe, for it is so,” Eyvind Torfinn said.
“Who are you, granddad, and what the demon do you know about it?” the guardsman snarled.
“I am Earl Eyvind Torfinn, and I know about this because I was inside the Golden Shrine with Count Hamnet here.”
“I am Baron Runolf Skallagrim, and so was I,” Runolf said.
The guards put their heads together. Two authentic noblemen, neither one known to be in bad odor with the Emperor, had vouched for Count Hamnet. Ulric Skakki and Hamnet exchanged small, tight smiles. Which of them Sigvat liked less was an interesting question. Ulric hadn’t spoken up for Hamnet, nor did Hamnet blame him. His word might have done more harm than good.
There was a classic solution to this kind of problem, and the palace guard who’d done the talking found it. “I can’t decide on my own,” he said. “I’ll send one of my men in to see what His Majesty wants.”
“To see what some fancier flunky wants, you mean.” Hamnet Thyssen enjoyed saying what was on his mind. He’d got in trouble for it before. He might again. He enjoyed it anyhow.
Although the guardsman reddened again, he almost shoved one of his troopers toward the doorway they protected. “Go find out His Majesty’s pleasure.”
Sigvat’s pleasure was bound to be something young and pretty and sweetly rounded. A sour nobleman like Hamnet didn’t come close. The ironic glint in Ulric’s eye said he was thinking along those lines, too. This time, neither of them said anything.
After a few minutes, the guard who’d been sent in to enquire came back with astonishment all over his face. “His Majesty wants to see him!” he exclaimed in obvious disbelief.
“He does?” The talky palace guard seemed even more amazed. “Well, fry me in dung and call me a Bizogot’s dinner!”
“What was that?” Trasamund rumbled ominously.
Maybe the guard hadn’t noticed him or Liv till then. If he hadn’t, he wasn’t doing his job as well as he might have. He offered a rather sickly smile. “No offense intended, I’m sure.”
“I’m not,” Trasamund said. “If I thought you were worth killing, I’d argue with Count Hamnet for the privilege. But my guess is you’ll choke to death on your own foot one day before too long.”
Another guardsman snickered at that. The mouthy one gave him a look composed of three parts vitriol and one part flaming pitch. The unlucky guardsman tried to pull into his mailshirt like a turtle pulling into its shell. Hamnet interrupted that little drama, saying, “So—we can go in?”
“I guess you can,” the guard replied.
“Then we will,” Hamnet said, dismounting. And he did, his companions right behind him.
THE INSIDE OF the palace was more like the rest of Nidaros than Hamnet had expected—which only meant the Rulers had plundered it more thoroughly than he’d thought. Even carpets and wall hangings had disappeared. They’d probably been cut up to help keep the invaders’ tents warm. For all Hamnet knew, the flood from Sudertorp Lake had swept some of them away.
A workman stood on a ladder scrubbing at something on a wall. Most of the big graffito was gone now, but Hamnet could still make out one of the striped beasts of prey the Rulers called tigers. The Rulers might no longer be a menace here below the Gap. Like riding deer and big-horned bison, tigers seemed likely to stay around.
Runolf Skallagrim also eyed the graffito. “I wonder what that tiger was hunting,” he remarked.
“Probably Sigvat,” Hamnet answered.
The servitor leading him and his comrades to the throne stopped in horror. “How dare you say such things?” he squawked. “How dare you?”
“Oh, it’s easy,” Hamnet assured him. “I just open my mouth, and out they come.”
“Yes, and look how much fun you’ve had because of it,” Ulric said.
Eyeing them as if they’d suddenly sprouted fur and stripes and fangs and claws, the servitor said, “His Majesty will not be pleased.”
“That’s all right, son,” Hamnet said cheerfully—Sigvat’s man was much younger than he was. “After the Rulers, after climbing the Glacier, after the Golden Shrine, I’m not going to worry about the Emperor of Raumsdalia.”
“After . . . the Golden Shrine?” the servitor echoed. “But that’s nothing but talk—isn’t it?”
“Sure—the same as the Gap melting through is nothing but talk,” Count Hamnet said.
“It’s as real as roasted armadillo,” Ulric added. Not knowing what to make of that, the servitor fell silent, but his eyes were as nervous as a restive horse’s.
Just outside the throne room, more guards relieved Hamnet and his companions of their weapons—of most of them, anyhow. Hamnet still had a holdout knife in his boot top. By Ulric’s quirked eyebrow, the guards had also searched him less perfectly than they might have. No wizard checked to see if Sigvat’s men had missed anything, as one had when Hamnet and Ulric first met Trasamund here. Not everything around the Emperor was back to normal yet.
Walking into the throne room underscored that. Sigvat’s throne had been of gold and ivory and glittering jewels. Now a stout wooden chair probably taken from a palace dining room replaced it. All the rest of the rich ornamentation in the throne room was gone, too. Maybe the gold had helped weigh down the Rulers as the unleashed waters of Sudertorp Lake washed over them. But Hamnet Thyssen doubted whether lighter pockets and belt pouches would have made much difference.
The Emperor’s surviving ministers looked leaner and poorer than they had the last time Hamnet saw them. So did Sigvat II. The robe he wore might have suited a tolerably prosperous trader. Before the Rulers chased him out of Nidaros, he wouldn’t have been caught dead in it.
Hamnet grudged a bow. “Your Majesty,” he said gruffly. Ulric Skakki followed his lead. So did Trasamund. And so did Audun Gilli, the man of least account among those who’d begun this adventure.
Sigvat scowled. He was still as sensitive to slights as he’d always been. “What’s this nonsense about Sudertorp Lake and the Golden Shrine?” he snapped.
“Your Majesty, it isn’t nonsense,” Count Hamnet said. Everyone with him nodded except Gudrid. She would never testify about the Golden Shrine. As quickly as he could, Hamnet told the Emperor what had happened.