The Breath of God (39 page)

He paced off the cell. Six strides from the door to the back wall. Seven from one side to the other. With nothing else to do, he walked back and forth and around and around for a bit. That soon palled, as he'd known it would. He sat down on the miserable pallet. The blanket that went with it would be warm enough now. When the Breath of God started to blow? How many prisoners died of chest fever every winter?

As his eyes got used to the near-darkness all around, he saw more sharply than he had when the guards first shoved him in here. That might have been useful if there were anything much to see in the cell. Or so he thought at first.

After a while, he got up and went back to the far wall. No, his eyes hadn't tricked him. Prisoners who'd been here before had used—well, who could say what?—to scratch their names and other things onto the stones there. Some proclaimed their innocence. Some named the women they'd loved. One had carefully shown a woman loving him. The man wasn't a bad artist,
and he must have had plenty of time to complete his work. Hamnet wondered how many other luckless souls in this cell had wandered over to the obscene drawing to remind themselves of what they were missing.

His mouth tightened. If he thought of Gudrid or Liv, he wouldn't necessarily think of them doing that with him. He might be more likely to see them in his mind's eye loving someone else.

And some of the prisoners cursed the people who'd caused them to end up here. Emperors' names figured prominently there. Some of them went back hundreds of years. Viglund had been a great conqueror in the days when the Raumsdalian Empire was much younger than it was now. Someone he'd conquered hadn't appreciated it.

Much good it did the poor bastard,
Hamnet Thyssen thought.
Much good anything does anybody.

With nothing better to do, he went back to the pallet and sat down again. He started reciting poetry, and wished he knew more of it. A bard might be able to entertain himself for a long time.

Or he might not. A guard's head blocked the grate, killing almost all the light in the cell. “Shut up in there!” the man snarled. “No noise allowed!”

Hamnet Thyssen laughed in his face. “What will you do to me if I make noise? Throw me in the dungeon?”

When the guard laughed, too, it was not a pleasant sound—anything but. “You want to find out, smart boy? Keep mouthing off and you will, by God! There's never been a bad place that couldn't get worse.”

He spoke with great assurance. After a couple of heartbeats, Count Hamnet decided he was bound to be right. The guards could do whatever they wanted to a prisoner who annoyed them. “I was only trying to make time pass by,” Hamnet said.

“It'll pass whether you do anything or not,” the guard said. “So shut up. That's the rules.” He stomped off.

A kidney stone would pass, too . . . eventually. And it would hurt all the time while it was passing. As for the rules, well, the people who enforced them always liked them better than those at whose expense they got enforced.

Swearing to himself, Hamnet—quietly—lay back on the miserable, lumpy pallet. When he and Kormak Bersi didn't come back to the hostel, Trasamund and Ulric Skakki would realize something had gone wrong. No doubt they would have a good idea what, too. But what could they do about it? When the Emperor was angry, could they do anything at all?

They would probably come straight to the palace to try to find out what was going on. And what would happen then? Count Hamnet's best guess was that they would end up here in the dungeons themselves in short order.

If Audun Gilli and Liv came along . . . Hamnet Thyssen ground his teeth. He didn't suppose they would end up here, or Marcovefa, either. But the Emperor was bound to have some place where he could put wizards who caused him trouble—a place warded by other, stronger wizards, no doubt.

Did the Raumsdalian Empire have any wizards stronger than Marcovefa? Count Hamnet wasn't so sure about that. She was liable to give Sigvat's arrogant sorcerers a surprise of the sort they hadn't had in many years, if ever. But was she stronger than all of them put together? Hamnet had trouble believing she was.

While he wondered about such things, time seemed to move at its normal rate. When his river of thought ran dry, though, it was as if everything stopped. He might have been in the cell for centuries, with another eternity or two to look forward to. He wasn't too hungry. He didn't need to ease himself. In the unending dim, damp twilight in there, those were his only clues that he hadn't already spent a very long time indeed down below all the parts of the palace he'd ever visited before.

If I do stay here long enough, my nails will grow out into claws and my beard will reach down to my waist.
He might measure months and years that way. Days and weeks? The gauge wasn't fine enough. Sunrise? Sunset? He was even more cut off from them than he would have been in winter up beyond the Glacier. The sun might stay below the horizon for weeks up there, but you knew it would come back sooner or later. Down here, he had no guarantee of ever seeing another sunrise again.

He must have slept, for he jerked in surprise when the cell door opened and a guard threw in another miserable loaf. He still had some left from the last one. They weren't trying to starve him, anyway. Was that any favor to him? Again, he wasn't so sure.

 

H
E LISTENED FOR
Ulric Skakki's sly tones and Trasamund's bellow outside the door. It wasn't that he wanted them mewed up in here with him. But he did expect them to come after him. When they didn't, he wondered what had happened to them—what had gone wrong with them, in other words.

He'd been there for seventeen loaves—another way to count the
time—when a guard looked in through the grate and said, “C'mere, Thyssen. You've got a visitor.”

“A visitor?” Hamnet's voice sounded rusty even to himself. He hadn't used it much lately. He also sounded astonished—and he was. He had trouble imagining any of the travelers talking their way down here without ending up prisoners themselves.

“That's right,” the guard said. “You want to talk or not?”

“I'm coming.” Count Hamnet hurried to the door. Somebody thought enough of him to come down here. That had to be good news, didn't it? He eagerly peered out.

Gudrid looked back through the grate at him.

She wore attar of roses, the same scent she'd brought with her when she traveled beyond the Glacier the year before. The flowery sweetness seemed even more incongruous against the stenches in the dungeon than it had up on the frozen steppe.

“Hello, Hamnet,” his former wife said. Her red-painted mouth stretched into a broad, happy smile. “So good to see you where you belong at last.”

“I don't know what I did to deserve you,” he answered. “Whatever it is, by God, I'm paying for it now.”

“I thought the very same thing when we were together,” Gudrid said.

He'd thought she loved him. He'd always known he loved her. Part of him still did, and always would. That only made her betrayal more bitter. He tried to show she couldn't wound him—a lying, and a losing, battle. “Are you enjoying yourself? Stare all you please,” he said.

“I should throw peanuts, the way I would at monkeys in cages,” she said, smiling wider yet. “What would you do for a peanut, Hamnet?”

He told her where she could put a peanut. He told her where she could put a year's worth of peanuts, and how well they would fit there, and why. She only laughed. Why not? She was on the outside looking in. He was on the inside looking out. It made all the difference in the world.

“Did Eyvind Torfinn tell you I was here?” he asked.

That only made Gudrid laugh again. “Don't be sillier than you can help, darling. Dear Eyvind knows, yes, because I told him. But Sigvat told me.”

She sounded smug as a cat in a creamery. She no doubt had the right to sound that way, too. Hamnet Thyssen used a shrug for a shield. “He can say what he wants. He can do what he wants. He's the Emperor, after all.”

“Oh, you do know that!” Gudrid exclaimed in mock surprise. “He didn't seem to think you did.”

“Well, there is one thing,” Hamnet said. “If the Rulers overrun Raumsdalia, he won't stay Emperor for long.”

Gudrid sneered. “How likely do you think that is?”

“You were up there. You saw the Rulers last year. You saw more of some of them than I did, by God.” Count Hamnet wasn't quite sure Gudrid had slept with their chief; he hadn't watched them in the act, for which he was duly grateful. But he was sure enough, and that was the kind of thing Gudrid did. For good measure, he added, “They've spent the time since last winter smashing up the Bizogots.”

His former wife didn't bother denying anything. She did ask, “Is Trasamund all right?”

“He's not hurt, but his clan's wrecked. He's down here in Nidaros, too.” Hamnet Thyssen didn't think he was giving anything away with that news.

All Gudrid said was, “Ah.” Then she asked, “And your new barbarous beloved?”

“Liv is here, too.”

Count Hamnet didn't think he revealed anything by how he said that. He must have been wrong, though, for Gudrid pounced—or rather, burst out laughing. “So she's gone and left you, has she? Well, that didn't take long.”

How did she know? How could she tell? Whatever the answer was, her instincts were unfailing. “Yes, she's left me,” Hamnet said. “She doesn't torment me for the fun of it, anyhow.”

“Don't worry about it, sweetheart. Sooner or later, she will.” With that casual reassurance, Gudrid blew him a kiss and swept out of the dungeon. A guard followed her. Hamnet watched them as far as the grate allowed, which wasn't very. Then, shaking his head, he went back to the pallet and lay down again.

The guard spoke to him: “You were married to that gal?”

“Afraid so,” Hamnet said.

“I was married to her, I'd be afraid, too,” the guard said. “She's nothing but trouble.”

“I found that out. A little late, but I did,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

“She why you're shut up here?”

“No.” Hamnet shook his head. “I found out about the Emperor a little late, too.”

“Here, now. You can't talk like that,” the guard said. “You do, and—”

“I know. I know. It'll be even worse than it is already,” Hamnet said wearily. “But you asked. I tried to tell you the truth.”

“That's what they all say.” The guard didn't want to listen. And he didn't have to listen, either. He walked away instead.

What will they do to me now?
Hamnet wondered. He knew how it could get worse, all right. They could stop feeding him. They could stop giving him water. Or they could just grab him and haul him off to the torturer. If enough of them came in, he hadn't a prayer of fighting them off.

They didn't do any of those things. The loaves and the water kept coming. He stayed in the cell . . . and stayed, and stayed. That might not have been worse, but it was bad enough and then some.

 

“Y
OU!
T
HYSSEN!
” A guard with a raspy voice barked at him through the grate.

“What now?” Count Hamnet asked. Any change in routine worried him. Silence, being ignored, was routine. Getting noticed? He didn't expect good news.

“Somebody here wants to talk to you,” the guard said.

Do I want to talk to Gudrid again?
Hamnet wondered. After what had to be days of doing nothing, even a quarrel with his former wife might seem entertaining. If that wasn't madness, he didn't know what would be. All the same, it was so. He got to his feet and walked up to the door.

Seeing him approach, the guard nodded. “Here's the bum,” the man said, and stepped to one side.

Hamnet braced himself to start snarling at Gudrid again. But those were not her aging but still attractive—still beautiful—features on the other side of the grate. Instead, Hamnet Thyssen found himself face-to-face with Earl Eyvind Torfinn.

Gudrid's husband. Gudrid's husband who hadn't, or acted as if he hadn't, the slightest idea how many times she'd put horns on him.

“I grieve to see you like this, Your Grace,” the scholarly noble said.

“I'm not too happy about it myself, Your Splendor,” Count Hamnet answered. “Did Gudrid finally tell you I was here?”

Earl Eyvind didn't notice that
finally
. He shook his head. His jowls wobbled. He'd regained the comfortable plumpness he'd enjoyed before his journey to the north the year before. Scratching at the edge of his whiskers, he said, “No. I don't think she knows you're here.”

That only proved the right hand didn't know what the left was doing—nothing new where Gudrid was concerned. “Well, how the demon
did
you find out I was stuck here, then?” Hamnet demanded.

“Ulric Skakki is a resourceful chap,” Eyvind replied: a truth so obvious, even he could see it. “He got word to me that you were having, ah, difficulties. I was shocked. I truly didn't believe His Majesty would be so, ah, unaccommodating.”

“Oh, you can't say that.” Hamnet Thyssen wagged a finger at him. “No, you can't, by God. After all, here I am—accommodated.”

“Er, yes.” Eyvind Torfinn laughed uneasily. “So you are. But whether you should be . . . That, perhaps, is a different question.”

“Sigvat's got the answer. He says I should.” Count Hamnet sounded more nearly resigned than outraged, which only proved he made a better actor than he'd ever dreamt he could.

“So I discovered,” Eyvind said. “I urged your release—urged it in strong terms, too—but His Majesty was not amenable to reason.”

He sounded surprised that reason couldn't sway the Raumsdalian Emperor. Reason would have swayed him, and so he believed it should sway everyone. That might have been logical—but it wasn't reasonable. Gudrid would have known better. Even Count Hamnet knew better.