Breath of God

His cell had stone walls, a stone floor and ceiling, a musty pallet and wool blanket that were bound to be verminous, and a stinking slop bucket. Maybe a wizard could have put that together and used it to escape, but Hamnet knew he couldn’t. The only light came through the grate.

After a bit, the door to the cell opened again. Three guards pointed bows at Hamnet while a fourth set a jug and a loaf on the floor and then hastily withdrew. When Count Hamnet sniffed the jug, he sighed. It held water. If he drank from it, it would probably give him a flux of the bowels. Of course, if he didn’t… The loaf wasn’t very big, and seemed almost as full of husks and chaff as his mattress. He ate about a quarter of it, and found it tasted as bad as it looked. Saving the rest for later – he had no idea how often they would feed him, but feared the worst – was no hardship. Eating more when he got hungry probably would be. Again, though, not eating was bound to be worse.

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 i

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 a

“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.

He 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.”