"Knowing who we are and our position, then, you will know also that we travel up the Gap as far as we may," Trasamund rumbled.

"It only stands to reason," Hamnet Thyssen said, and Ulric Skakki nodded.

For long and long and long, the Glacier that capped the north of the world had been a single vast sheet. Scholars claimed it was three miles thick in spots. Count Hamnet had no idea how they knew, or how they thought they knew, but he wasn't prepared to call them liars. He'd seen the edge of the Glacier himself, on journeys among the Bizogots. Those shining cliffs seemed to climb forever.

When the edge stood not far north of Nidaros, in the days before the Raumsdalian Empire rose to greatness, the Glacier had still been a single sheet. But, as it drew back over the centuries that followed, it drew back not straight north, but to the northeast and the northwest. Thus what Raumsdalians called the Gap—a narrow stretch of bare ground between the two lobes of the Glacier. The Bizogots used a word with the same literal meaning but much earthier associations.

"By God," Hamnet Thyssen said softly. "By God! Will you tell me, Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk clan, will you tell me the Gap has cloven the Glacier in two?"

Ulric Skakki whistled softly, a low, mournful note. Count Hamnet felt like doing the same. There were metaphysicians, and more than a few of them, who argued that the Gap could not possibly divide the Glacier, for the Glacier had to go on forever. Though no metaphysician himself—far from it—he’d always inclined toward that view himself. So did most men who'd actually set eyes on the Glacier. It was too vast to imagine its having an end.