Now Count Hamnet studied the jarl in surprise. Not all Bizogots even realized they were barbarians by the standards of the Raumsdalian Empire. Most of the ones who did realize it answered Raumsdalian scorn with contempt of their own. To them, Raumsdalians were weak and tricky and corrupt, of use to the Bizogots not for themselves but for their things, the things they could make and keep and the northerners couldn't.

But Trasamund, plainly, was no ordinary mammoth-herder. He grasped something a lot of Raumsdalians couldn't—that the way writing bound knowledge across time gave the Empire a breadth and a depth of thought no Bizogot clan could even approach. Facing the unknown beyond the Glacier, Trasamund wanted people equipped to understand it—if any people were.

Sigvat II seemed taken aback. When he did not answer at once, Count Hamnet said, "Your Majesty, if a wizard and a scholar will go with us, we would do well to have them. Who knows what we may find? Who knows what we may try to understand?"

"The Golden Shrine," Ulric Skakki murmured.

Hamnet Thyssen still had no idea if there was any such thing as the Golden Shrine. An hour earlier, he would have laughed at the very idea. He wasn't laughing now. If the Gap had opened, who could say what lay beyond the Glacier? No one now—no one except Trasamund and whoever traveled with him.

And whoever lived beyond the Glacier, if anyone did. Trasamund thought so. Hamnet wouldn't have believed it, but so what? The opening of the Gap made his beliefs, and everyone else's in the Empire, irrelevant. Belief worked well enough when a man could not measure it against facts. But when he could . .. Facts crushed belief like a mammoth crushing a vole.