Despite the warming weather in the south – or rather, because of it – Hamnet Thyssen bared his teeth in a mirthless grin. “Better that, some ways, than this.”

“What?” Ulric mocked without mercy. “I thought you always wanted to go beyond the Glacier.”

“Not always. I didn’t used to think there was anything beyond the Glacier,” Hamnet answered. “And even after I found out there was, I didn’t want what lived beyond the Glacier coming here, curse it.”

“Life is full of surprises,” Ulric Skakki said, which would have been funny if only it were funny.

For some time now, the Glacier had been melting back towards the northwest and northeast, leaving a corridor of open land – the Gap – between the two great frozen sheets. Now at last the Gap had melted through, allowing travelers from the south to discover what lay on the far side of the Glacier.

Up until that finally happened, Hamnet Thyssen had always thought the northern glaciers went on forever. So had most Raumsdalians – and most of the nomadic Bizogots who lived north of them. The Golden Shrine? As far as Count Hamnet was concerned, the Golden Shrine was only a myth.

He knew better now. Oh, not about the Golden Shrine, which might still be mythical for all he could prove. But he’d gone beyond the Glacier himself. He’d seen the striped cats called tigers, which preyed there in place of the lions and sabertooths he knew. He’d seen the great brown bears that scooped salmon from streams unfrozen in summer. He’d seen vast herds of deer with both stags and does bearing blunt-tined antlers.

And he’d seen the folk who rode those deer as men on this side of the Glacier rode horses. The Rulers, they called themselves. They not only herded woolly mammoths, as the Bizogots had for centuries uncounted, but rode them to war, with lancers and men with long, long lances on the beasts’ shaggy backs.