A few hoarse words drew them all into the front room; Nils in turn shouted to Erik. All six rushed for the open door. Nils's stroke caught the first as he emerged, sweeping below the shield and cutting his legs from under him. The second hurdled him before Nils could strike again, and attacked with berserk rage while a third ran out behind him. From inside came oaths and grunts as Erik fell on them from behind. Sten put an arrow through the third man out while Nils killed his furious assailant and went crouched through the door to help Erik.

Erik needed no help. One lay struck dead from behind and a second was down, bleeding and helpless, cursing. The blond Jot stood watching through the open window; the last of the enemy patrol had jumped through it and was running into the woods, holding his right shoulder where an arrow was embedded. A grinning, red-haired figure pursued him out of sight among the trees. In a minute Sten reappeared, waving his bloody sword, and they left the burning cabin.

When Nils's eyes opened, they focused first on the skeletal crown of a naked beech, its major limbs dimly resolved against the night sky. A few stars of larger magnitude were visible between the black masses of fir tops, and moving his head, he could see the lopsided moon past the meridian, telling him that dawn wasn't far off. Its pale light washed patches of ground and filled others with dense black shadow. Forty meters away, between the stems of trees and brush, he could see dull red where the collapsed heap of the cabin still smoldered. Its smell was strong but not unpleasant. Frost from his breath coated the fur at the upper edge of his sleeping robe.

He had wakened wide, not from the cold or the moonlight but from something that lay calm and watchful in his mind. Without ever having experienced it before, he knew it was the consciousness of a he-wolf, probably one of Ilse's familiars, but he didn't know how to communicate with it.

The wolf had sensed his waking telepathically and had waited until Nils was aware of him. As if it had sensed Nils's psi power even when the northman was still asleep-as if it had recognized what being was there. And then it held a picture of Ilse in its mind for Nils to see. The picture zoomed in on Ilse's face and seemed to go right into her mind where there was a physical and mental image of Nils. And with that as an almost instantaneous background, the picture was again of Ilse, hands tied, being taken away by a patrol of horse barbarians. As Nils sat up in his sleeping furs, the picture became one of a large man, Nils, on horseback, with undefined representations of companions, following a large wolf through the forest.

The picture faded and the emission of the wolf's mind changed to a quiet formlessness, as Ilse said his own did. Nils acknowledged, then lay back down and went to sleep almost at once, not to awake again until the gray wash of dawn.

He wakened his companions and the four warriors squatted hunched beneath their robes, silently gnawing cheese and dry bread, bodies stiff with cold and sleep. The only speech was Nils's quiet voice. They were glad to lead their horses up the dim slope to the ridge crest; the exertion warmed them before they mounted and rode away.

When the sun was two hours high, they lay beneath the low branches of a thicket of sapling firs. Farther downslope a fire had consumed the undergrowth two or three years earlier, leaving an open clumpy stand of older trees. A good campsite. Forty-two teepeelike tents stood on the gentle toe-slope-more than one hundred men and perhaps close to two hundred. Secure in their strength and hidden site, the horse barbarians had become careless again about sentries.

"Leif, run down there and bloody your sword," Erik breathed with a grin. "We did all the work yesterday."

Trollsverd grunted an obscenity.

Sten chuckled. "That's the price of a big reputation; they kept away from him. And when did fighting start to be work?"

Nils ignored their whispered chaffing. They were within the range of normal telepathic pickup from the camp-close enough that loud voices could be heard. He had intended to reach Ilse with his mind, but now he did not dare a forceful telepathic call to get her attention. For there were two psi minds in the camp-hers and one that belonged to a horse barbarian.

"This place is dangerous," he whispered. "There's a psi down there." With that they wriggled back out of the thicket and slipped away.

3.

The castle was much larger than that of Martin Gutknekt and had a moat with brown billows of dead algae. The gate stood open in the sunlit morning as the neovikings walked their horses across the drawbridge. The gate guards scowled at the strangely garbed and equipped riders but did not move to stop them. As the warriors approached the great squat keep, the two guards at its entrance lowered their pikes, and one called down to halt. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

Nils stared up the stone steps at them, one enormous hand spread on a thick thigh, making the most of his size and imposing physique as they stared back at him. "Who is your master?" he responded.

This question for a question stopped the slow-witted guard. After a moment he answered, "The graf, Karl Haupmann."

"Tell him four northmen are here to see him, with information about a strong force of horse barbarians in the country."

The sun-browned face stared suspiciously at the big northman, jaws working with indecision. These strangers obviously were not nobles, or even knights. Nils helped him. "Or would you rather be staked out in the sun and flayed?"

The guard stepped back, then turned reluctantly through the open door. His partner's mind squirmed with discomfort at being left alone to face the four big warriors, a discomfort that the three could read in his face as certainly as Nils read it in his mind.

"At home men like that would be thralls," Leif Trollsverd said.

"That's about what they are here," Sten answered.

The remaining guard stared at them, perplexed by the unfamiliar tonal syllables. He knew German and Anglic, but had never heard any other language and was uncertain whether this was truly speech or not. After several minutes a burly knight came out of the interior and squinted down at them in the bright sunshine. He snapped fast words in German, and they sat looking impassively up at him until he repeated in Anglic. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

"We are northmen and want to see the graf," Nils said dryly. "We've seen a large force of horse barbarians near the district of Martin Gutknekt."

The knight sneered. "Show a skin-clad savage a peasant riding on an ox and there's no telling what he'll think he saw."

The usually imperturbable Sten rose in his stirrups and had his sword half out before Nils put a hand on his wrist and spoke softly in Swedish. Turning back to the knight, Nils said with mild calm, "Then let us tell him what we think we saw."

Without saying anything more, the man led them inside and to a throne room some fifteen meters long. Entering, they passed two guards with pikes and swords who stood by the open door. Five mail-clad knights stood on the dais near the throne; three were breathing deeply as if they had hurried to be there. Karl Haupmann sat upright and hard-faced, as his marshal, followed by the barbaric-looking warriors, strode to the foot of the dais and stated the particulars in German.

Nils recognized an unforeseen problem here. The graf was a cruel and ruthless man with a pathological suspicion of foreigners.

He looked at them. "Northmen, eh? What is this about horse barbarians?"

"There's a large force of them, between one and two hundred, camped in the mountains near the district of Martin Gutknekt. We think they plan to take his principal village."