“You have finally come!” Inskor exclaimed, grasping his hands. “Did you have trouble getting away?”
“Some. You know I can’t absent myself without a reason.”
“Have you heard what happened?”
“I heard your scouts wiped out two Lantian armies, burned Lant Court, and captured the peer. If it is true, I will apologize for not believing it.”
“You will find the truth just as unbelieveable.”
They talked for the remainder of the dae. Inskor described the rescue of Egarn, the strange weapon he carried, and the copies of it made under Egarn’s direction for the scouts. Then he called for horses, and they rode to the ford where the ambush had occurred. Inskor showed Arne where each scout had been hidden, described the Lantiff’s disarray in crossing the river— evidence of deplorable discipline, it had played into the scouts’ hands—and spoke with awe of the carnage the weapon had wrought. He pointed out the places where each peerager had fallen: The first general here; the prince over there; one of the peer’s sons by that tree; two high officers in a clump of bushes where they thought to hide; another of the peer’s sons while crossing the river, his body was recovered later; the third son…
Arne listened quietly and had few questions except when Inskor tried to describe Egarn’s weapon. Arne knew len grinding well. Arne knew everything well—that was part of his job. Inskor was unable to explain how or why the weapon worked, but he had no difficulty in describing its effects and discussing the most effective tactics for its use.
They returned to Inskor’s headquarters, and Arne was given one of the weapons to examine and a porkley to try it on. That niot Egarn and the two scouts from Slorn, Roszt and Kaynor, joined them. First they feasted on roast porkley—the porkley being the one Arne had killed with Egarn’s weapon— eating it with critical interest and trying to determine whether the strange beam of fire had tainted the meat. It tasted delicious. Then Egarn described his plan and the role Roszt and Kaynor were to play in it. Arne said little, but he was willing to listen as long as Egarn was willing to talk, and they sat late over the remains of the porkley and heard Egarn’s tales of his own country and a time he called the past.
Early the next morning, Arne and Inskor rode to a high bluff and sat on a log looking at the sweep of forested hills that marched in diminishing order into Easlon. Beyond the horizon were the other nine peerdoms—safe for the time being from the ravages of Lant because of Egarn’s weapon and the valiance of the Easlon scouts. The grizzled old scout wore leather scouting garb; Arne, the wool jacket and trousers of a one-name crafter, much stained by travel. As first server of the Peer of Midlow, he was entitled to a uniform appropriate to that high office, but he disdained it. Two more nondescript-looking men had ever held the fate of a world in their hands—if they actually did. That was what they were trying to decide.
“All of this is beyond me,” Inskor said. “I can’t believe it is possible to travel through time and kill someone. We both know the past is over and done with, but if what Egarn says is true, while you and I are sitting here talking, I also am sitting somewhere else and talking with your father as we often did many sikes ago.”
Arne’s gray eyes were fixed on more remote horizons. “What Egarn said about the past—the wars and the destroyed civilization—explains much we have wondered about.”
“Maybe,” Inskor said doubtfully, “but talking about the past and traveling there are two different things. This Johnson must have been a monstrously evil man if the len he invented really did destroy the world and kill off most of the human race. If that could be prevented by murdering him, there is no doubt someone should do it. But who would believe such a thing is possible? Even if it could be done, Easlon has dozens of len grinders who can make a Honsun Len with ease. So does Midlow. So does every other peerdom. Why does Egarn think killing one man would make the len disappear? Surely someone else would have made it if this Johnson hadn’t.”
“A complicated thing like the Honsun Len can’t be made until it has been thought of,” Arne said. “It is the idea of the len that must be destroyed. If our own len grinders had neither seen nor heard of a Honsun Len, none of them could make one. This Johnson must be killed before he tells anyone else about it, or writes a description, or draws plans. Better yet, before he even thinks of it. Egarn made that clear enough. Has he said what will happen to us if he succeeds in changing human history?”
“He doesn’t know,” Inskor said. “He hopes the past will be set on a new path toward a future without war and catastrophe. If many futures can exist at the same time, whatever that means, then we may not notice anything different. If the past has only one future, then the world we know would simply stop existing. We might vanish like the flame when you blow out a candle. Obviously he doesn’t know—he is simply guessing. He says if we do disappear into nothing, we would be sacrificing ourselves for the welfare of humanity. This is the one chance humanity has to keep most of the people of Earth from living out their lives in mindless slavery.”
“It is difficult to believe.” Arne turned and looked thoughtfully at Inskor. “But if Egarn hadn’t brought the weapon with him, would you have believed him when he told you what it would do?”
“No. Not a word of it. I would have asked him to make one and show me.”
“We are in the same position with this talk about time travel, so we will ask Egarn to build his machine and show us. He may not be able to. Some of the things he needs are so rare they may no longer exist, and without them he can’t even make a beginning. Even if he builds his machine, it may not do what he expects it to, and I have my doubts that Roszt and Kaynor can learn the past’s ways well enough to carry out his mission. If a total stranger who talked and behaved oddly suddenly appeared in Midd Village, people would keep an eye on him and stop him if he tried to kill someone. The past shouldn’t be much different in that respect.”
“That is true,” Inskor agreed. “Egarn says there were guardians who did nothing but try to prevent serious crimes like murder.”
“In any case, it may be sikes before Egarn’s machine is ready, and we can stop the the project any time we choose—if it doesn’t stop itself because of difficulties that can’t be overcome. There are only two decisions that must be made now. The first is whether to let Egarn start—because if he is to do this thing, he must start at once. He is elderly, and the future for the Ten Peerdoms looks bleak. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that events beyond our control will decide this for us.”
“I hate having to make decisions about things I don’t understand.”
Arne smiled at the old scout. “You have already made several important decisions about this, my friend, and all of them have been correct. The most vital was deciding not tell your peer about the weapon. I would trust my own peer with my life. I already have, several times. I feel the same way about the Peer of Easlon. Among the ten peers, they alone merit any kind of trust, as you well know, but I wouldn’t trust either of them with Egarn’s weapon.”
Inskor glumly agreed.
“Do your scouts know how totally secret all of this must be?” Arne asked.
“Only Bernal, Roszt, Kaynor, and one len grinder know about Egarn. The len grinder is Inskel.”
Arne nodded approvingly. Inskel was Inskor’s son, now middle-aged himself and highly skilled.
“The moment they were safely within Easlon, Bernal came on ahead to tell me what had happened, and I made certain no one else saw Egarn. Roszt and Kaynor have been with him ever since. Egarn showed Inskel how to make the weapon. Inskel divided the labor among the best len grinders in the peerdom. No one of them did enough work to understand what it was Inskel was making, and none of them knew that anyone else was helping him. Each was sworn to secrecy, of course. That was as much care as we could contrive when copies of the weapon were needed so urgently. The scouts who used them also were sworn to secrecy, but except for Bernal, none of them knows anything about Egarn. Are you really going ah
ead with this?”
“I will decide before I leave here. There are so many uncertainties in Egarn’s plan that it will probably come to nothing anyway, but the decision to start must be made at once. If we delay, we may find that it can’t be done at all. We will have ample time later to decide whether we really want him to send assassins into the past.”
“Will you confide in the League of One-Namers?”
“Not even the League can be trusted with this. I have to guard against spies in everything I do. There are always a few one-namers who will sell their birthrights for favors and advancement. Where Egarn is concerned, we can’t afford a single act of treachery. No one is to know this secret who doesn’t need to know it.”
“Where will Egarn work?”
“That is the second thing to be decided,” Arne said with a smile.
“I suggest Easlon. The Prince of Midlow will turn that peerdom into another Lant within a tenite of her mother’s death.”
“Some of us doubt that she will wait a tenite.”
“Yes. A pity. It is Midlow’s tragedy, but it is bound to affect all of us. I haven’t seen her since she was a child. They say she is a beautiful woman.”
“The most beautiful in the Ten Peerdoms. And the most vicious.”
Inskor leaped to his feet. A horseman was approaching in the valley far below them. “Messenger,” he said. “We had better meet him.”
They mounted and rode back down the slope. The messenger brought his galloping horse to a halt when he saw them approaching.
“The peer is coming!” he gasped.
Inskor turned to Arne. “I must be there to greet her.” He rode off at a furious pace with Arne and the messenger trailing after him.
Inskor’s command post was a large stone building artfully concealed in a mountain forest. It served as his residence and also as a supply depot for his scouts. Usually there were several of them resting there between missions. He was waiting at the entrance when the Peer of Easlon rode up at a smart canter.
She rode superbly despite her short, plump stature. Her daughter the prince was with her, only eighteen sikes old but already a radiantly beautiful woman. Their only escort consisted of two elderly servers, one of whom had been sent on ahead to announce her coming.
Inskor greeted them warmly and assisted them in dismounting. Then he sank to both knees and told the peer quietly, “Majesty, you should not have come here. You should never travel anywhere without a strong escort. You should never come this far east no matter how many servers accompany you. You and the prince should never travel together. These are perilous times.”
“Perilous for an invader, certainly,” the peer said. “But surely not for a peer traveling in her own domain.” She signaled Inskor to rise.
He did so, and then he committed an unthinkable breach of decorum by speaking while looking the peer squarely in the face. “Majesty, we know how easily our scouts penetrate the Peerdom of Lant. The Lantian scouts only require practice to become as skilled as we are. It would be a rare coup for them to carry the Peer of Easlon to Lant as a prisoner. It would be a disaster for Easlon and the Ten Peerdoms if peer and prince were lost together. You must not travel without a strong escort. You must never travel together. Neither of you should venture so close to the frontier.”
His intensity disconcerted them. They followed in silence when he turned and led them into the building. Plao 3 mornings were chill at that altitude, and a fire crackled in the enormous stone fireplace. The furniture was roughly fashioned—the chief scout of Easlon did not maintain his home as a place of ease— but Inskor made them as comfortable as possible.
When they had seated themselves, Inskor again sank to his knees. “Your bidding, Majesty.”
“My bidding is that you bring a chair and sit with us,” the peer said impatiently. “We need to talk.”
Inskor obediently brought a chair and composed himself to listen. When a peer told a one-namer, “We need to talk,” she usually meant she had much to say to him.
She was deeply disturbed. When, years earlier, she had approved Inskor’s plan for defending Easlon against raids—with the provision about annihilating the invaders if possible—she had been thinking of small parties of scouts, not a raid of a hundred warriors led by notables from the Peer of Lant’s own family, the prince among them.
She was not surprised to learn that Inskor and his scouts had attacked and defeated a vastly superior force. They were expert night fighters. They could choose the time and place of their attack, and they were fighting for their own peerdom in territory where they knew every twig. The enemy had been far from home and fighting blind. She fully expected Inskor to send even such a large raiding force as this one reeling back over the mountains in bloody defeat. It was essential that he do so—essential that the raid be made a cautionary example for the Peer of Lant.
She had not expected him to launch a daytime attack with a mere twenty-five scouts and kill more than a hundred of Lant’s best warriors and all of their officers at the cost of two scouts slightly wounded.
Peer and prince had ridden to the scene of the carnage before they called on Inskor, but they quickly withdrew. The sickening sweet odor of death hung over the river valley, blended with the stench of burning flesh, for Inskor had decreed the complete destruction of the corpses and all of their equipment. One of his scouts was in charge, and a force of no-namers—supervised by lashers—was dealing with the battle’s debris. All of the metal had been hammered into unrecognizable shapes to be hauled away for salvage. Everything else was being burned or pulverized. If a dedicated Lantian scout somehow managed to penetrate that deeply into Easlon, there would be no shred of bone, no splinter of tooth remaining to mutely proclaim the fate of his prince. The captured horses had been taken west to places of concealment. Along the border, Inskor’s scouts were already poised to turn back Lant’s inevitable probes for news of the lost raiding party.
The peer said soberly, “I am sorry the Prince of Lant and her brothers were killed. Couldn’t they have been made prisoners?”
Inskor kept his gaze on an opposite window while he spoke. “In battle, Majesty, it is often difficult to know who is present until it is over.”
“Yes, yes, I understand that. You were only carrying out a plan long agreed upon, but I really didn’t think it possible to totally destroy such a large force. Now I am wondering whether it was necessary and whether it wouldn’t have been wiser to take prisoners.”
“Majesty, our plan was not devised merely to be vindictive. It was based on a sound military premise. In her insolence, the Peer of Lant thought to demonstrate that all the massed might of Easlon was not strong enough to interfere with a mere hundred Lantian warriors. She thought us far weaker than we are. Now that her force has disappeared without a trace, her sleep will be troubled with imaginings about how powerful we are. She may even suspect we use sorcery. Already our scouts have begun planting rumors across the border, and we will harvest a goodly crop from them. The next Lantiff raiding party that comes west will do so reluctantly, and it will be better prepared to flee than to give battle.”
“The Peer of Lant is not one to be influenced by rumors,” the peer said.
Inskor kept his eyes on the window. “Majesty, the Peer of Lant will not require assistance from anyone to see the truth in this matter: What Easlon has done once, it can do again, and unless she learns what befell the first force, a second force may commit the same errors and disappear in the same way. She will send scouts—many scouts. If she is the military genius her victories suggest, she won’t raid Easlon again until it has been successfully scouted, and she won’t send an army until it has been successfully raided. We have bought ourselves something beyond price, Majesty. Time.”
The peer was still troubled. “I know we had to strike as hard as possible. Still—the prince and her brothers would have made valuable hostages.”
“Dangerous hostages, Majesty. The peer would have spared nothing to rescue them.�
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“But now she will spare nothing to avenge them,” the peer objected.
“You can’t have it both ways, Majesty,” the prince said impatiently. “They invaded us. They plundered and burned Eas, and if Inskor hadn’t evacuated it, they would have brutalized and murdered our one-namers. If the Peer of Lant sends her children into a neighboring peerdom to loot and kill, the deaths that result are her own doing.”
The peer murmured sadly, “I wish there were a better way.”
“Majesty, all of us wish the Peer of Lant would leave her neighbors in peace,” Inskor said dryly. “That would solve so many problems. But she won’t. If we hadn’t given battle, if we had let the Lantiff raid unopposed, the peer would have taken that as a sign of weakness and followed the raid with her army. If we had merely defeated the raiders and chased them back into Lant, she would have tested our strength by sending a stronger force. Now she will be uneasy. She will suffer many troubled nights when all of her dreams end in unanswered questions. Very soon she will have to accept that her Lantiff have been wiped from the Earth like the vermin they are. She will be enraged, but she is too good a general to rush west with another force that may vanish in the same way. We have bought time, Majesty. How well we use it depends on us.”
The peer sighed. “On us and on the other nine peerdoms— which means it will be used badly. I will do what I can, of course. Inskor, I want you to speak frankly. If the Peer of Lant seeks revenge with her army this year, what chance do we have?”
Inskor smiled. The outlook had been dismal before Egarn’s arrival. Now, for the first time in years, he could look eastward with confidence. He would soon have all of his scouts armed with the miraculous weapon—all except those who ventured into Lant. He could not risk having the weapon recaptured; but for a time, until Lant produced something to counter this astonishing force or managed to overwhelm it with sheer numbers, the scouts defending the border would be invincible. He wished he could tell the peer about that, but of course he could not.
The Chronocide Mission Page 8
