Lloyd Biggle Jr.: The Chronocide Mission

Bernal waited silently.

“It is difficult to explain,” Egarn said. “Can you grind a Honsun Len?”

Bernal chuckled. “I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

Egarn’s voice took on a note of puzzlement. “I thought all one-name boys learned len grinding. They do in Lant, and med servers take the most talented as prentices. This civilization couldn’t survive without Honsun Len grinders. There is an oddity about the len I have never been able to figure out. Whether it is used or not, in time it loses its effectiveness. Medical lens have to be replaced every sike and sometimes oftener—which is why med servers must become expert len grinders. That is also why the peer believed me when I told her the weapons needed new lens. They didn’t, but eventually they would have. Lant’s med servers are always looking for prentices. Are things different in the Ten Peerdoms?”

“No different,” Bernal assured him. “My schooler taught len grinding to the younger boys, and a med server looked in on the classes and gave special lessons to those who had ability. He didn’t include me. Probably the talents that made me a successful scout also made it impossible for me to sit for long hours grinding meaningless ripples in glass.”

Egarn said regretfully, “Then you have never ground even one Honsun Len.”

“According to my schooler, the mutilated objects I produced didn’t bear the faintest resemblance to one. Those ripples required a precision that seemed inhuman to me. Only a few boys had both the patience and the ability, and they were sent to a special school. When we next saw them, they were wearing their prentice smocks and bragging about their futures as high servers of the peer. I wonder what they think of those futures now.”

“Don’t Easlon crafters have confidence in the future?”

“Perhaps len grinders do. We scouts know Lant will turn westward as soon as it conquers its other neighbors.”

“So it will,” Egarn agreed. There was a note of bitter sadness in his voice. He was silent for a moment, and then he returned to the subject of len grinding. “Did your schooler tell you anything about the Honsun Len?”

“That was for the students who became prentices.”

“He should have told you as much as he knew. It has shaped your entire life. It will shape the lives—and deaths—of your children. It made your civilization what it is, and it will also destroy it.”

“We scouts aren’t much given to deep thinking,” Bernal said cheerfully. “We have to be able to do the right thing quickly without thinking at all. But perhaps if you would explain what you mean—”

“I am sorry,” Egarn said. “I would like to, but I wouldn’t know how to begin if you don’t know anything about the Honsun Len. Perhaps Roszt or Kaynor—”

“They are as ignorant as I am, but don’t worry yourself about it. If we were expert len grinders, you might be able to make us understand, but we wouldn’t have the slightest notion of how to get you out of Lant. What you need right now are expert scouts, and you have them. When you are safely across the mountains, you will find plenty of len grinders to talk with.”

Egarn’s arm was healing. He would never be able to use his hand again, but he was much more fortunate than most victims of the Lantiff’s dogs. As he became stronger, the three scouts began planning their next move. It promised to be very dangerous indeed—so risky, in fact, that Bernal brought up the subject of Egarn’s strange weapon.

“I don’t want you to use it,” he told Egarn soberly. “If you do, and there is a survivor, the peer will know exactly where we are. Her armies will stop chasing all over western Lant and start looking where they are likely to find us. On the other hand, the Lantiff have filled the forests with traps, and we haven’t time to scout out all of them. It would be far better to use the weapon in order to escape than to not use it and be captured or killed.”

“I will give it to you,” Egarn said. “You can use it when you think it is necessary.”

“But I don’t know how,” Bernal objected.

“It is easily learned. The Lantiff had no trouble with it, and what the Lantiff can learn in a week, any one-namer can master in an hour. It takes a bit of practice be accurate with it, and I don’t suppose we can risk that, but even without practice you will be at least as good as I was. If I had aimed better, that last dog wouldn’t have got to me.”

The weapon did indeed seem easy to use. One pointed the correct end at the enemy and moved a small lever back and forth—an astonishingly simple manipulation for such an overwhelming result. Bernal tried it once, inside the cave, and marveled at the smoking hole it bored through solid rock.

When Egarn was finally ready to travel, Roszt and Kaynor went to search out a safe escape route. They reported that Lantiff were building encampments all along the frontier.

“I am sorry to hear that,” Bernal said. “I was hoping the peer would have a message from the south by now about a corpse found with Egarn’s clothing and pack.”

Roszt shook his head. “I told you at the time—there were far too many corpses and far too many human vultures plundering the dead. Only an incredible stroke of luck would have got that body identified as Egarn’s before the looters stripped it completely.”

“I thought there was a fair chance,” Bernal said. “These encampments mean the peer is combining the search for Egarn with preparations to invade Easlon, and that doubles our problems. We must get out of Lant quickly.”

A trek through the mountains would have been difficult for an elderly cripple even in the best of circumstances, and they would travel in darkness, on rugged, little-used tracks known only to the scouts, and under a constant threat of ambush or attack. Egarn resigned himself to a nightmarish journey that would tax his strength to the utmost.

When they finally started, the going seemed so easy that he had a bewildered feeling of disappointment. The Lantiff had blocked all the roads, but he rode a horse at a leisurely pace half of the night, from one of the scouts’ way stations to another, without seeing a single soldier.

“Where are they?” he blurted during one of their brief rests.

“You will see more than enough of them before we are finished,” Bernal said. “The Lantiff have concentrated to protect the passes. The further west we go, the more of them we will encounter. Enjoy your ride while you can.”

Roszt and Kaynor rode ahead. Then came Egarn, with Bernal bringing up the rear. The two scouts from Slorn cheerfully accepted the fact that they were expendable. If the little party rode into an ambush, their task was to keep Egarn from becoming involved. Even if they were disastrously outnumbered, they had to somehow occupy the Lantiff until Egarn and Bernal slipped away. Bernal carried Egarn’s weapon inside his shirt; he would use it only as a last resort.

The moon, which had been full the night of Egarn’s escape, was now only a sliver in the sky, but so thick was the forest that they rarely saw it. They followed paths that the forest floor did not hint of—ways known only to the scouts of Easlon. They threaded along hillsides and took unexpected loops to avoid roads and habitations.

On the first night they came abruptly on a place where a landslide had peeled away the forest and left a sweeping view of a broad valley. It was a cove, a rare area of cultivated land in the Lantian hills, and they paused for a moment to look down on the community there: the long sheds where the no-name males slept; the brood buildings where no-name females conceived and bore their children; the nursery; the lashers’ dormitory; the cook shed and storage buildings; the inevitable neat med cottage where a med server gave the community’s population its Honsun Len treatments. Day and night had no meaning for the no-namers, the work-humans. They were laboring in torch-lined fields, long hair and beards drooping as their muscular bodies bent low to strain at the ropes that drew the heavy cultivating sledges. The lashers were shouting orders and wielding their whips. The scene looked small and very far away, and the coarse shouts were only faintly audible, but the whups of whips striking the no-namers’ bare backs could be heard clearly. Of course the upwelling blood that appeared as each stroke peeled away living flesh could not be seen from such a distance.