Lloyd Biggle Jr.: The Chronocide Mission

Egarn knew the blood was there. He had witnessed such scenes often enough during his long lifetime in Lant. He jerked sharply on his reins and sat looking down into the valley until Bernal overtook him.

“’Man’s inhumanity to man,’” he muttered. “How can anyone look at that without sickening? Poor, mindless brutes laboring their lives away while other brutes trained to sadism systematically torture them. In the med cottage, we practice a different form of viciousness on them from the moment of their birth. I have done it myself. I am as responsible as anyone. These are the foul dregs of a humanity that once sought the stars. Perhaps it is no longer possible to save the human race, but if I have time—if I live long enough—”

Bernal had been listening quietly. “When we get to Easlon, we will send for Arne. This is his kind of problem. You mentioned once that the way to save humanity is by destroying it. What would that accomplish?”

“Maybe nothing,” Egarn said.

They spent their days in hiding places well-known to the scouts, and they had the carefully contrived good fortune to slip past the Lantiff’s watchposts without incident. It was evident by the third night, however, that they couldn’t go much farther. The mere presence of so many Lantiff clogged not only the roads but even the trailways leading west, and though they deftly avoided these routes, they still had to cross one occasionally. That became increasingly difficult, and finally Bernal decided to turn north.

They moved laterally across the mountain trails, slipping between Lantiff encampments, and eventually they gained the high mountains far north of the heavily guarded passes. Then they turned south. It was a journey perilous beyond Egarn’s imagining, but his strength was returning rapidly, and he throve on it. Frequently he had to dismount—because a misstep might send both horse and rider plunging into an abyss— and lead his blindfolded steed along ledges that looked far too narrow for any animal larger than the short-eared mountain rabbits. They traveled high, lonely valleys, riding recklessly at night but not daring to expose themselves by day. In that barren country, one could see for many kilometers. Finally they left their horses with Easlon scouts they met at a secret way station near the border, and they performed a final, tortuous climb on foot. In this way they reached Low Pass, one of the two gateways to the west the Lantiff were guarding so zealously.

They looked down on it from a thousand meters above.

“This is one of our passes,” Bernal said grimly. “The Lantiff would consider it impassable—which is why they have never been able to figure out how Easlon scouts come and go so easily.”

“Easily?” Egarn muttered.

But their tribulations were not over. Once they were safely across the high divide, they discovered that Lantiff had already pushed beyond the pass into Easlon, and they had to turn north again. For a time they feared the long expected invasion was upon them, but the Lantiff contented themselves with patrolling a few lateral valleys. Finally, after several nerve-wracking near encounters, they left the forces of Lant behind them.

They pressed onward until, in the deepest hours of an overcast night, they saw flares ahead of them. It was a lumber camp where no-name laborers strained at ropes to haul logs to a rushing river while the lashers’ whips wrote new chapters in agony on their bare backs—but these were Easlon lashers and no-namers working in an Easlon camp. Bernal halted their march long before dawn. He authorized a campfire and announced that they could rest until the following middae and then travel by daelight. He would try to find a horse somewhere and get to headquarters as quickly as possible to warn Inskor, the chief scout, that the Lantian invasion was imminent. Then he would meet them somewhere down the line with horses.

“You are safe, now,” Bernal told Egarn. “You are as safe as anyone can be in these troubled times. That doesn’t mean there is no longer any hurry. It is too early to say whether Lant is planning a full-scale invasion or only a reconnaissance, but we must prepare for the worst. We will need some of your weapons as quickly as we can make them. Inskor will send for the best len grinders in Easlon, and they will do whatever you want.”

“Will he send for the Med of Easlon?” Egarn asked.

“Certainly not. What help would he be? One-namers will make your weapons for you. One-name scouts will use them. We won’t let Easlon’s peeragers know anything about them. Otherwise, you would quickly find yourself in the same kind of trouble we just rescued you from.”

Roszt and Kaynor were nodding their agreement.

“What we absolutely must do is crush the Lantiff,” Bernal went on. “If we don’t, we won’t have any future to plan for. A victory will buy time for us and give you a chance to tell your ideas to Arne and the League of One-Namers. They are the ones concerned with saving humanity.”

He spoke his farewell and vanished into the night.

Egarn watched him go with a feeling of emptiness. He had become fast friends with Roszt and Kaynor. The tall, gaunt scouts from the ravished Peerdom of Slorn were rootless exiles like himself and victims of the same tyranny he was fleeing from. There was a strong empathy between them; but Bernal was their leader. He had made the decisions, sternly kept them on the move, and finally led them to safety.

Now they could relax for the first time in more than a tenite. The scouts from Slorn were far better company than the dour Bernal, who had become increasingly tense and irritable as they faced one delay after another. Even Kaynor, who liked to complain, also liked to joke. Before sleeping, they sat by the fire and ate hot food—a rare treat—and Egarn listened contentedly while the other two discussed the lore of the trail and hazards faced alone in the land of an inexorable enemy. The tales fascinated him. So did the scouts. In his long years at the court of Lant, he had come to know many people well, but he had never met anyone like these refugees from Slorn.

“In my childhood, there were legends told of a Med of Lant who was a sorcerer,” Roszt said suddenly. “I suppose he was long before your time.”

Egarn said quietly, “I was his student.”

Roszt nodded understandingly. “Every med trains his successor from boyhood, or so it is said. I thought perhaps you were an exception because you don’t look like a Lantian. The sorcerer med traveled through all the neighboring peerdoms ransacking old ruins for books. He had a reputation for acquiring forgotten wisdom that extended far beyond Lant.”

“He was a great man,” Egarn said. “He not only acquired wisdom, but he was also wise enough to know when not to use it.”

Both Roszt and Kaynor seemed interested, so Egarn told them about the Old Med and his experiments. When he reached the point where things began to disappear or appear out of nowhere, he expected them to turn away with polite skepticism. Instead, they were fascinated.

“Where did the things come from?” Roszt asked.

Egarn described the Old Med’s experiment with the porkley and its astonishing result.

“Were you the man?” Kaynor asked.

Egarn changed the subject. “The Old Med made many discoveries. It was he who invented the weapon. Then—when we understood a little about what it would do—he destroyed it. He said, ‘This is far too dangerous for anyone to know about, even us.’ He was far wiser than I.”

Roszt’s mind was still fixed on the disappearances and appearances. “But where did you come from?”

“It took us many sikes to find out,” Egarn said with a wistful smile. “We worked on it together, experiment after experiment. Each of us knew half the answer, but there was no way either of us could explain his half so the other could understand. We experimented, and we searched through book after book of the Old Med’s collection. Finally the combination of my past and his present gave us the answer.”