Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The Chronocide Mission

She fingered them thoughtfully. Egarn had worn the disk of metal on a thong as a neck ornament. A coin, he called it, and claimed it held a mysterious significance in the land of his origin. Where that land was she never understood. Perhaps the Old Med her uncle had known. Egarn never talked about it to anyone else. Certainly he had been a strange man.

“No weapon,” she said suddenly. “But we know he had at least one weapon when he escaped.” She looked at Com Gerna narrowly. “Are you positive the dead man was Egarn?”

“Yes, Majesty. There can be no doubt at all that it was he. These are personal things his servers know well. Another might have come into the possession of one or two, perhaps, but who else would have been carrying all of them, both the valuable and the trivial? The body was advanced in decay by the time I saw it, but the recognizable features were those of the Med of Lant—the tallness of stature, the slender build, the bald, beardless head. Of course the face—”

The peer shuddered. “But there was no weapon?” she persisted.

Com Gerna squirmed uneasily. “Majesty, I searched as carefully as the conditions permitted. The battlefield had been plundered twice—once by Wymeffian one-namers and once by local lashers from a nearby compound. There were many bodies, and scavengers would not waste time on trifles as long as there was a possibility of richer loot on the other dead. That is why these things were left. We can’t know what they took. It was sheer luck that a commander who formerly served your majesty at court chanced to see the body.”

“Then you think plunderers took his weapon?”

“I think it was taken by a one-namer or common lasher who thought it might prove valuable. When he couldn’t discover a use for it, he threw it away. Believe me, Majesty, if such a one had started using it, we would have heard.”

“And—there is nothing else?”

“I organized a careful search of a large area around the place where the med’s body lay. We discovered only one thing of interest, and that was found a considerable distance away. A plunderer could have taken it and then tossed it aside as worthless. It may have no connection with the med. Certainly he made no regular use of it—his servants and assistants don’t recognize it—but because it is so strange, I immediately thought it might be his.”

He placed the object before the peer.

She inhaled sharply. “His folding knife,” she murmured. “That was clever of you, Com Gerna, to search the area so widely. It was indeed his. It belonged to his past, and he valued it enormously. He never would have parted with it while he was alive.”

She took another deep breath. “So—Egarn is dead.” She felt triumphant and at the same time regretful. “I will make the announcement at once. Thank you, Com Gerna. You have exceeded my expectations.”

“Majesty,” the young commander murmured and knelt.

She sat motionless for a long time, thinking about Egarn. Perhaps—just perhaps—she had made a serious mistake. Egarn had been an old man, and the minds of elderly males were subject to strange aberrations. If she had been patient, treated him with kindness, and appealed to his friendship, perhaps she could have coaxed him back to normality. She had acted as a peer when she should have approached him as an old friend who needed his help.

“If I had been able to consult Egarn,” she reflected pensively, “he would have advised me to use patience and kindness.” At the time she had needed his counsel the most, she could not ask him for it. Now he was dead. He had escaped her. He also had defeated her. His miraculous weapon was lost— perhaps forever.

But this was no time for vain regrets. She wanted to look ahead, not backward. She conferred at once with Com Welsif, her first general. He was her cousin, the one who so frequently lost war games to her in their youth, but he had developed into her best commander. He handled an army with ease, and he had refused to panic over the flight of one elderly med.

“We know for certain, now, that a party of Easlon scouts slipped through our cordon many daez ago,” he said.

“They seem to have a knack for that,” the peer observed frostily.

The first general scowled. “They were riding black horses, Majesty. Four, perhaps five.”

The peer raised her eyebrows.

“They seem to have circled far to the north,” the first general went on. “They may have a secret pass there.”

“What does it mean?” the peer asked.

“It was silly to send a single squad of Lantiff after Egarn. We know he possessed strange knowledge, and we shouldn’t be surprised that he fooled his pursuers so easily. The puzzling thing is that he fooled their dogs as well. Could he have worked some kind of sorcery with his scent?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” the peer mused. “Certainly it is possible. Maybe it is even likely. As you said, he possessed much strange knowledge.”

“However it happened, he eluded the pursuit and turned south. The Lantiff, thinking they were still close behind him, continued westward. Lantiff and dogs are much alike—once they fix their minds on a chase, they never hesitate. They went charging into wild country, and Easlon scouts managed to ambush them.”

“How many scouts would it take to dispose of five Lantiff and their dogs?” the peer asked.

“Fewer than you would believe,” the first general said grimly. “They are resourceful and capable men. Take it that it was done. It was the horses they wanted, of course. Easlon has long envied us our horses. They must have hid the Lantiff’s bodies, but they were in a hurry to get away, so probably they did it in haste. Sooner or later someone will find them. The horses went north and west. Egarn went south and got caught up in the battle there. His weapon wouldn’t be of much use to him in the middle of a battlefield with enemies on all sides. Probably he had it in his hand when he fell, and it was the first thing looted—if it wasn’t covered by the debris of battle.”

The peer nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. That explains everything. The death of Egarn is the worst defeat Lant has suffered in my lifetime because I gave him my complete trust and he gave much in return and could have given more. But in the end he ranted at me—soft-livered male that he was—about the slaughter of peaceful populations, as though neighbors who train large armies and conspire against Lant are to be considered peaceful until the moment they strike. Now Lant’s army is large enough to be irresistible with or without Egarn’s weapon. We should be planning our next move. Isn’t it time to turn west?”

The first general said cautiously, “It is time to look west, perhaps.”

The peer understood what he meant. Lant had not made a successful border raid into Easlon for sikes. The mountains, gouged and twisted almost to the point of impassability—by great wars of the past, Egarn had said—were an invaluable defensive barrier but an enormous disadvantage to a peer intent on conquering her neighbors. They were as easily defended by Easlon as by Lant, and when Lant’s depredations among its neighbors increased, the Peerdom of Easlon greatly augmented its squadrons of scouts. Not only did they make the Lantian scouts pay dearly for every attempted incursion, but they so completely suppressed all efforts to obtain information that the peer’s generals did not even know whether any of the Ten Peerdoms maintained an army.

Certainly it was time to look west. The Peer of Lant reflected, with the darkly ominous scowl that had brought death and destruction crashing down on many a distant, peaceful village, that the lands beyond her other frontiers were no longer worth despoiling. Peerdoms that fancied themselves to be the next victims of Lant were hiding food and valuables and avoiding the accumulation of goods that could easily be wrested from them. They were even removing their commoners from the border regions. An army traveling in any of those directions would have to carry its own provisions.