Lloyd Biggle Jr.: The Chronocide Mission

Bernal made Egarn as comfortable as he could and let the horses run while he pondered the opportunity fate had given him.

The swolen armies of the Peer of Lant were everywhere invincible. The war in the north had long been finished. That in the east was in its final stages of plunder, destruction, and slaughter of noncombatants. The southern invasion was rolling relentlessly. Now the peer was looking westward. She had dedicated her life to war, and she had no other neighbors left to conquer.

To the west lay the Ten Peerdoms, protected throughout their independent existence by a formidable mountain range. The only passes known to the Lantians were blocked in winter and difficult even for intrepid explorers the remainder of the year. The scouts of Easlon, the easternmost of the Ten Peerdoms, regularly crossed the frontier on trails known only to them, but the Lantians would have considered these hazardous routes impassible. No sane Peer of Lant would attempt to march an army westward.

So the rulers of the Ten Peerdoms had always believed— while neglecting their defenses and failing to train even token armies. Clouds of war had hung over Easlon’s mountainous frontier all of Bernal’s lifetime, and Easlon’s scouts had skirmished regularly with scouts from Lant, but no army appeared. Unfortunately, those mountain passes were no obstacle for a determined commander, and the present Peer of Lant was a military genius. She could attack whenever she chose, and Easlon had only its few hundreds of scouts to oppose an army of thousands. The Ten Peerdoms were about to be devastated in an orgy of blood and fire.

In a desperate attempt to stave off disaster, the League of One-namers, a secret Ten Peerdoms organization, had attempted to make contact with the one-namers of Lant. The League wistfully hoped independent crafters everywhere could band together and constitute a force for peace and reason. Arne, their leader, had not subscribed to this silliness, but he was the designated emissary. Bernal had recently completed the most important mission of his life: guiding Arne to a series of secret meetings in Lant and bringing him back safely.

The noble errand was foredoomed to failure. The Peer of Lant was outstanding in her viciousness even in a world where evil tyrannies were the rule. All of Lant’s one-namers had been cowed by the brutality they suffered daily. They feared the sun and were terrified by darkness. There were no genuinely independent subjects left in Lant.

Arne himself had been an agreeable surprise. Son of a legendary father, already a legend himself, he was only twenty years old. Those few people who were still concerned with civilized values in a torn world could ill afford to lose him, and yet the idiotic council had sent him deep into enemy territory where capture meant instant death. He had been uncommonly lucky that the frightened Lantian one-namers had not betrayed him.

The mission failed utterly, and Bernal guided Arne back through the mountains with nothing accomplished. Now he was in Lant again with several new assignments, but he would willingly abandon all of them in order to lead Egarn to safety. The Med of Lant—with his strange weapon—would more than compensate for the failure of Arne’s risky mission.

Their niot-long dash through the thick forest was uneventful except for a few tense moments when the road took them close to a lumber camp. One-name foresters had felled select hardwoods the previous summer and trimmed them. Now a work crew of no-namers was hauling the logs to a near-by river. Bernal couldn’t risk having one of their lashers remember hearing horses pass, so he slowed their pace to a walk as they approached the camp. They were clearly visible on the moon-lit road if anyone chanced to look in their direction, but apparently no one did. As they moved quietly past the camp, Bernal could see the flickering torches and hear the cracks of the lashers’ whips and the grunts of the laboring no-namers straining to drag the logs. Not until they had placed the scene far behind them did he let the horses resume their frenzied flight.

The road led westward and upward as they passed through forested hills that anticipated the mountains beyond. Shortly before dawn, they encountered a rushing stream that was wide enough and deep enough to require bridging. Bernal turned aside and rode down a dip in the bank where travelers were accustomed to water their horses. There he dismounted. While all five of the huge animals drank and then waited patiently, knee-deep in water, he left Egarn balanced precariously in the broad saddle and went back to erase the tracks they had left on the river bank. No experienced scout would have been fooled by the hasty brushing he gave the ground with a tree branch, but there were no experienced scouts among the Lantiff.

Remounting, he turned the horses upstream and walked them in shallow water for more than two kilometers. His objective was a sketchy forest trail so overgrown that he had difficulty in finding it. When they finally left the water, he dismounted again to conceal their tracks before he hurried the horses forward.

The one-name foresters of Lant had carved this narrow path for their own use. It led from nowhere to nowhere, and since they hadn’t worked that sector for several years, the forest had almost reclaimed it. Probably the Lantiff were unaware of its existence. Even so, Bernal would have moved more cautiously if he hadn’t feared that Egarn would be dead before they reached a refuge. The going was arduous, and he had to struggle to keep encroaching branches from raking the old man as they passed, but he pressed on recklessly.

Egarn had become delirious. Bernal kept murmuring, “Just a little farther, old fellow,” but the old man’s feverish mind was beyond the reach of encouraging words. Finally they emerged in a small forest clearing, and Bernal began to whistle the lilting, tremulous call of the spotter, a bird rare in Lant but common beyond the mountains.

The song was answered faintly. Several minutes later, two unusually tall, gaunt men dressed in the rough leather clothing of Easlon scouts stepped into the clearing. Bernal was easing Egarn down from the horse, and they hurried forward to help him.

“Dog,” Bernal said, indicating the bandage. “He needs nursing. Probably he will die anyway. Do we have anything to feed the horses?”

Kaynor, the elder of the newcomers, answered, “A bit. But why five? Did you catch the Lantiff sound asleep?”

Bernal said indifferently, “I caught them dead. They and their dogs.”

“You took an unnecessary risk,” Kaynor said reproachfully. “The Lantiff might overlook one horse but certainly not five. They will turn out every dog in Lant to track you. Is the old man worth it?”

“They will turn out every dog in Lant to track the old man,” Bernal said. “Whether he is worth the risk depends on whether he lives. I am going to look after him myself. One of you will have to go south toniot.”

Roszt, the younger of the newcomers, said eagerly, “Give me a horse, and I will do it. Those bundles I stole last week had server clothing in them. I can go as a peer’s messenger.”

“Right now you can backtrack and cover my trail,” Bernal said. “If the pursuit comes this far, it will be hot. When you have done that, look after the horses.”

The younger man hurried away. Bernal and Kaynor picked up Egarn’s limp body and headed into the forest with it.

Kaynor had been scrutinizing Egarn perplexedly. “He is beardless, and he is wearing peerager’s trousers with a one-name smock. What is he?”

“I don’t know. He may be a peerager, but he has only one name.”

Kaynor was silent while they maneuvered Egarn’s light body through some dense undergrowth. Then he asked, “Don’t the rules forbid intervening in the peer’s private affairs? Inskor made it very clear we are to keep our hands off court doings unless it is something really important, and even then we are to make certain the result is worth the risk and the aftermath. This poor old crock probably did nothing more serious than sneeze in the peer’s presence, but there will be an army beating the forest tomorrow. When they find the bodies of those Lantiff and their dogs, only the evil gods of Lant know what will happen next. That was quite a deed, taking on all ten of them, but what have you gained?”