Lloyd Biggle Jr.: The Chronocide Mission

“I killed one of the dogs,” Bernal said. “He killed the rest. He is more important than all of the peer’s generals together— or he will be if he lives.”

“Be serious! An old crock like this? Probably he is the peer’s third assistant gardener wearing cast-off clothing.”

“He says his name is Egarn. I think he is the Med of Lant.”

The other nearly dropped the old man’s feet. When he spoke again, it was in tones that blended awe and skepticism. “The Med of Lant with five Lantiff and their dogs after him? What do you suppose he did?”

“I hope he lives long enough to tell us,” Bernal said soberly.

By the time the old man regained consciousness, he had been placed on a comfortable bed in a safe refuge. His arm had been bathed, treated with herbs, and rebandaged; and Bernal had a bowl of hot broth ready for him. Egarn ate slowly with Bernal assisting him. By the time he finished, he had revived sufficiently to take an interest in his surroundings.

He gazed about the small room wonderingly. It was lit by a flickering torch, and the smoke was sucked into a crack in the ceiling. There was a charcoal fire to take the edge off the cool, damp air, and skins were hung in two large openings. Comfortable chairs and beds had been improvised from branches and straw.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“In a cave,” Bernal answered.

“Are we safe here?”

“As safe as a fugitive can be in the Peerdom of Lant,” Bernal said gravely. “As soon as you are able to travel, we well take you to Easlon.”

“Across the mountains?”

“Of course.”

Egarn sank back comfortably. “I was hungry. They starved me. Is there more broth?”

“Better not overdo the eating for a few daez. You would make yourself sick.”

Bernal began to lay out rough garb that matched his own: leather jacket, pants, and mocs, with shirt and undergarments of wool. “When you feel up to it, I will bathe you and change your clothes. We need the things you are wearing. We also want your pack. I will give you another, and you can keep anything you think you absolutely must have. Just make certain you leave enough personal effects to identify you.”

Egarn gazed at him perplexedly.

“I am sending a scout south toniot,” Bernal said. “He will find a corpse in the Peerdom of Wymeff who resembles you as closely as possible. Fortunately for you—but not for Wymeff— there will be plenty of corpses to chose from. We are assuming the peer will order a massive search for you. If, in the middle of it, she receives word that your over-ripe body has been found in Wymeff, it will confuse the situation very satisfactorily.”

“I did it,” Egarn muttered.

“You did what?”

“The corpses. I did it. I made the weapons. To defend Lant, I thought, but the peer used them to destroy her neighbors. As if the len hadn’t tortured humanity enough.” He brightened. “But I got them back. I told her the lens would wear out if they weren’t replaced, and then I hid one and destroyed the rest. When I refused to make more, the peer stopped my food and then my water. When I got hungry and thirsty enough, I killed my guards with the weapon I had saved and escaped.”

“That was well done,” Bernal said. He knew, now, that he couldn’t rest until this old man was safely in Easlon.

“Some of the guards were my friends,” Egarn said despondently. “But I was afraid I would weaken if I got any hungrier. I had to escape or let her have the weapon.”

“It was well done,” Bernal said again. “Don’t look back, old fellow. Look ahead. The important thing now is to get well. Then maybe you can help us think of a few ways to have back at the Peer of Lant.”

Egarn grinned bitterly.

“What about your personal effects?” Bernal asked.

Egarn took a ring from his finger, surrendered a tooled leather belt that he wore, and then—with obviously reluctance—took a strange object from his pack. A blade snapped into view, and it was a knife.

“Jackknife,” Egarn said sadly. “And take this, it is called a coin. Anyone who knew me well will recognize them. They are the only things I have left from the place I came from, but they don’t matter now. Nothing matters.”

Bernal accepted them with a nod of approval. Next Egarn handed him a thin piece of wood with strange figures carved on it in orderly rows.

“Calculator I invented,” Egarn said. He added, when Bernal gave it a puzzled glance, “It is too complicated to explain, but my assistants will recognize it. Take it all. Take everything except the weapon. I wish you could take my memories, too—I no longer need them, either.”

One of the skins was pushed back, and Bernal’s two companions came into the room. Bernal gravely pronounced introductions: Roszt and Kaynor.

“They are so tall!” Egarn blurted. “Are they from Easlon, too?”

“They are from the Peerdom of Slorn. Their families were killed in the Lantian invasion, and now they scout for Easlon.”

“I have met people from Slorn, but they weren’t so tall and skinny. One doesn’t often meet tall people in this land.” Egarn returned his attention to Bernal. “Their families were—killed?”

Bernal nodded.

Egarn bowed his head. “All those corpses,” he muttered. “And I did it. I made the weapons.”

“Is it true that the Peer of Lant is getting ready to invade Easlon?” Bernal asked.

Egarn nodded miserably. Then he brightened. “But now she can’t! I destroyed all of her weapons except the one I brought with me!”

“She doesn’t need your weapons to invade Easlon, my friend. She has conquered all of her neighbors and added their lashers to her armies. If the Ten Peerdoms suddenly got energetic and formed a combined army of their own—which she knows their peers would never consent to do—she still would outnumber them twenty to one. Or fifty. Or a hundred. Probably she doesn’t know herself how large her armies are.”

Egarn covered his face with his good arm. “I suppose I must give the weapon to the Ten Peerdoms,” he muttered. “But after they have defeated Lant, they will use it on each other. Everything I do is cursed.”

“It needn’t happen that way,” Bernal said. “Don’t give it to the peers. Don’t trust any peerager. That was your mistake. Give it to us—to the one-namers. We are trying to live in peace and keep civilization going.”

“One-namers?” Egarn was incredulous. “But every one of them is servile to one peer or another!”

“Things are different beyond the mountains. Our first loyalty is to our own kind, and we have a League of One-Namers that extends through all of the Ten Peerdoms. The hope of the future lies with us, not with the rotten peeragers and certainly not with the no-namers and lashers. We one-namers don’t want to conquer anyone. We just want to protect our homes.” He added thoughtfully, “There is a rumor about a peerdom somewhere in the west that destroys its enemies with beams of light. Maybe someone already has your weapon.”

“A peerdom in the west is using a weapon like mine?”

“So it is rumored.”

“Any med server could make it if he knew how. If one of them has stumbled on the right combination of lens, the world is doomed. There is only one way to save humanity. I can’t do it alone—I would need help.”

“Tell Arne about it,” Bernal said. “He is first server of the Peer of Midlow and also of the League of One-Namers. He will see that you get all the help you need. What is the one way left to save humanity?”

Egarn’s gaze did not waiver. “By destroying it,” he said.

Egarn remembered little about the first daez in hiding. His fever worsened, and Bernal told him later he had been circling much of the time, which meant deranged or out of his head. His dim awareness of the cave—of Bernal anxiously changing the dressing on his mangled arm and brewing herbal poultices for it; of the two scouts from Slorn just as anxiously discussing the gathering fury of the peer’s search—was less vivid than his nightmarish recollections of the distant past.