Читать книгу The Chronocide Mission - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 10

CHAPTER 5

THE PEER OF LANT

The Med of Lant was missing.

The rumor spread through the court like one of the preposterous diseases the old man was so fond of warning peeragers about, carrying with it a rash of unlikely symptoms—fits of temper, seizures of indigestion, irritating itches, swollen gums, even a plague of hangnails. These maladies in combination dampened an entire tenite of the traditional Plao Fest and forced the cancellation of several hunts.

The disorders were much talked about, symptoms were compared, elixirs were exchanged. No one mentioned the Med of Lant aloud. No one dared to—and yet the rumor spread, and spread.

One-name servers and servants, always inexhaustible sources of court gossip, turned inexplicably reticent when asked about the Med. No one-namer in the entire court complex would admit to knowing anything at all, not even that the old man was missing. Court officials watched the peer for a sign. There could be no public comment on the Med’s absence until she herself officially acknowledged it and indicated the attitude she favored.

The Peer of Lant said nothing. She acted as though totally oblivious of the old man’s existence. When she passed the vanished Med’s quarters and workroom on her morning ride, she seemed not to notice the guard placed there. She even attempted to keep secret the far-ranging search she was conducting, but in that she failed spectacularly. The whispered rumors that seeped through the court carried descriptions of the rage with which she received her harassed officers’ reports of failure.

The routine work of the Med’s office suffered no disruption. His servers were highly competent, and—since he had devoted much of his time to private matters—they certainly didn’t need him to tell them what to do. Even so, it was remarkable for the peer to leave a high office vacant, and with each passing dae, uneasiness and uncertainly increased among the med servers and those with tasks linked to theirs.

“All this fuss about someone I don’t even know!” a pouting peerling, a younger daughter of the nobility, complained guardedly when told that yet another hunt had been cancelled. Peerists and peerlings, the younger aristocrats, were only vaguely aware of the Med’s existence. He had hovered dimly in the court’s background, a slightly comical, shadowy figure who preferred fussing in his dusty workroom to taking part in the richly varied cycle of fests and hunts. Some had never seen him at all. It was said that early each morning he walked in his garden, where strange and unpalatable fruits and vegetables like plums and strawberries and tomatoes were cultivated, but even if the garden had not been enclosed, no peerager would have been up at that hour to catch a glimpse of him.

Older peeragers could remember a time when he was very much a part of the court scene—an advisor, even a confident of the peer. Elderly peeragers his own age, of whom very few survived, could have told a great deal more about him, but they wisely made a virtue of their failing memories and said nothing.

Only in the peerdom’s one-name villages was the Med’s disappearance discussed openly. One-namers who lived away from the court did not have to rely on rumors for their information. Forest workers had seen the growing army of searchers beating the undergrowth. One-namers whose duties required travel had been harassed by road patrols and questioned at frequent watchposts. Outlying work camps had been searched. The Lantiff turned out every resident of one small village and tore their dwellings apart. Accounts of these experiences were passed from village to village until one-namers from one end of Lant to the other were watching and waiting apprehensively and sifting every scrap of news for portents of catastrophies to come, and their forebodings crossed the borders to one-namers of the conquered peerdoms.

Egarn’s predecessor in office, still referred to as the Old Med, had been a legend in his own time, an awesome figure venerated by all, a sorcerer who dealt with forces of darkness better left unmentioned. By comparison, Egarn—a one-namer, a commoner in a high office that tradition reserved for peeragers—had been a nonentity, and few had been aware of his power and influence. Elderly one-namers remembered him as a kindly man willing to speak out against an injustice when no one else dared. Elderly peeragers considered him an aberration because he worked hard. Not only had he accepted the responsibilities of his office, but he actually attempted to carry them out. A peerager would have considered it a solemn obligation to perform as little work as possible.

Egarn had concerned himself with everyone’s health, even that of the no-namers, and he made the peerdom a far healthier place by emphasizing the need for sanitation, for pure water, for carefully prepared food, for skillful nursing of the sick, and for the isolation of those with certain kinds of diseases. He held the respect of all of his contemporaries, including the peer, because he avoided court intrigue and disdained the sordid maneuvering for personal advantage that was the foremost concern of peeragers and their one-name high servers.

Now he was missing, and even those who thought they knew him well were discovering how little was known about him. He was a man of mystery in a land and an age where there should have been no mystery about anyone, and the peer’s incomprehensible conduct underscored his strangeness. Every member of her court savored the latest rumors and watched alertly to see what she would say and do.

She said and did nothing.

The Peer of Lant had attained the age of sixty-five in robust good health, and she fully expected to enjoy a remarkable longevity. She attributed this good fortune to her austere habits, and—conveniently forgetting the multifold indulgences of her youth—she was constantly taxing her fellow peeragers with their excesses.

Food, drink, fests, hunts, and love affairs circumscribed the peerager’s life, not only in Lant, but in every peerdom she was familiar with. She was determined to do something about that—not with her surviving contemporaries or their children, whom she scornfully considered beyond redemption, but with their children’s children. She redeemed those young peerlings and peerists whenever she could, snatching them out of their indolence and working them hard, especially at military command and organization, and they responded creditably. Already some were performing well in responsible positions.

The Peer of Lant meant to conquer the known world. One of her uncles had been fond of ancient military legends, and he retold these tales to her when she was a child. They fired her imagination and engendered a vision that never left her of warriors, and conquest, and the purification of a decadent human race by battle. She spent much of her youth playing at war games with troops recruited from among the children of servants, and she had followed her vision steadfastly throughout her life with very few deviations.

One of those deviations had been Egarn. She vividly remembered the day the Old Med her uncle brought him to court for the first time. She had been fourteen or fifteen—beautiful, she thought, and flushed with triumph from a mock battle in which her youthful warriors had soundly outmaneuvered a similar troop blunderingly led by a male cousin.

She came dashing along on her horse followed by an elite mounted escort of hulking lashers she had chosen herself for their ferocity in practice duels. Her uncle was approaching the palace from his workroom accompanied by the strangest-looking male she had ever seen. He was tall in stature but, compared with her lashers, preposterously slender. His hair was cut short enough to look silly, but it was the purest, most glimmering blond hair she had ever seen. Despite his outlandish clothing, he seemed handsome to her. She dismounted, as did her escort. Her uncle knelt; Egarn, who had been walking a pace ahead of him, failed to notice. He strolled past her, the Prince of Lant, as though she didn’t exist and without a hint of obeisance.

Any spirited prince would have reacted as she did. She used her whip on him. What followed was in every way astonishing. Egarn, speaking words that were incomprehensible to her, turned and with unbelievable quickness calmly caught her wrist, twisted it, took the whip from her, and tossed it aside. Her escort sprang forward to avenge this treasonable insult, and she, with becoming fury, signaled she wanted the miscreant dead. Moments later, all five members of her escort were trying to pick themselves up from the ground. Two had broken limbs and did not succeed. The other three abandoned their intention of tearing Egarn apart with their bare hands. They drew their swords. He stood waiting calmly for their next move. That was when the peer her mother arrived and demanded an explanation for this mayhem that was disturbing the peace of her court.

The Old Med presented the stranger to peer and prince as his personal guest. He was called Egarn—his real name was difficult to say, so the med had given him one of his own names to use—and he was a traveler from a far place. He had special knowledge and skills of great value that were unknown in the Peerdom of Lant. The Old Med hoped to persuade him to remain as his assistant. Unfortunately, Egarn hadn’t yet learned their customs, and therefore he didn’t know that everyone in Lant was required to kneel to prince and peer.

The Old Med then turned to Egarn and explained, speaking slowly and with simple words, that a single knee must touch the ground in greeting the prince, after which the subject could rise but with eyes downcast unless spoken to. Both knees must touch the ground in greeting the peer, and the subject was not permitted to rise until the peer had passed by unless the peer granted permission. The Old Med demonstrated.

Egarn watched and listened with obvious indignation. When the Old Med finished, he turned his gaze on the prince. She had never experienced one like it. It expressed contempt as well as a fierce desire to retrieve her whip and use it on her. No other inhabitant of Lant or any other peerdom would have dared to look at a prince in that fashion.

Egarn announced proudly, “An American Citizen kneels to no one,” and there was no mistaking his meaning even if the words were incomprehensible.

Since kneeling was contrary to the practices of the stranger’s own land, the peer ruled him exempt until he’d had time to familiarize himself with the customs of Lant and decide whether he wished to remain there.

He never did kneel. He contented himself with bending forward slightly at the waist. The peer her mother, who developed a liking for him, was content with that; the prince was not. For an entire sike she venomously plotted his death. Then it suddenly occurred to her that Egarn was by far the bravest person she had ever met, and she idolized bravery. Five oversized lashers had assaulted him simultaneously, and he met them without a flicker of fear and casually tossed one after another to the ground. When three of them came at him with drawn swords—himself unarmed—he had faced them just as calmly. His was a different sort of bravery, a bravery of skill and courage rather than the brutal force with which lashers met danger and dealt out death. Once she understood that, she fell madly in love with him and made him her first consort.

In Lant, it was unheard of for a peerager to openly mate with a one-namer. Even a willful prince such as herself wouldn’t have dared to do so if he hadn’t been a stranger. When several of her uncles objected, she told them what Egarn himself had said—in his own land, no one held a rank that was higher than his—and they had to be content with that.

Egarn was the father of her first child, a beautiful, gentle daughter who looked remarkably like him. Fortunately for the Peerdom of Lant, the girl died young. With her shy inwardness, she would have made a deplorable prince and peer, but she was a lovely child. Even when the prince tired of Egarn’s quiet ways and found other consorts, for many, many years—in fact, until she began her wars of conquest—they had remained friends, and when she needed advice, she had gone to him without hesitation and with the certainty that he would speak honestly and unselfishly. She appointed him Med of Lant when the Old Med her uncle died, and she had never regretted it.

She did not regret it now. Not only had he made Lant a healthier place for everyone, but none of her military conquests would have been possible without him.

The lashers of Lant, who guarded and supervised the no-namers and filled the ranks of the peer’s armies, were a race apart—a squat, muscular people possessed of a fearless recklessness that could, with proper training, make them invincible warriors. She saw that even when she was young. As soon as she became peer, she began organizing and training her Lantiff, elite troops of lasher horsemen whose frenzied charges, flashing, curved swords, and vicious lances were calculated to inflict terror on their opponents. She tested her ideas with occasional raids into neighboring peerdoms, and the results were gratifying.

Unfortunately, she miscalculated. She alarmed her neighbors before she was ready for war, and they responded by developing armies of their own. Worse, as the army of Lant became stronger and its incursions more frequent, the neighboring peerdoms began to band together for mutual assistance against the marauding Lantiff. Over the years a stand-off developed, but the Peerdom of Lant was badly outnumbered, and that disparity increased yearly. Finally the neighboring peers decided to put an end to Lant’s perpetual belligerency. A combined invasion was planned; Lant was to be partitioned amongst its neighbors and its peeragers exterminated.

In deep despair, the peer turned to Egarn. He promised to devise a weapon that would protect the peerdom against any combination of enemies, and he had done so, to her delight and astonishment. The amount of destruction a mere handful of trained Lantiff could do with the strange tubes Egarn fashioned strained the powers of belief. Suddenly she possessed a force powerful beyond her wildest imaginings.

The lesson of a near defeat had taught her to plan her moves with care. She launched a lightning campaign, triumphantly concluded before her enemies could react in concert, and toppled the first of her neighbors. Before she she struck again, she paused long enough to assimilate the conquered army into her own, fortify her new borders, and set up an administration that could exploit the subjected territory’s war potential.

She had conquered all her northern and eastern neighbors, began a long-planned southern invasion, and was turning her thoughts beyond the western mountains to the Ten Peerdoms when Egarn committed his appalling treachery. He came to her with a tale about renewing the weapons. She had believed him. Why not? She knew med servers had to replace their lens from time to time. Further, Egarn had given the weapons to her freely as a gift and asked nothing for himself. He never asked anything for himself except the freedom to pursue his studies.

Then he informed her he had destroyed the weapons—every one of them, he said—and he refused to make more. When she inflicted privations on him and threatened torture, he killed his guards with a weapon he somehow had kept hidden and escaped.

She had thought him the most selfless, the most totally loyal individual in her peerdom. When he turned against her, she discovered she hadn’t known him at all. In her fury she taxed him with treason, and he answered, “I have repaid my indebtedness to Lant and to you many times over. I have kept your peerdom healthy through both of our lifetimes, and I gave you weapons to defend it against invaders. When you used those weapons for conquest, you also used them against me.”

Now he had vanished utterly. So had the Lantiff sent to capture him, along with their dogs and horses, leaving her wondering uneasily about other miraculous weapons he might have.

She was consumed by apprehension that he might escape over the mountains and bestow his weapons, his knowledge, and his counsel—she well knew the value of all three—on the decadent rulers of the Ten Peerdoms. She took the only course open to her. She hurriedly concentrated her Lantiff, blocked all routes to the west, and began a massive search.

Then a totally unexpected report arrived out of the south. She refused to believe it, but she sent Com Gerna, the young commander of her guard, to investigate. He returned after eight daez of frenzied riding and silently offered her a shabby bundle. The peer opened it with her own hands.

She recognized Egarn’s clothing. The combination of peerager trousers and one-name smock defied both custom and common sense, but Egarn had worn it because he thought it comfortable.

The peer sniffed distastefully. The clothing reeked of death.

“I had the garments washed carefully, Majesty,” Com Gerna said. “The odor clings to anything it touches.”

She pushed the clothing aside and examined the small bag of oddments that accompanied it. The belt she recognized at once. There was a package of dried leaves of a kind Egarn had been fond of munching; a quill sharpener; the thin, flat piece of wood with patterns of figures used by Egarn in making calculations; an ordinary pocket len that had assisted his failing eyesight; a few trinkets. Most of it was mere pocket debris, but the trinkets brought back memories.

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.

The Ten Peerdoms, rich with wealth accumulated during sikes of peace and indolence, were ripe for plundering, but she reluctantly conceded that her cousin was right. Before exposing an army to unknown hazards, they first must take a careful look and gather information.

“A surprise raid?” she suggested. “A reconnaissance in sufficient strength to brush aside the curstuff Easlon scouts but small enough to withdraw quickly when it chooses?”

The first general agreed. A reconnaissance in force could map Easlon’s eastern province while gathering information and prisoners. If the force were large enough to crush local resistance and still small enough to travel lightly and quickly and live off the country, it could test the defenses and pick up invaluable intelligence at negligible risk.

“The Ten Peerdoms have been hiding their prosperity long enough,” the peer said. “Let’s do it.”

Half the peeragers of her court petitioned for permission to lead the raid. The peer scornfully rejected them. Her strategy for years to come would be determined by the outcome, and nothing could be permitted to go wrong. The first general would command in person. Her only concession to court clamor was to assign three of her own sons to his staff on the off chance that the dolts might learn something. After Egarn, she’d had a series of alliances with weak consorts able to beget only sons. She was in her late thirties when she finally bore the two daughters she wanted. These she had brought up in her own image, and she assigned the elder, her prince, to be the first general’s second in command.

The first general himself hand-picked the other commanders, and they hand-picked their troops. There would be a hundred Lantiff, ten scouts, a mapper and his two assistants, and a full contingent of officers.

Once the force was complete, the first general moved quickly. He sent it westward by niot in groups small enough to pass unnoticed among the armies that congregated along the entire western border. He knew Easlon’s scouts were watching the frontier alertly—perhaps even watching from within Lant—and if they became aware of the existence of such an elete force, they might suspect a raid. He would wait for an afternoon of misty fog to move through High Pass. Once his force gained the far side, it could disappear into the thick forest that covered the mountains’ western approaches.

Even if these precautions failed, the Easlon scouts certainly wouldn’t expect a reconnaissance in force to debouch from the High Pass. No one had ever succeeded in taking a horse through that hazardous gap. There had been only two known attempts to do so. In both of them, animals terrified at the treacherous footing and the pounding roar and spray of High Pass Falls had plunged to their deaths and taken their riders with them.

But the raiding party rode horses from the peer’s own stables. These beasts were superbly trained and conditioned to hardship and battle and to the discipline that both required. Med servers had rendered them mute by incising their throats. No horse’s whinny would betray this raid. Their hoofs were muffled with wrappings of cloth, a trick the prince suggested and her mother the peer proudly ordered. Finally, the horses had several days of training at being led in blinders.

They moved through the pass on foot in a heavy mist, guiding their blinded mounts along treacherous ledges, up and down steep inclines, and finally through the thundering, foaming spray of the falls. Abruptly the trail began to tilt downward. Gradually it widened. One by one they remounted, removed their horses’ blinders, and moved on at a slow walk. By the time darkness fell, all had cleared the pass. By morning the force was deep within Easlon’s eastern forest.

It moved at a leisurely pace, but its every action was severely disciplined. This was no frenzied charge at the enemy, but a stealthy, coldly calculated attack with all of its objectives carefully delineated in advance. It sheltered by dae in the dense mountain forest without so much as a sound or a wisp of smoke to betray its presence while its scouts searched surrounding hills and valleys in an attempt to capture any lurking Easlon scout before he could give an invasion alarm. They found none.

They encountered no defenses of any kind. The Peerdom of Easlon had not merely been caught napping but sound asleep. The Lantian force continued to travel by niot and shelter by dae. On the fourth niot it moved forward swiftly, and at dawn it fell upon Easlon’s most eastern community, a flourishing town called Eas.

Eas was deserted. Its granaries were empty. Even its most valuable and cumbersome object, the mill’s irreplaceable, enormous steel circular saw, had been removed and spirited off or hidden.

“The curstuff Easlon scouts saw us at least two days ago and gave warning,” the prince informed the first general. “The one-namers took their prized possessions with them.”

Even so, the loot that remained was enormously valuable. During the sikes of peace, Eas had transformed itself from a frontier village to a wealthy town. Every abode had pottery in graceful designs and colors that were wholly alien to the rough civilization across the mountains. The wall hangings were richly illustrated. Furniture in the humblest home was of a quality and style not even affected by peeragers in Lant.

They despoiled the town at their leisure and scoured the countryside for wagons that could be piled high with loot. Then they set fires and began a well-laden withdrawal toward Low Pass, the only route the wagons could negotiate.

To reach it they had to cross the foaming Stony River, and at that treacherous ford the Easlon scouts sprang their ambush. Beams of light ripped the invaders, and terrifying claps of sound crashed about them. The Lantiff knew those horrors only too well. They had used them with delight on the foes of Lant; now the same forces of death and destruction were unexpectedly turned on them, and they succumbed to a frenzy of terror. The reek of burned flesh filled the peaceful valley and terrified the horses. Easlon scouts plied Egarn’s weapon with an accuracy the armies of Lant had not even imagined, and they destroyed the entire raiding force—scouts, mappers, peeragers, officers, and Lantiff—to the last man and woman and captured unharmed nearly eighty of the horses.