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
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
