to a door of steel that was kept barred except to a select few.
Lanklin’s responsibility ended there, outside the door of the workroom. He removed a rag from the protruding end of a broken pipe, tapped a code, received a reply, and spoke the message into the pipe. Such was the tortuous labyrinth of defenses Arne had devised. Lanklin waited only long enough to hear the message repeated correctly. Then he turned away.
The news was alarming, but Lanklin welcomed the interruption. His “dae” consisted of sitting in total darkness waiting for intruders who never came. The rare message, the basket of supplies, the much rarer visitor brightened the gloom that enveloped him like a burst of sunlight. All of the guards working below envied the outside sentries who could enjoy the sun and rain and perform their signals with bird calls instead of clanging knocks. Assignments were rotated to give everyone an occasional breath of fresh air.
Of course Egarn and his close assistants labored tirelessly one mont after another without getting to the surface at all.
Beyond the steel door, a len grinder named Garzot, a refugee from Wymeff, immediately took the message to Inskel, Inskor’s son, who had been first len grinder at the Court of Easlon before Arne brought him to Midlow to be Egarn’s assistant. Inskel had to feign death in order to absent himself from his post, and he’d had the interesting experience of watching his own burying—from a distance—before he left.
Inskel was huddled near a large, rectangular cabinet fashioned of wood. Its supports raised it a meter above the floor. It was roughly built—Egarn had no concern at all for the exterior appearance of an apparatus as long as its functional parts were fashioned as meticulously as possible—and at one end was an enormous Honsun Len, a meter square, upon which shadowy figures and objects moved. While Inskel watched the len, Gevis, Wiltzon’s young assistant schooler, stood by the cabinet ready to make any necessary adjustments.
The len was a window on time that looked a staggering distance into the past. That distance could be approximated with involved calibrations, but Egarn had devised another method using guidelines he evolved himself. The length of a woman’s skirt, the shape of the odd horseless carriages, even the kind of buildings being erected held enormous significance for him. The others found this highly confusing, and the fact that the images were so indistinct added to their difficulties. Egarn hoped eventually to design a len that would show them the past more clearly.
Inskel’s position was slightly to one side of the len. This was Egarn’s order. There were many oddities about it no one understood, and one of them was the occasional surge of energy it released. Egarn feared this could be harmful, and he wanted no one watching a len from directly in front of it.
Garzot waited respectfully until Inskel became aware of his presence. Then he delivered the message: Midd Village raided by lashers—Roszt and Kaynor probably captured—no lashers anywhere near the ruins as yet—Arne at the village dealing with the raid as best he could. Marof had witnessed part of the raid himself, and he said the lashers were behaving viciously and pulling the village apart. Arne probably would be lashed for his efforts, and that was the worst news of all. Anyone punished when the lashers were in that mood might not survive.
Marof had cautioned the sentries to remain alert.
Sentries at the ruins were always alert, but those who heard the message were too disturbed by it to take offense. The news that Roszt and Kaynor—and possibly Arne—were in the hands of the prince’s guard staggered everyone.
Inskel heard the message incredulously, his face tense with sudden apprehension. He had to decide whether Egarn should be told. The old man was asleep in the room next door, which served as their living quarters, and he needed every moment of rest he could get. Since no lashers had approached the ruins, Inskel decided to tell him after he awoke.
But Egarn was not asleep. He was lying on his bed comfortably swathed in a mound of blankets—the cold, damp, underground air made his bones ache—and petting a large black dog that lay at this side.
The dog’s career in the ruins had begun with an unfortunate mistake. It was a child’s pet, and Egarn sucked it up accidentally when he was trying to steal clothing from a backyard clothesline. He wanted to outfit Roszt and Kaynor completely before they left. Unfortunately, the attempt hadn’t worked, and the dog jumped into the time vortex. Egarn was grateful it hadn’t been a child—a moment later a little boy was running about looking for his dog—and he resolved not to try that again.
Of course they couldn’t send the dog back. He seemed to be an intelligent creature, and he quickly made himself at home in the underground rooms. He answered to the name of Val. Actually, he answered to almost anything, but Roszt and Kaynor made a special pet of him, and they called him Val. When he heard that name, he wagged his tail with pleasure.
None of the members of Egarn’s team had ever had a pet before. Egarn had often wondered where all the domestic animals vanished to. The vicious hunting dogs of Lant were the only survivors he had seen. In the hard times following the wars, when there wasn’t enough food for people, he supposed no one could afford the luxury of feeding an animal. Probably all the dogs were eaten—and cats, too, and Guinea pigs and canaries and anything else that could serve as nourishment.
He heard the faint flurry of excitement in the next room, but he ignored it—they would tell him at once if it concerned him—and continued his reverie.
He was thinking about the Honsun Len. A lifetime of trying to understand it had convinced him he lacked a scientific mentality. He was an empiricist of some resourcefulness, an opportunist whose luck ran in streaks, but he certainly was no scientist. He tried things, building on what the Old Med had taught him and concentrating his efforts wherever a glimmer of promise appeared. Even so, the work of an abnormally long life—as lives were measured in this cursed future—had carried his knowledge a pathetically short distance beyond the legacy the Old Med had bestowed on him.
The len was made of a special glass produced by a select group of one-namers trained to that task only. They kept their guild’s secrets to themselves, rightfully feeling that their privileged position depended on this. In an earlier economic system, this would have been called job security. The little they were willing to impart to Egarn told him almost nothing. From other sources he heard vague references to the various treatments the glass was subjected to, and he suspected that important trace elements were added. Even if he’d had proper equipment for a chemical analysis, both his chemistry and his knowledge of glass were so rudimentary the results probably would have told him nothing. From the scant records that survived, he thought the len’s original inventor probably had stumbled upon some unlikely combination of ingredients by accident. That combination was now the glassmakers’ trade secret.
The glass they sent to the len grinders was black and opaque with a shiny surface. The grinders, working with unbelieveable precision for that primitive technology, formed the ripples that various types of Honsun Len called for. Egarn deeply regretted not being able to run simple laboratory tests involving standard forms of radiation on one of the lens. He had tried numerous experiments while the Old Med was still alive to advise him, but none of them were successful because he lacked basic laboratory equipment.
It had taken him years to conclude that the len emitted energy and more years to decide where it came from. It was temporal energy, the basic force of the universe. The Honsun Len absorbed and focused energy from time. No other explanation accounted for its peculiar effects. Again and again Egarn had drawn upon all of the scientific rudiments he could remember from his distant youth in an attempt to understand this, but each time they failed him.
The len emitted temporal energy. The genius of the Old Med had found a way to store that energy and release it in bursts—though he certainly hadn’t understood what he was doing. The strange, massive apparatus that looked like a photographic enlarger had a device faced with a thick, unpolished slab of Honsun Len glass that functioned like a camera shutter. Egarn reasoned that temporal energy backed up on one side of it or the other, depending on the arrangement of the lens, and rushed through when it was opened. That burst of force could push an object through time. Or, if the lens were reversed, it could suck an object from time.
It was impossible to test such a complicated device without proper laboratory equipment. He could only try different things and observe what happened. He had spent nightmarish months—monts, in this frustrating future— just trying to position his lens with the precision he knew was essential if he were to repeat experiments accurately. He searched tirelessly for ways to calibrate differences so he could make measurable adjustments. Nothing had worked satisfactorily until Arne asked the most expert wood carver in Midlow to make a system of gears for him. With these, he finally was able to move his lens accurately through small gradations.
Now he had refined the settings sufficiently to give him two identified places and two identified times in the
