leaving a reply.
Inskel, hoping the two men were only walking the dog and would soon return, continued to watch the motel, but there was no further sign of them. A maid put the room in order. Then a new guest checked in, a bustling, well-fed, middle-aged businessman, who dropped his suitcase, used the toilet, and then left at once.
Roszt and Kaynor had checked out.
“We need another len,” Egarn complained. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I thought of using the small len, but it just isn’t adequate for this kind of viewing. If we had been able to watch two places at once, we wouldn’t have lost them.”
Inskel agreed. There was a duplicate in the secret emergency room, but moving anything that bulky through the cramped escape route would be a problem. He said, “Do you want me to try to bring—”
“No,” Egarn said. “It is too late now, anyway. We will grind another when we have a chance. Surely they have started for Buffalo. I told them to look up their friend the first thing. He would be willing to help them again if they paid him, and they are going to need help.”
“Do you want me to look for them in Buffalo?” Inskel asked.
“Give them time to arrive there and get settled. Then we can watch for them at the check points. You try to get some sleep. Gevis can take your place. We will keep watching that house on DuRosche Court.”
Only then did they notice that the young assistant schooler was missing. It seemed so odd that he would absent himself in the middle of a crisis that Arne went looking for him. The guards had come on duty only a short time before, and they knew nothing about him. Finally Arne consulted Fornzt, the housekeeper, who told him Gevis had gone scrounging. “He needed a breath of fresh air, and he thought no one had searched the herders’ huts. They are widely scattered, and they don’t look like places where one would find anything of value, but he said herders sometimes laid in supplies for an entire eson, including wine. There seemed no harm in looking, so I told him to go ahead.”
“It is a pity he didn’t tell me,” Arne said. “I searched all of the huts in Midlow when I first arrived. What little I found is already in your larder.”
“Anyway, he should be back soon,” Fornzt said.
In the workroom, Garzot, Inskel’s assistant, was watching the DuRosche mansion on the len. Nothing was happening there. Egarn and Inskel were sleeping. When they awoke, they switched the scene to Buffalo and found the checkpoints, but Roszt and Kaynor did not appear.
Neither did Gevis, but it was the two scouts they were worried about. While Egarn, Inskel, and Garzot focused and refocused the len, Arne moved a chair to a remote corner and sat there for some time, meditating. Finally he announced, “Kaynor surely knew how dangerous it was to be carrying the weapon in his hand. He wouldn’t have done it without a good reason.”
Egarn stopped his fussing with the len’s controls. “The girl had been visiting at the house,” he protested. “She was on her way home. No one else was near them. What sort of reason could he have?”
“He must have learned something—or suspected something—about that house or someone living there.”
Inskel agreed excitedly. “Yes. Of course. If the inventor of the Honsun Len does live there, or even if he comes there occasionally, Kaynor would have been prepared to deal with him. And he would expect him to have a weapon of his own and be able to defend himself.”
“If the girl was the Honsun Len’s inventor—” Garzot began.
“But she wasn’t,” Egarn said impatiently. “If they had suspected that, they would have acted differently. Kaynor was trying to pull away from her.”
“However it happened, Kaynor must have thought they were close to completing their mission,” Arne said. “That is why he had his weapon in his hand. If I am right, they won’t leave Rochester until their work is finished, and there is no need to search for them all over the city. All we have to do is keep watching DuRosche Court. They will be back.”
“In that case, they certainly will be back,” Egarn agreed.
Inskel made the adjustments to bring the DuRosche mansion and its grounds into focus. Egarn sat down with a sigh. “I do hope you are right,” he said. He looked about him. “What
When new sentries came on duty at the entrance to the ruins, Ellar, who was acting as head sentry, conferred with Havler, who was to replace him. He remarked that Gevis had gone scrounging and hadn’t yet returned.
“That is odd,” Havler said. “Where did he go?”
“He went to search some herders’ huts,” Ellar said. “I don’t think he intended to be gone this long, but maybe he found so much he is having trouble carrying it back.”
“Maybe he found some wine, and he is having trouble drinking it all,” Havler said. Then he added worriedly, “They shouldn’t have let him go alone. He was the assistant schooler—probably he had never been outside the village. Now someone will have to look for him.”
“He will be back soon,” Ellar said confidently.
Half the niot was gone when Gevis finally returned. Connol, who met him at the checkpoint, had been expecting him for hours. He identified him with a flash of light—as though Gevis’s shrill voice wasn’t immediately recognizable—and passed him on to Havler.
“What took you so long?” Havler asked.
“I went further than I had planned,” Gevis said.
“The way back is always seems further than the way out,” Havler said with a chuckle. He obligingly opened the tunnel for Gevis. As he straightened up, Gevis buried a knife in his back, pulled his body aside, and positioned himself to guard the alarm wire. That was the critical point. He had been told that over and over—he must not permit anyone to pull the alarm wire.
Only then did he shout the signal, a “Ho!” that echoed through the trees. The Lantiff, who had been stealthily edging into position in a wide circle around the ruins, surged forward. Sentries shouted the alarm and put up a token resistance, killing a number of the Lantiff with Egarn’s weapon and holding the others off long enough for the head sentry to pull the alarm wire and make his own escape—or so they thought. Then they attempted to slip away themselves, but the encircling Lantiff had already blocked all of their escape routes. Arne had not foreseen the possibility of attack by an entire army of Lantiff. The sentries continued to spread death and devastation through the forest until their weapons were exhausted. Then they killed Lantiff with their knives until they bled to death from their wounds. None of them were taken alive.
With the Lantiff fully in control of the surrounding forest, Gevis led a picked squad through the tunnel to the stairwell. He paused while the Lantiff removed their shoes, and then he clumped down the stairs in his usual noisy fashion—members of Egarn’s team used this ploy to let the guards below know one of their own was coming—and the Lantiff tiptoed after him, wincing with every step on the metal mesh of the stairs. They halted one flight from the bottom. Behind them a second squad, shoeless like the first, was silently descending half way. Behind it, a third squad was waiting its turn and a fourth was working its way through the tunnel.
Gevis moved haltingly forward through the darkness to the checkpoint where the candle flickered. He performed the prescribed ritual of standing under it and then moved on to the concealed door.
The door swung open. On this night the guard was Larnor, a refugee from the south and a former potter, who had been a special friend of Gevis’s. Larnor had an unlikely interest in history, and he had been fascinated with what Gevis told him about the world of the past. He greeted the assistant schooler with his usual question. “Anything moving up there?”
Gevis said nothing was moving, but the weather was nice. As Larnor turned to bar the door, Gevis stabbed him in the back—and then had to stab him again because Larnor began to struggle with him. As the potter slumped to the floor, Gevis murmured, “I’m sorry, Larnor—but I don’t want to be blown out like a candle.”
Gevis pushed the body aside and returned to the corridor, closing the unbarred door behind him. At the stairwell, he whistled softly. The first squad of Lantiff tiptoed to the bottom. The second squad began its descent. The third waited at the top of the stairs to charge down the moment it was needed.
Gevis returned to the door where he had killed Larnor. The Lantiff followed cautiously at a distance. Now everything depended on the next guard post, where two men were posted. They had to be killed before either could give the alarm.
