Magnus glanced her way, then bowed his head gravely. “Good afternoon, Lieutenant.”
“Don’t give me ‘good afternoon,’ recruit!” Allouene advanced on him, eyes blazing. “Do you realize just what a churned-up mess you’ve made of things?”
“Not really,” Magnus answered, slowly and deliberately. “The castle fell, as you intended it to.”
“Yes, but we had to get an agent in to suggest strategy, after you shot out those first three cannon! You know you weren’t supposed to use modern sighting equipment!”
Magnus just stared. “You told the lords to surround the castle with energy projectors and fire all at once?”
“Not me—Oswald,” she said impatiently. “And he had the devil of a time getting into the camp and dreaming up a pretext to mention the notion, I can tell you!”
“So SCENT is responsible for the deaths of all those serfs.”
Allouene shrugged impatiently. “It would have happened eventually anyway—and as soon as we saw you were bound and determined not to let events take their course, we had to stop you, fast! How the hell did you blow up all those energy projectors, anyway?”
“A man who tries to use nuclear power as a weapon is a fool,” Magnus said evenly. “So you couldn’t take the chance that Aran might have been able to hold out.”
“He couldn’t possibly have lasted! It was just a matter of time before the other lords would squash him! The most he could hope for was martyrdom, so his example might inspire other men!”
“Or scare them off,” Magnus said evenly. “Besides, there was his granddaughter. Would you have left her an orphan? Or were you planning on her being martyred, too?”
“Don’t get smart with me, recruit! No matter how much you think of yourself, you’re just a bare beginner! You can’t possibly know anything about social change, beyond what I’ve taught you!”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Magnus retorted, “but true or not, I still know something of loyalty, and morality.”
“The ends justify the means, Gar! You know that!”
“The ends do not always justify the means,” he contradicted. “You must have a sense of proportion, a sense of balance.”
“It’s doctrine!”
“Doctrine by its nature is fallible. When it becomes inflexible, it opens itself to mistakes. You can’t live your life by principles alone; you have to have compassion, too. If you don’t, the best principles in the world can be corrupted into inhumanity. It’s people who matter, not causes.”
“If you honestly believe that, you can go someplace else to try to put it into practice!” Allouene snapped. “This is our planet, and we’ll push it toward democracy as we see fit! And so will you! You took an oath, and you’re under military discipline!”
“The oath I took was for the good of the people of the planets that SCENT would work on,” Magnus said evenly, “and the military can only apply discipline through a court-martial.”
“We’ll convene one.”
“You’ll have to start without me, then.” Allouene reddened, about to make another retort, but caught herself at the last instant. She took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “Look, Gar. The situation isn’t totally fouled up yet. We can still salvage something. Leave the old lord to his own devices. His peers will catch him and try him, and he’ll still be a martyr. Not as effective as dying in battle, but still good enough.”
“And the child Heloise will still be alone in the world. And I will be have lost my honor, and have to live with the knowledge that I abandoned a man to whom I had sworn loyalty. No.”
“Loyalty! Honor! You talk like somebody out of the Middle Ages!” Allouene snapped. “What have you done, gone native?”
“Let us say that I can understand the frame of reference,” Magnus said, poker-faced.
“Then remember this—you swore loyalty to us first!” Allouene blazed. “You have no right to louse up our plans this way!”
“And you have no right to interfere with these people and their society. If you’re going to do it at all, you should do it ethically.”
“There are no ethics when it comes to trying to change a society!”
“There are,” Magnus said. “You might start with trying to shorten the sufferings of the oppressed.”
“We can’t free them right away without starting a civil war! Even if they won and the lords were muzzled, the gentlemen and serfs don’t know enough to establish a viable democracy! They don’t even have the concept of human rights yet! Anything they build will fall apart! You’ll have anarchy! Warlords fighting it out! Everybody will suffer!”
“But you can save the ones who are in the worst trouble in the meantime,” Magnus retorted. “I won’t try to upset your plans, Lieutenant Allouene—but I won’t abandon this old lord, either.”
“You already have upset our plans. And how do you think you can save that old lord, anyway?”
“I’ll find a way,” Magnus answered.
Allouene suddenly calmed, watching him narrow-eyed. “No, you won’t—you already have, haven’t you? You’re too sure of yourself for anything else. You think you’ve figured out a way to save him! How?”
Magnus stood silent.
“Castlerock!” Allouene erupted. “You’re planning to take him to Castlerock!”
“An interesting idea,” Magnus replied.
“You fool, don’t you know you’ll never make it? It’s seventy miles to that inland sea! With a hundred lords and all their dogs and all their men in between!”
“There will be long odds, no matter what I do,” Magnus returned.
But the implications were just hitting Allouene. Her eyes widened in horror. “Damn! Castlerock, with all its escaped serfs, hit with a folk-hero like Lord Aran? You really do want to start that civil war, don’t you?”
“Revolution,” Magnus corrected, “and I don’t think it will start for several generations yet.”
“Castlerock can’t hold out for several years, let alone several generations! The lords will concentrate all their firepower on it! They can’t let it stand, especially not with Lord Aran there! The serfs will have to fight!”
“You could persuade the lords to ignore them,” Magnus said softly.
“Ignore them? Can you ignore a live hand grenade under your dinner table? They can’t allow it! We can’t allow it!” Then Allouene caught her breath, realizing what she had said.
So did Magnus. “Try to stop me,” he said.
Allouene’s eyes narrowed. “We will.”
CHAPTER 12
They tried. Oh, nothing overt—they couldn’t let their intervention be obvious, after all—but Oswald had recruited dozens of locals as his agents before Allouene and her team ever arrived, and had several in the lords’ camp; he saw to it that word of the fugitives’ whereabouts leaked to the noblemen.
Magnus, however, made sure he and Lord Aran weren’t there.
Oh, there were times when he couldn’t evade their hunters completely, times when Oswald outguessed him and he found a squadron of soldiers in his path, or was ambushed, or betrayed by an innkeeper or a ferryman; but a society with plenty of hounds and some modern technology was pitted against a psionic master with a medieval heart and a modern education. The lords didn’t really understand how their gadgets worked, but Magnus did. He saw to it that they stopped working; he saw to it that the soldiers were looking the other way as he and Lord Aran crept by; he countered the ambushes with telekinesis reinforcing karate.
Siflot, meanwhile, found the children and brought them to Magnus and Lord Aran, and together they fought their way through seventy miles of patrols and sentries, of checkpoints and cordons, until finally the day came when they found the escaped serfs, or the serfs found them.