The Last Ringbearer (17 page)

“Yes, I recall something like that; so?”

“So that guy was Baron Grager, lieutenant of the Ithilien regiment and my resident spy in Khand before the war. I’m inclined to think that he’s not alone in that Blackbird Hamlet. Your task is to establish contact with Grager, then we’ll play it by ear. You and I will only contact each other via a dead drop from now on – if you stand on the sixteenth step of the spiral staircase in the northern wing, there is a small crack in the left wall at elbow height, just right for a note. One can’t be seen using this drop either from the top or the bottom of the stairs, I’ve checked. Next, once you leave here, pretend to go on a drinking binge for a couple of days, since I’ve asked you to try and contact Aragorn via the
palantír
, and you beheld Denethor in it, of course … Don’t overdo it, though: the White officers seem very perceptive.”

That same evening the first crime occurred in the Settlement – arson. Some idiot fired – no, not the house of a successful romantic rival, nor the warehouse of an innkeeper who refused to pour him one on credit, nor the hayloft of a haughty neighbor. Rather, someone burned down the pigeon coop belonging to a sullen single blacksmith who had moved here from Anfalas and apparently has kept some city habits. The blacksmith loved his pigeons beyond all else, and promised a silver mark to whoever would lead him to the arsonist. The local police, in the persons of two White Company sergeants, turned the neighborhood upside down: knowing the mores of the Anfalasians, it was a safe bet that if the guilty party were not jailed quickly, very soon they would be investigating a premeditated murder rather than arson.

Faramir listened to this crazy story with an eyebrow raised high – he was very surprised. More precisely, he really was surprised. There were only two possibilities: either the foe had made his first major blunder, or, conversely, he has figured out the prince’s entire plan. Either way the Game has begun; it has begun earlier than he expected and not how he expected, but now there was no turning back.

CHAPTER 23

Mountains of Shadow, Hotont pass

May 12, 3019

T 
here’s your Ithilien.” The mountain Troll put down the sack and pointed forward, where the thick chaparral of low scrub oak piled up in the gorge below like dense clouds of light-green smoke. “I can go no further, but you won’t get lost, the path is well-trod. You’ll hit a stream in about an hour; the ford is a bit downstream. Looks scary, but it’s fine to cross. The thing there is not to be scared and step right into the breakers, that’s where the water is calmest. Just re-pack and go.”

“Thank you, Matun!” Haladdin firmly shook the guide’s shovel-wide hand. The Troll resembled a bear in both looks and demeanor: a good-natured placid honey-eater capable of turning, in a blink of an eye, into a deadly fighting machine fearsome even more in its swiftness and cunning than in its monstrous strength. The bulbous nose, the unkempt red beard, the expression of a bumpkin who just saw a carnival magician pull a gold coin out of his ear – all these concealed an excellent warrior, both skilled and merciless. Looking at him, Haladdin always recalled what he had heard once: peaceful family men make the best fighters – when a man like this one, coming home from work one day, finds nothing but charred bones in the ruins of his home.

He glanced once again at the snowy masses of the Mountains of Shadow looming over them – not even Tzerlag would have been able to get their company past all those ice pools, vertical moss-covered walls and vast rhododendron-covered slopes.

“When you get back to the base, please take care to remind Ivar to meet us in this same place in July.”

“No worries, buddy, the chief never forgets anything. We have an agreement, so we’ll be here through last week of July come hell or high water.”

“Right. And if we’re not here by August first, drink one to the rest of our souls.”

In parting, Matun slapped Tzerlag’s shoulder so that he barely kept his feet: “Be well, scout!” He and the Orocuen had become fast friends during the last few days. Of course, he did not even nod at Tangorn; had he only leave to do what he wanted to this Gondorian dude … Whatever, the officers know better. He had fought in Ivar the Drummer’s guerilla band since the beginning of the occupation and knew full well that one is supposed to wait for a scouting team’s return at the rendezvous point for no more than three days, and here the orders were for a full week! A mission of special importance, see? So the Gondorian dude must not be here just for show, either.

Yes, Haladdin thought, watching the rhythmically bobbing pack on the baron’s back, it all depends on Tangorn now: whether he can protect us in Ithilien the way we’ve protected him up to now. He’s Prince Faramir’s personal friend – that’s great, but we have to get to this wonderful prince first. Plus it may very well turn out that this Faramir is nothing but Aragorn’s puppet, while the baron has rather peculiar relations with Minas Tirith authorities – he may have already been declared an outlaw … In other words, we may easily hang together, either in the forest if we run into a Gondorian patrol, or on the wall of Emyn Arnen; the funniest thing is that in the forest the baron will hang with us, while in the fort we’ll hang with him. Yeah, the right company is key …

Such gloomy thoughts must have bothered the baron about ten days ago, when they confirmed that the route to Ithilien through Morgul Vale and the Cirith Ungol pass had been sealed shut by Elvish outposts, which meant that they had to seek help from the guerillas in the Mountains of Shadow. The worst fate would have been to run into one of the smaller bands that acknowledged no authority and were seeking nothing but revenge; no talk about any mission would have helped, and the guerillas now killed their prisoners with no less cruelty than their enemies did. Fortunately, using Sharya-Rana’s information, Tzerlag managed to locate in the Shara-Teg Gorge a well-regulated company reporting to the united command of the Resistance. It was led by a commissioned officer, Lieutenant Ivar, a one-armed veteran of the North Army. A native of the area, he had turned the gorge into an unassailable fastness; among other things, he instituted a remarkable audible warning system on all the observation posts, earning himself the nickname “Drummer.”

The lieutenant had weighed Haladdin’s nazgúl ring fearlessly in his palm, nodded and asked only one question: what could he do to assist sir Field Medic in his mission? Escort their recon team to Ithilien? No problem. His opinion was that they should use the Hotont pass; since it’s considered to be impassable during this time of year, it’s most likely unguarded from the Ithilien side. Unfortunately, his best guide, Matun, was away on a mission. Could they wait three or four days? No problem, then; this would let them rest and fatten up a little, too – it’ll be one arduous trek … Only when all three of them got back the weapons of which they had been relieved by the forward guard did Tangorn return the poison from Eloar’s medkit he had borrowed from the doctor.

Haladdin had never been to this part of the country before, so now he observed the daily life of the Shara-Teg Gorge with genuine interest. The mountain Trolls lived spartanly but conducted themselves with truly princely dignity; to an outsider, only their hospitality went beyond any measure reasonable to an outsider sometimes, acutely embarrassing Haladdin. At least now he understood where the amazing ambience of the Barad-dúr house of his university classmate Kumai came from.

The Trolls have always lived in large tight-knit families, and since the only way to put up a house big enough for thirty people on a steep slope is to build up, their abodes were thick-walled stone towers twenty to thirty feet high. The stonemasonry experience accumulated in the building of those miniature fortresses later made Troll expatriates into the leading city builders of Mordor. Their other line was metallurgy. First they discovered blacksmithing, making weapons cheap and therefore widely available; then they mastered working with iron-nickel alloys (most of the local iron ores were naturally alloyed), and since then the swords worn by every local male over the age of twelve were the best in Middle Earth. Not surprisingly, the Trolls never knew any authority other than their own elders: only a complete idiot will attack a Trollish tower and sacrifice half of the attacking force only to gain a dozen scrawny sheep as booty (or church tithe).

The Mordorian authorities understood this well and therefore did nothing but recruit warriors here, which much flattered the mountain men. Later, though, when mining and metal refining became their main occupations, the sale of those commodities was hit with a stupendous tax, but the Trolls seemed to regard all profits as the One’s gift – their indifference to wealth and luxury was already proverbial, just like their stubbornness. This also gave rise to a popular legend that the known Trolls were only a half of that people. The other half (mistakenly called ‘gnomes’ or ‘dwarves’ in the Western countries, in confusion with another mythical race – that of underground smiths) supposedly were wealth-crazy and spent all their lives in secret underground tunnels, searching for gold and gems; they were allegedly miserly, quarrelsome, treacherous – in other words, a mirror image of the real, above-ground Trolls. Be that as it may, the fact remains: the Trollish community gave Mordor many outstanding personalities, from generals and bladesmiths to scientists and preachers, but not a single merchant of note.

When the Western allies implementing ‘the final solution to the Mordorian problem’ have finished ‘mopping up’ the foothills and went to smoke out the Trolls from their Ash and Shadow Mountains gorges, they quickly discovered that fighting mountain men was rather different from collecting ears in Gorgoroth. The populations of the Trollish villages have been greatly reduced – thousands of men had perished in the march on Esgaroth and on the Pelennor Fields – but waging war in the confines of the mountains pretty much nullifies numerical advantages. The mountain dwellers always had the option to give battle in the tightest spots, where ten good warriors can hold back an entire army for hours while catapults on the slopes above methodically pound the paralyzed enemy column. After thrice burying large companies of invading enemies under man-made avalanches in their gorges, the Trolls took the fight to the foothills, so that now the Easterlings and the Elves in those parts did not dare stir out of a few well-fortified outposts at night. In the meantime, people from the plains kept arriving at the mountain villages which were now guerilla bases – if the end is near, better to meet it armed and not alone.

CHAPTER 24

T 
here were many intriguing personalities among those arriving in the Shara-Teg Gorge in those days. The doctor met one of them, a certain maestro Haddami, at Ivar’s headquarters, where the small parchment-faced Umbarian with inexpressibly sad eyes worked as a clerk, from time to time offering the lieutenant highly interesting ideas for reconnaissance operations. The maestro had been one of the country’s leading crooks; at the fall of Barad-dúr he was serving a five-year sentence in the local prison for a grandiose scam involving countersigned bank drafts. Being a financial ignoramus, Haladdin could not appreciate the technical details, but judging by the fact that the defrauded merchants (the heads of the three oldest trading houses of the capital) had expended a titanic effort to keep the prosecution out of court and thus out of the public eye, the scheme must have been very good indeed. With no opportunities to ply his trade in the ruined city, Haddami dug up his secreted gold and headed south towards his historical motherland, but the twists of fate which abound in war brought him to the Shara-Teg guerillas instead of to coveted Umbar.

The maestro was a fountainhead of assorted talents; having sorely missed learned conversation, he willingly demonstrated those to Haladdin. For example, he could imitate anyone’s handwriting with astounding perfection, which was certainly very useful in his craft. Nor was this simple forgery of signatures; far from it. After studying a few pages of the doctor’s notes, Haddami wrote a meaningful text which Haladdin first thought to be his own – I must have written and forgotten it; now he had found it and is playing head games with me …

It was both simpler and more complex. Haddami turned out to be a genius graphologist capable of putting together a precise psychological profile of an author from the peculiarities of his style and handwriting and then morphing into him, so that the texts he wrote in other people’s names were authentic, in a way. After the maestro told Haladdin everything he had learned about him from a few handwritten lines, the doctor experienced consternation liberally spiced with fear – this was real magic, and not benign, either. For a moment Haladdin was even sorely tempted to show the maestro some notes of Tangorn’s, although he clearly realized that this would have been much worse than simply snooping in someone’s private diary. No one has the right to know more about a person than he is willing to tell, and both friendship and love die together with the person’s right to privacy.

That was when he had a weird idea to submit Eloar’s letter (from the dead Elf’s possessions) to Haddami’s analysis. He and the baron had gone through it with a fine-tooth comb during their sojourn at Morgai, looking for any clues for entry into Lórien, but have found nothing useful. Now Haladdin wanted, for reasons unclear to himself, to obtain the Elf’s psychological portrait while he had a chance.

The results surprised him beyond belief. From the fine curlicues of runes, Haddami weaved a portrait of an exceptionally noble and likeable person, perhaps too dreamy, and open to the point of vulnerability. To Haladdin’s objections the graphologist insisted that his analysis of Eloar’s other notes on topography and logistics only confirmed his conclusions; there was no mistake.

Finally, Haladdin lost his patience. “If so, then your entire method isn’t worth a damn, maestro!” he stated, and then described to the startled expert what he had seen in Teshgol, sparing him no grisly detail.