The Last Ringbearer

by Kirill Yeskov

  "You have already seen everything you need, Beregond. You are not guilty of Denethor's death; you can sleep calmly."

  "What?! What did you say?"

  "You are not guilty of Denethor's death," the prince repeated. "Forgive me, but I had to trick you: this is, indeed, his palant r. It is true that blackened fingers can be seen in it, but only those who were involved in the murder of the King of Gondor see them. You saw nothing, so you're innocent. On that day your will had been paralyzed by someone's powerful magic, most likely Elvish."

  "Is this true?" Beregond whispered. "Perhaps you just want to console me, and this is some other palant r..." (Please tell me it's not so!)

  "Think about it -- who would give me another palant r? They only gave this one back to me because they believe it to be irretrievably damaged; they can see nothing in it past Denethor's hands, which block the entire field of vision. Luckily, they don't even suspect that people innocent of the crime can still use it."

  "So why did you tell me that it was another one?"

  "Well, you see... you're trusting and easily influenced, Beregond, and the Elves and Mithrandir have used that. I was afraid that you'd convince yourself that you could see that picture; self-hypnosis does weirder things sometimes... But now, praise Eru, it's over."

  "It's over," Beregond repeated hoarsely. He kneeled and stared at the prince with such doglike devotion that the latter was embarrassed. "So you will let me serve you, just like before?"

  "Yes, I will, but please rise immediately. Now, tell me: am I the sovereign of Ithilien to you?"

  "How else, Your Highness?!"

  "If so, do I have the right, while remaining a vassal of the Crown of Gondor, to replace the personal guard imposed on me by the King?"

  "Certainly, but this is easier said than done. The White Company is only nominally under my command; I'm more of a quartermaster here."

  "Yes, I've figured that out. Who are they, by the way -- D nedain?"

  "The soldiers are, but as for officers and sergeants -- those are all from the King's Secret Guard. Nobody knows where they came from to Gondor; there're rumors --" Beregond shot a glance at the door, "that they're living dead. Nor can I figure out who their chief is."

  "Well, well... in any case we should get rid of these guys, the sooner the better. So, Captain -- will you take the risk by my side?"

  "You have saved my honor; therefore, my life is yours with no reservations. But three against forty..."

  "I think that we're way more than three." Beregond stared at the prince in amazement.

  "About a week ago the men from one of the forest hamlets brought a cart of smoked deer meat to the fort and got into an argument with the gate guards -- those demanded that they leave their bows outside, as is their procedure. There was a black-haired guy there who made a big racket: how come noblemen can enter the Prince's residence armed, but the merry men from the Blackbird Hamlet can't? Do you remember?"

  "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 on the left wall at elbow height, just right for a note. One can't be seen using the drop either from the top or the bottom of the stairs, I've checked. Now. 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 palant r, and you saw Denethor's hands in it. 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 grim single blacksmith who had moved here from Anfalas and apparently have 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 have to investigate a premeditated murder. 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 there was no turning back.

  Chapter 23

  Mountains of Shadow, Hotont pass

  May 12, 3019

  "There'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 eddies, 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 yokel who just saw a carnival magician pull a gold coin out of his ear -- all these concealed an excellent warrior, both skilled and ruthless. 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 through all these 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, looking at 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 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, as 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 main command of the Resistance. It was led by a commissioned officer, one Lieutenant Ivar, a one-armed veteran of the North Army. A native of this 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 "the Drummer." The lieutenant had weighed Haladdin's nazg l ring fearlessly in his hand, nodded and asked only one question: what can he do to assist sir Field Medic in his mission? Escort their recon team to Ithilien? No problem. His opinion is 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, one Matun, is away on a mission. Can you wait three or four days? No problem, then; this will let you 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 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 often went beyond any reasonable measure, acutely embarrassing Haladdin. At least now he understood where the amazing ambience of the Barad-Dur house of his classmate Kumai came from.

  The Trolls have always lived together 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 these miniature fortresses later made Troll expatriates into the leading city builders of Mordor. Their other line was metallurgy. First they perfected blacksmithing, making weapons cheap and therefore widely available; then they mastered working with iron-nickel alloys (most of the ores in the region were self-legated), 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 total 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 powers understood this well and therefore did nothing but recruit warriors here, which much flattered the Trolls. Later, though, when mining and metal refining became their main occupation, the sale of those commodities was hit with a stupendous tax, but the Trolls did not seem to care -- their indifference to wealth and luxury was already legendary, along with 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, aggressive, 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 of the Mordorian problem' have finished `mopping up' the foothills and went to work on the Trolls in their Ash and Shadow Mountains gorges, they quickly discovered that fighting mountain men was rather different from collecting ears in Gorgoroth. The Trollish villages have been decimated or worse -- thousands of men have perished in the march on Esgaroth and on the Field of Pelennor -- 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 narrowest points, where ten good warriors can hold back an entire army for hours, while catapults on the slopes above methodically pound the paralyzed enemy column. Having thrice buried large companies of the enemy under man-made avalanches in the gorges, the Trolls then expanded their operations to the foothills, so that the Easterlings and the Elves alike 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

  There 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 Ivar highly interesting ideas for reconnaissance operations. The maestro had been one of the country's leading crooks; during the fall of Barad-Dur he was serving a five-year sentence there 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 firms of the capital) have 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 exigencies of war brought him to the guerillas instead of to Umbar.

  The maestro was a fountainhead of assorted talents; having sorely missed learned conversation, he willingly demonstrated those to Haladdin. For example, he could perfectly imitate anyone's handwriting, 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 games with my mind... It turned out to be simultaneously simpler and more complex. Haddami was a genius graphologist able to put together a complete psychological profile of an author and then morph 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 bewilderment 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 even 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 went through its contents with a fine-tooth comb during their sojourn at Morgai, looking for any clues for entry into L rien, but have found nothing useful. Now Haladdin wanted, for reasons unclear to himself, to have the Elf's psychological portrait.

  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, your entire method isn't worth a damn!" he stated, and then described to
the startled expert what he had seen in Teshgol, sparing him no grisly detail.

  "Listen, doctor," somewhat haggard Haddami said after a pause, "I still insist -- it wasn't him there, in that Teshgol of yours..."

  "What do you mean, it wasn't him?! Perhaps he personally hadn't raped an eight-year-old girl before slitting her throat, but he commanded the people who did!"

  "No, no, Haladdin, that's not at all what I mean! See, this is a deep, unimaginably deep (for us humans) split of personality. Imagine for a moment that you had to participate in something like Teshgol -- just had to. You have a mother whom you love dearly; with the Elves, it can't be otherwise, since children are very few and every member of society is truly invaluable. I suspect that you'd do everything possible to keep any knowledge of this nightmare from her, and knowing the Elves' perceptiveness, simple lying or even withholding information would not be enough. This would require you to really turn into another person. Two totally different personalities in one creature -- for internal and external consumption, so to speak. Do you understand me?"

  "To be honest, not really. Split personalities are not my field of expertise." Strangely, apparently it was this conversation that pointed Haladdin towards the solution to the main problem he has been working on, and this solution shocked him with its primitiveness. It had been lying right there, on the surface, and now it seemed to him that he had been deliberately looking away, pretending not to see it. That evening the doctor got back to the tower to which they have been assigned late at night; the hosts were already in bed, but the fire was still burning in the hearth, and he sat there motionless, staring fixedly at the orange embers. He did not even notice when the baron appeared by his side.

  "Listen, Haladdin, you look upset. Want a drink?"

  "Yes... I suppose I do." The local vodka burned his mouth and rolled along his spine like a spasm; he wiped his eyes and looked for a place to spit. The drink did not make him feel better, but did add a measure of detachment. Tangorn disappeared into the dark and returned with another stool.