The Last Ringbearer

by Kirill Yeskov

  No! No! No-o-o-o! It's untrue, this can't be happening -- not to him, Captain of the Secret Guard Marandil, the chief of Gondorian station in Umbar! Yet already they are dragging him down the steep chipped stairs (out of the blue he remembered that there were twenty of them, with a large hole in the fourth step from the bottom); once in the basement, they shake him out of his clothes and hang him up by the tied thumbs off a large hook in the ceiling beam. Then Mongoose's face appears in front of his again, eye to eye:

  "I'm not interested in your games with the Umbarian Secret Service right now. What I want to know is who advised you to point the Elves to our team by siccing their underground on His Majesty's Secret Guard? Who in Minas Tirith are you working for -- Arwen's people? What do they know about Tangorn's mission?"

  "I know nothing about that, I swear by anything!" he croaks, twisting with pain in dislocated joints, understanding full well that this is just a warm-up. "I gave no orders to kidnap that Algali -- Aravan is either crazy or working for himself..."

  "Please begin, Sergeant. So who told you to reveal me to the Elves?" They know their job well and doze the pain just so, not allowing him to slip away into unconsciousness... Then it is all over: the mercy of the Valar is truly boundless, and Vaira's gentle palms pick him up and carry him to the safest refuge -- the gloomy halls of Mandos. ...The sun was shining straight into Marandil's eyes -- it was almost noon. Groaning, he raised his head (heavy like he had not slept at all) off the rolled-up cloak he had used as a pillow, trying either to swallow or spit out the scream stuck in his dry throat. Habitually he felt for an unfinished bottle of rum by the couch, pulled the cork out with his teeth and took a few large swigs. Alcohol did not help much any more; he had to sniff kokkaine to really wake up. Over the last few days fear ate up the chief of station from the inside, leaving only a pitiful shell behind. The captain did not step outside the embassy now and slept only in the daytime, in his clothes: somehow he had convinced himself that Mongoose was going to come for him at midnight, just like in his nightmares.

  The nightmares were varied and diverse. In them, Mongoose's special ops team would now slip into his office like shadows, nin'yokve-style, then arrive ghost-like right out of the large Khandian wall mirror (when he woke up after that one, he smashed it first thing), or simply break down his door like a regular police squad, uniformed and armed with official papers. His most vivid recollection was of a dream in which he was attacked by four cat-sized bats. Fleet and impervious, they chased the captain all over the building, chirping angrily and slapping his head with their leathery wings, going for the eyes; the palms with which he had shielded his face and the back of his head were both already torn into bloody pulp by their tiny sharp teeth, and only then did the usual end come: "Captain Marandil, you're under arrest in the name of the King. Sergeant, take his weapons, badge, and keys to the safe. To the basement with him!"

  "Mister Secretary! Mister Secretary, wake up!" Finally he realized that he did not wake up by himself -- there was a courier mincing in the door. "Sir Ambassador is summoning you right now."

  Right now -- that was new. When he received the letter with Aravan's testimony ten days prior in the morning mail, Sir Eldred, the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Reunited Kingdom, demanded an explanation from the chief of station. Hearing nothing but pitiful

  "not my doing, not our affair," he began avoiding the captain like the plague, demonstratively severing all contact with him. The most horrible thing was that the legend that Tangorn had dictated to Aravan sounded so persuasive that Marandil doubted his own sanity: what if he had, indeed, given the order while out of his mind? He became so convinced that he did away with the wounded Morimir (what if he, too, confirms the order to kidnap Algali once he wakes up?); he did it in a hurry, clumsily, leaving plenty of clues and no way to go back. Marandil felt a suffocating emptiness around himself: his subordinates, to a man, avoided his glance, and all conversation stopped in any room he entered. He knew that it was high time to flee, but he was afraid of being alone in the city even more. The only hope was that DSD would get to Mongoose before he got to him; he no longer believed that his own guard (which was so instructed) would be able to stop him.

  "What's the big hurry?" he asked the courier gloomily, trying to smooth out his crumpled clothes.

  "They've found some corpse and say it's your department -- plenty of small scars around the mouth."

  Marandil almost ran into the Ambassador's office and was immediately grabbed by two bedraggled men in dirty jackets who had stationed themselves on either side of the door. Sir Eldred stood a bit aside, affronted aristocratic dignity and bureaucratic servility blending weirdly in his stance and expression -- it was obvious that His Eminence had just been administered the proverbial acid enema, a couple of pails worth at least. His chair was occupied by none other than cross-legged Mongoose himself, as dirty as his subordinates.

  "Captain Marandil, you're under arrest in the name of the King. Sergeant, take his weapons, badge, and keys to the safe. To the basement with him!" Standing up, he said over his shoulder: "Sir Ambassador, I strongly advise you to find the chief of security and kick his ass. There are at least four ways to get in here, but to fail to even put grates on the sewer openings -- such sloppiness is utterly beyond belief! Don't be surprised to find a gypsy camp in the courtyard and a couple of sleeping bums in the lobby one day..." No! No! No-o-o-o! It's untrue, this can't be happening -- not to him, Captain of the Secret Guard Marandil, the chief of Gondorian station in Umbar! Yet already they are dragging him down the steep chipped stairs (out of the blue he remembered that there were twenty of them, with a large hole in the fourth step from the bottom); once in the basement, they shake him out of his clothes and hang him up by the tied thumbs off a large hook in the ceiling beam. Then Mongoose's face appears in front of his again, eye to eye:

  "I'm not interested in your games with the Umbarian Secret Service right now. What I want to know is who advised you to point the Elves to our team by siccing their underground on His Majesty's Secret Guard? Who in Minas Tirith are you working for -- Arwen's people? What do they know about Tangorn's mission?"

  "I know nothing about that, I swear by anything!" he croaks, twisting with pain in dislocated joints, understanding full well that this is just a warm-up. "I gave no orders to kidnap that Algali -- Aravan is either crazy or working for himself..."

  "Please begin, Sergeant. So who told you to reveal me to the Elves?" They know their job well and doze the pain just so, not allowing him to slip away into unconsciousness... Then it is all over: the mercy of the Valar is truly boundless, and Vaira's gentle palms pick him up and carry him to the safest refuge -- the gloomy halls of Mandos. You wish!

  "You bastard, don't even hope to die before you tell everything you know! Which of Arwen's people are you working for? How do you communicate?" Nothing was over. It was only beginning...

  Chapter 50

  Umbar, the Long Dam

  June 27, 3019

  The Long Dam of Umbar is not among the Twelve Wonders of the World as enumerated by Ash-Sharam in his Universal History, but that is only a testament to the biases of that great Vendotenian: he preferred pretty playthings like the Barad-Dur tower and the Hanging Temple of Mendor to functional buildings, no matter how grandiose. The seven-hundred- fathom dam that joined the Peninsula to the Islands four centuries ago never failed to impress newcomers to Umbar: it was wider than any city street and allowed two-way caravan traffic. That was what it was built for, actually -- so that the merchants moving goods via the Chevelgar Highway to and from the continent would not have to bother with ferries. Not for free, of course: idle tongues insisted that the sheer volume of silver coins charged as tolls over those four centuries was enough to erect another dam of the same size. A small town of gaudy pavilions, tents, and bamboo cabins sprawled before the massive Customs House, which straddled the dam at the Peninsula end. Here, a merchant worn out by the five-day trek over the winding stretches of the Chevelg
ar Highway had every opportunity to spend his money on things much more pleasant than custom collectors. The gray shish-kebab smoke rising from the mangals was almost tastier than the shish-kebabs themselves, women of all skin colors and sizes unobtrusively paraded their charms, soothsayers and mages promised to predict the outcome of your next business deal for just a piccola, or forever wipe out all your competitors for a castamir... Beggars forcefully pled for mercy, pickpockets trawled the crowds, con artists competed for marks; the policemen calmly plied their racket nearby (this was a rich pasture, to say the least. It is said that a certain rookie policeman had once petitioned his sergeant with the following written request:

  "Due to severe financial circumstances thanks to the birth of my third child, I request at least a temporary transfer to the Long Dam"). In other words, it was a miniature Umbar in all its glory.

  Today the line crawled like never before. Not only did the customs inspectors appeared about to fall asleep on their feet (while still sticking their noses into every sack), but there was a bottleneck on the dam itself, where the road workers just had to be replacing the roadway cover. A huge black-bearded caravan-bashi from Khand already realized that the customs officials -- may the Almighty strike them with fever and boils! -- have wasted so much of his time that he and his bactrians were not going to make it to the Islands before lunch, and therefore today's marketing was gone to the dogs. All right, why worry and fume now -- it's all the Almighty's will. He told his assistant to watch the animals and goods while he was checking out the tent city.

  After filling up in one of the eateries (lagman, three portions of excellent saffron meat stew and a plate of dried-fruit finger pies), he headed back but detoured to a small stage where an olive-skinned dancer dressed only in a few flying strips of cloth was undulating invitingly. Two mountain men from the Peninsula were devouring her with their eyes (especially the shapely thighs moving back and forth in an unmistakable rhythm and the slick belly), not forgetting to either spit from time to time, as if in disgust ("What do the towners find in these skinny sluts?"), or to trade heartfelt generalities on the subject of townswomen's lack of virtue. The caravan-bashi was already figuring what a closer encounter with the dancer in her tent behind the stage was going to cost him, when fate brought a Hakimian preacher out of nowhere. The bald mummy with his rotten rags and burning eyes immediately poured out a storm of denunciations on the heads of "lechers who gaze lustily on the vile show put on by our fallen sister." The `fallen sister' did not give a damn, but the caravaner decided to retire from the scene promptly, lest the holy man brand him with some nightmarish curse.

  He did want a woman something awful, though -- five days of withdrawal, man! He scanned his immediate environs, and what do you know -- what he was looking for was right there, a few steps away. The girl did not look like much at first glance -- a skinny kid of seventeen or so with a large well-seasoned black eye to boot -- but the Khandian checked out her supple figure with his trained eye and almost licked his lips openly -- this, guys, was quite something! Cover her face with a rag and go ahead.

  "You bored, lass?"

  "Keep moving," the girl responded indifferently in a husky but pleasant voice. "I'm not in the business, buddy."

  "Not in the business, or haven't had a decent offer yet? Don't you worry, I pay real well!" With a laugh, as if jokingly, he grabbed her hand with an iron grip. The girl responded with a short tirade that would easily make a pirate bosun blush, freed her hand from the caravaner's paw with one precise learned movement, and quickly stepped back into the alleyway between a patched tent and a rickety reed-mat pavilion. Actually, there is nothing difficult about that -- you have to pull away strictly in the direction of the assailant's thumb tip -- but it is impressive the first time around and usually leads to proper conclusions. This time, though, the agitated caravan-bashi (some little whore will play hard-to-get with me?!) stampeded into the alleyway after his elusive prey. Not half a minute later the Khandian was back to the plaza. He was stepping gingerly now, almost tip-toeing, hugging his right hand to his belly with his left and quietly moaning. Sorry, man, you screwed up. It is child's play for even a rookie DSD operative to dislocate the thumb of a hand extended in a threat, and the girl was far from a rookie. A short time afterwards Fay (as she was known to her colleagues in the Department) was back to her assigned section of the plaza, but the unlucky caravaner would not have recognized her even were he to bump into her: the young whore was gone, replaced by a water-selling boy -- ragged and dirty-faced, but with no sign of a black eye, and it is precisely such distinctive features that observers typically notice. She was back to her post just in time: the blind beggar sitting at the very entrance to the dam whined: "Help me if you can, kind folks!" instead of his usual "Kind folks, help me if you can!" -- a `come here' signal. Of course, Fay remembered their quarry's description (brown-haired northerner, six feet tall, gray eyes, thirty-two but looks younger, slight right limp) word for word, despite only working operation support today, reporting directly to the blind beggar who worked recognition. Of course, she had no idea that the blind beggar was the Vice-Director for Operations himself, just like she had no knowledge of the stern warning Jacuzzi had received the day before -- that if his Tangorn-catching venture did not bear fruit within a day, he would not get away with just being fired without a pension. With a piercing "Water, water, cold water with ice!" the girl slipped expertly into the crowd, trying to figure out who had attracted the chief's attention.

  A cart loaded with what appeared to be sacks of corn was just entering the dam. A tall slender mountain man of about twenty-eight to thirty led a couple of mules pulling it; the gap between his raspberry fez and the pavement was exactly the required six feet. As for everything else... even discounting the lack of a limp (which could have been a distractive ruse like her erstwhile black eye), the man's eyes were definitely not gray. What about the sacks? The sacks are a serious possibility, which is why the baron has no hopes there. To get past the dam in a barrel or a sack is too obvious a move; it is so overused, banal, and ridiculed that its very kitschiness might tempt Tangorn, who is known for his paradoxical solutions. This is why the customs inspectors are working especially hard today (a rumor about undercover Treasury auditors had been planted among them), and a specially trained dog surreptitiously checks every single cart (which move very slowly because of the road repairs).

  Having thus ruled out both the sacks and their owner, Fay glanced sharply at a team of mounted gendarmes with their catch -- six mountain men chained in pairs -- that had cut into the line ("Watch out! Move back -- want some whip?"), made sure they looked all right and looked beyond them. Ah, so that's it!

  A group of Hakimian pilgrims returning home from Shavar-Shavan -- a traditional three- week pilgrimage to one of their mountain shrines. About thirty people with their faces hooded as a sign of contrition, almost a half of them either epileptics or handicapped, including lameness. A truly ideal cover -- even if they recognize the baron (practically impossible), how will they extract him from the crowd of pilgrims? By force, employing the team of `road workers?' That will start a melee that doesn't bear thinking about, not to mention a possible deadly clash between Hakimians and Aritanians tomorrow in the city. Entice him to move aside? How? These thoughts almost caused Fay to miss the moment when `her' blind man got up, yielding his lucrative spot to another member of the beggars guild, and followed the pilgrims, his cane clacking on the pavement; this meant that he had recognized Tangorn with certainty.

  A few moments later Fay morphed from a water-carrier into a guide. The two mountain men that together with the hapless caravan-bashi had been ogling the dancer were following a little behind (one of them was Ras-Shua, DSD's resident spy on the Peninsula), followed by a strange group of two shady-looking young men and a worn customs official. Lunch time had arrived for the road workers; they began heading into town, too. The trap on the dam had worked flawlessly, thanks to the old hand Jacuzzi.

  "
Girl, he did a great job. The idea is excellent, I applaud him. To be honest, it was pure dumb luck that I recognized him; the rest of our guys just plain missed him. Too bad he's not playing on our side..."

  The Vice-Director's voice was almost tender: a victory invites both magnanimousness and self-criticism. He remembered the little caf No on Great Castamir's Square, the goblet of N rnen he had drunk to the gondolier's success, and his verdict: "He is, indeed, an amateur -- a brilliant and lucky one, but he'll be lucky once or twice and the third time he'll break his neck..." Now is the third time -- no one can stay lucky forever.

  "How did you recognize him under the hood?"

  "The hood? Oh, you think he is one of the pilgrims?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Of course not. He's a prisoner, the right one in the first pair. His face is covered with a bloody cloth, and they all limp -- the leg irons are no joke."

  "But the gendarmes..."

  "The gendarmes are real, and he's a real prisoner, that's the point! An excellent and really elegant solution. Don't halt or gape -- people will notice. Learn from the pros while they're still around, girl... I mean him, not me."

  Chapter 51

  "I still don't understand... I mean, I don't understand fully," Fay admitted, seeing that her chief was in a great mood and thus predisposed to explain.

  "He figured correctly: the gendarmes were sure to attract our attention -- a captured uniform is standard cover -- but their catch, provided the gendarmes were real, were much less likely to do so. So he became their catch. I don't know how yet, but it's not really important. There are many ways... for example, he could come to Irapuato and spill half a mug of wine on one of them in the local tavern. They'd beat him up, of course (giving him an excuse to bandage his bloodied face), but then they'd take him into the city without hindrance, hiding him in the best possible hideout for a couple months; neither we nor Aragorn's people would look for him in jail. That is, if he wants to lie low; otherwise he could contact one of his people -- Alviss, say -- through the criminals, and they'd buy him out in a day or two. Well, my plans don't include letting him cool his heels in a jail cell."