Кирилл Еськов - The Last Ringbearer

Since Kumai was mostly looking towards Dol Guldur, he only saw the man walking the road from the direction of Mirkwood when he was about thirty yards away. Looking at the newcomer, the Troll first shook his head: no way! Then he sprinted towards the man head over heels and had him in a bear hug a moment later.

“Easy, big guy, you’ll break my ribs!”

“I have to know if you’re a ghost!.. When did they find you?”

“A while ago. Listen, first things first: Sonya is alive and well, she’s with the Resistance in the Ash Mountains…”

Haladdin listened to Kumai’s tale, staring at the busy milling of the earth bees over the heather flowers. Yeah, abandoned ruins with real hiding places, far from human habitation, where a normal person would never go… leave it to the Nazgúl to hide a palantír in such a hornet’s nest. I’m really lucky to have been intercepted before I had the chance to foist my clumsy story on a couple of intelligence professionals. I can’t tell Grizzly and Wolverine the truth, either. Just imagine this picture. Some field medic, second class, shows up at their super-extra-secret Weapon Monastery: hi, guys, I’m only here to pick up a palantír and go right back to Prince Faramir in Ithilien. I’m working for the Order of the Nazgúl, but the one who empowered me died on the spot, so no one can corroborate this fact. I can show you a Nazgúl ring as proof, but it’s magic-free… Yeah, a real pretty picture. They’ll probably peg me as a psycho, not even a spy. They’ll probably let me into the castle (poison experts aren’t common) but they won’t let me out – I myself wouldn’t have… Hey, wait a minute!..

“Halik, wake up! You all right?”

“Yes, I’m all right, sorry. I just had an idea. You see, I’m here on a special mission that has nothing to do with your Weapon Monastery… Have you ever heard of these rings?”

Kumai weighed the ring on his palm and whistled respectfully. “Inoceramium?”

“The same.”

“Do you mean to say…”

“I do. Engineer Second Class Kumai!”

“Sir!”

“In the name of the Order of the Nazgúl, will you follow my orders?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mind that your superiors in Dol Guldur must not know anything about this.”

“Do you realize what you’re saying?!”

“Kumai, my friend… I have no right to tell you what this is about, but I swear by everything that’s dear, I swear by Sonya’s life: this is the only thing that can still save our Middle Earth. It’s your choice. If I come to Grizzly, he’ll surely want to verify my credentials. It’ll be weeks if not months while his superiors contact mine, and in the meantime it will be all over. You think the Nazgúl are all-powerful? Like hell! They didn’t even tell me about these Secret Service games at Dol Guldur, most likely because they themselves didn’t know.”

“Yeah, that’s no wonder,” Kumai grumbled. “When you add secrecy to our usual chaos, there’s no verifying anything.”

“So will you do it?”

“I will.”

“Then listen and remember. There’s a fireplace in the Great Hall which has a six-sided stone in its rear wall…”

Ithilien, Emyn Arnen

July 12, 3019

There’s no harder work than waiting – this saying might as well be cast in bronze for its resistance to wear. It is even harder when waiting is your only work after everything else possible had been done and you only have to wait for the curtain signal – and wait and wait, day in and day out, for a signal that may never come at all, for this is already outside your control, with other Powers in charge.

Involuntarily idle at Emyn Arnen after his Dol Guldur trip, Haladdin caught himself sincerely envying Tangorn at his deadly game in Umbar: even risking your life every day is better than such waiting. How did he curse himself for these thoughts when a week ago haggard Faramir handed him the mithril coat: “…his last words were: ‘done.’”

Their return from Dol Guldur also came to his mind frequently. This time they failed to sneak through: the fighters from Mordorian intelligence that were guarding the paths through Mirkwood against the Elves had picked up their scent and followed them inexorably, like wolves follow a wounded deer. Now he knows the exact price of his life: forty silver marks that he paid Runcorn; if not for the ranger’s skill, they would have most certainly stayed in Mirkwood to feed the black butterflies. They ran into a trap on the shore of Anduin; when arrows flew, it was too late to yell: “Guys, we’re friendlies from a different service!” Back there he had shot poisoned Elvish arrows at his own people, and there’s no cleansing from that…

Do you know what the saddest thing is, dear Dr. Haladdin? You’re now bound with blood and have lost the right to choose, the One’s biggest gift. You’ll now be forever haunted by the young men in Mordorian uniforms without insignia who fell in the reeds by the Anduin, and by Tangorn, sent to certain death. Now, the moment you drop the quest you’ll be nothing but a murderer and a traitor. You have to win to make these sacrifices worthwhile, but in order to win you have to walk over corpses and wade through unthinkable muck, again and again – a vicious circle. And the most horrid job is still ahead of you; that you’ll be doing it with another’s hands – those of Baron Grager – makes no difference. What was it Tangorn had said back then? “An honest division of labor: clean hands for the mastermind, clean conscience for the executor.” Like hell…

(Tangorn ran a grand rehearsal of the key scene before he left for Umbar and concluded dispassionately: “This won’t work. You give yourself away by every look and the very tone of your voice. One can tell that you’re lying from a mile away without being an Elf, who are a lot more perceptive than we are. Forgive me – I should’ve realized right away that you’re incapable of doing this. Even if they swallow my bait in Umbar you won’t be able to angle the fish here.”

“I will – I have to.” “No. Please don’t argue, I won’t be able to do it, either. It’s not enough to have nerves of steel to play this part convincingly knowing the full background; one has to be not even a bastard, but completely inhuman.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Not at all, sir. Maybe you can become inhuman in time, but we have no time. The only solution is to use a cutout.”

“Use a what?”

“It’s our jargon. We need to involve an agent in the dark… sorry. In other words, the agent – an intermediary – has to believe that he’s telling the truth. Given who we’re dealing with, he has to be a top-notch professional.”

“You mean Baron Grager?”

“Hmm… As your sergeant would say: you get it, doc.”

“Under what pretext can we involve him?”

“The pretext is that we’re afraid that during negotiations the Elves will break into your brains with their magic or whatnot and turn the exchange into a robbery. Which is totally true, by the way. Plus it will be a little easier for you if you share this crock of shit with the baron. As the famous Su Vey Go used to say: ‘An honest division of labor: clean hands for the mastermind, clean conscience for the executor.’”

“Who was this Su Vey Go?”

“A spy, who else?”)

…The fish bit by the end of the eighty-third day of the hundred he had been allotted. The last rays of the setting sun pierced the echoing space of the Knights Hall, empty at this hour, casting orange spots on its far wall; the spots looked live and warm, seemingly trying to jump off the wall onto the face and hands of a slender girl in dusty man’s clothes, who chose to sit in Faramir’s armchair. She does look like a girl, Grager thought, although by human standards she looks about thirty, whereas it’s scary to even think about her real age. To say that she’s beautiful is to say nothing; one can describe great Alvendi’s Portrait of a Lovely Stranger in police search order terms, but should one? Interestingly, Doctor Haladdin predicted the identity and rank of the respondent like a lunar eclipse – truly excellent work – but didn’t seem at all happy about it; I wonder why?..