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She got to the hotel an hour later. She brought Osley up to speed on Les Inspecteurs—skipping the part about the money bag. She finished with Madame Litton’s revelation of the recovered pleas of Oruntuft.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“It could be important, or just a madman’s metaphysical ramblings, erased because it deserved to be.”
She looked at him; he was oblivious to the irony of who was a madman.
“For now, it all seems way behind the scenes. If you look at it hard enough, anything, everything becomes a conspiracy. People want to know what makes evil. And they won’t hesitate to make something up. Dark Elves, Beelzebub, Cain, Moriarity, Dick Cheney, whatever. Who can tell what fuels the Dark Lord’s ravening, or who controls whom? He is a monster, a world killer in his own right. I suspect Ara is going to have to deal with him. Which may tell us why he, someone, is trying to destroy her. In any case, it brings us back to her journey.” He held up a sheath of yellow pages. “You see, after Ara left the cave she headed into some very … well, here, you read it,”
Cadence took his hand-scrawled notes and read:
Within a half day after leaving the cave and finding the enchanted pool which revealed a young woman’s face, Ara came fully into the southern lands. It was a place fitfully wooded and beset by a wind that moaned tuneless, brooding and fearful. She came to a merestone, its great rock obelisk pointing upward like a craggy finger. Its exclamation seemed to have been long spent. She looked at its ruin and neglect. It seemed an emblem of some long-departed evil whose peculiar roots and seeds perhaps lay still in the soil.
A hundred yards further, beyond a grove of gnarled oaks of a kind she had never seen, she found greetings more current. Before her, flanking the meager trail, stood a phalanx of pikes. They were stove well into the ground and atop each of their upright lengths was a man’s head. There they swayed like a congress of whispering kings contemplating with tragic masks all that passed before them. Whether originally friend or foe to those who so anointed them was a pointless conjecture. The message to followers of this trail was clear enough.
She went past the sentinels, toward a huge oak whose branches hung over the trail. Birds screeched and wheeled into the air. Suddenly she averted her eyes, covering them with both hands. It was too late. The image was already burned into her memory. A hobbit hung by its neck from a rope. It turned slowly in the breeze, the rope and limb creaking in a dirge. The victim was already the sport of carrion-birds. She began to cry, trying to push the image away, when she realized that on his belt, hung by its leather strap, was a green Shandy. The cap was just the sort she had given to her Amon! Her heart came to a stop, and before it could summon itself to beat again she opened her eyes and moved forward. She walked right up, nauseous and overwhelmed, and looked.
It wasn’t him. This poor hobbit-traveler, his tale ended and never further to be told, was of the Fur-Shoulders clan. His soiled clothing was of another cut and color than would be worn by her love. The face was blackened and well-picked, but she knew.
She began to run, south down the trail, fleeing the images.
The next passage seemed to be Osley’s own musings:
There exists today, traveled by millions but its secret known to but a few, a multi-laned freeway overlaid on an older asphalt highway, which buries a macadamized road, under which is compressed a foundation of stone. This foundation once bore forth war and rejoicing, commerce and ideas, love and reunion, and the joy of setting forth on destinations unknown. Mad adventures. White line fever. The road that goes on and on.
His text then returned to the pathway of Ara. Leaning back with a sigh of just-let-it-flow, she entered once more into step with the heroine. Ara’s journey, life, tale and existence all seemed threatened by gathering menace within and without these documents:
On a road once straight and unbroken, laid with stones and mortar so scrupulously correct that only a thousand years of neglect could finally break its order, Ara’s path lay uneven and eroded. Each state of being, the perfect and the failed, bespoke the long decline that she knew by the myths served up by tumbled monument and ancient lay that accompanied her to this desperate track.
Hiding in a wild and extravagant thicket of bramble, only feet off the way, she watched through the thorns. Passing before her was the vanguard of an army in irregular array, bearded and braided and dirty, tromping in remnants of footwear. They were encased in unmatched parts, a left armshield, perhaps a right shin-guard, a breastplate, in dingy and broken cast-offs of metal plundered from the bloody armory of an unburied battlefield. More than a few heads were bandaged, some graced with only one seeing eye.
Slowly they tramped by. Low, ominous vibrations spread from their ponderous steps. Unscabbered blades of broken swords wrapped at the hilt with uncured hides swung from tattooed arms. Others carried staves and bludgeons. Some bore lances tipped with blades hammered from broken shields, ferrying ribbons of tattered cloth that flared straight back in the cold wind.
This procession was followed by oxcarts drawn by human slaves in harness. Women and children with the mien of captives followed in loose order. The lame and the utterly rejected, unfit even to pull at the traces, drifted behind.
The army of refugees bore no banners. Its cause was survival, its heraldry the leavings of the victorious and the defeated alike, its prey the lost and wayward. It failed any test of allegiance. It had not the memory of any land and it lacked the protection of any king, wizard or liege. It tramped on, ill-equipped to resist any side in this great war.
Ara hugged the ground, quiet as the hare that trembled and shivered with her in the thorny nest, and she smelled the soft and pungent earth that remembered still the nameless age that built the road.
The next morning, the horizon showed a land fully at war. Distant plumes of smoke coiled to the skies, each leaning in perfect choreography with the chill wind freshening from the north.
She was a prisoner. She listened to her captor. “Each of those columns of smoke comes from one of our villages,” said Thygol, leader of the Cerian Band of the Free. Ara leaned over again to look into the distance from their observation post in a high cluster of rocks. There was an unbroken line of armies and their support in movement on the roads far below. At a crossroads a great encampment sprawled like a black, tentacled fungus reaching across a ravaged landscape.
“They round up our innocents and take them away. Some say into the Black Gate for sport, slavery and … food for the man-orcs. Anything to humiliate and destroy us. The Goblin Camp will pay this night!”
She stared at him, eyeing the swirls of stained scars that festooned his arms, legs, face and hands. “May I make my own way to the south?”
“No. I have some things to tell you, and questions to ask. But first, be still.” He watched closely, then whispered, “Since only our sentinel hounds detected you, I know your ability to move with stealth, as unseen as a passing breeze. Do you wish to see my enemy close up?”
Even as she took a deep breath and nodded, he was moving ahead of her down a ravine that cut the road beneath a small bridge. They huddled at the bridge and watched a trudging column approach. It was thick with effort, moving beasts and engines of war. As they waited beneath the timbers, they felt the beams strain and creak as the black army began its passage. All was clank of metal and thud of hard-ridden, lathering horses. Crack of whip at man and beast and orc alike. Complaint and anger moved with the cloud of dust that escorted the column.
With its passing, they crept to the very edge of the enemy camp. The general pall quickly gave way to night. A ceremony began. Dry lightning approached from the distance, the freshening breezes bringing the far-off smells of raindrops on dry soil. Camp bonfires were piled higher. Rising torrents of sparks shifted with the fickle winds. Around the fire, a thousand orcs bearing the sign of a flaming circle, ranks of men, and a hundred great drums pounding in unison. And then came the Goblins. A procession of them, each impossibly tall, heads like huge living jack-o-lanterns that grimaced as they moved. They danced, a horrible shuffling remnant of the Days-Before, as six prisoners, bound and greased, were brought forth.
“They are ours,” said Thygol. “We must get back and prepare to interrupt their party.”
They made their way back along the ravine, through the rocks, and finally to a deep, dry vale. There waited a thousand armed men of mien and marking similar to Thygol. A lonely, blasted tree served as his headquarters. After a moment of dispensing instructions, he sat on a stump and gestured for her to sit likewise.” We will be ready in a few moments. Let’s talk while we can. Why do you journey here, alone save for the raptor that circles far above our bowshot? Are you lost in search of Lyfthelm, the gate that cannot be passed?”
“I search for one with whom I began this journey. We were separated. He has since traveled by paths I know not. Sparse clues, some the castaways of a wizard, told me to come this way. I continue on the chance that I may cross his path.”
“Wizards once came and went hereabouts, but they have forsaken this land. Or perhaps it was their parting curses that left us to this.”
“Tell me, Thygol why don’t you submit? Join the forces of the Dark One? That has to be better than resisting and being slaughtered.”
“That counsel we have debated many times. Even their company may not be too great a price to pay for life. Or so some say. But I cannot. I know not the right of it. The plain fact is … they are, simply and completely, the enemy of my blood. We have fought them since the times of our grandfathers, when we came into these lands as nomads herding the auroch. And even since the times of our ancestors, a race with armor and bright helms that came to live with us in the smoky world of the Before Time. Now much runs as great storms across the steppes. One approaches even now, and will herald our attack. An omen to our liking.”
A plate of simple food was brought to Ara. As she ate, he continued. “At first we doubted you, just for your orc-like size. And even appearances must be twice studied. There are no doubt spells about….”
Thygol’s sentence was cut short by a bolt of lightning that cracked open the sky, momentarily revealing huge breakers of clouds rolling forth in purple waves. The thunder that followed, hard and swift, pressed them down with its pounding force. The moment is now!” he ordered, “Gather with us the beasts of vengeance so they may feed on our spoils.”
At the stern direction of his hand signals, Ara followed Thygol. They were headed toward the Goblin Camp. The rain swept down on them as thunder rolled overhead in hellish beats. Flashes of light revealed jagged images of men jostling, intent on havoc and destruction.
Ara remembered the final approach only as imagery torn by relentless, windswept rain. She recalled the angled rents of flame and sparks that had been the fires of the camp. The roar of the storm and the peals of thunder masked the clank of metal, creak of leather, and boot-treads of a thousand armed men. They lined the wide stone road that ran alongside the camp, waiting for Thygol’s signal.
“Young halfling?”
She came close to his side. He bent and said “Hogal, my aide, shall take you now by this western road. Three leagues from here opens the last free lands of this corner of the world. With the token of my word, you may take respite there. But beware. Prince Thorn and his advisors in that realm survive by audacity and irreverence. They parlay for neutrality with the minions of the Source even as they make jest of him. Dangerous business, this toying. Like dancing in the set jaws of a cave bear trap. Go now, and may luck accompany you on your journey. You may need it more than most.”
She thanked him and turned as Hogal beckoned for her to make haste in moving down the line and unto the road. They had just cleared the flank of the Cerian warriors when, from a nearby jumble of boulders, there sprang a great torch. Its light revealed the unforgettable, leering pumpkin face of a fully grown Goblin. Two feet wide at the head, twice a man’s height at the shoulders, he roared past them. Another six followed as the wishwash of torch sounds mixed with the storm. A great war cry rose up from the Cerians as they moved on the camp. Ara and Hogal ran into the night.
She never learned which force, each to the other embittered enemies of the blood, prevailed that night.
Dawn two days hence found the storm clearing as they approached the great gates of the castle that rested on the shoulder of the Black Lands and protected young Prince Thorn. The man-size door within one of the gates opened, and Hogal spoke to a guard. The guard gazed past his shoulder, his eyes settling on Ara.
Her escort returned to her, “You may enter and take refuge as the guest of the Prince. I leave you now, lest my entry violate the neutrality of this place. I return to what may survive of my band. Goodspeed!”
“Goodspeed to you and your people.” replied Ara, as she thought of the unprotected, silly borders of her own people. No contrivance of politic or force of arms was likely to hold back the enemy that surely approached her village by now.
But my fate and my errand are, for now, here, she thought as she entered the door to Thornland, where intrigue and plots within plots swirled in a cauldron of double meanings.
Cadence reread the last passage. Plots within plots. Sounds familiar, she thought. I’m with you, girl. With you to the end.
After a moment she looked around the room, the piles of scribbled pages, the strange Elvish documents, the exdrug king biting his lip as he turned a page with the circular key held upside down. She shook her head ever so slightly and blew out a breath. She spoke out loud to the air, “Professor Tolkien, did you have any idea how this would turn out?”