The Last Ringbearer (44 page)

He scanned the empty garden, which was in full view from the second floor, then the empty Jasper street with the DSD man in police uniform. Guard cobras in Chakti-Vari’s store – so what? Feet over the windowsill, he thought fleetingly that he’d better spring clear of the flower bed, lest Alviss chew his head off over her favorite nasturtiums.

Alviss was almost ready to go when she caught a movement in the garden in the corner of her eye. Her heart lurched; she sprang to the window and beheld Tangorn on the garden path. Blowing her a kiss, he went towards the door. Whispering a few choice expressions better fitting her port youth than current status, Alviss observed, with some relief, that the baron was armed and that his stance showed caution rather than undue attention to the beauty of the summer morning. He went through the door watchfully, crossed the street, exchanged a few words with the policeman and stretched his hand towards the brass knocker on the jewelry shop door …

“Ta-a-a-a-n!!!” The desperate scream shattered the silence.

Too late.

The policeman raised a hand to his mouth, and the next moment the baron sagged to the pavement, clutching his throat convulsively.

When she ran into the street the ‘policeman’ was long gone, and Tangorn was living the last seconds of his life. The poisoned thorn spat from an
ulshitan
– a small blow tube used by Far Harad pygmies – struck him in the neck, a finger’s width above the
mithril
mail; the third sword of Gondor had no time to even draw the
Slumber-maker
. Alviss tried to lift him; the baron clutched her arms in a death grip and breathed hoarsely: “Tell … Faramir … un … done …”; he tried to say something else, but lacked the air to do it: the alkaloids of the
anchar
tree on which the pygmies’ poison is based paralyze the respiratory muscles. The baron failed both to complete his mission and to let his comrades know about it; he died with that thought.

A man nicknamed Ferryman, a ‘clean-up guy’ from Elandar’s organization, observed the scene from a nearby attic through a cobwebbed vent hole. He put his crossbow down, at a loss to figure out who beat him to it so neatly. DSD? Too tidy for 12 Shore Street … What if this is another of the baron’s tricks? Maybe he should plink him with a bolt, just to be sure?

By that time Mongoose had already shed his police uniform, becoming once again a duly accredited ambassador of His Majesty the Sultan Sagul the Fifth the Pious, the mighty ruler of non-existent Florissant Islands. He walked briskly but without undue haste towards the port, where a previously chartered felucca named
Trepang
was waiting for him. The duel of the two lieutenants ended the way it had to end, because another way a professional differs from an amateur is that he plays not until he has scored a beautiful goal or until he has a psychological crisis, but rather until the sixtieth second of the last minute of the game. By the way, for Mongoose that sixtieth second occurred at the port, where he had another chance to demonstrate his high degree of professionalism. He himself probably would have been unable to say exactly what it was about the
Trepang
’s crew that alerted him, but he turned to the skipper as the man stepped on the ramp after him, as if to ask a question, chopped him across the throat with the edge of his palm and stepped off into the rusty, oily water between the pier and the ship. The two seconds he gained thereby were enough to get a little green pill from behind his collar and swallow it, so Yakudze’s operatives only captured another unidentified corpse (the fourth that day). The game that the special team from Task Force Féanor played with the Umbarian Secret Service ended in a draw, nil-nil.

… Petrified with grief, Alviss held dying Tangorn in her arms. He would never find out the most important part: it was precisely his death at the hands of the Secret Guard that settled Elandar’s doubts, so that same evening his package started north, to Lórien, via routes unknown to any man. Nor was he to know that Alviss heard his last choking whisper as “tell Faramir: done!” and would do everything properly … And the Someone tirelessly knitting the gorgeous tapestry we call History out of invisible coincidences and rather visible human weaknesses immediately put the entire episode out of His mind: a gambit is a gambit, you sacrifice a piece to win the game, and that’s all there is to it …

PART IV

Ransom for a Shadow

Over and over the story, ending as he began:
“Make ye no truce with Adam-zad – the Bear that walks like a Man!”
Rudyard Kipling

CHAPTER 55

Mirkwood, near Dol-Guldur

June 5, 3019

T 
hat’s a fresh track, very fresh …” Runcorn muttered under his breath. He dropped to one knee and, without looking back, signaled Haladdin, who was walking some fifteen yards behind, to get off the path. Tzerlag, who brought up the rear, overtook the obediently yielding doctor, and both sergeants engaged in an elaborate scouting ritual by a small spot of wet clay, trading quiet phrases in Common. Haladdin’s opinion did not interest the rangers at all, of course; not even the Orocuen’s thoughts counted for much in that discussion: the scouts have already worked out a pecking order. The erstwhile enemies – the Ithilien ranger and the squad leader of the Cirith Ungol Rangers – treated each other with exaggerated respect (like, say, a master goldsmith and a master swordsmith might), but the desert is the desert, and the forest is the forest. Both professionals knew the scope of their expertise very well. The Ithilien ranger had spent his entire life in these forests.

Back then he still walked upright and with shoulders squared (the right one was not yet higher than the left one), while his face was yet free of a badly healed purple scar; he was handsome, brave, and lucky, with his bottle-green Royal Forester uniform fitting him like a glove – in other words, a serious threat to womankind. The local peasants disliked him, which he considered normal: villeins only like accommodating foresters, whereas Runcorn took his service with all the seriousness of youth. Being a King’s man, he could disregard the local landlords; he quickly put their courts, which under his predecessor used to visit the royal forests like their own larder, in their place. Everybody knew the story of Eggy the Kestrel’s band that had wandered into their country once – Runcorn did away with those guys all by himself, not deigning to wait for the sheriff’s men to pry their behinds off the benches of the Three Pint Tavern. To sum it up, the neighbors treated the young forester with cautious respect but not much sympathy, which he did not care much for anyway. He was used to being by himself since he was a child, and socialized with the Forest way more than with his peers. The Forest was everything to him: playmate, interlocutor, mentor, eventually becoming his Home. Some people even claimed that he had in him the blood of the
woodwoses
– forest demons from the ominous Drúadan Dell. Well, people in remote forest villages say all sorts of things during chilly fall evenings, when only the feeble light of a splinter keeps the ancient evils from creeping out of the dark corners …

To top it all off, at one point Runcorn stopped showing up at village festivities (to the acute disappointment of all eligible maidens in the vicinity) and instead hung out at a tumbledown shack at the edge of Drúadan, where an old medicine woman from the far north (maybe as far as Angmar) had settled some time before with her granddaughter Lianica. Manwe only knows what such an eligible bachelor saw in that puny freckled girl; many supposed that witchcraft was involved – the old woman certainly knew some spells and could heal with herbs and laying of hands, which was her livelihood. Lianica was known to talk to birds and beasts in their language and could have a ferret and a mouse sit together in the palm of her hand. This rumor may have been due to the fact that she avoided people (as opposed to forest animals) so much that she was originally thought to be dumb. When someone would mention the royal forester’s strange choice, the local beauties snorted: “Whatever. Maybe they’ll make a good couple.”

It did look like they would have, but it was not to be. One day the girl ran into the young landlord, out with his merry company to hunt and ‘improve the serfs’ blood line a bit;’ those exploits of his had even caused some of his neighboring landlords to grumble: “Really, young sir, this penchant of yours to screw everything that moves …” It was a routine matter, nothing to get excited about, really. Who’d’ve thought that the fool girl would drown herself, as if something precious had been taken away from her? No, guys, it really is true that all northerners are nuts.

Runcorn buried Lianica alone – the old woman could not bear the loss of her granddaughter and passed away two days later without regaining consciousness. The neighbors came to the cemetery mostly to check whether the forester would put a black-feathered arrow on the fresh grave, signifying an oath of vengeance. But no, he did not risk that. Nor was that a surprise; sure, he’s the King’s man, but the King is far, while the landlord’s bodyguard (eighteen thugs, gallows material all) is right here. Still, the guy turned out to be much weaker than we first thought … So did those villagers who had foolishly bet on Runcorn’s declaration of vengeance (two- or even three-to-one) grouse in the Three Pint Tavern, sourly counting out the coins they have lost onto the sticky tables.

However, the young lord was of a different opinion – he was exceedingly prudent in all matters that did not involve his passion for ‘pink meat.’ The forester did not strike him as a man who would either let such a thing pass or go to court and write petitions (which amounted to the same thing). That sprightly peasant girl upon whom he bestowed his favor in the forest despite her objections (damn, the bitten finger still hurts) … To be honest, had he known that a man such as Runcorn was courting her, he would’ve simply passed by, especially seeing as the girl turned out to be nothing much. But what’s done is done. Comparing his impressions with those of his chief bodyguard, the landlord became certain that the absence of a black arrow meant only that Runcorn was not one for theatrical gestures and cared little for the bystanders’ opinions. A serious man, to be dealt with seriously … That same night the forester’s house was set on fire from all four sides. The arsonists propped the door shut with a large beam; when a man’s shadow appeared in the fire-lit attic window, arrows flew from the darkness below; after that, no one tried to escape the burning hut.

A King’s forester burned alive was no lousy serf that managed to get himself run over by a landlord’s horse; no cover-up was possible. Although …

“Everybody here thinks it was the poachers, sir. The late forester, gods rest his soul, was real hard on them, so they struck back. A really sad story … More wine?” The young landlord addressed those words to the court’s magister from Harlond, who had happened to stop at his hospitable manor.

“Yes, please! A wonderful claret, haven’t had its like for a while,” the magister, a dumpy sleepy old man with a nimbus of silver hair around a pink bald spot, nodded courtly. For a long time he admired the flames in the fireplace through the wine in a thin Umbarian glass, and then raised his faded blue eyes – piercing icicles, not sleepy at all – at his host.

“By the way, that drowned girl – one of your serfs?”

“What drowned girl?”

“Why, do they drown themselves every other day around here?”

“Oh, that one … No, she was from the north somewhere. Is it important?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” The magister again raised the glass to eye level and said thoughtfully: “Your estate, young sir, is very well-kept – an exemplar for all landlords in this area. I figure at least two and a half hundred marks in annual rents, right?”

“A hundred fifty,” the landlord lied smoothly and caught his breath: praise Eru, the conversation was turning to real business. “But almost a half goes to taxes, and then there’re the mortgages …”

Poachers, you say? All right, poachers it is. A suitable candidate was soon found; after enough time on a rack above a censer the guy made the appropriate confession and was duly impaled on a stake, as a lesson to the other serfs. The court magister departed to town, tenderly hugging to his side a money bag with a hundred eighty silver marks … All set? You wish! …

From the very beginning the landlord was troubled by the absence of any bones in the ruins of Runcorn’s house. The chief bodyguard, who had personally commanded that operation, tried to calm his boss down: the house was large, with a wooden rather than earthen floor, the fire had raged for more than an hour, so the corpse must have burned to cinders; this does happen often. However, the young lord, being (as already mentioned) prudent beyond his years in nearly all matters, ordered his men to examine the location once again. His worst suspicions came true. The forester, who had had his share of surprises, was prudent, too: a thirty-yard tunnel led from the basement outside. There were a few recent blood spots on the tunnel floor – one of the arrows had found its mark that night.

“Find him!” the young lord ordered – quietly, but in a tone of voice that made his hastily assembled henchmen break out in goose bumps. “It’s us or him, no going back. So far, Oromë be praised, he’s licking his wounds somewhere in the forest. If he escapes, I’m a dead man, but you will all die before me, I promise.”

The landlord took personal charge of the hunt, declaring that this time he would not rest until he saw Runcorn’s corpse with his own eyes. The fugitive’s tracks led inside the forest and were clearly readable throughout the day; the man had not bothered to conceal them, apparently assuming that he was believed dead. Closer to evening the chief bodyguard found a cocked arbalest hidden in the bushes by the trail; more precisely, the weapon was found later, after its bolt had already buried itself in his gut. While the bodyguards bickered around the wounded man, another arrow whistled in from somewhere, taking a man in the neck. Runcorn gave himself away thereby – his silhouette showed briefly between the trees some thirty yards away down the dale, and they all chased him down a narrow clearing between the bushes. That was the forester’s idea: to get them all to run without looking down. As a result, three men wound up in that pit, more than he expected. Eggy the Kestrel’s bandits had crafted it with skill and care: eight feet deep with sharp stakes at the bottom, smeared with rotten meat to guarantee a blood poisoning at the very least.