A Burg’s Tale: Chapter 25

Clang! Clank! Rattle!

We halted in front of the wizard’s tower and the metallic scraping and clattering also went quiet. I slowly swiveled around to stare at Tinendail. “I thought you said your name meant “leaf-walker” in Sindarin because you were so stealthy?” I accused, aggrieved.

The elf’s genuine frown of consternation didn’t help matters. Trennil answered in his dwarf brogue, “That is what I’ve been asking for days, now. Exactly how am I supposed to sneak up on things to shoot them when they’ve heard him coming from leagues away?”

“My father,” the elf replied stiffly to us both, “had high hopes for me. And I assure you, I am soundless when I wish to be.”

I rubbed one of my cheeks. The dried mud and water on it, other than garnering more than one concerned look from the camp of skirmishers just outside the walls, had begun to itch. I refrained from asking them as we went past why they weren’t helping the Eglain survive, since they were there, so that the rest of us could do what we needed to quickly and easily. “Could you, possibly, maybe, wish to be that way all the time?” I asked flatly.

Dandelion nudged me forward. “Let’s just go in,” she told me. “The sooner we see to Radagast, the sooner we can be away from these scoundrels.”

Trennil looked up at the tower with narrowed brown eyes and a creased brow. “You’re really off to see the wizard?” he asked in mild surprise, not having believed it when Dandelion mentioned it on the way back.

I snorted. “The wonderful wizard of moss.” My shoulders lifted in a shrug. “You may as well come up with us. He may have something you can do for him as well.” I paused. “That, and it takes quite a bit of labor for the Eglain in order to even get an audience with his majesty up there, so I would take the opportunity to flaunt their authority.” Gammer made a noise and hauled open the door. “What? I don’t like authority, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Switchings,” Gammer grumbled, “you needed more switches.” She glared at Trennil. “This could’ve been avoided if you’d stayed with me to raise the children!”

The dwarf stared at her. “How… are you this delusional?”

Tinendail looked around the tower with great interest. “You shouldn’t switch your children,” he said solemnly. “Why do you want to hurt them to teach them right from wrong? The Elves refuse to. Children are blessings.”

I snorted. “You also live for thousands of years and have the time to be patient with them. You protect them in your homes and very little attempts to kill them, unlike us.” I glanced over at the elf before mounting the spiral stairwell up to Radagast’s study. “I’m betting it takes at least five hundred or a thousand years before an elf is considered an adult. Men are at around eighteen, last I checked. Some younger.”

“Thirty-three, for hobbits,” Gammer said from ahead of us. “Oof, these stairs… when did I get so old?”

Trennil made a sound from the end of our little line. “Forty is when we’re physically adults,” he commented. “But we don’t go out adventuring as true adults until seventy-five or so. Can fight at thirty.”

Tinendail’s eyes were round at the numbers. “Such little time,” he whispered sadly. “It’s… hard to comprehend. We’re considered children until between fifty and one hundred years. I appeared the same age as a seven-year-old Man child at my twentieth birthday.”

I paused at the second floor to frown at him. “You looked how old?” I asked. The comparison was bewildering. “How old are you right now, then?”

“Seventy,” the elf replied at the same time the dwarf said, “Ninety.” They looked at one another with various stages of curiosity and shock for a moment.

Trennil was the first to speak. “I’m older than you?” he asked with a puffing out of his long moustache to punctuate it. I expected him to start huffing and flailing and yelling about how preposterous it was at any moment.

Tinendail seemed floored. “You look far older than that,” he pointed out to the dwarf. “I would never have guessed.”

I pointed accusingly toward the Champion. “You’re not even an adult, yet. Why are you out in the world?”

Our other companion straightened proudly. “We dwarves age slowly until we’re quite old. I’m fit and strong.” His eyes narrowed slightly at the elf. “And an adult.” The cogs turned in his head. I could see them. We were all capable of bossing the elf around now that we knew he was still an adolescent. Mostly.

Tinendail cleared his throat. He may have realized the same thing that we did. “I’m exploring,” he replied with a pert nod. “Satisfying my natural curiosity about everything.”

Gammer clicked her tongue. “Tsk. Just a baby. You and my grandson are bound to get into trouble if we don’t keep an eye on you.” She eyed him. “How did you leave without the other elves, especially your parents, forbidding it since children are so precious?”

The young elf glanced askance and ran a hand through his hair. “I was very convincing.”

I laughed as it occurred to me. “You sneaked out, didn’t you?” I asked with a smirk. “Sneaky, sneaky elf.”

Tinendail ducked his head. Trennil’s brow furrowed as he looked up at us. “How?” he demanded. “You can’t even walk quietly to save your life in that armor!” He looked up at me. “Literally. Remind me to tell you about the goblin ambush.”

The elf’s aggrieved expression said it all. Gammer sighed. “Trouble,” she reiterated. “You young’uns are trouble.”

Tinendail turned his gaze to her. “How old are you, ah… Gammer Digweed?”

I winced. Trennil made a soft, “oof” noise and looked anywhere but the hobbit. The Guardian glared at the elf Champion and said primly, “A lady never tells. A gentleman never asks. And if you do so again, I shall switch you, elf or not!” She hmphed and started up the stairs again.

Trennil peered up as she stomped further away from them and whispered to us, “She’s seventy! I met her ten years back and she was sixty, then.”

“I heard you!”

“Oops,” the dwarf replied as he shooed us on. “Best keep moving.”

When we reached the top of the tower and came upon Radagast among his stacks of books and other sundries in the lantern-lit room, he appeared bemused at first. “I see you’ve returned safely despite the danger you were just in.” I wasn’t sure if he meant the bog-guardians or the angry hobbit Guardian still steaming with her arms crossed off to the side.

I approached the desk as I tugged out the pouch with its contents from where I’d secured it. I still felt dirty and flaky from the disgusting swamp water that had dried on me. Radagast smirked when he saw me. “I need a nice soak,” I growled.

He didn’t respond to that. Instead, he took the bag, rolled out a little parchment, and began to empty the moss out atop it. “You did well. This moss will help me understand how the evil is tainting the Red Swamp.” He didn’t look up as he spoke. “This is but the first step in determining what caused the shepherds to become confused and irrational.” I knew what was coming before he said it. “There is more still to do, my friend. It will not be easy.”

He hadn’t even questioned the addition of two people the Eglain hadn’t vetted. Tinendail stepped forward with some scraping of metal to metal and asked, “Is this the same thing that has upset the creatures and lands between here and Imladris, Radagast?” He brightened. “Do you need any help?”

No, I groaned silently. No, don’t ask that, elf boy. Gammer must have spotted my expression since she silently stomped my booted toe with a foot and gave me a glare daring me to keep looking that way. I almost gasped at the pain as I snatched away my foot; instead, I kept it to a glare for her. Tinendail’s motion forward to the desk covered the interaction and resultant sounds. Trennil did give us a quick look, though, as if wondering what had just happened.

Radagast lifted the moss and smelled it like a fine tobacco. One pinch. Two. Three. He did this for the whole pile before frowning as if disturbed. “I can smell death in the moss, as if it was plucked from an ancient grave. This stench of decay is not a thing from nature.” He nodded grimly. “I believe that the wights are to blame.”

“Nnngh.” I couldn’t help the noise that escaped me that time. “Them again.” This time, Gammer patted my forearm gently.

Tinendail looked toward me and then back to the wizard. “Wights?” he asked.

Radagast’s brows lifted at the question. An elf had just asked him something he must have assumed an elf would already know about. I wondered at it, too. An elf still too young to be outside on his own was, in theory, still old enough to have read widely of the wisdom in Rivendell. It struck me then how innocent an elf had to be before he went out into the world, if he ever did, before he was an adult. A Man could live and die of old age before that innocence might leave; Tinendail’s childhood spanned generations of Men, Hobbits, and Dwarves.

But the wizard had continued. “Wights are the bones of the dead stirred by fell spirits out of Angmar and Rhudaur.” Tinendail’s horrified features spoke everything he couldn’t say about the abhorrence of the idea. “The wars here long ago made Haragmar as ripe for wights as the Barrow-downs in the west.”

“And there are plenty there,” I told the Champion. “I had to fight them. And worse.”

“Worse than fight them?” Trennil asked from my side.

I looked down at him. “What? No. Worse than wights.”

Radagast pressed his lips together amid the reddish-brown that surrounded them. “Return to Haragmar, the swamp in the east, and destroy these foul creatures.” Acknowledging that he’d heard me, he added, “If there are wights, I fear there are other fell creatures haunting the swamp, as well. For now, though, you need only concern yourself with the wights.”

I looked to the ceiling and closed my eyes. “Fabulous. More swamp and dead things that don’t stay dead. That soak is going to have to wait.”

We turned away to start filing down the stairs again, Gammer first, then myself. This time, Trennil followed me and Tinendail took up the rear. Three of us had headed down when Radagast called to the elf, “Unlike the living, wights grow stronger and more powerful with time and age. Destroy them, while I determine their origins.”

Dandelion muttered, “Oh, he didn’t just say that!” and turned to go back up the stairs. I didn’t know what she had planned – give a wizard a piece of her mind (if she had any pieces left, crazy as she was) or switch him – but we couldn’t let her do it. I grabbed her up, lifted her off her feet with a soft sound of effort, and started carefully moving down the stairs again. “No,” I cautioned her wriggling form. “No, Gammer, he wasn’t saying anything about you…”

“I’m not old,” she insisted in her wrath. “How dare he? A wizard should know better!”

Oh, I’m sure he does, I thought to myself. I wondered if he might’ve been making a purposeful dig at us for our conversation while ascending to his study. If there was one thing I’d learned about wizards, out of the two I had met, it was that they really had no sense of tact.

************

The corpses sloshed through the murky bog water. I felt ill. “I had that in my mouth,” I said with an urge to be sick. A piece of the mostly rotted Man splashed into the bog where it fell from his back.

Dandelion shook her head where we crouched behind a hummock nearby. “I can see mischief like this happening in a vast graveyard like the barrows near Bree,” she told us softly. “I was unaware there were so many of the dead in this area to do it here, too.”

“Plenty of history in Rhudar and fighting to have the bones there,” Tinendail assured her.

She wrinkled her nose. “Yes, but so many are still….” She looked back at us as she searched for a good word.

“Juicy,” Trennil offered in grim assistance.

She nodded. “Juicy,” she agreed with a shudder.

Tinendail happily offered an answer. “Oh, Angmar had control of this region for a long while. The Hill-men serve him, I’m sure, and so they bury their bodies or use them. And who knows what the Angmarim did to their dead in this area even before that.”

“Necromancers,” the dwarf growled with a little spit into the ground nearby for punctuation.

I breathed in through my nose, regretted it, and then remembered I wanted the stench of decay and death in my mouth (again) even less. “I don’t know what possesses those people,” I also agreed with the Hunter.

Tinendail lay very still on the ground despite the fact the corpses couldn’t actually hear the clanking of his armor with their dead ears. “Wights,” he reminded me quietly. “Wights possess them. Though I don’t think they’re really people now they’re dead?”

I closed my eyes and forced myself to stay silent. Opening them after a few long, very long, moments, I murmured, “Well, he wants us to kill several and… that’s it.”

“Thank goodness!” Dandelion breathed in relief. She pointed at us. “No hacking off bits for him! I’m not walking all the way back to Ost Guruth with rotting bits of flesh bringing in the flies and worse. I’ve seen wargs out there, you know!”

Trennil made a low noise. “Makes me wonder what else is out here in this swamp if they’ve not come in looking for easy meals.” It was a thought that put me on edge. I’d already been face to face, more or less, with a Black Rider on more than one occasion.

“I have some ideas given what I’ve already met along the way here,” I assured him. “Best not to think about it.” That includes you, I reminded myself. “I would bet one of them is the same creature from the Great Barrow in Othrongroth.”

The elf’s eyes grew huge. “You were in the Great Barrow?” he whispered in awe. “What happened? Father would tell us stories of when it was first built and–”

“Later,” Dandelion firmly hissed. “Dead things first. Bedtime tales later!”

The dwarf snorted as he hefted his bow. “If any of us get to sleep tonight without horrible dreams.”

Oh, trust me, my dreams aren’t usually good regardless, I thought with a humorless smirk. Rather than say it aloud, I drew my knives and nodded to them. “Here’s the plan,” I said. “You head over the top and follow whatever target Trennil marks with an arrow. He’s going to be hanging back as much as possible.”

“I’ll pull their attention away and keep it,” Dandelion added. “If they’re focused on me, that will let Trennil and Tinendail do the most damage.”

Trennil glanced at me. “What are you doing, then?”

I circled an index finger at the ground. “Sneaking. I’m a burglar by trade. You and the elf can handle more than one opponent fairly easily. I can finish them off from behind before they know I’m there and make sure you, dwarven Hunter, aren’t set upon from somewhere you aren’t paying attention to.” I nodded at the others. “Same with the rest of you. I’m not good at direct assaults. But final ones?” I beamed beneath my mask. “I’m your Man.”

“Unfortunately,” Dandelion groused. “It’s that Took blood in you.”

Trennil seemed about to argue about the impossibility of Took-blooded Men when I made a cutting motion with a flat hand near my throat to stop him. Instead, he offered a brief, “Sounds like a plan. Gammer goes in to take their attention, I stand and mark a target with arrows, and Tinendail makes his charge, correct?”

Dandelion nodded firmly and Tinendail shrugged his agreement so that his armor rattled. I wondered not for the first time if it actually fit him or if he’d taken his father’s and had yet to grow into it. I tried not to think about how old I’d be before I could figure that mystery out when he became an adult by Elf standards. “Right, then,” the dwarf said to me. “Off you go. We’ll give you to a count of ten before the Guardian and Champion make their charge.” He peeked over the edge of the hill once more. “They’ve wandered away slightly.”

I took the chance offered and crept over the hill off to the side. As I did so, I counted in my head. One Minas Tirith, two Minas Tirith… I was on nine when a small female roar resounded through the close air of the swamp. I heard the splashing before the solid yet wet impact noises of a shield meeting flesh that was, as a dwarf had mentioned not long before, still terribly juicy. I kept my mind off that particular idea lest I find myself sick and distracted. I turned as arrows began to plant themselves into a secondary target, and a ferocious rattling of slightly too-big armor bounced through the moist air. Tinendail let loose an Elvish bellow – literally, in Elvish, and I had no real idea what it meant – before his zweihander split one of the walking undead in two. The sound wasn’t pleasant. The image was even worse.

I rather preferred this method of fighting, all told. I hadn’t lied about not doing well in direct, face-to-face combat despite being trained for it; perhaps it was some of my innate laziness involved, but I had never truly liked the type of fighting that had me standing and dodging constantly while hacking at my opponent. It wasn’t all because of my bad memories of the past with the lieutenant and guards thanks to my ex-wife. I felt the whole problem should be settled as quickly as possible instead. No shouting. No protracted parries and blocks and instantaneous reactions to whatever the other person would do. Get in, slit their throat or punch a knife into their heart or lungs from behind, and end it so that you could move along. Poison blades or drinks or food. A dozen different ways better than crying out, “For Gondor!” and roaring with flashing armor and blade lofted overhead to smite the wicked.

That was for heroes and idiots. I, thankfully, was neither.

My services went unrendered in the fight. The group of wights sank beneath the surface of the bog from whence some of them had come (the skeletal ones, at least), and we regrouped to find another patch of them. Then a third. By the time we trudged back into Ost Guruth for the night, we had a better grasp on tactics when fighting together to use our strengths, and I, personally, had finally managed stab a wight in the kidneys. Which I’d been able to see given the gap in its flesh, and which hadn’t really slowed the thing down to lose.

We trailed a bit of mud and foul plant matter through Radagast’s entrance and up the first flight of his spiral stairs as we went. I felt a little bit smug for it, too. Upon reaching the top where the brown-robed wizard sat studying the moss we’d left for him earlier, he looked up. “Hm. You’ve returned.” He yet again sounded so surprised by it that I had to narrow my eyes at him in suspicion for his motives in sending us on these errands. “The wights have been destroyed, I take it?”

“Yes, Radagast,” Tinendail replied with a small bow. “We slew many.” He then amended, “Or… slew again?”

The wizard nodded. “The wights’ destruction can only prove to help us in the time to come. Now listen, for there is much more to do.” He waved us forward. “How many did you return to their sleep?”

I pulled my mask up and away from my face. “I stopped counting after the first dozen,” I told him. “Can this not wait until we’ve rested and rinsed the stench from ourselves and found new clothes to wear?” Please? I almost added to the end after catching another good nose full of my own foulness.

Radagast squinted toward one of the torches in the room. “I forget how often you need to rest,” he remarked almost disdainfully. “There is great danger here, but it cannot be faced with a weakened body and mind.” I could almost feel how Dandelion bristled up at the reminder of his last words to us earlier. “Go, eat. Rest. Return to me in the morning, for you will be embarking on a most treacherous leg of this mystery.”

Trennil’s beard seemed to stiffen ferociously. “Worse than wandering the swamp killing wicked dead things and crazed bog lurkers?” he growled.

Radagast merely nodded. “Quite.” He grew grim. “The sheer number of wights in Haragmar indicates the presence of gaunt-men,” he glanced at the young elf with us, “vile necromancers who serve the Dark Lord.” Tinendail gave a tiny, audible gasp. “In ages past, they dwelt in the Witch-realm of Angmar, but the White Council believed them all destroyed.” He motioned at the moss and then at us. “Clearly, they were wrong.”

I rubbed my face. “Like that tall creature from the Great Barrow walking around with the dead dwarf king.”

Trennil offered me a double take. “Pardon, the what?”

But Radagast continued. “Only the strongest of the gaunt-men, the Gaunt-lords, have the power to summon the spirits of the Shadow Realm. The war-singers carry the sigil of their Gaunt-lord. Search the ruins in the far east of Haragmar, defeat these creatures, and bring me their sigils.” He sank back into his chair. “We must learn which Gaunt-lord these creatures serve.”

“Tomorrow,” Dandelion told us sternly. “It sounds as if we’ll need all the rest we can get tonight after a good wash. Hopefully, the Eglain won’t mind helping us with getting these clothes cleaned.”

It was as we were leaving that Trennil spoke up again, safely outside of the Lore-tower, to ask, “What did you mean by a dead dwarf king?”

I sighed. “Something happened to the west, in the dwarf lands,” I explained. “Dourhands, they’re called? One of your people.”

He nodded. “Aye. Much to my disgrace. Heard they’d done something terrible and were allied with Angmar these days. Good Longbeards have shunned them.” Tinendail rattled along slightly behind us listening intently.

“Yes, well, their dead king isn’t dead any longer. That’s why they’ve decided to throw in their lot with the wrong side. They think he’s their king reborn and not…” I waved a hand helplessly. “A wight. The thing that raised him was a gaunt-man. Gaunt-lord, I suppose, now that I know there’s a difference.”

Trennil halted, and we did the same. His large hands waved in a ludicrous manner as he spluttered. “This is an outrage!” he finally shouted. “The Dourhands turned against Durin’s Folk nearly two years ago! This thing, this Skorgrím puppet, has been roaming around for all this time?”

“Looks like,” Dandelion murmured not unkindly.

I glanced back up at the Tower. “Ivar,” I said. “I almost forgot his name. The Gaunt-lord.” An idea formed in my mind as pieces fit together. “The east. Here. That’s what the Witch-king meant when he spoke to Ivar.”

I didn’t know that an elf could grow deathly pale and ashen while still alive until I looked at Tinendail to see him doing just that. It was his companion who spoke, however. “By Durin’s Beard,” Trennil said in horror. “You saw that fell spirit?”

I grimaced. “I’ve never felt a terror so oppressive.” I sucked in a deep breath. “It’s not the point. Ivar was the Gaunt-lord who was there. The Witch-king instructed him to make trouble in the east with his ward. I don’t know who the ward is, but I’m going to bet that the one doing all of this is Ivar.”

Dandelion took my hand in both of hers. “Grandson, why have you not told Radagast this information?” Her worried eyes looked up into mine.

“Because he already knows,” I said. “Or suspects it. Going to retrieve the sigils tomorrow will confirm that suspicion or tell him it’s another of the gaunt-lords he knows about.”

“This is very bad,” Tinendail finally said with a shaky voice. “I know there are many gaunt-men from the First Age, but only five Gaunt-lords. Those are records that the Elves kept since that Age was theirs.”

I regarded him. “You can go home,” I told him. “Take this information back to Rivendell and the elves there. Perhaps they might offer assistance to us, even if it’s only one of their member and not an army.”

He shook his head. “No. What would be the use of me returning home and never getting to leave again, and them sending a single elf here to help, when by staying, I AM the elf who will help?”

I didn’t have a good argument for that other than that of a father. If my son had sneaked away to go on adventures and had come into the path of danger, I wouldn’t want him there. Not while he wasn’t a man. But this elf, despite not being an adult, was already older than my own father would’ve been and perhaps even his father after him. What would time matter to the immortal? When could I tell that immortal that he wasn’t old enough to risk his life for a worthy cause if it meant so many others would be saved? When would I tell a young Man the same when I was barely sixteen when I began my own training in the arts of war and manhood?

I nodded at him. Dandelion made a sound of dismay. For the first time, I turned a scowl to her that brooked no argument, and she seemed taken aback. “No, Gammer. He’s right. And if the danger is dire enough, he’d never make it there and back in time to offer any aid, besides. As much as it might pain us to let a child help us, he’s here and skilled. And he’s not a child too young to hold a sword or fight beside us. We’ve seen as much.”

Tinendail straightened a bit more. “I’m almost grown,” he assured us all. “Another quarter century at most.”

She sighed heavily. “Let’s find somewhere to rest and eat and wash ourselves. We have a long day ahead of us come the dawn.”

We began walking once again, and Trennil rumbled slightly either in thought or dismay of his own. “We’ll need to discuss our tactics on the way to these ruins. Definitely once we reach them and get the lay of the land and our enemies. Remind me to ask Radagast how to tell these gaunt-men apart from one another so that we know which to target for the sigils.”

At least there aren’t many, I consoled myself. The wizard thought they’d died out and been destroyed Ages ago. There may only be one working for Ivar, perhaps two, and we can figure out their weaknesses with the wizard’s help. The task is daunting, but it isn’t impossible. It can’t be.