| Previous |
"Yo, Papa!" Saintly shouts cheerfully about two inches from my left ear.
Through an immense act of willpower, I manage to keep my eyes closed. I was trying to get some sleep, head down on a old wooden table in what has become the rec room of Minas Morgul, and interruptions were not to be welcomed. It was a lazy afternoon, with no regiments coming in, so my usual duty of trying to bribe my way to the location of the Annals did not apply.
"Papa papa papa papa papa! Hey! Papa Jack! Up and at 'em!"
I spring up swiftly, slinging my cloak from my shoulders and towards Saintly's face. Had it connected, it would have wrapped around his head and allowed me to boff him three or four times while he was blinded and disoriented, but he sways back and my cloak flutters far off target. He favors me with the smuggest smile I've seen in over fifty years.
"So close," I mutter. I drop back to my rest.
"Sorry, old boy. I'm can't help being quicker than a mongoose crossbred with a cobra."
"Good for you. Good night."
"Come on, there be death and blood and real wild times to be had! Do you want your life to pass you by?"
"My life has been a never-ending party since before you were born. Now leave me be. Sleeping."
Saintly sighs. "Alas, Papa, duty calls you. The Lieutenant says you're coming with me."
I jerk my head up. "Eh?"
"You know that Nazgul coming around later today?"
"Aye?"
"Well, me and a few of the boys are going to lay the final groundwork for his arrival, and the Lieutenant figures you'd better be there to capture the experience. You know, for posterity."
I softly bang my head against the tabletop. "Shit. Don't want to move. Want to stay here and sleep."
Saintly chuckles. "Come along, now. Check out just how badass old Saintly can be when he starts up his mojo."
We get up and go to it.
"Fill me in, then? I'm not intimately familiar with your little terror campaign."
Saintly shakes his head. "Hold up. The briefing will commence once I got my crew together. Yo, Sapper! We need to deal with Crashbang today, come on!"
Sapper is across the room, bleeding silver in a game of Tonk with a few off-duty brothers. You'd think a man that age could work out how to cheat at that game by now- I mean, he's had over a century to work out how. His fellow players call out good-natured curses at me and Saintly.
"Come on, man! Just give us another hour, we'll have him covering the drinks tab for the next decade!"
"Hey, Ghazi! Sleep carefully tonight, you hear?" Sapper calls back. "It would be a damned shame if a tentacled horror from the Outer Regions somehow got conjured straight into your blankets. Alright, I'm here. We ready?"
"Not yet. Still collecting my team."
He continues calling out names- Bop, Arrowhead, Kisander. Word around the mess hall has it that Saintly wants Arrowhead and Kisander to be in the new and improved Sapper protection detail, with the third man yet to be chosen.
"That should be plenty," Saintly says. "Oh, wait. Bop, nip off and get Goth and Grog. We could use a little uruk back-up. Meet us in the conference room."
Having assembled in the barrack room, Saintly quickly organizes us into a half circle around the table with him at the head.
"Right," he starts. "Now, I've worked with many of you before, but not all. So let me say this right up front- for the duration of this op, I am your Lord and King. If I tell you to charge the enemy unarmed and naked, you bloody do it. If I order you to retreat while we're still winning, you run like a coward with his legs set on fire. If I order you to jump, your head hits the ceiling before you ask me how high. The Lieutenant put me in charge because he knows that when I run things, no brother gets hurt through blatant stupidity. So obey me the same as you would him, the same way we would have obeyed the Captain. Goth, Grog, I hate to put you on the spot like this, but you've never fought alongside us. Can you obey orders even when they may not make sense?"
Goth nods sharply. "When Chief gives order, pissant snagas snap to it."
"That's what I like to hear. Now, for the most part, we have the fortress of Minas Morgul pretty well covered. There isn't much resistance to our little rebellion. What resistance there is is revolving around the uruk warchief from out of the Lithlad. I can't exactly pronounce his name, so I've labelled him Crashbang."
"Krauchbangh," Grog offers.
"Yeah, that's it. Crashbang has a group of loyalist uruks holed up near the Fifth Tower, where there's a bottleneck designed to slow any invaders. It also makes it difficult to sneak in and assassinate them like we prefer. Most of the loyal soldiers left in the fortress are with him. As of right now, we have them sort of blockaded in, with guards on all entrances to the tower, so they can't escape easily and we can't reach them easily.
"Lads, this cannot stand. It's one thing to back them into a corner and then forget about them, but we can't possibly explain to the Nazgul why we are constructing barricades on the inside of the fortress. We need to sort these bootlicking dumbasses out today. Me, now, I wanted to toss a few dozen jars of naptha inside and throw some torches in after, but the Lieutenant nixed that. We cannot afford to leave any sort of mess to arouse the Nazgul's suspicions. For the moment, at least, that includes wiping them out in pitched battle. Everybody clear so far?"
We nod and grunt our assent.
"So what we're doing is, we're going to do a sort of mix of diplomacy and assassination. We'll throw up the white flag, tell them we just want to talk, then we do our damnedest to convince them to join our revolution. When they refuse, then either Sapper burns Crashbang to a crisp or Arrowhead puts a bolt in his forehead, then we renegotiate with the survivors. The way we hear it, Crashbang is only holding them together by force of will. If he's dead, they won't be a problem at all. Hell, half of them are probably trying to figure out how to desert to our barricade without the other half catching them. So, we clear? We don't bust any heads till they refuse to give in."
"How many of them are there?" Arrowhead asks.
"More than five, less than a dozen. Beyond that, we don't know."
Nod, nod; grunt, grunt.
"Then let's get started. Everybody go out and grab your equipment. Meet me here again in a half hour."
All I'm using is a buckler and a kukri knife. Pretty simple. I've used my half hour to add this entry to my notes.
"White flag!" Saintly hollers. "White flag means parley! Ceasefire! Come on!"
He retreats out of range. The loyalists have good aim, strong arms, and a ready supply of rocks fallen from the ancient stone walls. Saintly is now sporting a bruised cut on his left cheek, what might be a broken finger, and a rising temper.
"Bastards!" he hisses to me. "No good, sons-a-bitching, uncivilized bastards. Fucking finger. Ouch."
"There, there," I soothe him. "Who's daddy's big strong little man, huh? Who's a tough boy, then?"
He cocks his head and stares at me. Then he gets it. "This is because of how I woke you up earlier, isn't it?"
I nod solemnly. "What goes around, comes around, Saintly."
"Why couldn't we have burned the little bastards out, huh? Things would have been simpler. Tell the fucking Nazgul that one of Sapper's experiments got out of hand."
"Focus on the task at hand, O Terror of Minas Morgul. Go ask Goth or Grog how uruks negotiate, because clearly a white flag isn't doing the trick."
"I knew that," Saintly says. "I knew to ask them. Go teach your grandma to suck eggs, Papa." He stalks off towards Goth and Grog's position, pouting. Having authority is new to him, and he likes the feeling of power too much to take criticism or advice well. With any luck, he'll grow out of it.
Me, Bop, Arrowhead, and Kisander hang around. They're packing short swords and large shields, except for Arrowhead, who inherited Blink's high-tech crossbow. We stand there, staring into the darkness that leads to the Fifth Tower. We can see the huddled form of an uruk near the door. We know, from Saintly's unintentional recon, that there are another two of them standing guard alongside him.
Saintly returns with the uruk brothers.
"Yo, Papa! I found out how uruks negotiate!"
"How?"
"Both sides send the oldest member of their tribe to talk one-on-one. That way, in case of treachery, they don't lose a young, strong warrior."
"What!"
"And," he hastens to add, "if there is no treachery, you got you're smartest and most cunning uruk negotiating. 'Cause, you see, no uruk can survive that long without being sharper than a needle. If there's treason, we remain strong- if there ain't, we gain concessions. It's a win-win situation."
"Yeah, for you it is. For the oldie, it's a win-lose situation."
"Well?"
"Well bloody what?"
"Hop to it, old man."
"Aha. Aha. Ha. No."
"Oh, come on, Papa! We'll be ready to back you up if anything goes sour."
"No."
It turns out that, just as Saintly had told the lot of us earlier, the on-site commander outranks the Annalist.
Damn it.
"Hey, Sapper! Give Papa Jack your rock of death, will ya? We got a pack of loyalists to deal with. Make sure you tell him how to use it."
I narrow my eyes suspiciously. "Rock of death? This is what?"
"He'll explain. Go! Go! Forward, for the glory of the Company!" Saintly was one snarky little cuss.
So. Through the shadowed doorway into enemy held territory. Past the three tense looking uruks gripping scimitars. Into the core of the cancer that has held Minas Morgul for far too long.
I'll write the rest later. Saintly is telling me that the Captain is waiting to debrief me.
I was in a massive open area within the depths of the Fifth Tower. I imagine that in the event of invasion, this would be the area where you place reserves to support the other troops, as there were multiple exits leading towards different parts of the wall. Also, its size would allow it to double as a stockpile of food, arms, and ammunition. There were no supplies there now. Just four uruk minions, one uruk warchief, and one Annalist. I stood still and tried to exude fearlessness and confidence.
Krauchbangh was big. There was likely some troll mixed up in his lineage. By normal human standards, he was merely larger than normal at five feet ten inches, weighing in at 230 pounds. By uruk standards, he was a giant. Ugly, too. He had blackened fangs jutting out of uncomfortable angles from his dull red mouth; greasy, thin, sparse hair; and of course, yellow skin. And that's just what Mother Nature did to him. After she had misshaped him, he looked like he had sass-talked a sword blade three or four times. Gnarled scar tissue was webbed across his face and skull.
Plus, his breath stank.
"Greetings, Krauchbangh," I say, bowing from the neck and not the waist. I want to give respect but no submission- showing weakness in an uruk's den is like swimming in shark territory with open wounds. "I am the Mouth of Gothmog, Lord of the luftig-hai burzum."
Krauchbangh grins, showing the full range of black teeth filed to points. A slimmer, shorter uruk to his right steps forward.
"Krauchbangh does not speak Common," he hisses. "So I am his Mouth. You speak through me, southlander piss stain maggot breeder." The other uruks laugh. Standards for uruk wit are low. Possibly below ground level.
"Oh," I say. "I'm going to set you on fire, Krauchbangh, and dance in your ashes."
Ol' Crashbang makes a gallant effort, but he can't hide the surprise and aggression that flickers in his eyes.
"Oops! Gave yourself away there, Krauchbangh," I say. "Dispense with the lackeys. Let us talk, one warrior to another."
Krauchbangh snarls something in the Black Tongue to his would-be translator. The littler uruk shrinks away, cowed.
For the life of me, I can't imagine why he would pretend not to speak Common. Perhaps he thought that there was some advantage to be had in making me strain my message through a translator.
"My boss wishes to find a way of ending our little war here without wiping you out."
Krauchbangh's voice is low, almost too low to believe. Like one of those giant trumpets that some of the Haradrim favor. "I am a servant of the Lidless Eye. I am the Lord of Blood. No Southron sellsword can stand against me. You signed your own death warrant when you rebelled. Piss drinking maggot fuck, if you keep standing there shitting arrogance, I give you a red, red smile on your filthy throat." The uruk minions try their best not to show their nervousness, but even I can tell that they don't precisely hold to this version of reality. They know, even if their boss doesn't: they're outnumbered exponentially, and even if the luftig-hai burzum are put down it won't help them at all.
"Personal insults do not help the negotiations," I say. "Now, I'm on your side, Krauchbangh. My boss is a violent man. He wants to burn you lot out and spit on your corpses. But I tell him: those uruks in there? They're the cream of the crop, the roughnecks. They're the ones who lasted the longest against the odds and they still refuse to give up. So I say, why not get them on our side?"
"Treason shit motherfucker. I'll jam my sword through your belly and out the back," Krauchbangh says, calm as you please. "We are uruk-hai, and that means we're the cruelest, the hardest, the best. You come after us, we'll tear your eyes out and eat them as crows do. We fuck your offer. Fuck you, old maggot. The Eye sees all, and sees our defiance. He is coming for you, and he'll rip your guts out and feast on them in front of you. Like a pig." He oinks hoggishly for effect.
May I just take this moment to note that I really, really dislike Krauchbangh, and just about every other uruk that has lived in Mordor for any length in time. They are cruel, stupid, ignorant, and more gratingly they never let up on the profanity. Now, I've been a soldier for over half my life, and I've cursed more than my fair share, it's true. But these Mordor uruks... they exist with nothing but crudity and hatred in their lives. I reckon it warps them. Never ending curses flow from every uruk soul, and the very act of cursing the world that wrought them corrodes them from the inside out. And the worse off they are on the inside, the more they lash out at anything around them. Soon enough they are sullen, vicious, dull-minded and borderline retarded.
They are hell to negotiate with.
I should mention that Slaz, Goth and Grog were all born and raised outside of the Eye's immediate control, up north in the Misty Mountains. So my ire is not directed at them, my unorthodox new brothers. It is tightly focused on the asshole in front of me. It pleases me to think that he's going to die soon. But before I am allowed to kill him, I must first obey my orders to try to convince him to defect.
"I can guarantee your safety," I say. It's possible my voice dripped with boredom at this point. I knew what his answer would be, I just didn't know in what profane manner he would cloak his refusal.
"Fucking Southron, tark-screwing, mercenary shit," Krauchbangh spits. Emboldened by my lack of response, the four uruk lackeys join in and jeer, shouting insults and shoving me back and forth between them, like I'm the weakest member of a pack of children. One of them jabs me in the stomach with the hilt of his knife, and I simply absorb the blow; I have on a leather jerkin and it doesn't hurt me much.
I retreat a few paces, orienting myself so that they're all arranged in front of me again, ignoring their snarls and laughs. I have to raise my voice over the uruk's din. "Final answer, Crashbang?"
Whimsically, I decide not to give him a chance to respond. I slip my hand down my jerkin, and grasp the smooth ebony stone that was hanging around my neck on a length of twine. Sapper's "death stone", to be precise. I know nothing of magic, but as the little wizard had put it, it takes enormous levels of strength and skill to climb to the top of a mountain, and almost no effort at all to fall back down. Sapper had pumped some sorcery into the little rock, and now any idiot could trigger it. I concentrated on Krauchbangh- the scarred up face; the bulging muscles; the tube of fat around his waist; the inky dark teeth; everything. This part was the equivalent of aiming a crossbow at someone, Sapper had said. By thinking hard of one person in sight, that lets the magical doohickey know where to unleash the power.
I spoke a single word: "Burn." This, of course, was the equivalent of pulling the trigger of a crossbow.
Krauchbangh goes up like a vat of naptha. I can see most of his face, the tips of his hands in the air, the toes of his boots on the floor. Everything else was crimson flames.
He shrieks and rolls on the floor, and strikes himself trying to extinguish the flames. Vain and useless. Sapper is nowhere near the level of Sauron the Putrid, or the Witch-king, or any other heavy hitter. But even he can do a fire spell that won't be put out by bare hands and by "stop, drop, and roll."
It takes only seconds for Crashbang the Unpleasant to burn to death.
His former minions stand horrorstruck, staring at their warchief wreathed in fire. My kukri had been taken from me as I entered the Fifth Tower, but I am still Tiger Hand. I need no shard of sharpened metal to fight.
I grab the nearest of them from behind. I first break his wrist, then his upper arm. I then kick his kneecap out of alignment and then strike at his throat with stiffened fingers. Not knowing uruk physiology, I could not be sure that the strike to the throat would be a death blow, so I rendered him incapable of fighting before going for the kill. The other three don't notice as he drops to the floor and gurgles his last. I scoop up his scimitar and slay another, spraying black onto the dull grey walls. The last two see me at work and scamper off. They have no interest in fighting a man who can set his enemies on fire, and who they only outnumber by one.
This was technically against orders- I was supposed to fry Krauchbangh and then renegotiate with the survivors. But until I knew how the survivors stood, I refused to stay in an unfriendly environment while outnumbered four to one.
I head towards the nearest wall. I crouch down with my back to the stone, sword held in front of me. There are still up to eight other uruks lurking around the Fifth Tower somewhere, and I don't know what their reaction to Krauchbangh's death will be. Best to just sit tight with my eyes peeled and await retrieval. Sapper will have sensed his death stone going off, and is supposed to be leading Saintly's platoon right towards me as I sit.
Krauchbangh's body is still burning, but it has lessened to the intensity of an average campfire.
After Saintly's boys find me in there with the three corpses, we set out together to search for the remaining loyalists.
We don't get so much as a scratch, and what little destruction we cause to the infrastructure- burned holes in the walls, bloodstains, and the like- is easily cleaned up. Had we tried to barge in without assassinating Krauchbangh first, the uruks might have fought back with strong leadership and caused untold destruction. There would have been obvious signs of small-scale warfare.
We take no casualties and take no prisoners.
In my humble opinion, this mission was a limited success.
The Lieutenant chose not to chew me out. Apparently, he had no high hopes for Krauchbangh to join us. He only wishes that we had left a few of the underlings alive to enlist with us, but he is glad none of us got hurt trying to accomplish it.
So that's something.
Nazgul came. Suspected nothing. We're marching out soon, headed for the Black Gate up north. No one knows why. Shatarz will be given another of Sapper's magic thingamabobs so we can communicate with him long distance. He'll be left in charge here at Minas Morgul, or wherever the troops under his command go.
I'm rather glad that we're not being hung wholesale. Anticlimaxes are to be welcomed when you're playing for high stakes.
Cirith Ungol is a minor fortress a half day's march north of Minas Morgul. To approach it from the east would require an attacking army to breach three walls and three tall towers- so basically, no deserters from Mordor could get through. To approach it from the west would require an attacking army to march up a long, narrow, and damn near vertical staircase leading to the gate. Having seen it, I can attest that a juvenile street gang at the top armed with nought but rocks could hold off an army ten times their size. And if you did reach the top, there was some kind of psychic barrier that would stop you anyway. You could still be shot, of course, but you couldn't advance past the enchanted Watchers. And trying to bypass the fortress, we had been assured, was an equally bad idea- there was a labyrinth of caves on both sides that was guarded by something that Grog and Goth didn't want to talk about. Judging by the fact that "Cirith Ungol" translates to something like "Path of the Spider", I think it could be safely left to the imagination. The idea of a horde of waist high spiders swarming in those creepy caves is unnerving.
Somehow, while we and the hosts of Mordor were out on the Fields of Pelennor getting our noses bloodied, enemies had entered the Tower, shattered the enchanted Watchers, slaughtered all the uruks stationed there, and vanished without a trace. The same Nazgul that ordered us out of Minas Morgul to the Black Gate had also ordered half a platoon led by Salim to retake this fortress. There were fifteen of us and we commanded about a hundred uruks. Our orders were to find out what had happened here, report it, and regroup with our Company. The uruks would stay and become the new garrison. All of the uruks were secret rebels, so we now controlled two of the entrances into Mordor. I'm not sure to how much use these advantages have, but it's better to have it than not.
Kisander is a bright boy and he has a reputation as a hunter. It has become a fad in the Company to come up with increasingly exaggerated tales of his exploits- "Kisander once tracked an eagle on a cloudy day with his eyes closed;" "Kisander once shot a single arrow at a dragonfly from twenty miles away- the arrow hit the bug five times;" "Kisander hunts djinni for venison- he likes their meat because it tastes like fear." And so on. Kisander's real talent in life is looking at what is and figuring out what happened that resulted in what he's looking at. This applies just as much to old battlefields and enemy movements as it does to the habits of wild animals. If anyone can figure out what happened here, Kisander can.
We don't know yet what happened, but it left uruk corpses strewn haphazardly over the whole damn fortress,
"So, Brother Kisander," Salim is saying. "What can you see?"
Kisander glances up, grinning boyishly. He was on all fours and had been crawling around for the last hour.
"Would've been more convenient to have come round here just after it happened. It's been what, two weeks since the this place was raided? Lot of clues disappear when you wait that long."
"Live with it," Salim says, smiling.
"Yeah, yeah. I've had a look around. Come on!" And he jumps up and quick-walks into the barracks room. We sigh, roll our eyes, and follow him.
Kisander skips over some inert bodies and positions himself next to one of the bunks.
"Check this out!" he proclaims, pointing up at the ceiling.
All our eyes swivel upwards.
"It's a bloodstain," I say.
"Yes," Kisander says, "Way to state the obvious, Papa. This, right here. This is where the fight started."
Salim frowns. "How the hell did the enemy get in here?"
Kisander does a doubletake. "When this guy"- he nudges a yellow corpse slightly- "got his throat cut, no enemy had entered Cirith Ungol. Purely internal affair."
Salim stares upwards. "So how do you know that this is where the battle began?"
"Hell, it was obvious. I checked out the remains of the Watchers- the rubble was covering up the pools of blood and some of the bodies nearby had gravel stuck in their wounds. Clearly, then, no enemy had broken in until after they died. Therefore, it was uruk on uruk at the first. I made a guess that the room with the most bodies was the starting off point, since once things got heated one side would have broken and left casualties in a long trail. So I snoop around, yeah? And I see this little fella," he said, pointing up at the blood stain. Kisander can get slightly weird while talking about his passion. "If you'll observe, there's only one smallish blot of black blood here, and sprinkles around it. So, the carotid got cut and it sprayed up, yeah? So why didn't more blood hit the ceiling?" He looks at us questioningly. "Well?"
I raise my hand. "Because... uruks have low blood pressure?"
Kisander smacks his face with his palm, leaving a smear of black blood in his hair. "No."
A grunt named Azez speaks up. "The uruk was sitting down when the blow was struck."
"Exactly! And I tell ya, no uruk is going to be sitting down sedately if there violence in the air. So! The first strike was a sneak attack, and resulted in a brawl- there was the Morgul reinforcements on one side, about forty or so of them, and the local garrison on the other, about twice that."
Kisander dances towards the center. "Note the way that those wearing Morgul colors and those in Ungol colors are roughly divided left and right. The Morgul boys got their asses kicked, but they slaughtered plenty of the other boys before retreating out into the courtyard, where uruk archers loosed shafts indiscriminately into the crowd."
"What was the fight about?" Salim asks.
"I'm... working on it. Anyway, come along. "
Step by step he walks us through it. To a tracker, I suppose, it must have been fascinating, but to me it was simply boring. Who needs to know every single move and ambush in a minor inconsequential squabble that took place a fortnight ago? Eventually he brings us back to the courtyard where the Watchers met their doom.
"So," he continues, "We've seen the Ungol uruks and the Morgul uruks wipe each other out. Now, by this time, I reckon there's only four or five uruks alive in the whole place. Maybe two or three alive on either side. They've survived one hell of a brawl, so we can assume that either these guys are the cowards who skulked around the edges... or they're the meanest, cruelest, strongest of the lot. Or both. We are after all talking about uruks."
Neither Slaz, Grog, or Goth were present, so he didn't feel the need to throw in a "present company excepted."
"Here is where enemy action first took place," Kisander says, gesturing towards the shattered statues in the courtyard. "After the battle was pretty much burned out. Someone... or something... broke the Watchers to rubble.
"I wish to hell Sapper was around to tell me what could do that. I ain't no sorceror, I don't know these things. However, based on the evidence before us we can make a few educated guesses.
"Whoever did it had access to a fairly potent source of Power. That either makes him the Grey Walker, an Elf, or someone who's had dealings with the Grey Walker or the Elves. No one else we know of on the Gondorian side does magic.
"Whoever did this did this had wide feet. Check the footprints. The prints themselves are slightly wider than normal. This generally indicates a good-sized adult, right? But his stride, man- short and stunted, like he couldn't swing his legs very far. So a child-sized adult. To me, this says dwarven warrior.
"Just what a dwarf is doing alone in an enemy fortress armed with elf magic is beyond me. Don't elves and dwarves hate each others' guts? Still, what do I know, I'm just a dumb-ass grunt."
We all stare around us at the scattered bodies and the shattered gate. To us, it was merely a bloody mess lightly sprinkled with rocks. To Kisander...
Well, you know what they say. Kisander can see in the dark, because he sliced the dark's belly with a hunting knife and poked around a bit.
Salim is saying, "So, where did the dwarf go?"
Kisander stares blankly. "How should I know? You interrupted me at about this point, and I never got to find out."
Salim pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes, and breathes in deep. "Then, why don't you go on and find out."
"Right-o, sir!"
After a few false starts, Kisander leads us to the main tower. Inside was a long winding staircase, dimly lit and bloodstained, and at the top was a ladder leading up into what we assumed to be a torture chamber judging by the reek.
"Half a sec," Kisander says, and crawls up the ladder. Me, Salim, Azez, and Ghazi cool our heels at the bottom of the ladder while Kisander stomps around upstairs, humming cheerfully to himself.
| Previous | Next |