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"He's a good boy," Salim says, gazing upwards. "But he's too upbeat. We're a hardcore band of mercenaries, we got no business singing lovely little songs to ourselves with big smiles on our ugly mugs."
Ghazi cracks a smile. "Yeah. He needs to develop some fucking cynical world-weariness, like the rest of us."
I nod solemnly. "There is no cheer allowed in this outfit. Only bitterness, hatred, and aggression."
Azez jumps in like he was waiting for the cue and sings a snatch of a marching song from our last campaign. "No fucking sport; no fucking games; no fucking fun; the fucking dames, won't even give you their fucking names-"
We all shout the ending, "-in fucking Umbar!" We don't exactly erupt into gales of laughter, but we all grin to each other and chuckle a bit. It's hard to believe that we had thought our last war was a rough one.
Ghazi hisses in a mock-sinister tone, like a stage-play villain. "We have no blood running through our veins in the Black Company. Our hearts pump naught but fermented spite and asp venom."
I chime in again. "I'm not cynical all the time. I only get moody when I'm not stabbing motherfuckers in the face and desecrating their corpses."
Kisander shouts from the top of the ladder. "You guys are sick, you hear me? Sick, sick, sick! Oh, hullo!"
"Come on, get down here already!" Salim calls. "We're bored as hell down here."
"Hold up! Hold up... I think... the son of a bitch must've ran. Must have. Only explanation." Kisander's muttered words echo down towards us. Kisander descends the ladder. He stares blankly ahead, lips moving, hands held awkwardly at his side. He looks down the stairs, back up the ladder. He squats down, pursing his lips. He drums his fingers on the floor, heedless of the blood puddles.
"Either he's about to get an epiphany and run out of here," Ghazi stage-whispers, "or he's about to start banging his head against the wall in frustration."
"Ten silvers on an epiphany," I whisper back. "Five-to-one."
"I'll take that bet," Ghazi says. "You don't know Kisander like I do. When he gets latched on to something, the slightest little setback drives him crazy-"
Kisander bounds up and beams at us. "Got it!" he declares proudly. "Follow me!" And he's off again, down the stairs.
On the way down, Ghazi pays up, spitting against the stone wall as he does so. He's been lucky at Tonk recently so he has currency on him.
"Remember," I tell him, smiling gently as we jog. "The only time Kisander ever gave up is when he was trying to think up something more badass than he is."
"Prick," Ghazi mutters.
We always hate Bullet for running us ragged, but then come times where it is of material benefit to us. Osgiliath and the Pelennor Fields, for instance. The seizing of al-Qats. The march through the hell of Gorgoroth.
The epic-sized run up and down the fucking Tower of Cirith Ungol. The Black Company knows all about cardiovascular shit.
"The thing is," Kisander pants as we trot after him, "after the main show, there was a minor altercation up here. An uruk was chased up these stairs, probably by the dwarf. He reached the top, and then things get confused for me. I think that he had a conversation with another uruk up there, as there's indication that he paced around. At one point he adopted a fighting stance. Uruks tend to do that a lot in any conversation. But I couldn't tell which of the prints my running uruk was reacting to, since there were a lot of them all mixed up from before the battle broke out. Like I said, if I could've been here right after it happened... ah, hell with it.
"The uruk I had been tracking is dead up there, and I think the dwarf killed him. But I couldn't figure out what happened to the other uruk, the one that was up here. He must have ran off away from the dwarf, but where to, eh? Where to?"
He looks at us inquisitively, as though he was actually expecting us to answer.
"He must have tried to escape into the Plateau of Gorgoroth, trusting to his superior knowledge of the local area to allow him to escape. He needn't have bothered. The dwarf was here to rescue the poor dope getting flogged to death. Blood, red blood, all over the damn place, splashed in ways that could only be done using a whip. And when the dwarf exits, he's helping someone who's staggering. Or, possibly, he was here for something else entirely and got sidetracked by the human whipping post. Doesn't matter.
"So," he says as we reach the edge of the fortifications overlooking Gorgoroth, "where's our missing uruk? Out there, buddy boys, out there. He's obviously dead, since he never reported this and hasn't been caught. But once we find his remains, we'll find clues.
"I love clues," he adds, eyes shining. "They warm me up inside."
We found the uruk's corpse. It took three hours of scouring the surrounding area, but we did it. Kisander almost pisses himself with joy. He really enjoys being correct.
Wild animals and the dry sun have rendered his mortal remains into something as sickening as it is puzzling. Salim reckoned that he died of sunstroke, but Kisander pointed out that dirty cloth wrapped around his arm, and figured that he died of blood loss, possibly shock. But who cares how the poor bastard died? He was holding something inedible and unperishable with him- a mithril coat. Small, designed no doubt for a child or midget, but undoubtedly the real deal.
Mithril is as valuable as it is useful- completely invulnerable, resistant to magic, never rusts, never wears, never lets you down. Forge it into a sword and it will cut through steel like cloth. Smear a thin layer of it on your breastplate and it will never be pierced. Mithril is the closest thing non-wizards have to magic.
This coat, if sold at fair market value, could hire us for a decade. Shit you not.
Not that anyone would actually sell it. It was priceless in the purest sense of the word, in that it was impossible to put a tag on it.
At least we know now what the fight was about. God knows I'd be willing to pull a knife on someone to own this.
Of course, we gave it up without a fuss to the Nazgul, who shrieked off with both it and our story to the Eye.
Let's see. Shit tons of gold, or a chance to ingratiate ourselves with the upper echelon of Mordor? As much coin as we could spend, or a fighting chance to recover our Annals?
Gee, let me think about that.
We're camped out on the Plateau of Gorgoroth. It's almost exactly as dismal and depressing and miserable as I recall from the first march through, almost two years ago.
Gorgoroth is a desert wasteland, but without the purity and austerity of the Haradwaith desert. You picture a desert, you think bright sun beating down, tan sand dunes, howling winds and unforgiving miles to walk with no food or water source for miles. And this certainly describes Gorgoroth accurately. But it does not convoy the sheer godawful misery of the place. Gorgoroth is diseased, if it is possible for a terrain feature to be diseased.
You got clouds of poison gas seeping up from darkened pits. You got unhealthy weeds that look like they grow on unclean meat, not water. You got bleached bones of the poor dumb-asses who came before you.
Then there's rumors of foul beasts that hunt by night and are ever hungry. You hear stories about whole companies of uruk troops found in the wilds, drained of blood and splayed out on the ground, still in their ranks and files
Every man jack of us hates Gorgoroth with a passion.
It's not a region that a mere fifteen guys would ever choose to march through alone, but then, if Fate ever took our preferences into account we would have won on the Pelennor Fields.
Our fire is set up and blazing strong, though few are awake to watch it. Azez is on watch with Webfoot on the perimeter. Saintly and I are sharing a flask of Noose, a homemade moonshine so named because all it takes is one drop and you're dead.
Saintly is staring into the fire. "You ever wonder just what we're doing here?"
"Sometimes."
"I do. I am. I mean, here we are, fighting the good fight, and part of me feels like everything is worthless. Like all our honor and courage and so on is just so much bollocks. You know?"
"Don't let no one else hear you say that."
"I know, I know. It's just... Alright. The Red Eye is uncontestably evil and a bastard now, yeah?"
"Sure."
"So when we were kicking ass and taking names in Osgiliath, we were, you might say, the bad guys."
"I could make an argument or two against that."
"Yeah, but, I mean. We were advancing the cause of relentless evil, and it's only after we were personally screwed that we decided to fight him. So all this about our heritage in danger? Our Company history in danger? Bollocks. We were willing to sell the whole damn world down the river because we were too lazy to distinguish between basic right and wrong. It's getting hard to remember why I'm a brother here, Papa. When we had the Annals, it was easy; us against the world, the outcasts looking out for each other, comrades and brothers together as one, and so on. But the more I think of it now, the less I care about what happens to us. We deserve whatever the world does to us for being what we are." He trails off. He spits a stream of alcohol into the flames, and they rise up spectacularly for a moment.
I start speaking almost without meaning to. "When I was a young man- just, like, 15 years old- I was betrothed to a woman I loved."
"Oh?"
"We were together for just five years. I was young, strong, rich by the standards of my tribe. I could give her anything she wanted, and frequently did. She was drop dead gorgeous, with wisdom and grace in abundance. A perfect wife, aye, but even better, a good woman. I was very, very fortunate."
Saintly doesn't have a clue where I'm going with this, but it's night and the poison fumes from the blasted landscape are swirling lazily in front of the moon and everything is relaxed. He doesn't press me to get to the point, like he normally would.
I continue. "We had two daughters. Lovely girls. We named the older one Silk Fingers, and the younger Diamond. They were aged three and one, respectively, when I got my poor ass drafted."
Saintly inhales sharply, "Ouch."
"Don't I know it. My tribe, well, we lost the last war against the Tellemite empire. Every ten years the Imperial horseman would ride into the village, bold as brass, and pick and choose which ten percent of us would be volunteering."
"Life sucks when you're the one on bottom."
"Yep. After my ten years were up, I came home to find my wife had died years before. Plague. My daughters had been adopted by the chief. I saw them just the once before I left again. My Silk Fingers was getting betrothed to the chief's son, and my Diamond was there too. Dancing the Dance of Impending Love."
Saintly twists his face in disgust. "Ew."
"What?"
"She was getting betrothed at 13? Fuck, man."
"She wouldn't be getting married till she was 15, dumbass." I swat at his arm.
"Alright, alright. Betrothal ceremony, go on."
"I was in attendance at the party. My daughters didn't know me, they thought I was just another returned vet. But they were sweet about it, man. You know? Silk Fingers offered to fill my cup herself. Me! A man she thought she had never met before! God above, she was so brilliant that night. My chief, he was good at raising kids. Of course, he had over twenty, so I guess he got more practice."
I pause, lost in thought. Saintly abides.
"Both my daughters got renamed that night. Silk Fingers took on part of the aspect of her fiancee's name, so the future wife of Oaken Arm became Oak Leaf. Diamond so impressed everybody with her dancing that she became, simply, Dancer."
I drink from the flask, choking slightly on the burning liquid. "I left the next day. I didn't know them, nor anybody else in my hometown. They didn't know me, they didn't need me, and I didn't want to depend on nobody's charity. My darlings were in good hands, and who gives a good god damn about anything past that? You know? I just gave what was left of my pay to the chief to thank him, and told him that if my daughters ever asked after me, I had died in the wars but had loved them very much. The last thing I saw before I left my village was the Tellemite cavalrymen drafting a new crop of young men. Lined 'em up, picked 'em out, told 'em where to show up the next day. I stayed long enough to give the fresh fish some pointers and tell them that it wasn't the end of the world. I wound up here in the Company about ten years after I started wandering."
Silence once more. Then Saintly asks, "So what was her name? Your wife?"
"Didn't I say? She was Turtle when I met her, but she became Fragrance once she married me." I smile.
"Fragrance, Oak Leaf, Dancer, and Papa Jack. I got ya, I got ya." He nods to himself a few times. "So, what connection to my impending nihilism does your story have? Not intending to be insensitive or nothing."
"When I got drafted, I lost my family. Losing my family fucked me up, here," I said, tapping my heart, "and here," tapping my temple. "If Fate had given me a chance to be restored to them while I was in service to the Tellemites, I would have done anything, fought anyone, marched anywhere to be with them again. I would have risked anything to be back where I belong. And if at anytime in my attempt the thought had struck me that trying to get back to Fragrance was vain, or stupid, or just so much bollocks, I would have banished that thought from my mind as unworthy of a warrior finding his way back home. Because when something precious has been taken from you, nothing else in the world matters but getting it back."
Saintly nods, slowly. "I got ya, I think."
Saintly pokes the fire with his sword, his mind elsewhere.
"And keep in mind," I add. "If we get through this intact, and the Company marches free once more, it will be made of men who remember how it felt to have served wickedness. I'd like to think that we'll be a little more wary of serving Dark Lords. Stick with robber barons, petty tyrants, pirates, and the like. The small scale villainy. That seems to be more our speed."
Saintly snorts. "Unlikely."
"Unlikely how?"
"Haven't you ever read the Annals, Papa? The Company always seems to end up fighting for the stronger side. And like you probably know, the stronger nations tend to use conquest as a crutch. Therefore, we'll sign on with the 'bad guys' more often than not. Therefore, we'll keep on serving the Saurons of this world from now to the day we end."
"Hmm." I can't think of any response to this line. I never knew Saintly harbored any moral objections to mercenary work.
Saintly is looking out on the full moon, but talking aside to me. "I ever tell you? I use to be quite the revolutionary in my youth."
I bark out a laugh. "Says the wee lad of six-and-twenty. Wait till you're staring 60 in the face, you'll look back where you are now and think you were a toddler."
"Yeah, yeah. Old man Wisdom comes a-knockin eventually. Yada yada yada. Anyways, in my youth, I moonlighted as a king-killer. No shit, Jack. Saintly the Assassin. Saintly, Scourge of Tyranny." He gets up and adopts an exaggerated kung-fu stance, striking out at invisible opponents. I yank him down by the cuff and we collapse back in our seats.
"Saintly, Spanker of Satraps," I suggest.
"Heh. That was quick on the uptake, mate. Yeah. Like you, my country got whupped in the last war, so we were getting curb-stomped day in day out by this nasty group of motherfuckers called the Moabs. The slimy, thieving, murderous pricks. Hate them. Hate them, hate them, hate them. Fuckers. Anyways, we were getting the food taxed straight out of our mouths, you know? Like, the Moabs weren't interested in enriching themselves even, just as long as we had nothing they were happy. Their whole tax scheme thing was designed to hurt us, not help them, ya know?"
"I don't know the specifics, but I know the mindset. Go on."
"So me and a couple friends, we decided to do something about it. I got this kick-ass little sword made, like, a foot and a half long, and got in a special sheath that went on the inside of my right thigh, yeah? 'Cause all the soldiers in the Moab army, they were right handed. I'm ambidextrous, so fuck them." He chortles. "So whenever they checked for weapons, they would only check on the left hand side. You see?"
"Got it. Undetectable weapon poking into your sack. Continue." I lean back. Saintly's stories are usually good, and this was proving to be no exception.
"I sent a message to the Moab king, this obese motherfucker who decided that he would set up his summer home in the heart of our conquered nation. Just to rub it in that we were his bitches. And I ain't kidding about obese, Papa, he must've weighed almost 400 pounds. On his little 5 foot frame. Short, fat, fucking bastard. Anyway. I convinced our representatives to send me with the monthly tribute, so I got in his presence easy as pie. The guards searched me thoroughly- by their standards. That means, they didn't leave a single inch of my left hand side unsearched. Because they're unbelievably stupid. Of course, they had kicked our asses in a military campaign just eight years previously, so I supposed that makes my side reformed idiots at best.
"So, I was in the Moab king's presence. I give him our tribute, bowed down and groveled like a tenant before his landlord. I praised his name, and licked his boots, and swore everlasting fealty to him and his descendants."
I smirk at the image of Saintly groveling to anybody. "So you were a sneaky little commando even before you met the Company."
"Where do you think I got the job training? I says to him, I says, 'I have a message for you, my king.'
"He says, 'What is it?' "
"I whisper in his ear that I have found a traitor in his midst, a snake in his bosom. One of his courtiers is plotting his demise. If I tell him aloud in front of everybody, then all members of the conspiracy will go to ground and he'll have to spend the rest of his life rooting them out."
"Yee-haw," I say. "If something's worth fighting for, it's worth fighting dirty for."
Saintly giggles drunkenly to himself. "I love being me, you know? I fucking love it. Sly as foxes and deadly as nightshade. Hoo ah!"
I nudge him. "Go on."
"So I'm alone with him, yeah? He's slobbering all over himself with greedy, you know, with, like, intensity. God, I'm smashed, I can't talk straight. So he's, you know, all fired up to find out who the traitor is.
"I look him right in the eye. I say, 'I have a message from the Lord my God, Eru Illuvatar.' I draw the sword, lefty style.
"You should've seen the look in his eye. Swoosh! Instant terror. Blubbing, whimpering, pants-wetting fear. Ha! I stuck him like the pig he was. The whole eighteen inches went in, and his blubber flopped over the handle. He was that fat, man. You couldn't even see the pommel."
I burst out laughing. "Gross! Ugh!" I measure out eighteen inches from my body. A foot and a half doesn't seem too long until you apply it to body width. I imagine being so damn fat that a short sword would disappear into me. Bullet would probably have a heart attack and then kill me, bloodily.
"I leapt out the window, hit the ground running, got to the local friendly guerrillas before the king's guards knew they had failed their master. I told my boys to mount up and get ready for round two. The rest was, hell, just a straight up military campaign lasting about three months. We slapped the Moabs around, kicked their asses out, then counter-invaded. Those were good times," he reflected wistfully. "Real good times."
"So how did you end up with us?" I ask.
"It's complicated. But hey, Papa, my main man, I'll tell you this," he adds, black eyes glittering strangely in the firelight. "The weeks leading up to my little foray into monarch-poaching, I felt like I was being guided. Like when I was on patrol with Sapper and Haroun and the rest. Someone infinitely superior to me, like the Captain, would tell me where to go and what to do. Exactly how I achieved my mission was up to me, but the impulse to do it was irresistible. That how I felt when I plunged my lefty sword into that Moab pimp's belly. Like I was just a sword in someone else's hand. It's also how I've been feeling since we've got back from Pelennor. Like someone's been setting things up for us to take down the Eye, just like I took down the Moab king."
I sit still as stone. "I didn't have long to study the Annals. But I remember from the readings that Wallace did. Kali. Shivetya. The Lady and the Dominator. The Star Rider. The Company has a long, proud history of being jerked around by gods and devils. Is that what you think is going on here? Some old terror from ancient times is making us its cats-paw?"
He frowns, shrugs. "I don't know. It would make sense, I guess. The Red Eye has been around forever, apparently. He must have made some supernatural enemies in that time."
"Damn it," I mutter, more to myself than him. "Things are more than bad enough just trying to lead a military coup against a warlock warlord. Complications are unwelcome."
"Still, doesn't really change anything, does it? We still have our objective, we still have our obstacle. If we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were getting manipulated into fighting Barad-dur, would we really abandon our Annals just to spite our puppetmaster? Of course not. We'd still carry on."
"I suppose. Anyway, it's still fairly unlikely. Conspiracies are bullshit more often than not." The fire's dying down. We pile on a few more chunks of wood.
"True," says Saintly. "But remember what I told the Moab king before I wasted him?"
"The one-liner?"
"Aye."
"I have a message from the Lord my God, something something yada yada."
"Eru Illuvatar. Yeah. My country has whole pantheons of gods to worship, mostly imported in from our neighbors. We got battalions of gods, we got oceans of idols and buckets of spirits. Calling any one of the gods Lord is slightly blasphemous to the rest. And even if it wasn't, we don't have any god named Eru Illuvatar. In fact, I have no idea why I invoked the name of non-existent deity when striking down my people's oppressor. Unless... there was an actual god named Eru, like, in real life. Pushing me. Forcing my jaw up and down and throwing his voice into my mouth."
A haunted look crosses Saintly darkened face, followed immediately by a mix of rage and fear.
"I could feel- and I am feeling- my fucking strings getting pulled, and I don't like it. But like a good little puppet, I'm dancing anyway."
Papa Jack the life-long sceptic says bull-crap. Oh, I'm sure that Saintly is catching bad vibes from something, but that don't mean it was a god. Lots of sorcerors who live long enough become dark gods in their own right, but they're not actual deities, they don't count. Just because something's using us to whack the Eye doesn't mean a thing.
But Papa Jack the survivor of the Pelennor Fields is a little more open minded.
We sit in comfortable silence, contemplating uncomfortable futures until the fire burns down and we go to our blankets.
For reasons unknown, the Gondorians are counter-invading Mordor, rolling up the paths from Osgiliath up to the Black Gate to the north. After we rejoined the Company, we were instantly sent packing, off to the Black Gate to prepare for the confrontation.
I have no idea why the ravaged armies of the western nations are attacking a foe standing on strong walls and outnumbering them 200 to 1, but nonetheless, they are.
If rumors are accurate (and sometimes the grapevine is fairly knowledgeable), the "enemy" comes in two flavors: the force out of Gondor and her tributaries number 6,000 superb foot soldiers and 3,000 cavalry; and the force out of Rohan is 3,000 elite cavalry.
12,000 warriors. 12,000, in total. There are at least 150,000 uruks that can be mustered to the defenses of Mordor at this very moment, with untold more able to reach the defenses before the Gondorian coalition reaches striking distance. What the hell are they thinking?
Stupid bastards, get back to your walls! We need you intact when the revolution comes. They've been marching through Ithilien as bold as you please, routing the few outposts we had and proclaiming that the new king of Gondor was coming to hammer our faces in. It turns out, the reason we had been ordered out of Minas Morgul in the first place was to give the other team some bait to swallow. Had they taken a shot at charging through our former base, a host of uruks could have whipped down from the north and cut them off from supplies and reinforcements, leaving them to wither on the vine and be starved into submission. The Eye could have ended the war in a week had they occupied that death trap. But they were canny, or as canny as that load of bloody idiots can be. They kept marching north, swatting aside all the feeble resistance and reoccupying their lost lands.
And always, always shouting for the armies of Mordor to make way for Lord Elessar, the new king of Gondor.
There were very unkind words said of Elessar in our camp, I'll tell you that. The fool is going to get the only allies we have inside of a thousand miles slaughtered because he is incapable of grasping the rudiments of military strategy. All he's going to accomplish is making the Eye in Barad-dur stare intently at him for a couple of short weeks, after which will be naught but death and pain, the vast majority of which will be inflicted on him.
Goddamned fool.
Our Annals are located at last. Bullet offered a bribe to the right Southron- our spy laid a finger on the exact location; the vault in the Tower of Grufoz, the northern-most port of the Sea of Nurnen. The Sea of Nurnen was, in our humble opinion, the only part of Mordor worth actually holding onto. The water there was undrinkable, but enough silt and other fertile funk got swept into its deltas from the Ephel Duath mountain range to make the surrounding areas viable for food production. We passed through the southern parts of Mordor on our way up two years ago, and we had all agreed it wasn't a bad place to live, provided that one does not mind a boot heel out of Barad-dur on the back of one's neck all the time.
The Lieutenant, Bullet, and Quartermaster have their heads together, trying to work out how to organize supplies for the march south. For there is no doubt in any of our minds that we were on the bounce. Our salvation is in sight, and there's not a one of us who's not eager and willing to get through Gorgoroth and lay siege to Grufoz.
Except, possibly, a few of the fifteen man team that were at Cirith Ungol. We had just walked through Gorgoroth, and now we have to about face and march right through it again. We weren't too pleased with the challenge, but we can't deny it's a prize worth suffering for.
We had been bogged down in intrigue and planning and such for the last few weeks, but now things are almost moving too quickly for us to handle. Slaz, Grog, and Goth had been given whole companies of a hundred uruks to command, and our revolution had seeped into their ranks almost from the word go. All three are coming with us, bringing the Company up to 450 fighters- much closer to its original strength. This is undeniably good news, but before it was a moderately sized group trying to sneak out of the front lines to desert- now it's a small army.
If the Lieutenant wasn't in his Gothmog armor in almost all of his waking hours, I think he would have ripped his hair out in frustration. We can either escape with a small and weakened force, and thus have serious difficulties taking the Tower of Grufoz. Or we can take enough warm bodies to get the job done and maybe have to fight our way out of here.
The solution, of course, is that there is no solution. No right answer. Only a host of bad ones.
The Lieutenant decides to bring them along, not necessarily because it's a smart move but because Slaz, Grog and Goth are brothers of the Company, and that means they deserve a chance to retake the Annals.
And that's when the ball really got rolling.
Shatarz, the former commander of Minas Morgul, saw that we were preparing to move south, and assumed that the revolution was on. He sent out word to all the cells inside the Morgul army and started drawing supplies to go with us.
We try to explain to him that this was our personal mission, not the revolution.
"No," he says. "You go now to seize Grufoz, yeah? Face-fuck the filthy slugs down in Nurnen, yeah? That's revolution business. It's on."
He laughs his big belly laugh, repeating to himself, "It's on, it's on, it's on."
The Lieutenant tries to explain again, taking off the Gothmog helmet to talk face to face. "This is not the revolution. Shatarz, this is a raid, alright? We bust down the door, kill any witnesses, grab the Annals, and we're gone. We're not setting up shop there."
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