Chapter 24
OCTOBER 26: 8:50 A. M
Sunday morning. Her appointment at nine o’clock. Cadence arrived early at the office of L’Institut des Inspecteurs, which seemed to be open just for her visit. Per Mel’s instructions, she brought an envelope containing three pages, including the original note from Tolkien to her grandfather.
The receptionist noted her name and chirped, “Are you French? Es-que vous parlez francais?”
“Uh, non.” The best she could do from ninth grade French.
“Wait here, please.”
Cadence sat and picked up a glossy brochure from the coffee table. It was bi-lingual, an English version conveniently provided on the opposing pages.
Up till now, she hadn’t given L’Institut des Inspecteurs much thought, but flipping through the brochure and reading the qualifications of the experts made her feel a little queasy with apprehension. They were scarily qualified professionals who would go over every centimeter of her grandfather’s documents. What frightened her most of all was the idea that maybe the entire thing was a fake. If so, what did that make of Osley and everything she’d experienced since getting here?
The receptionist suddenly asked her if she would like a cup of coffee. Cadence shook her head, and the receptionist smiled back in relief. Cadence watched the institutional wall clock tick off fifteen minutes.
Finally the receptionist stood up and Cadence was whisked into a large office where she was met by a tall, goateed gentleman whose dress and manner struck her as elegant, veering dangerously close to affected. Brian de Bois-Gilbert. He began speaking to her in French, or what her baffled ear assumed was French. Then she caught a stray English word, and another, and it became clear that he was speaking grammatically perfect English in an almost impenetrable accent. Her ear finally straightened it out. “Mademoiselle Cadence, I understand that you have certain lost documents, allegedly part of a secret cache owned by Monsieur Tolkien. May I have the sample documents, please?”
Without waiting for an answer, he deftly plucked the envelope from her clutched hand.
“This is but a preliminary meeting,” he told her. “Our team of experts will be examining these today and will give you their findings tomorrow morning.”
“They’re here? In New York? The people in this brochure?”
He smiled indulgently as she flapped the glossy brochure at him. “But of course. Where did you think they’d be?”
“… custody, ink, paper, calligraphy, type, and context. These are but some of the elements our panel of experts will examine. These will be the proofs.”
Again she got that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. The reception desk phone rang and Bois-Gilbert answered it smartly. He spoke at length in French before she realized her meeting had ended. When she reached hesitantly for her handbag, he confirmed it by waving an exuberant good-bye.
She found her way back to the reception area, where she was given a different address for the next morning’s meeting: Eleventh Avenue and West Sixty-first Street. Why a different address? It didn’t make any sense.
After leaving the Institute, Cadence took a bus toward downtown. She got a window seat and let the blocks and stops roll by. She wanted to see if Ara escaped from the pursuers. She pulled out the last pages Osley had handed her. She laughed despite herself, thinking of his manic flurries with pen and paper. His translation read:
Ara made it to the rocks. There the hawk, immobile save for the bitter wind rippling through its feathers, rested on a tree that guarded the cleft between two giant boulders. Far above, on the purple flank of the mountain, snow fell and gales moaned to herald the coming winter. The cave was nestled behind a chaos of fallen rocks that gave no encouragement to explore its fissures. Indeed, the entrance twisted between stones so closely spaced that, save for a thin line of shadow, its passage could not be seen from the outside. To enter was an act of faith.
She frantically made her preparations and, with Hafoc unhooded but jessed to one arm, and a crude torch held high before her, Ara slid between the stones.
She soon found a broadening cave, cool and damp at first, which had a single, well-excavated pathway. She followed this for some time, feeling the air grow warmer. She began to hear a distant, subterranean sound, like massive, sonorous breathing. On top of that sound danced the creak of wood and the chip and thud of hammers. At last, she entered a high-roofed cavern, illuminated with an orange glow.
In the center sat some one or some thing. She approached with caution and looked closely. It was warped in the way of a large beast misshapen, its design errant from the intended stamp of some obscure race of men. Its face, if such could still be said of it, was shadowed by the flickering light of a small fire. Hidden in wreaths of smoke that lifted slowly upward, this being was such as men do not see in a thousand years, and halflings, never. Its face was monstrous. Folds and creases, rather than mouth and nose and ears, were its hallmarks. Ragged, tortured, deeply scarred from upper left to lower right, it was a face tired beyond the endless toil of lifetimes. But a glint shone from an eye socket. All those that rarest chance brought before this creature sensed that here sat a being — not man, not wizard, not named — of knowledge to match those years.
She gazed further into the torch-lit, glowing depths and saw a dozen men sitting before a wall of the cave. The thing before her precariously raised a long, spiraled, goat horn ear trumpet to the nob on the side of its head. Suitably equipped for conversation, it pointed an arthritic finger toward the men and spoke in a strangely heightened voice.
“There sit prisoners unchained save by their ignorance. See how they stare giddily at the wall, entranced by shadows? They came as looters, yet they stay by their own free will. Do you, Aragranessa, do better? Do you know when the unreal is real, and the real is but a shadow? … And what of your stewards?”
Ara replied, “Of stewards I have none, for I carry myself and all that I need. What the mists of things-to-be may bring, I know not. Such is beyond the vision of our kind.” She gazed at the “looters,” ragged and long-bearded, and saw that much of the light etching the shadows came from a side chamber. From there also protruded a scaled tail. The very breath of some long-sleeping, lesser dragon was the source of the light that shackled these men to a false world. So would they all stay. Men tethered by bonds as solid as clanking iron yet tenuous as untested superstition.
The unbeheld dragon did what unbeheld dragons do best, furnishing unto men false shadows and the spell of its glow until, at some moment, in some tale long hence, it would inexorably awake and visit itself upon the world.
She turned to the figure before her, and their discourse, if such it was, has been lost from this chronicle, save the now-famous wisdom he imparted to her. “Of all beliefs, a vow is the most precious, because it is the giver who must believe.”
Aside from the path down which she fled to arrive in this cavern, there was only one way out. The opening which pulsed with the glow that fed the fantastical shadows. As she watched, they expanded and contracted like inky, vaulting phantoms. She left the misshapen creature, ear trumpet still poised, and walked toward the glow. She passed by the prisoners, saw in their glittering eyes and cracked smiles the way of self-delusion and false paths. She hurried ahead, toward the slowly pulsing light of the worm’s breathing. An undercurrent smell of something nasty and revolting hung in the air.
In a moment, she stood next to the entrance to a side tunnel, its sides worn smooth by the passage of immense, granite-hard coils. The sounds of picks and hammers and creaky wood wheels and gears came from here. The smell was worse.
She paused, Hafoc still on her arm, then braved a step over the protruding trail to look inside.
