her way to a restaurant called Zimbabwe. She expected some Disney-like images of the Great Harare Temple, but found only a long room fronted with battered tables and chairs, and a kitchen in back that smelled like a village. She ordered a porridge-like vegetable soup. This is perfect, she thought, a break from all the over-wrought English-ness and French forensics hocus-pocus that were clinging to her like competing vines of ivy. With this bit of perspective, she pondered the thin dossier of credibility left to this whole affair. What proofs were there? The documents seemed to be related to Tolkien. Two sources, Les Inspecteurs and Mr. Bossier’s little machine, said that some of them were indeed old. But what was the meaning of it all? Could she count on a few fragments of readable text and, thinnest of all, the translations of an eccentric homeless man — the only person in the world who knows Elf? What kind of case was that? There were, as she considered it, only two things that kept her indulgence going. Her grandfather, his fate hidden but exquisitely close in this maze, and Ara. Somehow they were connected. One would lead to the other. And wouldn’t it be a damn shame if Ara were somehow real and then got erased, just for lack of belief?
She let all the pieces float around like lazy, deflating helium balloons. Today her mind could accept that perhaps the spider was just an illusion down in the dark and confusing subway tunnel. And the feeling of being stalked? Just a case of nerves built upon all this hoodoo pressure.
No matter how hard she tried, the prospect of going home in defeat seemed less like an option and more and more like an inevitable result. A few tantalizing tidbits but basically empty-handed. Her grandfather, Ara, the meaning of the documents, all untethered to any real evidence. Maybe Os was totally right, Mirkwood giveth and taketh away.
She couldn’t just hang out here forever. She thought of the practicalities: money, job, getting a life.
She finished with an exotic tea and milk concoction and headed back to the Algonquin, ready to check on The Os.
Chapter 27
OCTOBER 27. 5:10 P.M
She got to the hotel an hour later. She brought Osley up to speed on Les Inspecteurs — skipping the part about the money bag. She finished with Madame Litton’s revelation of the recovered pleas of Oruntuft.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“It could be important, or just a madman’s metaphysical ramblings, erased because it deserved to be.”
She looked at him; he was oblivious to the irony of who was a madman.
“For now, it all seems way behind the scenes. If you look at it hard enough, anything, everything becomes a conspiracy. People want to know what makes evil. And they won’t hesitate to make something up. Dark Elves, Beelzebub, Cain, Moriarity, Dick Cheney, whatever. Who can tell what fuels the Dark Lord’s ravening, or who controls whom? He is a monster, a world killer in his own right. I suspect Ara is going to have to deal with him. Which may tell us why he, someone, is trying to destroy her. In any case, it brings us back to her journey.” He held up a sheath of yellow pages. “You see, after Ara left the cave she headed into some very … well, here, you read it,”
Cadence took his hand-scrawled notes and read:
Within a half day after leaving the cave and finding the enchanted pool which revealed a young woman’s face, Ara came fully into the southern lands. It was a place fitfully wooded and beset by a wind that moaned tuneless, brooding and fearful. She came to a merestone, its great rock obelisk pointing upward like a craggy finger. Its exclamation seemed to have been long spent. She looked at its ruin and neglect. It seemed an emblem of some long-departed evil whose peculiar roots and seeds perhaps lay still in the soil.
A hundred yards further, beyond a grove of gnarled oaks of a kind she had never seen, she found greetings more current. Before her, flanking the meager trail, stood a phalanx of pikes. They were stove well into the ground and atop each of their upright lengths was a man’s head. There they swayed like a congress of whispering kings contemplating with tragic masks all that passed before them. Whether originally friend or foe to those who so anointed them was a pointless conjecture. The message to followers of this trail was clear enough.
She went past the sentinels, toward a huge oak whose branches hung over the trail. Birds screeched and wheeled into the air. Suddenly she averted her eyes, covering them with both hands. It was too late. The image was already burned into her memory. A hobbit hung by its neck from a rope. It turned slowly in the breeze, the rope and limb creaking in a dirge. The victim was already the sport of carrion-birds. She began to cry, trying to push the image away, when she realized that on his belt, hung by its leather strap, was a green Shandy. The cap was just the sort she had given to her Amon! Her heart came to a stop, and before it could summon itself to beat again she opened her eyes and moved forward. She walked right up, nauseous and overwhelmed, and looked.
It wasn’t him. This poor hobbit-traveler, his tale ended and never further to be told, was of the Fur- Shoulders clan. His soiled clothing was of another cut and color than would be worn by her love. The face was blackened and well-picked, but she knew.
She began to run, south down the trail, fleeing the images.
The next passage seemed to be Osley’s own musings:
There exists today, traveled by millions but its secret known to but a few, a multi-laned freeway overlaid on an older asphalt highway, which buries a macadamized road, under which is compressed a foundation of stone. This foundation once bore forth war and rejoicing, commerce and ideas, love and reunion, and the joy of setting forth on destinations unknown. Mad adventures. White line fever. The road that goes on and on.
His text then returned to the pathway of Ara. Leaning back with a sigh of just-let-it-flow, she entered once more into step with the heroine. Ara’s journey, life, tale and existence all seemed threatened by gathering menace within and without these documents:
On a road once straight and unbroken, laid with stones and mortar so scrupulously correct that only a thousand years of neglect could finally break its order, Ara’s path lay uneven and eroded. Each state of being, the perfect and the failed, bespoke the long decline that she knew by the myths served up by tumbled monument and ancient lay that accompanied her to this desperate track.
Hiding in a wild and extravagant thicket of bramble, only feet off the way, she watched through the thorns. Passing before her was the vanguard of an army in irregular array, bearded and braided and dirty, tromping in remnants of footwear. They were encased in unmatched parts, a left armshield, perhaps a right shin-guard, a breastplate, in dingy and broken cast-offs of metal plundered from the bloody armory of an unburied battlefield. More than a few heads were bandaged, some graced with only one seeing eye.
Slowly they tramped by. Low, ominous vibrations spread from their ponderous steps. Unscabbered blades of broken swords wrapped at the hilt with uncured hides swung from tattooed arms. Others carried staves and bludgeons. Some bore lances tipped with blades hammered from broken shields, ferrying ribbons of tattered cloth that flared straight back in the cold wind.
This procession was followed by oxcarts drawn by human slaves in harness. Women and children with the mien of captives followed in loose order. The lame and the utterly rejected, unfit even to pull at the traces, drifted behind.
The army of refugees bore no banners. Its cause was survival, its heraldry the leavings of the victorious and the defeated alike, its prey the lost and wayward. It failed any test of allegiance. It had not the memory of any land and it lacked the protection of any king, wizard or liege. It tramped on, ill-equipped to resist any side in this great war.
Ara hugged the ground, quiet as the hare that trembled and shivered with her in the thorny nest, and she smelled the soft and pungent earth that remembered still the nameless age that built the road.
The next morning, the horizon showed a land fully at war. Distant plumes of smoke coiled to the skies, each leaning in perfect choreography with the chill wind freshening from the north.
She was a prisoner. She listened to her captor. “Each of those columns of smoke comes from one of our villages,” said Thygol, leader of the Cerian Band of the Free. Ara leaned over again to look into the distance from their observation post in a high cluster of rocks. There was an unbroken line of armies and their support in
