“We have spoken of this before. Your story will be measured and preserved only if properly told.”
“Told? I have only reported the truth.”
“Not … about
Their breakfasts came. Mel took a call. Cadence ate while keeping the valise on her lap, awkwardly guarding her grandfather’s trove of scribbles, runes, and ornate writings from many hands. Whatever it was, someone, or multiple someones, had gone to extraordinary lengths to create it.
Mel’s iPhone vibrated again and he picked it up, studying the caller’s ID before declining. He held the phone out importantly. “These new touch screens, sensitive as hell. This thing keeps dialing people up on its own. Dangerous, huh?”
She nodded. She didn’t want to talk about her own phone, the rudimentary little freebie Nokia that came with her basic prepay plan.
“Cadence, let’s get down to our business. I understand you need money to save your grandpa’s place. I wish I could help, but this seems like bits and pieces. You got anything that we can frame into a whole story?”
He began to read, and then put down his fork as the words unwound before him:
Herein lies the account of the Fourth Book.
In the last days of Middle-earth, when the Ascendance of Man was assured, and many plots wove through the separate ambitions of all races, there was lost a fourth volume to the Red Book of Hertegest.
Unlike the three “known” volumes, of which many copies were scribed and long cherished, the original and the few secret copies of the fourth volume were doubtless destroyed in the hopes of erasing the contents forever. The effort was successful, and little of its tale escaped save as unexplained lapses and obscure references in what readers, now far removed from those elder days, presume to enjoy as truth.
It was only in the deep to the south of the world as it was then recognized, where the dimming of all the other races and their powers was swift and complete, that Azakuul, Third Caliph of the Realm, extracted much of the tale. It came to him from Orontuf, most quiet and humble of the Great Wizards. The Caliph, proud of a long lineage of learning and knowledge, was adept at collecting both information and power — by charm, by the bribe, and, if necessary, by ruthless cruelty.
And so our story has a source, but we know not if the giving of it was willing. The grim circumstances of the Confession of Orontuf are little known now. As he was, by reputation, not inclined to speak to mortals, we may surmise that His Brownness, Master of the Plants and Harvest, was coerced. So also does the unflinching character of Azakuul the Beheader testify that most certainly not all was voluntary.
Such was the time: halflings dwindled, elves fled to their havens, dwarves toiled ever deeper into the mountain fastness, yes, even as orcs became extinct from a noxious plague of their own foul making, and trolls grew smaller and hid under bridges. So too did the Wizards of Old change forever. Gone now was their power. Orontuf, it is said, survived his unfortunate stay with the Caliph, and became a wanderer in the Far Lands. Legend has it that his nature was changed, such that he began to speak to Men and ended his days as a mortal, quietly growing the best potatoes in all the region.
The Caliph, himself beheaded, quite lost his grasp of the tale. Thereafter it passed through paths unknown until it lay, long dormant and unnoticed, in the personal library of an ale merchant that collected, but never read, what were even then ancient manuscripts. Then once again it disappeared into obscurity.
It drifted on tides of ebb and flow for a long, long time.
Mel held up another page, similar in appearance, and read:
It is said by ancient sources that, at its core, the events that came to be known as the Saga of Ara span but thirty days between two full moons before their terrible conclusion. These were marked by a … WONDER.
Her journey began with a full moon that was a great fat coin of harvest time. The next full moon was discolored and bruised, a battered shield of war hanging in a sky fumed with anger and strife.
And in between those so different moons, the great red star Narcross grew large and hove close to the land of Middle Earth. There it grew progressively brighter until it filled the intervening run of dark nights with a deep red gloaming.
Narcross stared balefully over the land like a watchful eye. People fretted, fearful of portents that herald a return to the dark legends of the past. Seers and auguries in multitude arose. Owls in twain crossed that angry red star. Beasts misshapen pulled by night carts laden with unknown cargo that fouled the air for leagues about. Crows cawed in sentences and sat upon the heads of docile children.
People shuttered their windows and barred their doors. Folk of design both fell and fair withdrew to refuge common to their kind. Within keep and hut, smial and cave, underbridge and deepest forest, sheltered eyrie and simple hole, all huddled and hoped. Please, please let this likeness gaze only with harmless envy on lands untouched by its evil purpose.
In the span of a week, the celestial intruder dimmed and receded into the twinkling tapestry of the night.
But something had stirred, great movement was afoot, and events came to pass that shook the world. Ara, as all the world once knew, moved at the very center of this tumult, and by her witness the Long Age ended.
Mel put the last page in his lap and took a deep breath. “You know I’m close to both Houghton-Mifflin and New Line. Bernie Alsop and Maxwell Karis are personal friends. That’s the little morsel of good news. Want the seriously bad news?”
“OK.”
“You’ll probably never get this stuff published.”
“Why!”
“Two reasons. First, publishing as we, as I, know it, is gone. It is the Great Auk. It is going bankrupt. Almost no one will take a chance on an unknown like you.”
She listened, slightly stunned, waiting to finish getting hit with the one-two punch.
“Second, one word. Lawyers.”
She caught the whiff of threat, could see the long unspooling of a tangled thread of hassle and delay before anything got done. It pissed her off. “All right, so tell me first about the publishers.”
“In truth there are only a handful of big houses left, mostly foreign-owned. And they are fragments of bigger conglomerates. I work this street. I know. I haven’t done a decent deal in six months. This industry’s worse than General Motors because it’s broken and it won’t get bailed out.”
“But won’t it all come back soon? This can’t last too long.”
“It will never come back, not the way it was. What’s coming is what you see everywhere else — a digital tsunami overwhelming the old ways. Newspapers? Dying. Magazines? Falling like flies. Big label music and CD’s? Gone. Broadcast radio? So last century. TV. All sliced into bits. Now, clunky old hard-copy paper books that are hauled around from warehouses to dying bricks and mortar emporiums? And then back again. No way. The whole industry is compressing to a few survivors. People are getting laid off, budgets cut, and that’s not a great time for unproven writers. Hell, even I got rejected this year. Totally. My first book.”
“What?”
“Yeah, and I went to Iowa for Cris-sakes!”
His tone opened a little window into his psyche. He suddenly reminded her of a boyish, sputtering Luke Skywalker. “I … I’m not a half-bad pilot myself!”
She started to let it slide, but something told her to push him back while he was in this vulnerable zone. “So, with these Tolkien documents, I guess if all else fails, I could go on Oprah?”
He leaned back, the momentary look was priceless.
“Just kidding, Mr. Chricter. OK, so what about the legal stuff. I’m only trying …”
He recovered smoothly. “Hold on. Just suppose some of these documents
“Well …”
“Intellectual property lawyers. They are terrible. They are the bloodless low priests — our friend Everett
