this his focus wavered.
There they stood, frozen in tableau, as the fumes rolled up over the precipice and the earth at its core trembled and rendered up its boiling soup.
Then the Lord of the Source, soon to be once again Wielder of Bind, extended one hand in gracious direction before Ara. She stepped forward. She walked across the rubble to where the Bearer lay. She knelt by him and gently uncoiled his fingers. Bind she took into her own palm, rising and displaying it to her Master in triumph. Its spell swirled about her. It tugged and writhed in anticipation of its return to the Hand of the Source.
The Halfling Queen turned to the defeated halfling who was once her Amon. “Rise,” she said, “and let us try to speak the words.”
The Bearer looked up, fighting the pain and struggling to see around him. Ara’s eyes pronounced the secret of their vows. The words that just might break the invisible chains that yanked them here and there like clumsy puppets in some crude minstrel show. Whether the Dark Lord, or Bind itself, pulled the chains in this macabre dance, she could not tell.
The Bearer coiled tighter in a returning spasm of pain. He uttered, “Down … roads …”
The Halfling Queen’s obsidian eyes softened. She also spoke: “Past … borders …”
He raised his head and reached his hand to her: “Through … gates …”
And in unison they groped to speak: “Each … together … to spy that … sea!”
Tested, the spell would not unclasp its chains. They and the Dark Lord were for a moment rendered still, as a painting might preserve their demeanors for all time. Even then, the air about them swirled with the tumult of contesting wills. Suddenly, as if the chains were but smoke rings created by jesters, their power fell away. The Bearer was himself again. Free to choose.
He stood up, retrieved Bind from Ara’s open hand, and held it over the precipice.
“My fate is my own,” he said calmly, looking into the dismayed eyes of the Dark Lord.
There he held Bind for a moment. All was still. Tensiles of fate adjusted and rearranged beyond the vision of any of the races of Middle-earth.
The Bearer looked at Ara, then yelled at the Dark Lord to divert his attention, “Red-Eye, your vision and your spells are weak. Like the Source itself. You have no more days.”
Many things happened at once: Ara moved quickly to stand beside the device that supported the Source. The minions scurried about, oblivious to her and servile to their tasks of adjustment to valve and stem. The great glass bowl at the top shimmered with its precious contents. She saw that, like the Dark Lord’s empire, the contraption was top heavy. She grabbed a wooden strut and pulled. The mechanism wobbled. The Dark One turned around, then looked back at the Bearer, then back to Ara. A ghastly, unbelieving look of dismay crept across his features.
Ara jumped up on the strut and leaned impishly back. The device teetered beyond its center of gravity. Like a great tree, stiff and solemn in its slow fall, it leaned and then fell in a thundering crash of heavy liquid and exploding glass and splintered wood. Ara, nimble as ever, jumped free at the last second. The broken vials burst forth their contents. The essences, loose and hurried, ran with lives of their own, from ledge to floor to precipice. The Dark Lord danced awkwardly as the metallic liquids of the Source slithered and scurried, shimmering and deft as eels, to pour over the edge.
Still standing at the precipice, the Bearer opened his hand and Bind glinted forlornly as it fell away, following the Source to oblivion.
Barren picked up the pages and tucked them in his coat pocket.
Chapter 41
RUSH
Cadence banged her own cell phone with her fist. It was shut down. Dead battery.
After surfacing from the subway stop, she took a wrong turn, walked three needless blocks and finally swept into the lobby of the Algonquin. Heraclitus bolted from his perch. Guests’ heads turned, the desk clerk stood up straight. Cadence made it to the elevator. Her head was ringing like an in-use anvil.
First floor. Out of the elevator. The hallway loomed in two opposite and indistinguishable directions. She had to concentrate, holding her plastic key card and remembering the room number. It was fuzzy, like trying to remember the street address where you lived in the fifth grade. She tried several doors and finally one worked.
She burst through the door and shut it behind her. Safe.
The room was empty. The bed was made. The room was clean and arranged in impeccable order. Her shoe crinkled on a note on the floor. She picked it up, opened it cautiously.
M. Lawrence Novell, the manager, was inquiring whether, as her reservation was through Monday only, would she be extending her stay?
Monday was yesterday, according to the newspapers she glimpsed while running to the subway platform. She held the note like it was heavy. A reminder of an incongruous, alternate world. A place of quiet despair and frozen rivers of indecision, where petty errands sailed haphazardly on the air currents from the seacliff of her inertia. A place that would be a prison where it was always three o’clock in the morning.
She scrunched the note and threw it aside and looked at the room desk. Her cell phone charger cord was there, neatly coiled. She plugged the phone in. She used the hotel phone to call Jess’s room. A stranger answered, indignant about her questions. She called the front desk. Sorry, he checked out. No, no note left behind for her, nothing in Lost and Found. A Mr. Thornton called. “Oh yes, has madame had a chance to do her shopping?” She said a deflated “yes” and hung up and flopped on the bed, crushed.
After a moment, she folded over like a collapsing tower of sticks. She took in the world in sideways view. Maybe that would help her think.
She checked drawers, the closet, inside the shower.
She repeated the entire search, overturned all the trash cans, and ransacked the couch. She grew still and contemplated a return to that perpetual, pre-dawn prison cell that yawed open in her mind.
After a while her room phone rang. “Cadence, Bossier. I’ve been calling your cell and your rooms. I cornered a man, the one who was stalking you. Outside your other room. He got away. I fainted or something. I just blacked out. You were missing …”
“No, I’m OK, more or less. How did you find him?”
“I got a call on Monday from a different cell phone. You were talking with someone … like you were in trouble. I heard a man say he was going to the Algonquin. So I went there and saw this guy outside your grandfather’s room. Then I woke up in the maid’s closet.”
“So, are you sure you’re all right?”
The second line of the phone rang, the light blinking with idiot insistence. “Uh … hold on.” She punched the blinking button. It was the desk clerk again. Sorry, he’d forgotten. There was a note for her from Mr. Grande, formerly of Room 608. She punched back to the first line. “Gotta go. Yes. Yes. I’m OK. Bye.”
Counting the elevator time, she was downstairs in thirty seconds. She got the envelope, Algonquin stationary, her name on the front in Jess’ erratic handwriting. She ripped it open and read the wobbly, trailed writing that spoke of adrenaline and haste:
Just like that, everything … gone.
She let the note fall, its wish-wash flutter perfect closure to the yellow telegram flimsy that had ignited this journey. A horde of emotions jostled in her mind, like sale-mad shoppers bottlenecked at the opening doorway of Wal-Mart on Black Friday. All her naive family questions, Jess, Os, the ancient documents, Elvish, belief, cynicism, Ara — everything, at least whatever was left, was being trampled in this mad, mindless roar. She squeezed her
