judge. All I need is information about the locations of the Ithilien regiment fighters. I do not intend to kill these people; I really am trying to avoid bloodshed. You’ll have to take my word for it, since you’ve lost and have no other options. I will get this information out of you, whatever it costs. Certainly no one can interrogate in the third degree the sister of the King of Rohan, but you can be sure that I will make her watch the torture of Beregond, whom you betrayed, from the beginning to the bitter end, by the silence of Mandos!”
In the meantime the prince was absent-mindedly playing with his quill atop an incomplete manuscript, as if not noticing that his left elbow had nudged an unfinished cup of wine to the very edge of the table. In another moment the cup will crash to the floor, Cheetah will involuntarily glance at it – then he’ll vault over the table and go for the counter-spy’s throat, and devil may care… Suddenly the door opened without a knock and a White Company lieutenant strode quickly into the room; two soldiers appeared in the gloom just beyond the threshold. Late again, Faramir thought with a sense of doom, but the lieutenant paid him no heed, instead whispering something apparently very surprising into Cheetah’s ear. “We’ll continue our conversation in ten minutes or so, Prince,” the captain said, heading to the door. The lock clanged, the sound of marching boots faded quickly into the distance, and quiet fell – a kind of uneasy, confused quiet, as though it realized its fleeting quality.
“What’re you looking for?” She was surprisingly calm, even serene.
“Anything that can serve as a weapon.”
“Yes, that’s good. Find anything for me?”
“See, baby, I got you into this and couldn’t save…”
“Nonsense, you did everything right, Far; it’s just that luck was on their side this time.”
“Shall we say goodbye?”
“Yes, let’s. Whatever happens, we’ve had this month… You know, it must be Valar envy: we had too much happiness.”
“Are you ready, darling?” Now, after those few seconds, he was a totally different man.
“Yes. What should I do?’
“Look carefully. The door opens inward, the doorposts are inside, too…”
Chapter 27
Meanwhile, Cheetah was leaning on the battlement over the gates, his gaze fixed on Grager’s hard hawk-like face, which he had previously known only from descriptions. The spot in front of the gate was lit with a dozen torches held aloft by riders in Ithilien regiment’s camouflage cloaks from the Baron’s entourage. The talks proceeded with great difficulty, or almost not at all; the ‘esteemed treating parties’ agreed on the need to avoid bloodshed and nothing else. With good reason, neither trusted the other worth a damn (“Suppose I simply capture you right now, Baron, thus solving all my problems?” “You’ll have to open the gates to do that, Captain. Go ahead – open them, and we’ll see whose archers are better…”); neither budged an inch from their preconditions. Grager demanded that the Ithilienians be let inside the fort to stand guard over Faramir. Cheetah wanted to know the locations of their forest strongholds (“Do you think I’m an idiot, Captain?” “Well, you’re the one suggesting that I voluntarily let armed enemies inside the fort.”) After about fifteen minutes of this back-and-forth they finally agreed that the White Company would request orders from Minas Tirith while the Ithilienians would let the courier through, and broke up the talks.
Someone else might have been fooled by this show, but not Cheetah. The moment he went up the wall and assessed the situation, he turned to the accompanying lieutenant and gave a quiet order: “Raise a quiet alarm. All available men to the courtyard. Everyone freeze and watch for an intruder; any minute now someone from the Ithilien regiment will scale the wall, most likely in the rear, under cover of all the talk-talk. Capture him alive – I will personally take apart whoever produces a corpse.”
He was absolutely correct but for a couple of small details. The infiltrator chose the front rather than the back wall. Soundlessly he tossed a tiny grapple on a length of weightless elvenrope over the shoddy stockade (less than a dozen yards from the group at the gates, where the dark pushed away by their torches seemed thickest by contrast), flew up like a spider on a strand, and then slid into the courtyard like a breath of night breeze right under the noses of sentries, who kept their attention and bows trained on Grager’s well-lit men and expected no such chutzpah. Another small detail that Cheetah got wrong was that the man who was now trying to free the prince (an impromptu attempt conceived less than an hour ago of hopelessness and desperation) was not of the Ithilien regiment, but of the Cirith Ungol Rangers.
It rates a mention that Sergeant Tzerlag’s unit identification had caused a greatly animated discussion at Blackbird Hamlet, both as to essence and as to appearances. “My friend, are you totally nuts?” was Grager’s first reaction to Tangorn’s sudden suggestion to use the ‘visiting Mordorian professional’ rather than an Ithilien Ranger to infiltrate Emyn Arnen. “An Orc is an Orc! To trust the Prince’s life to one… Sure, it’s nice that he knows the fort layout – from when they were stationed here, right? – and can pick locks. But dammit, Baron – to let an armed Mordorian into the Prince’s bedchamber with your own hands?” “I’m willing to trust my own life to these two guys,” Tangorn explained patiently. “I can’t tell you about their mission, but please believe me: it so happens that we’re fighting the same enemy on the same team, at least for now, and they’re as interested as we are in getting Faramir out from under the White Company.”
Be that as it may, working in intelligence had long ago taught Grager that a temporary alignment of interest can sometimes produce a totally unbelievable alliance and that oftentimes one can trust a former enemy more than certain friends. In the end he assumed all responsibility, formally enlisted Tzerlag into the Ithilien regiment ‘for the duration of the raid on Emyn Arnen’ and handed the Orocuen the appropriate paperwork in case he got caught by the Whites. The sergeant only snorted – a captured Orc will get short shrift in any case; better to hang as a Mordorian insurgent than a Gondorian conspirator – but Haladdin told him to mind his own business.
“…And remember, Sergeant: no killing when taking down sentries and such! Treat this as a war game.”
“Very nice! Do those guys understand it’s a war game?”
“I hope so.”
“All right. I guess they’ll hang me with a pretend rope…”
They say that there are werewolves-
In any event, by the time the White Company soldiers have been roused and took their
