Chapter Three: Shadows Fall
The door opening sent the man jerking away from the solar's high cabinet.
Erestor stopped on the threshold, instincts prickling. "Forgive the intrusion," he said in his politest tones, the one he reserved for those intruding. "But this room is private, sir, unless Lord Elrond himself is present."
Adûnarû's man of 'business' offered him a soft, conciliating smile. "Apologies. I didn't realize."
He didn't take the hint either, half an eye wandering back to the cabinet.
Erestor's hand tightened on the handle of his cane. "What sort of 'business' do you conduct for your master, if I might inquire?"
"He's not my master. I am no liveried serving man. My employer pays me to protect what's his." Going to the sideboard, he uncorked the decanter and held it up in offer. "Care for one?"
"No…thank you."
He poured himself a measure of brandy with the smug assurance of an able-bodied man who knew full well Erestor could not carry him out. (Though Erestor had half a mind to brain him anyway and go find Glorfindel to heave him out, scene or no.)
"It's a pretty place, this," Imrazôr said. "A fine little burrow. I had thought your kind always lived in white towers. That's what all the old stories say."
Though Imrazôr's eyes appealed with almost liquid guilelessness, his hands belied.
Sometimes Erestor felt he'd spent a lifetime—maybe two—watching men's hands (before he paid attention to their legs.) Eyes might reveal one's soul, but the hands revealed purpose. And on the field of battle — or in other measures — they were what mattered.
Adûnarû's 'man of business' tapped a restless tattoo against his thigh with the air of a man interrupted. His palms and fingertips were worn as dog's paws. The proper callouses in all the right places. The tip of the forefinger on his right hand — the blade hand — was shorn off at the first knuckle. Not a fresh wound.
"You were a fighting man," Erestor said.
Imrazôr followed Erestor's gaze to his hand and held it up as if for closer inspection. "I understood you fought in the war your own self."
"I did, yes."
"Get that on the field then?"
Erestor braced his cane on the floor between his feet. "The perils of too sprightly a springle-ring."
Imrazôr let out a bray of laughter.
Erestor allowed himself a small, tight smile that had nothing of mirth in it. "If you wish to speak of war records, I would be quite happy to introduce you to our archivist. He has a number of tomes on the subject."
"What's the fun of reading when you can ask one who stood on the field? They know better than any book." He scratched the bristles under his chin. "You in that mess at Gorgoroth? They give you a medal for it?"
The mocking edge in his words flashed up like a spark from a burning log. Erestor stiffened, his hands and lips gone cold and tingling, but the spark sank as suddenly as it had sprung.
Imrazôr offered him an easy smile. "Fair enough. Don't like to speak of it myself. Nasty business. Never quite know when it's over."
"When your enemy is vanquished," Erestor said, the words shaping the air but not quite emerging full-fledged.
Imrazôr considered this with a sideways sort-of-smile. When Erestor continued to say nothing, he added with a swirl of his glass, "There is one thing about the war I miss. It was simple. You knew where you stood. There wasn't all this confusion over politics and pandering to high folk. What for? I'm not a political man. No patience for it. So maybe it's my own misunderstanding. But the way I see it, if a job has to be done, I'll do it. Duty that's all. And that's all there is."
No, that's not all there is, Erestor wanted to say around his mouthful of heart.
Faint and far off, as if in a dream, the bell began to toll out the hour.
Nine chimes. The mercy stroke.
"Nine bells. It is my task to bank the fires now, so unless you wish to find yourself sitting in the dark, I suggest you take a candle with you to bed," he said, injecting a hard note into his voice he hadn't had to use since the war. "And if I find you here again, uninvited, I will have you escorted out."
"All right, all right, don't get your hair in a knot. I'm going." He drained his glass and set it on the sideboard. His shoulder brushed against Erestor's as he left.
The ripple of it went through him like a sword slash.
Perhaps, he should have sent for Glorfindel after all.
He shut the door in the man's wake and, as an afterthought, withdrew his keys from his belt. If it took him two or three tries to fit the key in the lock and twist, the key was firmly to blame.
For the first time in nine years, he took a bottle of brandy from the cellar without bothering with the inventory.
Gwîndir would likely note the lack, but he truly was a gentleman and told no tales.
He didn't even take a glass of wine with dinner these days — and the brandy dropped him effortlessly into a trough of sleep.
But he woke, gasping, the sour taste of sulfur-fumes in the back of his throat and a blinding darkness crawling across his eyes. The screams of Gorgoroth still echoed, following him into the room until he flung off the damp blankets and set his feet on the cold, steady floorboards of his garret room.
He contemplated the depleted-looking brandy bottle on his bedside table but didn't like the lacquer at the bottom of his glass. It turned his stomach.
Flashes of the dream lurked in the corners: the rat at his breast, its sharp, little claws digging into the meat of his shoulder, its naked tail lashing his neck. The faint impression of a stag in the distance draped in purple.
His thigh was aching fiercely, and only when he flexed his hand did he feel his nails. He let go and raked both hands through his hair, trying to breathe his heart back into rhythm.
The light, still thin and watery, cast a silver blade across his knees. He eased himself to his feet, the change in position bringing a sudden awareness of the heaviness in his bladder.
The house was quiet, the hall completely dark—dark as ashes, dark as a battlefield, that cool, little voice whispered—as he crossed to the garderobe.
Returning after to the threshold of his room, he paused, heart lurching.
A shadow-figure, that terrible, familiar shape, raised its bashed-in head towards Erestor.
There was bright blood on one cheek. The head caved on one side, rendering the formally handsome face a desperate portrait of itself.
A hand rose. It was the raised hand, the beckoning appeal in it, not the blood that made Erestor shut his eyes tight and press both fists to his forehead, cursing himself that a dream could cow him like a child with a night-terror.
The dark behind his closed lids shifted and swirled. His lids felt transparent. He became convinced the shadow-figure had moved nearer from its place on the bed. As a child, he had played games where you couldn't move if the seeker's eyes were on you, but once they'd turned away—
He forced his eyes wide.
Only the moonlight shone on the dented pillow now—that thin blade sharpened to a wicked spike by the angle of the window.
He could not bring himself to lay in that bed again tonight, or even retrieve his cane from beside it.
Retreating back into the hallway, he made for the servant's staircase.
It was too early yet for the maids. At least, he could start tea without being disturbed. Leveraging a hand against the wall for balance, he worked his way down the stairs.
He was not quite at the end of the stair when his foot came down on something (not stone). His stomach lurched as if he'd missed a step going down (but he hadn't, he hadn't), and his bad leg gave.
His face was pressed against the dusty floor at the bottom of the stair, a sickening pain spreading from his nose all the way to the back of his head, shooting through both temples. He breathed himself through it before levering himself up. A sluice of wet warmth spilled down his upper lip and over his teeth and chin, filling his mouth with an iron tang.
Groaning, he sat up, gingerly feeling his face. When he reached his nose, a hot stab greeted him, and the world swirled around once.
After some little time, he managed to get shakily to his feet and fetched a rag for his streaming nose. It took him even longer to search out a candle and longer still for his trembling hands to still enough to light it. He hadn't trembled since the night after Gorgoroth, and he roundly cursed both candle and flame for their dereliction of duty before one caught the other alight.
If one of the maids had left a bundle of laundry at the foot of the stairs, he'd—
It wasn't laundry.
Not even close.
The candle fell from his nerveless fingers and went out but not before its glow revealed the shock of silver hair, two, pale points like the play of light over river stones sunk in the deep mud of the Bruinen, and the unnatural angle of the neck, a tiny little lump sticking up underneath the chin quite out of place.
In the darkness, near where the stairs would be, a breath like a sigh, a rattle in the lungs.
Men with their legs crushed made that sound. Men with their chests bashed in, with sword lengths through them made that sound. Always it heralded the nurse cutting towards the cot, that would lie empty before the hour was out.
A humming started up behind his eyes. Not the tinny hum of blood sometimes heard if you held your breath too long, but an angry black swarm echoing behind his skull, flashing across his vision. For a moment, everything swirled brown and grey.
He lowered himself to the floor, fumbling to grasp at something, something to ground him before the world went away. He found a table leg and clutched it the way a shipwrecked mariner catches hold of a spar. He clung on grimly until splinters dug into the meat of his palm and fingers.
Those are not his eyes, he told himself over and over. They are not. They are not. They are not.
Even so, the word sprang from his mouth as it had in war.
"Cyll." It emerged a gargled croak. He coughed, spat into the rag, and tried again. "Cyll!"
This time the bellow ran all the way up the stairwell.
It took forever for one of the maids to answer his call. She stopped short at the top of the steps, all eyes and hair and stupidly gaping mouth. "Sir?"
"It's Adûnarû," he said, his voice a thing apart from himself, the words spooling out into the distance. "It's Adûnarû."