Disclaimer: Elves and orcs belong to Tolkien. Polaris and Iusia's story belong to Ambrosia Software and ATMOS.
All characters speak in their respective languages unless specifically stated otherwise. Ie, Elves speak Sindarin, Nil'Tanar speaks Polaran, and Ryllaen speaks Federation Basic.
They had no rest that night. Orcs rose up with the dark and assaulted the crack in the cliff face that Elrohir had found to shelter the injured Men. The crack was not deep; there was enough space for both of them to lie down, if the Elves and horses stayed near the narrow entrance. Neither Ryllaen nor Nil'Tanar could ignore the danger beyond the rough stone walls, however, and despite their injuries remained ready to defend themselves should the orcs win past the Elves. But the Elves were seasoned warriors and did not falter. The aliens had little else to do but watch them in wonder.
And wonder they did. The Elves were beautiful, fair, deadly. To Nil'Tanar, insensitive to all weave-sense but a mild and untrained empathy, they were glorious. Starlight glittered in their eyes and shone in their hair. Their expressions were fierce, their blades dark with blood. They moved faster than any he had seen except for some few Nil'Kemorya masters. He learned quickly their fighting styles, subtly different from each other, and though they were alien to his own, they were no less effective.
Ryllaen could not take his eyes off Glorfindel. The panic of those first two meetings had given way to steadier emotions. There was fear, yes, deep and abiding. Underneath it lay a strong current of awe and, oddly, reverence. Nil'Tanar looked at him quizzically before studying the Elf once more. He could discern nothing unusual about the golden-haired Elf beyond what he sensed in all the Elves they had met so far. He resolved to ask the Vell-os about it when the opportunity arose.
But it was not to be that night. The attacks were sporadic, with never enough time between for the party to rest. The orcs got behind the Elves only once, climbing down the cliff walls from above, and the fighting then had been quick and bloody. By dawn the stench was near unbearable.
Elrohir leaned against the rock while he cleaned his blade. "They will not be back soon." There was a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.
Nodding, Glorfindel surveyed the littered ground. "We must leave this place now; the nearest shelter is some leagues away. I like not this unrest in the hills."
Turning back to the Men, Elrohir swept a sharp gaze over them. Noting no serious wounds, he said, "Come. Alagos and Asfaloth will bear you."
Nil'Tanar and Ryllaen exchanged glances. Staring at the great white horses, hooves matted with dark blood where each had used them to good effect against the orcs, the Polaran could not suppress a grimace of disgust. "You want us," he asked slowly, "to ride your beasts? The Vell-os can do what he wishes. I will not."
"These are Elf-steeds and have long been friends of ours. They will not let you fall. Rest as you can upon their backs; we cannot stop today."
"Then ride them yourselves," Ryllaen said. It was clear that he found the idea at least as distasteful as Nil'Tanar. "You have been fighting all night: you must be at least as tired as us."
"We are not injured, and we are not Men. It will take more than one night of orcs before we become weary," Elrohir replied. A hint of impatience tempered the urgency of his tone. "Ride. We have far to travel."
The two Men did not move. "To travel on the back of an animal," Nil'Tanar muttered.
"Says the Polaran. What was it I caught you in, then?" Ryllaen smirked when Nil'Tanar rounded on him with a furious glare.
"Polaran ships are not animals," he hissed. "Better my Manta than a pathetic energy shield that relies on you."
Ryllaen scowled and opened his mouth as if to issue a scathing reply, but Glorfindel chose that moment to intervene. "You will ride," he said, voice calm and authoritative. Ryllaen flinched. "The orcs were not without purpose. They will follow, and we must reach better shelter."
Straightening, Nil'Tanar regarded him with some surprise. Though he knew at some level that the orcs must be intelligent - at least enough to forge weapons and armour - he had considered them barely more than beasts. "What purpose?"
The Elves looked at each other for a long moment. "A dark hand moves them. We have caught the attention of Dol Guldur."
But the name meant nothing to the Men, and they were not persuaded. A faint frown graced Glorfindel's expression. "You will ride," he said again. This time there was a distinct threat in the words, calm though they were.
It was their memory of the Elves in battle and their own injuries that eventually convinced them. The horses waited patiently for them to settle, clumsy though they were and inconsiderate of knees digging into the horses' sides. Once the two Men had gained their seats, the party departed the crack in the cliff face. Stiff and uncomfortable upon the warm moving back, Nil'Tanar saw at once why the Elves had insisted that the Men ride. Glorfindel and Elrohir settled into a ground-eating lope that the young Polaran warrior would have been hard-pressed to maintain at the peak of his strength. As they ran light chatter and laughter flew from their lips, appearing not at all hindered by the need for breath. Nil'Tanar shook his head. "Iusia," he muttered.
"And who is that?" Elrohir queried. "Many times I heard you speak that name in the night. What tale does it hold?"
Startled, Nil'Tanar looked at the Elf and shook his head again. He had barely been able to hear himself speak over the clatter of the horses' hooves and the chiming of the silver bells on the bridles. "It's a long story," he replied.
"It is a long road. Leagues fly when there is a tale in the air."
Nil'Tanar glanced to the other horse - Elrohir's, he thought. The Vell-os was slumped upon its back, face hidden by the fall of long untamed hair. Nil'Tanar could see that every slight bump pained the exhausted Vell-os, who gripped the reins with white-knuckled hands even while barely conscious. The Polaran turned back to face the Elves running before them. He sighed. "Very well. Of all the Polarans, the Nil'Kemorya are charged with the protection of our people. We are warriors; we train for war all our lives. There are many threats to Polaris: pirates. Aurorans. The Federation." The last was said with a heated glance at the Vell-os, who did not appear to be listening. "Only once in our history were we forced to protect Polaris from Polarans.
"Many centuries ago, a dispute arose between two castes over the administration of a system. Ownership goes to those with the most need and use for the land, yet both Ver'ash engineers and P'aedt scientists were equally qualified, and neither was willing to submit. For two decades they argued. The Tre'pira – the worker caste – adjudicated, but could not decide. In the end, they ruled that the Tre'pira would own the land until either Ver'ash or P'aedt could provide clear proof of their right. The conflicting castes could not accept this. They exiled all Tre'pira from the land. And then, the leaders of Ver'ash and P'aedt died, assassinated with their families. Both castes claimed Tre'piran guilt, though even now we can't be certain.
"Polaris was split apart and engulfed in the first and only civil war we have ever known. Even the Kel'ariy fought amongst themselves, for each member of the ruling caste has their roots in one of the other castes. We, the Nil'kemorya, remained apart. It was not for us to take part in internal conflicts: we were concerned only with outside threats to the Polaris. But the time came when we were forced to act or witness our people destroy themselves. But no single caste was wholly at fault – we could not stop one without stopping the others. And so we chose to strike against them all, and took all Polaris as our enemy so that we might save some part of our people.
"We are trained for war: the other castes were no match for us. We brought them to their knees and forced them to stop fighting. And then... we surrendered. We fight to protect Polaris, not to rule. Iusia was leader of the Nil'Kemorya in that time. For the actions he took to end the civil war, he condemned himself to exile from all that he loved and served. Ar'za Iusia was the place that caused the war, named for Iusia's sacrifice, and none claim it now."
Nil'Tanar fell silent. From the day of the war's end, each successive leader of the warrior caste took the title of Iuso in honour of he who shamed himself for the good of his people. The Nil'kemorya patrolled that system and kept Iusia's final resting place untouched by any. Long after the man's death, the Nil'kemorya had sent a patrol down, and found the words that Iusia had placed into writing. All Nil'kemorya read them, and they never failed to touch the warriors' hearts. To the end of his days, Iusia had been haunted by the lives he had ended, though not one of those three million deaths had been unnecessary. The civil war had been long ago, yet still every Nil'kemorya felt the creeping unease, the nightmares that they too would one day be faced with killing their own people.
The sun was low in the west before they came at last to a house at the foot of the mountains. A rough but sturdy wall surrounded the buildings and a garden, leaving well-tended fields protected only by a short fence. Glorfindel had barely touched the gate when a young woman emerged from the house, shouting welcome.
"My lords!" she cried. The Elves laughed as they caught the running girl and swung her around in turn.
"Elsa." Glorfindel set her down on her feet. "You have grown! Surely you could not have reached my knees when last I saw you."
She wrinkled her nose. "It has been seven years, my lord. You promised you would come."
"And here I am." He laughed again at her exclamation of delight.
The young woman turned curious eyes to the riders. She was human, Nil'Tanar realized with surprise. Her features did not have the same cast as the Elves; she was stronger and did not draw the gaze with an almost frightening compulsion, though she was not without her own beauty to one who had not thought to find a human here.
"I am Nil'Tanar," he said quietly in response to her unspoken query. He was far too uncomfortable atop the horse to bow, and so settled for smiling politely.
Ryllaen said nothing, merely gazing through her. The Polaran wondered what he was picking out of her thoughts.
"This," Nil'Tanar said with a grimace, for he felt suddenly the desire not to offend the human girl with ill manners, "is Ryllaen."
Her eyes widened.
"Elsa," Elrohir said. "May we speak with your father?"
She nodded. "Yes, he's with the dogs. I'll tell him you've arrived. But go on inside. Mother will be glad to see you. And," she added, looking at both Nil'Tanar and Ryllaen, "she'll clean you up. Orcs, was it?" She nodded and turned away without waiting for them to reply, and the Elves grinned at her youthful self-assurance.
The horses were stabled in one long building. Nil'Tanar and Ryllaen dismounted before one of the Elves thought it necessary to offer aid they were unwilling to accept. Pride – and rivalry, for neither was willing to admit pain before the other – kept them on their feet as they followed the Elves into the main complex. The woman who met them looked too much like Elsa not to be her mother, and she clucked over the four of them in a way that reminded Nil'Tanar very much of a Ver'ash doctor. In short order the aliens found themselves in a bathing room with two great half-barrels of heating water and a washcloth each. The barbarity of it gave them pause, but not for long: both were too sore and too eager to be clean to reflect on the sheer primitivity of this planet. Nil'Tanar was not used to waterbaths; looking at Ryllaen, he saw that the Vell-os was even less so. But it was all they had, and they made use of it.
Layers of dirt, product of imprisonment and battle, were sloughed off. Flexing his muscles where he could and cleaning carefully around all the scrapes and cuts he had gained, Nil'Tanar regarded his newly acquired scars with disgust and resignation. Were he in Polaris, a Ver'ash would heal his wounds so well that no trace remained. Nil'kemorya far more senior than he who spent their lives on the borders had less to show for it. Nil'Tanar knew that some cultures, the Aurorans foremost among them, considered battlescars to be signs of stature. But the Aurorans were barbarians who made of their bodies a canvas upon which to tattoo the history of every battle they fought. It was a practice the Polarans considered repulsive. But what could not be helped, could not be helped. Nil'Tanar supposed he should be glad that he was not yet crippled or dead; he could still fight, if need be, and that meant he could still find a way off this planet. He held on to that thought tightly before setting it aside and concentrating on making sure his wounds would not get infected.
A suppressed exclamation caused him to look aside. The Vell-os sat in a tub stained dark with blood and grime. Nil'Tanar could see that one long gash in his side had reopened. He shook his head.
"Get out of there," he said. "You'll get it infected, and I doubt even your nanites can handle something like that."
Ryllaen hissed, face drawn into a grimace. "I would if I could move at all."
As gently as he could, Nil'Tanar pulled the Vell-os up. It was an effort, for his own muscles did not like the strain, and he could see that the Vell-os' body had taken as much trauma for one day as it would suffer. He used one drying cloth to staunch the bloodflow and ran a cursory gaze over Ryllaen until he was satisfied that no other wound had opened. Nil'Tanar stopped, and stared.
The Vell-os had washed his hair. It hung in one sodden mass, pulled to the side and over one shoulder so it would not chafe against an ugly scratch on his back. It left his neck clear, and for the first time Nil'Tanar could clearly see the device attached there. It was an ugly-looking thing, smooth, rectangular, not much larger than his thumb. Wires penetrated into the Vell-os' skin, leading directly to his central nervous system. It glistened with the beads of water that had collected on it. The whole thing looked like a Ver'ash implant gone wrong, and the evil that it represented seemed to lend it a dark miasma.
"So that's it," Nil'Tanar said quietly. "The device that keeps an entire race subjugated."
Ryllaen flinched as if Nil'Tanar had hit him. His expression hardened. "Go do something useful and find us clean clothes," he snapped.
Shaking his head, Nil'Tanar turned away. He tried to keep his pity to himself – a futile task against a Vell-os – and could not help but feel a little guilty when Ryllaen's scathing glare fell on him. Clothes had been set aside for them on a bench nearby, simple large tunics and trousers, held up by a strip of cured leather for a belt. Nil'Tanar put them on reluctantly. The cloth felt too light and fragile, too loose. It had none of the durability of his own clothing which was, to his dismay, the worse for wear. But it would do.
The Vell-os looked oddly waiflike in the borrowed clothes that hung loosely around his tall frame. He did not have the build to fill them out, and Nil'Tanar noticed with concern that their time on this planet was not doing him any good. The Vell-os had not pulled the tunic on, and Nil'Tanar could see why: the clean clothing would not stay clean for long. He used another towel to replace the one soaked in blood.
"Let's go," Nil'Tanar said briskly. "Glorfindel will look at that. He seems competent enough without the benefits of technology. The sooner you heal, the faster we can find a way off this rock." He noted the Vell-os' change of expression. "What is it?" he asked. "Why are you afraid of that one?"
Ryllaen strode, stiffly and unsteadily, out of the bathing room.