CHAPTER TWELVE

EICYS

Eicys heard a shout of alarm, and a hand closed around her wrist just as the rest of her tumbled into the pit. Her feet swung crazily over a quarter-mile of empty space. Still limp and nauseous with pain, she felt herself hauled onto solid ground again. She looked up into the uruk's brutish face.

Eicys squeezed her eyes shut and hoped this wasn't going to hurt too badly…

"Stop tha'," he growled. "I'm not goin' t' hurt you."

Eicys didn't have the breath – or the suicidal instincts – to add a sarcastic "again." And she lost even the inclination quite quickly: she still couldn't breathe. The uruk, who had been about to turn away, hesitated and bent over her again. After a while he began to look alarmed. "C'mon," he muttered. "I didn' hit y' tha' hard… Come on…"

And at last air began seeping into her chest in hoarse, shallow gasps. Eicys realized abruptly that she was gripping the orc's wrist so tightly her fingers ached; she yanked her hand back as though scalded, and stared at him.

He stared back, guardedly, and touched his wrist with a preoccupied air. "You a'righ'?" he grated.

"Yeah," croaked Eicys.

"Thought y' were gonna die for a minute there," he joked.

Eicys refused to look at him. "Yeah." She levered herself shakily upright. A hand gripped her arm and there was a moment of disoriented panic before she realized he'd set her on her feet with as little effort as she might have expended in straightening a pillow.

"Y' sure y're a'righ'?"

"I'm fine," Eicys snapped, pulling away. The uruk gave her a stiff nod, and a sort of shutter closed over his eyes: he was all orc again. He just stood and watched as she set about slowly and painfully adjusting various bits of metal that had bent or slipped or twisted around her limbs. Armor was a pain. Literally. She should've worn Murgash's nasty leather undershirt after all: she was going to have bruises everywhere. "Horrible stuff," she muttered.

"Be glad y' had it on," said the uruk, and Eicys jumped. He didn't look at her face, though, only her armored torso, and his expression was strangely bitter. Eicys looked down at her breastplate. Her face twisted in shock. No wonder it felt so uncomfortable – the uruk had left a dent in the thing that stretched from its lower edge nearly to her armpit. It looked like she'd been hit by a wrecking crane.

"Oh," said Eicys, dazed. The uruk winced. "How did you do that?" asked Eicys. Then a certain sense of injustice reared its head, and she added angrily, "And why?"

"I'm strong for my size," he said dully.

Eicys eyed almost eight feet of bulky orc. Eeek… she thought. Still, being Eicys, she couldn't be prevented from saying, "Fine, then – what about the why?"

The anger, which had never really left his eyes, boiled to the surface again. "As though y' weren' listenin' in th' mess hall," he snarled.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Eicys demanded recklessly. "I only wanted to know your name, for Pete's sake! If you didn't want to tell me, you could've just said so!"

The uruk stared at her for a long moment. At last he said, warily, "Halg shurg'ik Ungrath duz 'na."

"What?"

A pause. "Y' don' understand th' Speech," he said, his voice slow with realization.

"The what?" snapped Eicys.

"Black Speech."

"Oh," said Eicys, disoriented. "Uh, no. I… never got the hang of it."

"So… so y' didn' catch anythin' back there."

She shook her head, scowling.

"…Oh," said the uruk, and Eicys had never before heard an unspoken expletive hang so loudly in the air. There were several words that could be applied to the orc's expression, the only repeatable one of which would probably be 'oops.'

Eicys shifted impatiently, and felt her ribs send up a splintery scream of pain. She stifled a moan, but her eyes watered and her breath hissed between her teeth. The uruk jerked his eyes away from her face, looking as though he hated himself.

"Ungrath," he muttered, defeated.

"Come again?'

"I don' really have a name," he said. "Y' c'n jus' call me Ungrath; mos' people do."

"But…that's what they were calling you in the mess hall," Eicys ventured. "It's your name? It sounded like – something else. Um, bad."

"I told y' I don' have a name," said the uruk. "Ungrath jus' means 'experiment'.

There was a small, sick silence. Eicys remembered the blur of motion, the uruk swinging his prey out at arm's length. An' y' know what Sharkey was experimentin' for?

"Don' stare at me like tha'," said Ungrath.

"What… what do you mean by experiment?" Eicys asked.

"Wha' it sounds like," he said. "The wizard's always wantin' better fighters. When he's got time he likes t'… practice… on th' ones he's got." He shrugged, but it seemed to be disguising a shudder. "I was one of th' practicings."

Eicys went limp with horror. "He made…"

"No," snarled Ungrath. "No one can do tha'. All he can do is… mess wi' things. But I didn' work ou', obviously – "

"Why obviously?" asked Eicys.

Ungrath snorted. "Y' think th' kind of orc tha' Sharkey's after would be talkin' t' you?"

"Oh," said Eicys. "But you're… very strong…" And if that doesn't win me the award for Understatement of the Year, she thought to herself, it can't be won.

Ungrath curled one gauntleted hand into a fist. "Bein' strong is pretty pointless if y' don' fight," he said.

"So… why don't you?"

"Questions," he snarled to himself. Louder, he said, "If I told y' it was jus' t' spite Sharkey, would y' believe me?"

"Everything but the 'just'," said Eicys.

"Close enough, then," he said.

After a while it became clear that he wasn't going to say anything else. The line of his back and shoulders was hunched and stiff, and he wouldn't look at her. At last Eicys cleared her throat and said, "Well, I guess… I know why you freaked out over the name thing, now. So, uh, sorry."

If Ungrath had looked astonished before, it was nothing to the way he looked now. He stared at her incredulously. "I hit you," he pointed out.

"I haven't forgotten," Eicys said, dry as the Sahara. "I think you cracked a couple ribs."

The uruk grimaced and looked away. "Sorry," he said. "I don' usually lose my temper tha' way."

"Lucky me."

"Yeah. Well." He rubbed his arm uneasily. After a while he said, "I'm off t' th' barracks, then. If y' need anythin'… well, y'd better find someone else t' play nursemaid, 'cause y' need an awful lot of lookin' after, an' havin' me on y'r side is probably goin' t' do more harm than good."

"Why?"

"Morgoth – you an' y'r questions. I thought I was pretty clear before: I didn' work. I'm th' first failed experiment tha's ever lived long enough t' escape Sharkey's workroom. Tha' puts me flat at th' bottom of th' peckin' order, strong or no, an' I c'n live a'righ' down there but there's no point in you – "

"I don't mind."

Ungrath took a step backwards. "You – wha'?" he asked stupidly.

"Well, I'm not about to win any popularity contests around here, either," said Eicys. "We might as well stick together." Then, since he was still staring at her as though she'd grown a second head, she added, "Um… if you don't mind, anyway."

"No!" said Ungrath. "Er. I mean, tha's fine. Um. Really?"

Eicys nodded.

"Righ'," Ungrath said. "Er, right. Yeah. So. Th' barracks are this way…"

"Lead on," said Eicys. And she followed the hulking uruk across the Ring of Isengard, shaking her head and thinking that she'd just formed what had to be the strangest partnership in the history of Middle-earth.

DILLY

Dilly blinked uncomprehendingly at the prisoner across from her. – Or at the darkness where his voice was, at any rate. The phrase "pitch black" doesn't mean much until you've had to touch your own eyes to make sure they're open. "Who are you?" she asked.

Silence. Then the man's voice came again, with a slightly strangled edge to it that said he was doing his best to stay calm: "You don't… Lothiriel? It's me. What are you doing here? Maenadan didn't… You're not – Please tell me you're all right."

"I think you've got me confused with someone else," said Dilly.

She heard a hiss of breath. She could have sworn the temperature dropped slightly from the chill in the man's voice: "Who are you, then?"

"My name's Dilly. Who are you? And who's Lothi – ouch!" Dilly pulled back from the bars as a brilliant, agonizing lance of pain shot through her hand and wrist. "Who's Lothiriel?" she finished, prodding at the painful spot experimentally.

He didn't answer; instead he asked politely, "Are you hurt?"

"Not really. I think I broke my thumb."

"You—what?"

"I forgot to leave my thumb out of the fist when I punched that orc," said Dilly. "What did you say your name was?"

"But – " There was a brief pause while the man came to terms with an essential Dilly-ism: an absolute antipathy toward fuss of any kind, particularly and especially if it was about her. Dilly had always treated injuries, however dire, as a minor annoyance, and she couldn't see why everyone else couldn't do the same.

At least this one was relatively quick on the uptake. He left the 'but' unfinished, and simply said, "Taras. Formerly of Dol Amroth. And you are…?"

"Dilly, like I said. Ah… 'Formerly'?"

"I've had an unwanted change of address," Taras said dryly, and Dilly managed a smile before he continued: "Where are you from, then… 'Dilly'?"

Dilly bristled at his tone. It was the cool, tolerant tone of someone who expects to be treated to a long load of nonsense. "Nowhere you would know," she said.

"I've traveled a great deal of Middle-earth," he said pleasantly.

"How nice for you," said Dilly, matching his tone.

"No," said Taras. "It wasn't. But at least it was informative."

"Meaning that I'm not," said Dilly, who didn't much care.

"Oh, I'm sure you are," said Taras, "when the right people are asking."

Dilly folded her arms and glared into the darkness. "And are you a decent human being when the right people get thrown into the cell across from you?"

"I don't know," said Taras blandly. "I've never had the opportunity to find out, seeing as Saruman gave very strict orders that I was to be kept in total isolation. Now why, I wonder, would he chose to suddenly rescind that order for a young, pretty, helpless-looking girl? Oh, and she's even injured." His tone dropped from bland to frigid faster than a plunge into the Arctic Ocean. Dilly actually shivered, which was not something she was prone to doing. "I'm not stupid, you know," said Taras. "Nor, against all logic, have I gone completely mad yet. And I think I've learned my lesson when it comes to trusting people. So why don't you just trot back upstairs to your master and tell him to come down himself if he wants me interrogated? I've got a sharpened rock all ready and waiting for him."

Dilly was impressed. This annoyed her. "You hear this, Mr. Suspicious?" she asked, rattling her cell door. The bolt clanged like the iron gates of the netherworld. "That's what we in the prisoner business like to call a lock. A lock is something that makes it rather difficult to trot anywhere. I am not working for Saruman, I am not interested in interrogating you, and if you call me helpless again I will slap you into next week."

"You've got two sets of bars in your way."

Dilly scowled. "It will be a… a verbal slap, okay? A really vicious one."

"Well, that's good, seeing as you 'broke your thumb' last time you attempted a physical blow. –You might want to brush up on your acting skills, by the way. No real female breaks her thumb and then goes straight on to 'what did you say your name was?'"

"Oh, gee, I'm sorry," Dilly said, rolling her eyes. She did not like being reminded of her injury; she'd been ignoring it so efficiently up till now. "Next time I'll wail and sob and swoon and earn myself lots of sympathy, the way a real female would do."

She heard Taras draw a breath, as though he were going to say something, but he didn't. Silence settled over their cells, heavy as the stone tower above them.

Well, crap, thought Dilly, after about an hour.

It was going to be a long, awkward, and very silent imprisonment.

LCLCLCLCLCLCLCLCLCLC

Hello, all our lovely readers! I apologize most sincerely for the delay, and for the delays likely to accrue in the future. Y'see, I'm studying at Cambridge this summer, and my life is INSANE.

It does not help that the publisher I recently sent my novel to wrote back that they like it and want to see the rest... which I do not actually have written. You can imagine the exponential increase in (maniacally happy) insanity after I found that out. :D

Thanks for your patience and your reviews -- they mean the world to us! Seriously, we crave your reviews like Gollum craves shiny jewelry. Any more that you choose to send us will be polished and admired and carried about in our pocketses.

Cheers!

Tuima and the Immies (Good garbage, that sounds like a rock band or something, doesn't it?)