Nénimë 6, 2965
Winter had not yet let go of Bree the night Celenneth came in out of the dark. She put her shoulder to the door of the Prancing Pony until it gave, and the wind came in with her before the latch caught — cold across a room already thick with heat and roast fat and the noise of people who had somewhere to belong. She stood in it a moment, hood up, and let the warmth work through the seams of her armour.
Orlen was at his table by the hearth, laughing at something she would never hear. She looked at him the way she had taught herself to look at anything she wanted and could not keep: once, then not again. She was always arriving or leaving. Bree was a place other people lived.
She lowered her hood, and Barliman Butterbur found her before she had gone three steps.
"Celenneth! Back again? In and out like the wind itself." A few heads turned. She let herself smile — small, but real; she spent them more freely here than on the road.
"I can't seem to stay away, Barliman."
He set a tankard down, foam sliding over the rim. "You've the look of a long road on you. Sit. It'll keep an hour."
But she had stopped listening. Two tables over, men had dropped their voices, and dropped voices carried farther than they knew. Brigands. Along the Baranduin. Third party this month. It was not the words that turned her in her seat but the fear beneath them.
She crossed to them, and her presence was enough to still the table. "Forgive me — I couldn't help but hear. These men on the Baranduin. How many, and how often?"
They gave her what they had: travellers waylaid at the fords, shapes in the reeds at dusk, a merchant bound for Sarn Ford who never arrived. By the end her mind was made. Orlen would keep. The road would not.
She pushed the tankard back, drunk from once. "I'll need those provisions after all. There's no rest in it tonight."
Butterbur sighed, already reaching. "Off again. Mind yourself, girl. The roads are dark this year."
She made good time down from Bree — the Greenway, then off it, cutting the corner of the Barrow-downs where the grass lay grey and the air went still.1 By the time the land broke toward Sarn Ford the sun was down, and a ruined tower stood black across a ravine.
Smoke gave the camp away, a thin thread of it above an abandoned robbers' den. She went toward it low and quiet, and saw the woman before the woman saw her: a figure slipping into a cave by the fire, dressed in the cast-off finery of Tharbad, a long way from wherever she had started.
A lookout, Celenneth judged — someone who could carry word ahead. She closed the distance without sound and took her from behind, an arm across the throat, her free hand reaching for the rope. But desperate is quick. The woman twisted a hand loose before the knot could bite, and the fight slipped Celenneth's control in a breath.
There was a knife between them, or would be. She made the choice the road makes when it leaves no other, and drove the blade up beneath the ribs, and clamped a hand over the woman's mouth to keep the cry from carrying. The body went slack by degrees, and then it was only weight.
She lowered it down with more care than the killing had allowed. It had not been a battle — no honour spent, none earned, only a life ended because keeping it might have cost her own. Kneeling in the sudden quiet, she knew that a thing done in the dark for one's own sake does not stay there. It goes in with you.2
She cleaned the blade on the grass and stood. No time to mourn a stranger.
The cave gave onto the ravine, and the ravine onto a bridge — old Dúnedain stonework broken at the span, and beside it a newer crossing lashed from rope and plank. She had barely set foot to it when a shape came out of the dark on the far side: a man, wild-eyed, already sawing at the ropes.
She ran. The bridge slewed under her boots, the ropes went, and she threw herself the last stride into open air.3 Her feet found stone as the crossing folded into the dark below.
The man stared as if she had broken a law of the world, then lost his nerve and bolted into the passage beyond. She followed by torchlight into a chamber choked with rubble and old water, oak doors across the far wall, the trickle of water somewhere doubling until it sounded like whispering.
He came at her out of the pantry with an axe and a cry. She turned the first swing on her buckler — the shock of it drove up into her shoulder — and gave it back: a thrust turned aside, a second that scored the wall, then the opening, and her sword into his chest to the hilt.4 She dragged it free and let him fall. There was no time to search him. She hauled him to the ravine's lip, gave him to the dark, and did not watch him land.
Beyond the doors lay a pillared hall gone to flood, and the dread came off it like cold off stone. Worn carvings lined the walls, figures past reading; across the black water a stair rose half out of the flood. She was ankle-deep and crossing when a dwarf broke from cover — small, dark, quick — and was gone down a side passage before she could call out. Then a bell tolled, deep and slow, up through the pillars and the water and into her teeth.
The water answered it. Two shapes rose streaming from the flood, grey and gaunt and wrong, and came for her.5 Her arrow, thrown off by the water, cracked against a pillar. Then they were on her — one set its teeth to her arm and found only leather; she wrenched clear, turned a raking hand on the buckler, cut and missed. The second caught her sword-arm in fingers like wet bone and bore in, jaws working at the seam of her helm.
Her torch was gone, guttering in the shallows — and the sight of it dying saved her, for both creatures flinched even from that. She strained toward it against the grip, got her fist to the handle, and swung the flame up into the thing's face. It loosed her with a shriek, and its fellow with it, and both slid back beneath the water and did not rise.
She stood shaking until the flood lay flat. Only then did she see the sepulchres ranged across the hall, some sealed, some broken open onto nothing. She searched them and found only cold and echo. Whatever the place kept, it would not give to her. The bridge was gone behind her; there was only forward. She climbed the drowned stair.
She came up into another country. Ruins ran to the edge of sight, drowned now in mist — a grey unbroken sea of it, the low red sun going down beyond. Nothing stood higher than a few yards; the rest had been thrown down, as though a single great hand had closed on the city and let go. One tower still kept its shape, its walls black with scrawled marks.
She read them when she was near enough. The letters were Elvish, cut in an old twisted hand, but the words were the Black Speech of Mordor, and they were a curse — the ruin laid on this hold by the Witch-king of Angmar in his fury at the Dúnedain who had defied him, bound to hold as long as the torment of one Lord Arveleg endured. She did not know the name. She did not need it to understand what she stood in: a stronghold of her own people, taken and fouled and left to rot around its grief. The knowing pressed in past the armour and closed on something beneath her ribs.6 She made herself turn from the wall and breathe. She had read enough to blunt the worst of it — but only the worst.
She found a hollow beneath a fallen arch, out of the wind, and set the day down there a while.7 When she rose her muscles had stiffened with cold. Searching, she came on a rusted gate half-buried in rubble, and behind it, impossibly, green: an orchard run wild, an herbalist's garden still keeping faith with a gardener centuries dead. She knelt and found what she knew, a healing herb and enough of it, and pressed it to the ghouls' bite — but the ache in her ran deeper than any leaf could reach.8 She gathered the rest and told herself it was something.
The tower door groaned open on a round room walled with books gone soft with the years. One had held: black leather, titleless, marked with a sigil she half-knew. She took it; it felt like something that had waited to be taken.
A sound came from above — a shuffle, a shifting of weight. Her hand went to her sword. As she started up the winding stair the mist below seemed to gather, and a figure rose out of it: a woman worn nearly to smoke, her hair drifting white as cobweb, her eyes lit from within.
"Why have you come? There is nothing here. Only death. Leave, or stay and share my torment."
Celenneth held still — the markings, the name half-remembered. "Lady Elwin," she said, because she believed it. "Who is it you keep this place against?"
The wraith's sorrow went to fury in an instant, and it came at her like blown fog. She gave ground, reached for her bow, found the thing already on her where footing meant nothing. So she cut, and the blade passed clean through where a head should be, and the wraith screamed — a sound like winter forced through a gap in a door, and the cold of it went into her marrow and told her, in a voice like her own, to lie down and give up.9 She cut again. On the second stroke the spirit came apart and was gone.
She stood shivering long after, the despair still guttering in her. She reached past it — for the ones counting on her return, whether or not they rode at her side — and took hold, and pulled herself back up into herself.10 The worst of the cold lifted. The shadow of the place did not.
At the top she found the reason for all of it. A corpse sat chained upright to a rotting throne, mummified to leather and bone, and driven through its skull, nailed into it, a crown — a blue gem burning cold in the metal. She saw how the nails were set, and understood: not honour paid a king but its mockery.
She bowed her head to the ruined thing, because it had once been a lord of her people, and asked its pardon. Then she set her hands to the crown and worked it free. The air changed; a presence gathered at her back, and she turned to find the wraith again — Lady Elwin, whole and still, her hollow eyes fixed on the crown.
It came away. The body fell to dust, the chains with it, and for a breath the wraith was a woman in a noblewoman's robes, looking at her with a gratitude too old for words — and then she too was gone, and the mist that had held her went with her.11 The gem's light guttered out. Celenneth could not have named all she had undone, but she felt it go: a knot in the air worked loose at last.
She made camp at the foot of the empty throne, barred a door, set a trap on the stair. Her sleep was thin and haunted; she woke once certain she was watched, but the room was empty and the trap unsprung. By morning the mist was gone, and the sun came up hard and clean over the broken city.
In daylight she found what the night had hidden: a trapdoor under rubble, and beneath it a small hoard. Among the coin her eye caught on a pair of boots — fine leather, Númenórean by the make, near-untouched, a rune of travelling worked into the side. Herald's boots, blessed for the road and its hurts. She traded her worn ones for them where she stood.12
She was leaving when the dwarf found her again and loosed a quick, agitated stream of words she had no share in. She answered the only way that needed no language: she held out a portion of the hoard, courtesy in an open hand. He looked at her, and at the gold, and eased. He beckoned, and she followed — past the flooded hall, through cramped corridors, to a concealed crevice and a stair, and the stair to a ledge above the ravine. She made her rope fast and went down, and from the ledge she saw them: the brigands, gathered again where the bridge had stood, waiting for her to come out the way she had gone in. But she had another road now.
At the bottom the dwarf loosed her rope, let it fall, and was gone without a word.
She coiled it and read the land, and it offered a way around them — broken ground where she might pass unseen. She took it carefully, every footfall chosen. And still it turned on her: her boot caught a scatter of loose stone and sent it down the slope, and the noise went up sharp, and the brigands' shouts rose to meet it.13
She ran. The new boots gave her more than she had any right to, and she used all of it, until the last of the pursuit thinned into silence. She knew the shortcuts home from here, and took them with fortune at her shoulder.
She came back to the Prancing Pony worn to the bone and unbroken, and gave the other Dúnedain a full account of what waited on the Baranduin — the numbers, the fords they favoured, the routes they worked. Whatever came of it, her people would not walk into it blind.
Then she let herself stop. She rested while the wound closed, and as her strength came back she thought of Orlen, and went looking — but Butterbur told her he had gone west to a fair and would not return for weeks. She thanked him, and kept her disappointment where she kept everything, behind a small, easy smile. The road would call her out again soon enough.
Súlimë 8, 2965
Word reached her in Bree that Gandalf the Grey had come through, bound west, and Celenneth did not sit on it. She took up her pack and went out to find him on the road, and near midday she did — a tall grey figure on a wagon behind a stout pony, rolling unhurried toward the Shire.
She came up quiet, but he had marked her long before she called; his eyes had a way of finding a thing before it announced itself. He slowed the wagon and let her fall in at the wheel.
"Celenneth." There was curiosity in it. "It is not often a ranger runs me down on the open road. And with such purpose."
"I hoped to catch you. I've come from the ruins south of here — there were things in them worth the telling. And I found these." She tipped her chin at her feet.
Gandalf's glance dropped to the boots, and his eyes narrowed with interest. "Ah. The work of Númenor — made for the long road and the hurts it deals. A rare find. They'll carry you well."
She told him the rest as they went: the brigands on the Baranduin, the drowned hall, the tower and the curse cut into its stone, the lady bound there in her grief and the crown she had drawn from a dead king's skull. She did not name the thing the cursed hall had left in her, but she felt it still — a cold lodged somewhere beneath the breastbone that had not thawed. Gandalf listened the way he did, eyes on the road, a low sound of acknowledgement now and then, giving nothing back until he was ready.
When she had finished he was quiet a long while.
"You have grown," he said at last. "When we last spoke you were near a child — a child with a grown woman's burdens laid on her, but a child. You are neither now."
He let the wagon roll a few turns of the wheel.
"I have an errand that might suit you. A quiet one." His voice took on weight. "Balin the dwarf went to treat with the folk of Moria, and neither he nor they have sent me word since. If they are well, I would have my message reach them. If some ill has found them, come back and tell me of it."
Moria. The name went through her like cold water, and Gandalf saw it land.
"It is no place for the bold," he said. "It is perilous in ways that have nothing to do with courage. Go carefully. Do not walk in as though the dark owed you passage. And if four months pass with no word of you, I will come looking."
That he would set such a thing in her hands — she felt the size of it, pride and unease in the same breath, and let neither reach her face. "I'll see it to Balin," she said, "or to whoever holds Moria now. Whatever state I find them in."
Gandalf smiled, and there was something sad at the edge of it. He drew a small sealed parchment from his cloak, the wax stamped with marks that caught the light strangely, and set it in her hand as though it might bruise. "For Balin's eyes. Guard it well — it must not fall to the wrong ones."
She stowed it deep in her pack. They went on together a little farther, and the talk eased — the Shire, its hobbits, small green comforts he spoke of with unexpected fondness — until the road forked and took them apart, him west toward the Shire, her back toward Bree.
She returned with the errand already turning in her. Over the next days she made ready: an edge put back on her sword, her stores checked and made good, provisions laid in for the long road south and then east, to the roots of the Misty Mountains. Moria sat in her thoughts like a stone in a boot — dread and resolve together. But it was her road now. She had said as much.
Súlimë 10, 2965
The herald's boots had already earned their place. Celenneth went east from Bree with a lightness in her stride she had never owned, the country opening ahead of her the way it always did once the last fences fell behind — wider, older, emptier of anything but weather. This was the part of a ranger's life that was not hardship but the opposite of it: the road under her, no walls, no one's eyes, the land telling her what it knew to any who had the patience to listen.
By the second day Weathertop stood against the sky, that lonely broken crown where the watchtower of the old kings had burned in a war ages gone. A ranger did not pass Amon Sûl without climbing it, and so she climbed, and stood in the wind at the summit where the whole reach of Eriador lay grey and folded away to every horizon. She felt the weight of all the years the hill had kept its watch, and the smallness of her own errand against them, and was not troubled by it — there was a kind of comfort in being small against something so old. She came down and went on.
She cut southeast into the South Downs, hill-country untamed and folded with hidden valleys, where the grass grew long and the streams ran cold and clean and little had a name she knew. On the third day the land gave her a gift for the walking of it: two great stags in a clearing with their antlers locked, wheeling and shoving for the ground itself, the crack of bone on bone carrying across the valley. She crouched in the bracken and watched it out — the power and the grace and the plain animal ferocity — until the victor broke the other and drove him crashing into the trees, and stood the field alone, sides heaving, king of a few acres of hill. Something in the wildness of it steadied her, the way the wild always did.
Near the Greyflood she found ruins in a copse of trees, and stopped for them. Elvish by the make: stonework too fine and carvings too careful for any wayside shrine, too small ever to have been a village. She walked among them slow, her fingers on the cool worked stone, reading what little the weather had left and understanding none of it, and wondered what grief or joy the Firstborn had raised this quiet place to hold. She marked it in her memory to return to, and knew even as she did that the road rarely gave a ranger back her own footsteps.
The Greyflood itself was no gift. It ran wide and hard with the spring melt, and she was a long cold while in the crossing of it, the current dragging at her hips and her pack and doing its best to carry her down to the sea. She came out on the far bank soaked and shivering, and there, on a path that offered itself as a shortcut, found the first sign she was not alone on this road: tracks. Broad paw-prints pressed deep into the mud, unmistakable. Wargs. And bound the same way she was — east, and east again, toward Moria.
She followed them three days, and it was the hardest kind of travelling — the kind where the land itself has turned against you, where every ridgeline might hold what you are hunting or what is hunting you. She went slower for it, and quieter, reading the trail as she came: four beasts, unshod and huge, in no great haste. Her unease climbed with every league, until she found them — the four of them at rest in a valley that lay square across her road, sprawled in the weak sun like great grey dogs. She lay a long time on the valley's lip and studied them. There was no fighting four wargs and living, and she knew it.
So she did the ranger's work instead. She filled her waterskins from a clean stream before she went near — the waters of Moria had been orc-fouled an age ago, and she meant to carry her own into the dark — and then she waited on the wind. The valley was bordered by the ruined mansions of Thráin I, their crumbling majesty still holding the old rumour of gold buried there before the dwarves went east, and she used their long shadows to break her shape. When at last the wind turned and drew her scent away from the beasts, she moved: slow along the rocky slope, every footfall set down like a held breath, the whole of her narrowed to the sleeping shapes below. And slipped past them, unseen — and did not breathe easy until the valley was well behind.1
The camp at the Stair Falls was not empty. Four dwarves held it — beards long, eyes worn — part of Balin's own company, sent out to carry word to their kin and now pinned here by the same wargs. Their hands went to their weapons as she came up.
"I carry a message for Balin," she said, keeping her voice level though her pulse was not. "From Gandalf the Grey."
They traded looks. A stout one, his beard thick and braided, answered. "Gandalf, is it. I'd not wager Balin wants to hear a word Gandalf sends."
That was twice now she'd been told as much. "I can help you," she offered. "Draw the wargs off, and you can move on. In return — safe passage into Moria."
The braided dwarf shook his head. "We'll not risk Balin's temper, acting without his leave. We'll wait. As long as it takes."
She saw they meant it, and let it lie. She went up the Stair Falls alone, and it was a hard climb: the old dwarf-road broken and steep, the water coming down beside it in a white unending noise, up through a grove of holly whose dark leaves whispered overhead as though passing word of her along. She forded the Sirannon at the top, swollen and freezing with the same melt that had fed the Greyflood, and came out of it half-frozen and aching — and then the land ran out. Before her stood the sheer western wall of the mountains, grey and blind and enormous, that held somewhere in its blank face the doors of Moria, and gave no least sign of where.
Five days she searched for them. Five days walking the foot of that cliff through the turning light, her fingers tracing dead stone, her eyes hunting a seam, a shadow, anything, while her patience wore through and the mountain gave her nothing. On the second she went back for the dwarves and found the camp abandoned, the four of them gone into the wilds without a word, and after that she was alone with the wall. It was the fifth evening, the sun going down red at her back and a thin new moon climbing, that the stone gave up its secret at last: a doorway surfacing out of the blank rock in faint silver lines as the moonlight touched it, written in Ithildin that had slept until the moon should wake it.
Sleeps until it is touched by one who speaks words long forgotten in Middle-earth.
She stood before it a long while, turning the riddle over, trying and discarding a dozen phrasings while the moon climbed higher. In the end she set her hand to the graven crescent and spoke the plainest truth she had.
"I come in peace, and bring tidings to the dwarves."2
The stillness held — and then, with a low grinding of stone waking after long sleep, the great doors drew inward, and the dark of Moria opened before her: a cold breath off the deep, and the smell of wet stone and old decay. She stood a moment on the threshold of the mountain's heart, alone, and then lifted her torch, and went in.
Súlimë 23, 2965
The dark inside Moria was a weight, thick enough that her torchlight seemed to strain against it and lose. She stood a while on the threshold and let her eyes find what they could, and looked down a corridor that ran on past the reach of the flame, its arches climbing out of sight, every surface worked with a patience no living hand would ever spend again. The dwarves had made a cathedral of the mountain's bones, and then the mountain had taken it back, and left the two of them — the ruin and the dark — to keep each other company. She was one small warmth carrying one small light into all of it, and she felt the size of what she had walked into settle on her like cold water.
She went carefully, and the echo of her own boots was the loudest thing in the world. For the first hours the vastness alone was almost more than she could hold: halls whose ceilings her torch could not reach, columns cut like the trunks of stone trees marching away into black, stairs that climbed and climbed, kings standing forgotten in their niches with the dust of an age on their shoulders. There was beauty here even gutted — the ghost of forge-heat, of hall-song, of a whole people's long industry — and a grief in it too deep to name, all that had been made and mastered and then simply lost. She let herself feel both, and let neither slow her. She had one road through this place, and it was Balin.
The days ran together in the dark, for there was no sun to mark them — only the burning-down of torches and the wearing of her own strength. She crossed narrow spans over chasms her light could not sound, where a dropped stone fell and fell and never spoke of landing. She passed a gate hung with three orc skulls, a warning left to rot, and did not linger under it. She climbed stairs cut for shorter legs, and waded flooded halls where the black water threw the shadows back at her until the whole drowned space seemed to move, alive with things that were not there. She learned the trick of the deep — that it was never wholly silent, that there was always water somewhere, a drip, a distant fall, a settling of stone, so that a woman alone in it might believe herself followed for hours and be wrong, or believe herself alone and be wrong the other way.
In the upper mines she found a dead orc camp, cold fire-pits and the small gnawed bones of eaten things, and read it as she read any sign — recent enough to be wary of, old enough to have moved on — and went past it onto a straight, endless road, a great processional way that ran arrow-true into the dark. She made her camp at a wayfarers' alcove worn smooth by the resting of travellers a thousand years dead, its walls still carrying their old cut runes of shelter and hope, and ate cold, and slept little, and rose to walk again into a dark that never changed.1
On the seventh day it changed. She came through a broken gate into the King's Hall, and her breath caught despite herself: a vastness of pillars carved with the whole story of a people — king and forge and war and the delving of the deep — her small torchlight waking one graven scene and then the next as she passed, so that the dead history seemed to move alongside her for a moment before it fell back into the dark. She let herself look, once and fully, because some things are owed that much. Then she went on: east along the King's Road and up a molten stair to the Second Hall, a great crossroads of pillars where a dozen ways met.
And there a sound stopped her — the scuff and clash of metal on metal, close, and no echo-trick about it. She doused the torch and went toward it in the dark, feeling along the wall.
Dwarves. A knot of them, barely shapes in the gloom, falling on a small band of goblins — and the goblins, caught, were down and silenced before they could raise a cry. She waited until the last of it was still, then struck her torch alight and stepped into the glow with her hands open.
"I come as a friend," she called, and the hall carried it. "I seek Balin."
They came round on her, eyes going wide at what they saw. A broad one with a braided beard stepped out. "And who are you, to seek Balin?"
"Celenneth, of the Dúnedain. I carry a message from Gandalf the Grey — for Balin's own ear."
The look that passed between them was surprise and unease both. At last the braided dwarf gave a grudging nod. "We'll take you to him. But know this, woman: Balin has no love of Men in dwarvish halls. You'll not find him warm."
"I only mean to deliver the message," she said. "Nothing else."
That seemed to satisfy them. They motioned her on, sure of their footing even in the black where she needed the wall, and led her back through the deep — past the columns and the broken gates and down at last into the First Hall, where among the leavings of an old dwarven camp a figure looked up at their approach, his eyes sharp as struck flint: Balin, son of Fundin.
Súlimë 27, 2965
"The woman seeks Balin," the dwarf said.
Balin looked up, and his gaze fixed on her and stayed. Something moved behind his eyes as he took her measure. "You've found him."
Celenneth reached into her pack and drew out Gandalf's sealed parchment, and held it out. He took it, broke the wax in his thick fingers, and read — and whatever the words were, they soured him. His brow drew down; he rolled the thing up and pushed it into his vest.
"Well?" he said, an edge on it.
She had done what she came to do, and still it sat unfinished in her. She looked around the ruined hall — the worn stone, the leavings of a kingdom.
"Well, what?" Balin pressed. "Is that the whole of it? Some other need? Or are you away, then?"
She thought of the halls she had crossed to reach him, the pillars, the drowned grandeur of the place — all that road, to turn straight round and walk it back. "I am at your service," she said, "should you have use for me."
He studied her a long moment. "By what road did you come into Moria?"
"The West Gate."
His brows went up. "And crossed the whole of it to here. Alone. Seeking me."
"Aye."
A murmur went through the dwarves at that. Balin got to his feet, and something in him eased; he clapped her on the shoulder, a blow that would have staggered a smaller woman. "Then you've earned a place in this company. We've a party going out to explore — the same you met on your way in, as it happens. We'll make our adjustments and set you among them." He did not ask so much as tell her. "The work's not gentle. We're after captives — our own, taken. We've heard them crying up out of a crevasse, and no way down to them yet."
He nodded toward the dwarves ranged nearby, and Celenneth read them the way she read anyone she might have to fight beside: quickly, and by what they showed.
The one set a little apart was Dagrun, half-wreathed in pipe-smoke, her eyes sharp above it and something behind them gone quiet and dark — the look of someone Moria had shown too much. Beside her stood Ida, a crossbow slung at her back and her fingers never far from its stock; a deadeye, the others said, and she had the stillness of it. Hanar kept his arms crossed and his beard braided tight, old scars written up both forearms — a goblin-slayer, and looked it. His brother Ginar stood off from the rest, eyes in the shadows, the kind who scouted alone and liked it. Nar was wiry and quick, forever reading the passage ahead for the safe line through it — their pathfinder. And last, out of place and unbothered by it, Regin, ink-stained fingers around a sketchbook: the one who fought when he must, but had come to set down what they found, the wonders and the ruin both.
Balin's eye came back to her, a bare edge of a smile on him. "So. The seven of you will bring our people up out of the dark."
Celenneth looked round the company, and each gave her a nod, and she gave it back. Her allies, then — for whatever the deep was keeping.
Súlimë 28, 2965
They went down into the deep together, and the dark took them by degrees.
It was a different thing, travelling in company, after so long alone. The dwarves moved through the lower halls with the ease of a people who had the stone in their blood, naming what they passed — the Halls of the Roadwarden, the Doors of Durin — and Celenneth set each name against the map she was building behind her eyes, learning the shape of the deep as she had learned the wilds above, because a ranger who did not know the ground she walked was already half-lost. They went by torch and by the dwarves' surer sense of the dark, and the days below had no dawn to them, only the rhythm of walking and resting and walking again, deeper and always deeper, the weight of the mountain growing over their heads with every stair they took down.
On the first day Dagrun's pipe-smoke led them to a forge — a modest one, not of the famed mithril kind, but a proper dwarven hearth — and Regin coaxed it back to life, and they warmed themselves at a fire burning where none had burned in an age. For an hour the deep felt less like a tomb and more like a hall that had only been waiting for its folk to come home. Then they banked it and went on, and the dark closed the small warmth away behind them.
On the second they came into a hall of records carved whole from the living rock, a great chamber that had held the memory of a kingdom — and found it broken. The walls were split, the stone shelves thrown down and shattered, ages of dwarven learning strewn across the floor as though the mountain itself had shuddered and shaken it all to ruin. Regin knelt among it a long while, turning broken pieces in his ink-stained hands, grieving in a silence worse than weeping; and before they left they marked the wall by the door, a small human thing to say that they had passed, and seen, and been sorry.
By the third day the dark had a weight to it that was more than the mountain, and the air a dread that settled into all of them. The way narrowed to a ledge — sheer rock rising on one hand, on the other a chasm that dropped past all sounding — and there, as they edged along it, a gust of air came up out of the depths and killed every torch at once. They crossed it blind. Step by measured step along a hand's-breadth of stone with the black falling away beside them, each with a hand on the wall and a hand on the shoulder ahead, breath held, the only sounds their own careful feet and the far-down sigh of the wind that had no business being there. And something rose with that cold air that was not only cold, and reached into them as they crept, and clung to them long after their feet found solid ground and their trembling hands could strike a light again.1
The fourth day the passages turned on themselves. They doubled back more than once, the way forking and forking and leading nowhere, and the strain of the deep began to tell — the endless dark, the endless stone, the sense of the whole mountain pressing down. Tempers frayed and were mastered. Late, at the end of a hard day's wandering, they came into an austere shining hall, its stone polished near to glass and giving their torchlight back in cold reflections — a forum once, the dwarves thought, a place of judgements — empty now but for the echo of their own steps, and none of them rested easy in it.
The fifth brought them to the flooded halls: rank standing water, foul with the years, hip-deep where it was no worse and worse where it was, so cold it stole the feeling from their legs and left them wading half-numb through the drowned dark. In one chamber they found a burned-out wine cellar, its barrels staved and charred — some old raid's leavings, a small violence done so long ago there was no one left to remember it. By then the weariness was in all of them, bone and mind both, the long descent pressing its weight down through them, the shadow of the deep grown heavy on every heart.2 But the Ledge of Woe lay somewhere ahead, and the captives with it, and Celenneth knew as well as any of them that there was no road back — not now, not this far down, not with all that dark lying between them and the light.
Víressë 4, 2965
On the sixth day they found the passage to the Ledge of Woe, and the crying of the captives came up it louder, off the wet stone. Orcs went in and out of the place with a careless frequency that told its own story — but the filth of the flooded halls still clung to the company, and it masked them, and they came up close unseen.
The ledge itself was a cruelty. The captives — dwarves, and even a few orcs — had been herded onto a shelf above the drop, and their captors were making sport of it, shoving and jeering, setting them to fight one another for the right to keep their footing. Celenneth counted the guard from the shadows and did not like the sum.1 The great brute among them she would come to know as Grimnar the Gaoler.
The first thing was the guard post, and the silencing of it before any orc could run for help. Balin gave the smallest nod, and Celenneth went.
She led them in before the last of the prisoners had been driven through the door, and in the cramped stone of the guardhouse it became at once a butcher's press of bodies. She came up against the orc chieftain and drew first blood — and paid for it, his blade opening her shoulder near the breast, so the room swam and she gave ground fighting to keep her feet.2 Hanar threw himself in with his axe going in wide arcs, but the crush split them apart, dwarf from dwarf, each walled into his own small battle. She could not make her voice carry over it. Hanar cut his way back to the others and hewed a path for them to close ranks again.
Cut off, she did the thing she did best: nocked, and loosed, and put the arrow into Grimnar's shoulder and staggered the brute. It bought the dwarves their footing. They pressed, and on the ledge the captives took heart at the sight of their own kin and turned on the guards, and three orcs went screaming off the shelf into the dark. Celenneth drew again, and this time the shaft took Grimnar through the eye, and the Gaoler went down like a felled post. The rest broke — and she called out over the din, let none of them run — and the dwarves saw to it that none did.3
They brought the six captives back through the gate, left two bound and silent orcs behind, and stripped the guardhouse quick: a little treasure, and in Grimnar's quarters a dwarven dagger, wickedly keen. Then they went, laden with what food and dwarf-wine they could trust in that place, the load shared out so the weakened could keep the pace.
The way back was its own trial, for they went slower now — burdened with six freed captives weak from their keeping, and a company that had already spent itself in the taking of them. Celenneth cut the road short where the deep allowed it: her eye found a plunging watercourse, and they rode it down on a scavenged orc-craft, a whole day's march gone in a single racing hour of white water and dark; and later a network of great hollow pipes whose throats carried the sound of the warbands to them long before the warbands came, so they could go softly another way.4 But the deep does not give up its distances cleanly. The stairs ran on past counting, the ledges narrow and dizzying under weary feet, the rescued dwarves flagging until they had to be let to rest whether the company willed it or no. A dead end sent them doubling back over ground they had no strength to spare. The last four miles cost them near a whole day. But at the end of it the great pillars of the First Hall rose up out of the dark like the gateposts of home, and Balin's camp met them with a cheer that went a long way toward mending what the road had taken.
She had earned her place, and knew it. They gave her food and healing herbs and leave to mend, and Hanar was given the keen dagger for his courage in the guardhouse.
The rest did not last. An orc assault came howling against the camp's defences not long after, and Celenneth rose to it weary and met it anyway — and came out the other side harder than she had gone in, something in her tempered by all of it, her eye keener in the dark, her will set deeper than before.5 The shadow of Moria still lay over the place. But she would not break under it, and neither would they.
Víressë 28, 2965
With the orcs thrown back and her wounds half-mended, the days filled with the work of holding a camp in a dead kingdom — shoring the defences, standing the watches, taking what quiet the dark allowed. It was in one such lull that Balin came to her, Hanar at his side.
"We need water untainted by orc-filth," Balin said, direct as ever. "Deeper in. Somewhere we can make a lasting base. I'm sending you two and your crew to find it. Lif and Tora — two you brought up off the ledge — want to go with you. Expect to cut your way through."
She traded a look with Hanar, who gave his resolute nod. "We'll get it done."
They went out nine strong — Celenneth, Hanar, Dagrun, Ida, Ginar, Nar, Regin, and the two new-freed, Lif and Tora — down into passages none of them had walked, and the deep closed over them again as it had before. This was blind country even to the dwarves: no named halls now, no map behind the eyes, only the torch and the next turning and the patient ranger's work of leaving marks to find the way back by. They went slow and watchful, pushing into the dark's own ground, and every branching of the way was a choice made half on instinct.
The first day's road ended at a dead wall — but the wall was a gift. A shear in the rock high above had let the deep bleed water into the low places, drowning what had once been a sizable orc-nest, and the flood stood clear and cold in the ruin of it. They stood at its edge with their torches doubled in the black surface and wondered what fed it from higher up, and took the wondering as a sign to keep climbing.
On the second day the going eased, and by its middle they came on a remote outpost and more of Balin's own — Frerin, Fenja, Yrr, and Sefa, of an earlier expedition sent down and half-forgotten. They had taken in two dwarves the goblins had kept as thralls, Svior and Veig, found wandering the dark half-mad and raving of mansions of gold hidden somewhere below. Celenneth gave the two what herb-craft she had, and it did little for minds the deep had broken. But there is strength in numbers in the dark, and the two parties threw in together and went on as one.
After that the search wore at them. Svior and Veig had to be tended and half-carried, and failed a little more with every league deeper; the passages seemed to circle back on themselves, though Celenneth's marks swore they never crossed their own trail; a tunnel had fallen in on itself and cost them the better part of a day's doubling-back, and the dwarves' patience wore to a thread. But on the fifth day, up a hard climb at the very end of their strength, they found it — a pool of clean water fed by a thin thread of a waterfall spilling down out of the dark above, untouched by any orc: a small clean mercy, a living thing, deep in the dead heart of the mountain. They stood around it a moment and none of them spoke, and then they drank, and it was sweet.1
They made their camp around the pool, settled Svior and Veig to what rest their minds allowed, set watches on the dark, and sent a party back to Balin with word and a call for supplies and more hands. In the days that followed they built the place out into something defensible, and there was a plain, worn satisfaction in the labour of it — a clean well won back from the deep, a second hearth kindled where the orcs had held nothing but poison.
Rest came harder to Celenneth than the work did. Each night her sleep turned to dark dreams — endless tunnels, a voice in the shadows shaping her name, unseen eyes at the edge of the light — and she woke uneasy each time, the weight of the place still on her.2 Dagrun was changed by it too; the long campaign and the deeper dark had cooled something in her, and she smoked her pipe in a long silence now, her gaze gone far off to somewhere none of them could follow.
Still, they had done it: a haven made in the heart of Moria, a foothold reclaimed for Balin's company. More lay ahead, Celenneth knew. But this was worth the marking.
Lótessë 17, 2965
The weeks turned the camp into a settlement. Parties came and went along the road they had opened between the First Hall and the new outpost, bearing gear and stores and news, and the deep between the two grew almost familiar with the walking of it. The First Hall was still the wider and the easier held — but it had no water, and this place did, the lifeblood of any place folk meant to hold. A hard-won thing, and it gave them all something to hope on.
Lótessë 17, 2965
Balin's next want was plain: the Fortress of Malech, a strongpoint the orcs held in numbers, and worth the taking to loosen their grip on the deep. He gathered his hardest for it — Celenneth among a war band of a dozen and more, every one of them tempered by the halls behind them.1
It would be a long road, and every league of it through orc-held ground. There would be no slipping down quiet passages this time; the way to Malech ran through the enemy's own country, and they went into it braced for the fight to find them before they found the fortress.
They travelled the way a war band travels in hostile dark — Ginar and Nar out ahead reading the ground, the archers loose in the middle, the rest close, torches shielded, voices down to nothing. It made for slow, taut going, the kind that wears a company more than hard marching ever does: every hall entered as though it might be held, every silence weighed and measured before a foot was set into it.
On the first day Fenja's eye earned its keep — a sheer rock-face that looked impassable and was not, if a dwarf knew where to set an iron. They spent hours at it, driving pitons and rigging rope, and hauled themselves up and over, and came out above the orc-thick passages they would otherwise have had to cut through: a hard climb traded for a harder battle, and counted well spent.2
The second day began as well — good time through the winding ways, a collapsed tunnel picked through rather than turned from — until a stone bridge betrayed them. They were halfway across a span over a deep dark gulf when orcs came on from both ends at once, a party closing before and another behind, and the bridge became a trap with the company caught in the jaws of it. There was no thought in it, only the doing: Hanar cut for the far side without a word, hewing a path through the orcs that held it; Ida's bolts snapped out of the middle to harry the nearest off their stride; Celenneth held the span itself, her sword and her body between the dwarves and the ones coming up behind, buying the crossing with every heartbeat she could steal. They came off the bridge in a frantic press and up a broken hill into a tunnel-mouth — and there, Ginar's quick hands, brought the loose slope down behind them in a small roaring avalanche that sealed the way and their pursuers with it. Won, and none of them lost. But the near thing rode out with them, the shadow of it heavy on the whole band.3
The third day the strain of that told. They went slower, and Nar flagged, and no one blamed him for it; the deep did not care that they had won the bridge, and only offered more of itself — more dark, more stone, more distance. The fourth day brought them, late and worn, to a thing none of them expected: a small dwarven home carved into the rock off a forgotten passage, long ransacked, its shelves bare and its furniture overturned, a single bed and a sink and a little workbench gone to dust. And yet there was a homeliness to it even in the ruin — the shape of a life once lived down here in the quiet, a dwarf who had risen and worked and slept in this small room in the belly of the world. It put something back in the company to see it. It was, Celenneth thought, the very thing all of this was for.
On the fifth day they came to the Cave of Lights, where the walls glimmered with a cold luminescence that owed nothing to their torches, and high in the dark above it Celenneth marked an old dwarven lantern gone dull with the years — no common lamp, that, but a made thing, one that might be woken again with the mending of it. They noted where it hung, to come back for if ever the road allowed, and went on.
And the road ran out at Malech. The great stairs up to the fortress were watched, orc sentries set at their feet — but a careful circuit of the ground found a second stair, unguarded, winding up the far side, and they took it quiet, hearts high in their throats, eyes on the dark. At the top, the dark gave them what they had come all that long road to find: Uftak. An orc greater than any they had faced, ranged about with a gleaming hoard of polished weapons — swords and axes of dwarves and elves and men and orcs alike, taken and kept and hung like trophies against the day one more fool came climbing.
Lótessë 17, 2965
Uftak was no common orc. There was troll in his blood by the look of him — a bulk and a height that dwarfed the largest of his kind — and he was Malech's enforcer, kept to make the fortress afraid. This was the thing waiting for them at the top of the stair.
They struck first, for what surprise was worth. Celenneth loosed as she came — and missed, the shaft cracking off the wall behind him — and dropped the bow and drew her sword and rushed to close before he could set himself.
He came up roaring, a great axe in his fists, and swung a stroke that would have halved her; she went under it, the wind of it stirring her hair, and drove her sword up between his ribs on the rise. He bellowed and wrenched himself off the blade. Steel rang on stone as she gave ground before his wild swings — and then his cries brought the guards, and the corridor became a battle, the dwarves throwing themselves in to keep the orcs off her back, Ida and the archers harrying Uftak while Celenneth pressed him.1
She thought she had him. Her blade was set for the killing thrust when he laughed, low and guttural, and hurled the axe at her head; she ducked, and it smashed the wall where she had stood — and while she was off balance he had a spear off the wall and drove it into her side. The pain went through her white and total. She stumbled, bleeding, and made herself come on, because there was nothing to do but end it. But he fought like a cornered thing, and she was slowing, and when he lunged again the spear took her below the collarbone and put her down. The stone came up cold against her cheek. The dark crowded in at the edges of her, and she thought, with a strange flat clarity, not like this — and could not stop it.
She did not see the end of him. She learned it after: Hanar and Lif on him from both sides, Ida's arrows finding him one on the next, Lif's blade going deep even as Uftak drove a spear through Lif's thigh; then Regin and Tora snatching spears from the wall and running the great orc through together, until at last he shuddered out his final breath and came down like a wall falling.
She surfaced to lamplight and grim faces and the tight pull of a binding at her side. They had slowed the bleeding, but only slowed it; she was in no state to be moved far. Ginar had slipped away into the fortress after help — and come back with it, of all things: a dwarf named Imri, a smith the orcs had kept at their forge, brought round by the sight of Uftak's severed ear and Yrr's promise that they would be gone as soon as ever they could.2 Imri hid them in a back room and stole food from the larder, and they made a cold soup and got it into her and dressed her wounds, and there they stayed two days while she mended enough to stand — not to fight, but to stand.
They could not stay longer; Uftak would be missed. And Imri, with his tormentor dead and the orcs in disarray, threw his lot in with them, and told them what he knew of the one who held this place: Malech One-Eye. A name off the Battle of Five Armies, trading on an old reputation — but weak beneath it, Imri said, and paranoid, and wholly reliant on Uftak to keep his order. Without his enforcer, he was a soft thing in a hard shell.
So they chose to push, while surprise still held. Imri showed them a hidden stair, and they went up it silencing the guards they met, quick and quiet, and broke into Malech's chambers before he knew they were in the fortress.3
Celenneth put an arrow into his shoulder. He roared for his guards, and no guards came, and she watched the understanding of that reach his eye. He caught up a spear and lashed out as Hanar and Lif closed — and Lif, already hurt, took the point through the gut and went down with his eyes wide, the life leaving him fast. Hanar's cry was terrible; his blade went into Malech's back. The orc reeled, wild now, and Ida and Celenneth loosed and loosed until a shaft went home and Malech One-Eye folded to the floor and did not rise.
It was done. They took his head for a trophy, and found his hoard: gold and gems out of every corner of Middle-earth — and better than gold, among it, a sword whose making she knew at a glance, a relic carried at the Battle of Five Armies; the brazen head of Dero, said to whisper secrets under the moon; and a ring of elven amethyst, blessed with the graces of courtesy and insight.4 The dwarves stripped the best of the weapons from Uftak's chambers besides. Then they wrapped Lif's body to carry home, and Imri came away with them, hope in his face where there had been none, and left the fortress to its dead.
The road back was long, and heavier than any they had walked, for they carried Lif with them. There is a particular weight to bearing a dead friend through the dark — not the weight of the body, which they shared and spelled between them as Tora bowed under it and then Hanar and then another, but the weight of the silence that travels alongside it, the knowing that the deep had taken one of them and would not give him back. Imri led them by a feast-hall he had been marched to once under orc-guard to haul stores, and they rested there among the ghosts of some long-ago revelry, and pushed on through hard miles and failing strength, Celenneth still mending and slower than she liked to be. But at the last the new base camp opened its light to them out of the dark and took them in — relief and grief in the same breath, the joy of a homecoming and the sorrow of the one who would not share it.5 Celenneth laid the brazen head of Dero before Balin; Hanar set down Uftak's ear and Malech's head; and they laid Lif before him last, and the weight of it sat on all of them. They had not cleared the fortress, they told him — but they had broken its back, and loosened the orcs' grip on the deep.
In the weeks that followed they mended. Wounds closed; the shadow lifted by degrees as the victory settled into them. Celenneth's understanding of the deep grew with the treasures they had carried out of it, and she and the dwarves made a lay for Lif — for the friend they had lost and the fight they had won — that he might be remembered.
And yet the ending of Malech did not feel to her like an ending. Something in the aftermath sat wrong — a sense she could put no name to, of a greater eye somewhere in the dark turning slowly toward them.6
Cermië 3, 2965
The gates of Moria shut behind her with a heavy clang, and left her alone beneath the open sky. After so long in the deep the silence of it was almost more than the echoes had been — no dwarven voices, no weight of stone overhead, only the wind and the wide grey light. She settled the straps of her pack, felt the heft of mithril shift inside it, and set her hand to her bow. The dwarves had brought her to the threshold. The rest of the road — to Rivendell — was hers to walk alone.
Balin had sent her off with errands. The brazen head of Dero she was to carry to Rivendell as a gift, and bring back the answers to a list of questions he had written out in a careful hand. The gold and gems she had taken from Malech's hoard he had made her leave behind, and given her their worth in mithril instead — a king's value in a weight a woman could actually carry.1 And he had bidden her choose three of the company to see her to the western gate; she had chosen Ginar, Dagrun, and Nar.
Three days that journey took, following a winding watercourse down through the western deep — a last passage through Moria in good company, the four of them talking low as they walked, the way folk do when a parting is coming and no one wants to be the first to name it. At the westmost door she made her farewells and clasped each of them and wished them safe road back into the dark that was their home; and then the stone closed between her and them, and she was alone again. She camped that night at the threshold, half in the mountain and half out of it, and rested, and gathered herself for the long road north.
The Misty Mountains stood at her back, their peaks lost in dark cloud. She started down into the western foothills by the hidden paths, every step deliberate, the solitude settling over her like an old cloak. The road ahead was long, and it was dangerous. But a Ranger of the North knew how to endure the long and dangerous road. It was, in the end, the only kind she had.