The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [190]
"Quit pretending, dear ally!" The Firstborn was smiling, but his eyes burned with such hatred that his vertical cat's pupils narrowed into tiny slits. "You are going to tell us everything about those strange games of His Majesty Elessar Elfstone, aren't you, beastie? There shouldn't be any secrets between allies."
"Mordor… and… the Eye…" The lieutenant's voice was still even, although Manwe only knew the effort it took: the Elf had casually dropped his hand to the prisoner's broken ankle and…
"Sir Engold, look! What's that?!"
At the cry of his comrades the Elf turned around and stared, frozen, at something resembling a colossal dandelion swiftly grow to the sky beyond the Anduin, right where Caras Galadhon ought to be – a thin blinding-white stalk crowned with a bright-red bulbous 'flower.' Almighty Eru, if this thing is indeed in Galadhon, how huge must it be? What Galadhon? There's probably not even ashes left there… A strangled cry made him turn back: "Sir Engold, the prisoner! What's happening to him?.."
Fast as he turned back, it was all over before he could see it happen. The prisoner was dead and no physician was necessary to confirm that. In a few moments, right under the gaze of the astonished Elves, the man had turned into a skeleton covered here and there in remnants of mummified skin. The brown-yellow skull, its eye sockets filled with sand, grinned at Engold from between shrunken blackened lips, as if mockingly inviting him to ask his questions – immerse me in the truth potion, perhaps that will help?
And in the palace in Minas Tirith Aragorn watched in astonishment the subtle changes taking place in the face of Arwen, seated across from him. Nothing seemed to change, really, but he felt with absolute certainty that something important, perhaps the most important, was going, slipping away like a blissful morning dream slips from memory… some magical incompleteness of her features, which became completely human. When this metamorphosis was over in a few moments, he reached a verdict summing up that period of his life: a beautiful woman, no question about it. Very beautiful, even. But that's all.
None of his subjects saw that, nor would they have ascribed any importance to it had they seen it. What they did dutifully reflect in the chronicles of that day was another event of that noon: when the Mirror was destroyed in Lórien, the other six palantíri remaining in Middle Earth detonated, too, and a monstrous geyser almost half a mile high shot up from the Anduin-receiving Bay of Belfalas. The geyser spawned a forty-foot tsunami that wiped out several fishing villages together with their inhabitants; it is doubtful that anyone recognized that those unfortunates, too, were victims of the War of the Ring.
The most surprising thing is that despite his powers of observation and insight His Majesty Elessar Elfstone had not connected those two events that happened at noon of August the first of the Year 3019 of the Third Age and in a sense became its final moment, either. For sure, no one after him had ever connected them, having had no opportunity to do so.
***
"Bend the arm, quick!" Haladdin ordered, tightening the tourniquet above Tzerlag's left elbow. "Keep the rag pressed there, lest you bleed out."
The sergeant's hand 'unfroze' the moment the volcano swallowed the palantír, so now his blood gushed like it always does when a man loses a couple of fingers. They had no means to stop the bleeding other than the tourniquet: it turned out that the blood-clotting medicines from the Elvish medkit, including the legendary mandrake root (which reputedly could even patch a severed artery), have stopped working entirely. Who would have thought that this was magic, too?
"Listen… so we won, right?"
"Yes, dammit! If it can be called victory…"
"I don't understand, Field Medic, sir…" it seemed that the sergeant's lips, gray with blood loss, had trouble obeying him. "What does 'if it can be called victory' mean?"
Don't you