Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 12: The Second Demise of Igasêz

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Ambarto can’t stop thinking about—and mourning—the peaches. In the time it took them to buckle on their snowshoes, it became clear that the Wight had no interest in pursuing them, and they were left to clump back home feeling rather foolish. Ambarto grieves less for not having had the chance to eat the peaches and more for thinking about the little gobbets of topaz-colored fruit strewn across the snow: fruit fed literally by the Light of Laurelin, fleshed out to sugary fullness, and hauled all this way to Formenos only to be broken upon the road and left in the snow to spoil. It seems a shameful end for something so long-nurtured into sweetness to be discarded, untasted.

Neither twin wants to articulate what both feel, the pallid shine in the space midway between their minds: that life without their family isn’t as carefree as they imagined. Both are hungry and have a pantry full of provisions, but to mix and knead the dough to bake the bread to make even a cheese sandwich seems effortful. They are accustomed to a kitchen full of delights to sate every hunger: fruit just waiting to be savored, bread to be cut, meat to be carved. And even these small chores they’d sighed over and believed themselves prevailed upon.

It is Ambarto who finally opens the bag of flour to begin the bread. He has watched his mother do this many times. Ambarussa watches his brother for a few minutes before setting a pot of water on the stove and beginning to boil some bones to make stock and cutting some potatoes for soup.

After the intensity of their scare, the Wight is suddenly far from their thoughts, removed to a distance of absurdity. The man is terrifying and clearly an escapee from Mandos or a part-Orc or something similarly hideous (of this they have no doubt, with Tyelkormo as their expert source), with his overlong limbs and pallid skin and blind-white eyes, but neither can disabuse himself of the sudden conviction that they overreacted in the market, and not just because of the peaches. (Although that is part of it.)

Ambarto at last gives voice to this. “We should be eating peaches right now.” He punches the dough. Ambarussa echoes his frustration with a thwack of the knife that splits an innocent potato into two.

Outside the house, it is not the Wight who approaches.

Iniðilêz and Dušamanûðânâz have none of yesterday’s swagger. Even after overhearing the conversation between the innkeepers, they are guarded, keeping to the shade of the trees to watch the house before hazarding an approach. It is silent and still, the windows dark and shuttered. The whipping wind has already erased all but a dimpled memory of the twins’ snowshoe tracks. There is no carriage or horses; none of the banging doors and shouting voices and running feet that mark the House of Fëanáro.

“This is it,” says Iniðilêz. “They’re gone.” He buries a doughy elbow into Dušamanûðânâz’s side. “Go check it out.”

“Who? Me?” and the slap of Iniðilêz’s hand across his face is near-simultaneous with the smack of dough onto the board as Ambarto leaves it to rise.

“Yes! You! Why do you think I brought you? Not your brains, surely!”

The twins drift into the living room while they wait for their bread to rise and stock to boil. It is a mess, with the sticky remnants of their caramel breakfast from the other morning, the cast-asides from their mischief, and in the midst of it all, the memory stone with the awkwardly scratched title at its base: “Ainur with Filthy Feär.” A curtain hangs across the door to the patio to keep out the drafts, admitting only a thin bar of Laurelin’s light into the room from the gap between curtain and doorframe.

“But!” says Dušamanûðânâz from behind the trees. “Magic!”

“Magic didn’t get me far yesterday, did it?” Iniðilêz snaps. “To the Void with magic! This is magic enough to get us in.” He holds aloft the prybar. “While you’re doing that, I will be preparing the full power of my sorcery to open the vaults.” He waves his mittenish hands in the air like he is rubbing a smudge off the sky.

(He’ll be preparing nothing. He’ll be enjoying a jar of pomegranates that he swiped from the southern woman’s cart when she wasn’t looking. Dušamanûðânâz likes pomegranates, and he doesn’t want to share. His “sorcery” is a small beer in the roadhouse of magic, squirreled under the counter as far from the glittering, chiseled, top-shelf bottles as one can get, but he’s still more powerful than Dušamanûðânâz, whose “magic” is being constantly squandered as involuntary shape-shifting. Right now, he is all wiry bones like an egret but with the pop-jawed, bug-eyed face of a deep-sea fish.)

Dušamanûðânâz prances from foot to foot, lifting his knees high above the nonexistent water, until Iniðilêz loses patience and shouts, “Git!” He gits, before he is delivered another slap.

The twins have begun to tidy the living room. They are cleaning their own mess and even putting away Curufinwë’s books and straightening Tyelkormo’s heap of unmatched boots and organizing Macalaurë’s scattered sheet music by song, then instrument and vocal range.

Dušamanûðânâz approaches the front door, but remembering the recalcitrance of lock and wood, has a rare flash of insight. With high, bony steps, he creeps around to the back of the house to see if there is another way in. With all those children, he reasons, Fëanáro must have built numerous ingresses.

“What is a mezzo-soprano?” Ambarussa asks. “Should that go above or below a soprano?”

“Below,” answers Ambarto. “I think.”

There is a wide stone patio, cleared of furniture, its fountain drained and its gardens mounded under a quilt of snow. And there is a door, south-facing to let in the small Light of the Trees that comes this far north. A glass door. Dušamanûðânâz giggles, a garpling sound like he’s swallowing a minnow and glad to have it, and grasps the prybar like a dance cane, an effect enhanced by his high, marching step. He leaves a row of tracks like punctures in the snow.

Ambarussa is sorting mezzo-soprano sheet music for the Váralindalë between the soprano and contralto parts when he happens to glance up and see a shadow pass across the curtain that covers the patio door. The shape is like a stick insect, if a stick insect was bipedal and itself carried a stick. The heart-skipping flash of alarm alerts Ambarto before his brother’s subdued gasp does.

The stick insect is still making a gulping laugh in its throat. It is fumbling at the door. The twins hear the scratching sound of something trying to find purchase on the smooth-sanded wood of the doorframe, then the jangle of something metal being dropped and an utterance, in a very human voice, of a word that would get them in trouble even with Fëanáro for saying.

Ambarto echoes his brother’s gasp.

Ambarto is the twin who overthinks—in the manner of his elder brothers and his mother and Curufinwë—and his mind is now turning over some fabulous schemes that he lacks time or courage or both to enact. They always involve schematic drawings and imported materials. Ambarussa is not so burdened. Taking after Fëanáro and Tyelkormo and Carnistir, his actions sometimes precede his thoughts, arriving in his brain only after his mouth has opened or his hand has shot out.

In this case, it shoots out toward the memory stone, outstretched fingers sliding just enough on the face of the stone to set it back several seconds from where the twins stopped it in a panic.

“I have brought a delivery of thraaalls, milord."

They know the voice is Macalaurë’s, but surely the dulcet tones of their renowned brother could not be rendered so noxious except by swallowing a handful of gravel peppered with tacks, could they? The boys feel the same creeping revulsion as before—tensing, knowing what is coming—but the shadow beyond the curtain also freezes.

“How many you got?”

How could Macalaurë know the voice of Melkor? Yet this must be what it sounds like, no? The stick insect’s shadow melts against the doorframe, convinced also.

“Two dozen, milord. Enough to haul the coal.”

“I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna need three dozen, thralls enough to haul the coal and push the carts.”

The stick insect’s shadow is making little jumpy motions, like he doesn’t know if he should run or hide or stand still and listen. The twins—even knowing where the recording will end up—find they are enjoying his little paroxysms. With a swipe of his fingers up the side of the stone, Ambarto even turns up the volume.

Igasêz’s voice, brimming with horror, explodes into the room. “Three! But milord! You told me two!” The shadow noticeably twitches and then goes still. Dušamanûðânâz is not intelligent, but he has the same kind of reflexive survival instinct of brainless things that survive in the mud.

“You question me? You? Who’ve been scroungin in the murk and dressin up like Eönwë and smoochin with Gothmogûz? I tell you what, Igasêz. I’m gonna give ya to the count of ten to get outta here and start bringin my thralls before I make a grinder outta ya and toss ya to my Balrogs.”

“Alright, milord! I’m sorry!”

“One, two—ten!”

As poor Igasêz’s agonizing screams echo off the living room walls (and how did Macalaurë know how to scream that way?), the shadow shoots like an arrow in front of the curtained glass door and into the snow. Responding to the sudden terror, his body has suddenly morphed into a tadpole-like shape. Most of him is a fleshy tail but a pair of rudimentary legs pedal at the snow. He squirms for a long time before his legs lengthen enough that he may toddle at full speed back to Iniðilêz. His mouth is opening and closing soundlessly like a carp yoinked out of its pond. He doesn’t even notice that Iniðilêz’s pasty hands and face are pink-stained by pomegranate juice.

Iniðilêz stops in the middle of licking a finger like a pale—now pink—sausage link. “What in Utumno is it now?” Iniðilêz’s first reaction to anything is always to be irritated by it.

“He’s here!” One would think that Dušamanûðânâz’s voice might have froggy tones but he peeps like a bald nestling with its eyes sealed shut.

“Who?”

“Melkor!”

This gets Iniðilêz’s attention. He thinks of little else but Melkor. (Not even stealing, which he does without thinking about it.) His eyes go wide, and he peers around the tree to try to catch a glimpse of his lord perhaps exiting the domicile. “Are you sure?”

“Ay! It was his voice, no mistake. He was wanting thralls …”

Iniðilêz is thinking. He is the intelligence in the outfit, but when he thinks, his face wears the labored expression of a machine allowed to go to rust and dust grinding to action. At last, he pops his pinkened finger aloft in the air, a sure sign that he has had an insight. “He knows about the vault! He knows about the vault, and he’s trying to break it. Bet ya anything! And he needs thralls … well, the thralls are for getting into this impossible place.”

“Yeah but the guy, the guy getting the thralls? He got tossed to the Balrogs.”

“Balrogs …” Iniðilêz has never seen a Balrog. He pokes his face around the tree again, hoping for and dreading a glimpse. “Dušamanûðânâz, do you know what this means?”

“Nope, afraid I do not.”

“This means that if we get in first, if we break into the vault and present what we find of Fëanáro’s shiny, mysterious things to the Lord, then we will rise high in his service. Even his servants, even his Balrogs, cannot help him! Imagine what he will think of us when we do—”

Iniðilêz leaves the question hanging. Dušamanûðânâz’s mouth carps open and shut a few times before he asks brightly, “What will he think of us?”

The doughy slap is not of unbaked bread upon the board, but it makes the man crossing the snow between Formenos and the House of Fëanáro on snowshoes made of ash limbs—a man so pale, even to the centers of his eyes, that he passes all but invisible—stop and lift his head to listen.