Another Man's Trash by Uvatha the Horseman

Chapter 4 - The Ithil Stone

Chapter 4 - The Ithil Stone

After passing the chamber that held the Dark Throne, the hallway turned a corner, revealing a broad staircase. From its width and its proximity to the main entrance, it appeared to be one of the Tower's main routes up and down.

Saruman would have expected a major stairway to be made of stone, but it looked like a temporary structure thrown together from scraps of wood. A carpenter might have made something like that for a building that was still going up.

He looked around in the dim light. There was no carved stonework, no paneling, no tiled floors. The finely-made iron torches had given way to reeds held by iron staples hammered into the stone walls. This section looked as if it had been thrown together as quickly as possible.

Saruman mounted the stairs. The bodies of dead Orcs had been piled up on the landing. The stench made his eyes water. A crude sigil defaced the Eye on their surcotes. It had been painted in what must have been the victim's own blood. He stepped over the bodies, breathing through his mouth, and continued to climb.

He mistrusted the staircase. It was a stand-alone structure not well anchored into the walls around it. There were treads but no risers, which added to the feeling of vertigo. About fifteen stories up, he almost put his foot through a space where there should have been a tread. He paused to let his pulse slow down before continuing.

Twenty flights above ground level, the staircase ended in a broad landing. He put his hands on his knees and drew deep breaths. He was sweating freely. Strands of hair stuck to his forehead.

A number of passages fanned away from it, some paralleling the outer walls, others plunging into the heart of the building. Saruman chose the one most likely to take him to the center of the Tower where he might find the stairs to the watchtower. From where he stood, it should be about half a mile distant. He started walking.

He turned a corner. The unchanging direction of true north, an arrow that passed harmlessly through him, moved in response. Usually he didn't notice it, but today when it was so important not to get lost, he felt it sweep through his body every time he changed direction.

After about ten minutes, the feeling of an enormous mass was as intense all around him as it was in front. He judged he'd reached the center of the Fortress. He'd only felt that panicked, suffocating pressure once before, a mile down a mine shaft, with the weight of a whole mountain overhead.

He found a stairway, narrow and too steep for regular use. He began to climb. His legs shook and he had to use his hands to haul himself using the railing. Forty stories up, a window appeared in the side of the stairwell, a narrow slit piercing a thick wall. A half-turn later, another slit faced the opposite direction. Far below, the Elvish camp fanned out around the foot of the bridge.

Narrow slits pierced the wall at regular intervals, letting in light and air and giving vantage points in all directions. He extinguished his torch and left it on the stair. He'd reached the watchtower, the slender pillar of stone he'd seen from the ground. There were no rooms opening off it. The spiral stairs themselves filled all the available space.

At some point, the stairs passed through what appeared to be the room of a servant. It was a strange location for a servant's room, so far above the rest of the Fortress. It had no rugs, shelves, or tapestries, no ornamentations of any kind. A cot stood against the far wall, the blanket pulled as tight as a drum, and a plain wooden chest stood at its foot. A small table had been pushed against the window, its surface bare.

A ladder against the wall stopped just below a trapdoor cut in the planks of the ceiling. Saruman started to climb, taking care not to look down. He stuck his head into the room above. There were no more stairs. He'd reached the top of the Tower. He felt triumphant, but at the same time, the anxiety left his mouth bone dry.

The top of the watchtower was an observation platform. Windows encircled the room on all sides. The volcano dominated the view to the West. Red fingers of lava drained down its sides in slow rivers, dark red with gray edges. The wind caught smoke from the volcano's peak and carried it away. Gusts of air whipped his hair in his face. He shivered in the unexpected chill.

A hundred stories above the ground, the watchtower swayed in the wind. An inkwell sat abandoned on a windowsill. The ink rode up one side of the clear glass, then the other, sloshing around in a lazy circle. He minded it more than the thousand-foot drop, and had to look away. It didn't help that tremors from the volcano, unnoticeable at ground level, were magnified up here, traveling through the stone to reach the soles of his feet.

The room was bare except for a stone pillar covered by a cloth. Saruman pulled it away to reveal an orb, purple-black and blind, the Ithil Stone. He felt a stab of longing for the Orthanc Stone, now lost. The Ithil Stone looked like his own Palantir, only slightly smaller, and he hoped, easier to carry. He dreaded trying to bring it down the ladder with only one hand. It should be possible to make a sack from the cloth that covered it.

He put a palm on either side of it glassy surface and began to lift it from its base. Its interior was dead and lifeless. It was possible it wasn't working. He didn't want to lug it down a hundred flights of stairs if it wasn't working. He considered what to do. It would be wise to test it first.

He looked into the stone and commanded it to life. The purple-black glass lightened to gray. An image of the Elvish camp came into focus. Elves walked among the tents, cooked over fires, and watered their horses. He leaned out the window and saw the same arrangement of tents, the same groupings of horses in brush corral. The Ithil Stone still worked.

He moved around the stone to put it between himself and the volcano. The image of the Elvish camp was replaced by a dark red blur from which an image of rivers of lava emerged. He looked up. The real volcano looked the same.

He kept the Palantir fixed on Orodruin but steered it into the past. Day became night, the seasons changed, and Orodruin went dormant. Smoke no longer rose from its peak. The centuries scrolled backwards in time, and the volcano slept.

Saruman's attention wandered. This room had no shelves or storage chests. It held nothing but the Palantir on its stone pillar. Whatever papers were hidden in the Tower, they weren't here.

The Palantir flashed yellow-orange. Saruman wheeled around and saw an image of the Sammath Naur, the entrance to Sauron's workshop, flickering with yellow light. He peered into the stone, riveted.

Outside the workshop, tents dotted the road and the slope of the cinder cone below it, along with horses and wagons. A dozen men milled around. Then he saw Sauron, looking older and more world-weary than Saruman remembered him. These were the preparations for forging the Ring. Saruman wanted to see the Ring-forging itself.

Far below, footsteps banged up the stairs, and there was the sound of voices shouting.

Saruman steered the Palantir a day closer. Tents and wagons still cluttered the road to the workshop. People milled around, more of them than the day before. There was a flurry of activity as they collected tools and drawing, then filed into the Sammath Naur. Something important was about to happen.

The trapdoor banged open. Saruman looked up, startled. A pair of Elves burst through the opening. "We'll take that, if you don't mind."

"But…" Saruman gripped the smooth surface, but the burly one pulled it from his hands and dropped it into a leather bag held open by the other. They departed as quickly as they arrived.

Saruman could have stopped them, if he'd been willing to use his powers against someone fighting on the same side, and if the whole of his attention hadn't been on the vision he'd been watching. As it was, he was left standing there speechless, clenching and unclenching his fists.

There was nothing here. Discouraged, Saruman knelt by the trapdoor and felt for the top rung of the ladder with his toe. It hadn't been secured to the wall and shifted when he tried to put his weight on it. The swaying of the watchtower didn't make things any better.

With effort, Saruman descended to the room below. He still had a hundred flights to descend, and he was not happy about it. His legs had cramped up and his knees ached.

As he passed through the servant's room, he realized, it wasn't a servant's room at all, it had been Sauron's room. Unless he climbed the stairs every day, he would have slept up here.

Saruman felt a rush of excitement, like a hunter closing in on its prey. He upended the small chest and spilled its contents on the floorboards. It contained clothes, most of them black. He poked the pile with his toe, looking for books, papers, a key, anything that might help him in his search. Nothing.

Discouraged, Saruman turned his back on the wreckage and began the long descent to ground level. He retraced the route he'd taken up and finally reached the bottom of the grand staircase, taking care to step around the bodies of the Orcs.