Another Man's Trash by Uvatha the Horseman

Chapter 8 - Treasure Beyond Gold

Chapter 8 - Treasure Beyond Gold

They hurried along a hallway toward the front of the building. Saruman felt completely discouraged. The secrets of Ring-making had been lost long ago, buried under the broken stones and timbers of the first Barad-dûr. But Sauron hated to lose anything. What if he'd managed to reconstruct his notes? Saruman shivered at the possibility. The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed.

"Is there anywhere else we might look? Somewhere Sauron might have kept anything he'd written recently?"

"Maybe in the Council chamber, although I don't think you'll find anything interesting. But we can stop by and have a look," said Urzahil.

Instead of retracing their steps into the heart of the Fortress, Urzahil took them along a smaller hallway and down an unfamiliar stairway. They left it after only two flights. The unseen arrow left his body through his left shoulder. They were traveling generally east, but he lost track of where they were or even what level they were on.

"The Council chamber is just ahead." Urzahil slowed to a walk, breathing hard. He was well into middle-age and not particularly fit.

"Where are we, exactly?" Saruman asked.

"We're almost directly above the audience chamber. There's a staircase just ahead goes all the way down to ground level. We could be outside in minutes."

Urzahil stopped in front of a wooden door. He said something under his breath. There was an answering click, but when he pushed on the door, it wouldn't budge. "It's not the latch. The building settled and jammed the lintel against the top of the door. There's nothing but meeting notes in there anyway." He turned and headed for the stairs.

Saruman took a step back, then drove his shoulder against the door. It yielded and banged against the far wall. Saruman stumbled into the room.

The barrel-vaulted chamber held a long table surrounded by a dozen or more chairs. A tall chair dominated the head of the table. Behind it, leather-bound books filled the shelves of a low bookcase.

Saruman pulled a notebook from the shelf and let it fall open to a random page. Sauron's handwriting jumped out at him. He skimmed the text, a tedious accounting of troop movements and logistics.

Many pages into the notebook, the notes were interrupted by a line in Valarin, Sauron's mother tongue. "Find out if Khamûl is still mad at me for yelling at him."

Saruman reached the end of the notebook without finding anything more of interest. He dropped the volume on the table and pulled out another. It was much the same, mostly notes on financial matters. He turned the page. A drawing of a trebuchet decorated the margin.

"Did Sauron find these meetings boring? There's a lot of artwork in here."

Urzahil left his perch by the door to look. "The drawings? Sauron demanded detailed reporting on all expenditures. An official would tell how much it cost to feed a battalion and he'd give the impression he was writing it all down, but he was actually drawing." Just like anyone else.

Saruman skimmed the pages. An emissary from Khand had visited. The builders of war machinery brought in a model. After that, there was reporting on the price of grain, an almost unbelievably tedious discussion that went on for page after page.

A few inches down the page, the meeting notes gave way to a block of Valarin.

Urzahil tapped the passage with a talon-like nail. "That looks like a things-to-do list. Sauron could only listen to financial reporting for so long before his attention wondered."

"Can you read this language?" asked Saruman.

"I don't even know what language it is. One of my duties was to transcribe Sauron's notes. He said to skip anything in a language I didn't understand. It wasn't part of the official record."

Mildly interested, Saruman skimmed the Valarin section.

1. Cast an ingot from seventeen parts gold and three parts iron, with traces of tin and silver.

2. Made four times as much alloy as needed for the project, to allow for the usual errors and false starts.

3. The amount of alloy needed for the project is at least…

It appeared that Sauron went to the forge to relax. It was deeply satisfying to shape the glowing metal with a hammer and make the anvil ring.

Saruman turned the page. The list covered both halves of the notebook, the writing small and densely spaced. He leafed through the next few pages.

"That must have been a long presentation. This list goes on and on," he said, but Urzahil wasn't paying attention.

Saruman kept turning pages. The list finally ended, leaving a few inches of blank space below the last item.

117. … Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul

At first, Saruman didn't understand at first what he was reading. And then he did. The room spun, and he clutched the edge of the table for balance. In a moment of boredom, Sauron had written out detailed instructions for forging the Ring. Saruman couldn't believe his luck. He whispered a prayer of thanks.

Urzahil mustn't find out. Saruman glanced at up, wondering how much Sauron's secretary had seen, but Urzahil was leaning against the wall, lost in his own thoughts.

Saruman closed the notebook. "Nothing in here either," he said in a theatrical voice, and dropped it on the table near the first one.

A quake rocked the building. A stone from the ceiling crashed to the floor and broke into fragments. Stone dust sifted down from the ceiling. Urzahil turned and ran. He knew the way out, and he had their torch. Saruman grabbed the notebook and ran after him. Saruman wondered how much longer the Tower would remain standing.

The sole of Urzahil's boot flapped as he raced down the hall. Torchlight receded down a different corridor than expected. Saruman sprinted to keep up. He had no desire to lose his way in a collapsing building.

The torch disappeared down a wide staircase, spiraling flight after flight before the yellow light pulled ahead and vanished from sight.

Saruman had counted four flights when he arrived at a landing that smelled unbelievably bad. In the dim light, he could just barely see a pile of dead Orcs, the same ones he'd seen earlier. He knew where he was, at the foot of the grand staircase. The chamber housing the Dark Throne lay just ahead, and beyond it, the tunnel that would take him outside.