Escape from Dol Guldur

They had moved him several times now.  The bare stone floors upon which he and Zerephath had awakened were long gone. He had been taken by force days ago in darkness, bludgeoned into unconsciousness, though he had a memory of two orcs fallen with broken necks and two others howling with pain before a massive blow felled him.

Life had become a blur for a while until he had foregone for a few days the base food and drink they had supplied him.  Then his head began to clear again though his stomach ached and his throat rasped with thirst.  He realized he had been moved to a stout wooden cage on the side of the mountain. 

He gained his strength there, at least so it had seemed at first, with the arrival of wine and victuals tolerable enough to eat.  Then the empty time began, half awake, half dreaming.  Shouts and leering faces, threats and violent abuse, terror and rage, some of which was his, some of which came from others.  Then silence for a while, as if something in him had broken, snapped, retreating to a final fortress deep inside his will that none could touch.

That might have been three days ago or weeks, he did not know.  But when he had awoken some hours ago his head was clear again though his body ached. 

This was a different prison from the others.  His cell was hollowed out of a rock wall, fronted by thick bars and a locked gate.  There was barely room to sit upright much less stand.  Beyond the confines of his cell was a narrow rough stone track for orcs to stand and patrol his cell and others carved out of a long curving wall of rock. 

Then there was a second set of bars, six feet distant from those of his cell, thick as a man’s wrist, spanning the gap from the track floor to the ceiling of a large underground cavern that opened up far beyond the bars.

His eyes had almost fully adjusted to the dim light provided by torches in sconces every third cell.  When he pressed his face against the cold metal confines of his own cell, he could see the second set of heavy bars retreating to the right and left, pinioned between the ten foot opening in the long rock face that curved away in each direction. 

Beyond the second set of bars there was the open space of a great cavern, dimly outlined by the torches and a pale phosphorescence that speckled its walls.  Far off he thought he could discern a tunnel at the left and right ends of the barred gallery where the orcs patrolled, and yet another hole in the rock in the far wall of the cavern, a large and almost perfectly round opening black as pitch. 

The was the sound of splashing water, distant and below his line of sight, followed by snarling and hissing.  A strong reptilian stench saturated the already moist subterranean air.  He had glimpses of shapes in the distance.  Was it the glint of wet scales in the torchlight? Or some vague refuse being dumped in the foul waters of this forgotten cavern. 

And the hiss and snarl, was it an echo of orcs fighting over some mean wager, a scrap of meat, or something else more vile and sinister than the caged creatures he had seen upon reaching consciousness days ago when he and Zerephath were in adjoining cells.  

He suspected the latter if his experience of last night was real and not some holdover from the fog of terror of days past. 

There had been a sound, a shouting that had wakened him.  A headache seemed nearly to cleave his skull with pain, but he had enough of his wits to recognize the voice that spent itself echoing in the cavern as his own.  He had sat, swaying, clutching his head, shivering slightly in the pathetic rags that remained of his garments. 

Then there was a rush of odor on a wave of air.  Hot, decayed, vaguely sulfurous.  He remembered gagging, trying to stand up, but only able to crouch in the cramped space of his cell.  Then moving towards the bars as if better air would be there.  But it was fouler still.  Beyond the second, stouter set of bars he saw something in the dim light, a shape emerging as it slowly approached.  A great snakelike head sporting small fan-like ears and large green-gold eyes.  A mouth half open lined with long, sharp, wet fangs and a forked tongue, black in the murky gloom, sliding from side to side, testing the air.

He remembered the pain in his head being suspended, his mouth gaping open, his own eyes drawn hypnotically to the eyes that hovered just inches from the massive bars.  Then a great metallic clang as the creature’s jaws lunged and snapped at the thick steel barrier.  A loud resentful hiss, coupled with an intense stench that caught his breath, leaving him doubled over coughing and crawling back to the far recesses of his confinement. 

He had then sunk into sleep, succumbing to exhaustion and the returning pain in his head.

But it was no dream that had left the fresh grooves he had spied on the heavy metal bars across the passageway when he had awakened hours ago.     

His dark recollection ended with the sudden clang of a metal gate down the passageway far to his left, and the sound of shuffling foot steps snapped him out of his dark reverie.  In a few moments a bedraggled orc in oversized armor and boots appeared at the face of his cell carrying a stained leather pouch and a rude wooden bowl, its foul contents steaming and sloshing over.

“Look what we got here, the Steward’s son.  And how’s the high and mighty toast of Gondor today”

Eradan merely glowered at the orc.

“Ahh too noble to share a word with old Naglik is he.  Old Naglik who brings him something to drink…something to eat too” Naglik cackled at some private joke

“Keep your slop and rubbish orc.  I’ve had enough of your master’s poisons!”

“You’ll sing a different tune soon enough” Naglik snarled.  “Old Naglik is all that is left to guard the caverns…the others have been called to other quarry, fresh meat from Gondor”

Eradan’s pulse quickened.  A rescue party.  An army of Gondor’s finest come to exact revenge and free him and any others that yet survived.  He crept up to the bars.

“It is you who should change your tune, orc.  Gondor’s might, its great armies will overwhelm this pit of evil and all in it”

Naglik laughed, harsh, rasping and mocking. “Armies” he seemed to spit out the word in contempt, “No armies at all…scarcely a thousand men and what more the Steward himself in the van.  Soon we’ll have the father and the son as guests of Naglik!” 

The old orc let out another round of twisted laughter, half doubled over with his own amusement, leaning against the bars, grasping them for support lest he collapse with mirth altogether.  The stained pouch and foul meal dropped from his hands greasing the stone floor.

The news stunned Eradan.  What could they be thinking, his father above all, to venture out with such a scant force.  He would be a sure target for capture or death.  Before him the orc was contorted in mirth, cackling and coughing now, trying to catch his breath.  Eradan was weak from lack of nourishment, bruised and battered from days of abuse, but he knew that this might be his only moment , that he had to act if he was to have any chance to prevent what he saw as a disaster in the making.

Naglik’s cynical laughter was beginning to recede, his old bent shape starting to rise from his crouch, when Eradan launched himself at the bars of his cell.  His right hand, strong from 20 years of gripping a mace, reached between the bars and snared Naglik’s wrist in a mighty grip.  With all his strength he pulled the orc’s hand and forearm through the bars.  Naglik let out a wheezy gasp.  There was a dull metallic clunk as his body and head slammed into the bars, the only thing that prevented the rest of his body from being yanked into Eradan’s cell.

The old orc fell like a sack of cobbles.  Eradan quickly pulled his motionless jailor close to the bars, feverishly rifling through his pockets, belts and pouches.  Nothing, not the ring of keys he had hoped would be there to free him.  Eradan leaned back, breathing heavily, trying to control his disappointment, grasping for the focus he would need. 

It came in a childhood memory, when he and his friends among the noble families in Minas Tirith would play a game they knew their elders would disapprove.  One that amongst themselves they called guards and gaols.  They would steal down to the lower levels of the city where the miscreants and thieves were held for trial.  Sneaking past the guards they would venture into little used passages, extra cells made in times long past when there was more need.  With keys snatched from the Royal Gaoler’s chamber they would play endless games of capture and escape.  And none better than Eradan who had quickly learned that the locks on the cells could be picked from the inside by dint of hard work and a slender metal fillet.

But this was no game now.  There were no keys.  Eradan returned in earnest to his search of Naglik’s still quiescent form.  A dagger…no use, too blunt, the standard orc sword, stout and heavy for battle but little use on a lock.  His frustration was mounting. Eradan grabbed at a small grimy pouch that the old vermin had tucked under his sword belt.  The contents spilled out, a few third rate baubles, a handful of coins, no help.  Then the prize, a crude broach, booty from some past battle or stolen from another orc.  But its crudeness was its bounty, for the rough metal crafting was attached to a long, thick pin meant to pierce heavy garments for the display of the broach.

Eradan bent back the pin from the metal face.  It might be enough.  He reached through the bars and inserted the pin into the keyhole from the outside.  For minutes he fished around, getting the feel of the lock, trying to remember the locks of his childhood, the path of the tumblers, the feel of the metal point on the invisible mechanisms.  Sweat broke on his brow as he tried to maintain control over his urgency, striving to constrain his movements and focus to the minute battlefield in the small metal space before him.

There was something vaguely familiar about the lock, something coming back to him from decades past.  The urgency fell away as his fingers took over, the feel of the metal parts becoming instinctive, the unerring intuitions of his youth taking over.  An almost inaudible click, a sliding movement, pressure on a spring mount, then release, another louder click, then a resigned metallic clunk as the lock yielded to him.

Holding his breath, he nudged the door.  It swung open slightly.  Eradan leapt up and forced the gate back.  He was outside now, able to stand fully for the first time.  But there was no time for triumph and celebration.  He knew what he had to do.  Working quickly, he stripped Naglik of his oversized armor and boots.  Too big for the old bent orc, confiningly small for him, but all that he had to camouflage his form and intentions.  Eradan donned the foul orc gear, sword and dagger included.  He grabbed a gob of his greasy meal, spilt on the floor, and smeared it on his face with what grit he could scrape from the floor of the passage.  Then he heaved Naglik into the cell. 

Now which way to go.  On his left he knew the passageway led to an entrance where Naglik had come.  No good, there would only be more orcs there, however thinly garrisoned, and some to check on Naglik’s guard before long.  So he would go to the right, hoping for an alternative exit.  Whatever awaited him there he could not say, only that it now seemed the lesser threat of the two choices. 

Movement was painful, part from the awkward restrictions of the undersized black orcish armor, but mostly from the array of deep bruises from the repeated beatings that had been inflicted on his entire body over the past days.  Every dozen steps he stopped for breath, his head spinning from lack of food and water and the lingering effects of the potions they had forced on him. 

Now he could see the outline of a heavy barred gate in the distance, at the end of the corridor.  To his left, through the massive set of bars he could now make out the lazy surface of a subterranean pool, ghostly silver in the luminescence of the cavern.  Its pale watery sheen was broken with shallow ripples from long sinuous forms.  On his right were small empty cells like the one he’d just escaped, some completely bare, others cluttered with human bones.

In moments he stood in front of the gate, old and rusted.  A tug at the bars moved it a few inches on screeching hinges.  Eradan pulled harder, opening it enough to pass into a tunnel in the rock wall beyond the last cell.  A cool draught of air flushed his face, pouring from the darkness beyond.  A mix of odors flooded his nostrils.  A vague musty decay mixed with a softer rot like spoiled fruit, and an unidentifiable scent, not quite reptilian, but not that of any animal he had known. 

Ahead, the passage was pitch dark.  The infrequent torches along the way from his cell did not continue.  Eradan walked back a few yards to the last one and yanked it from its sconce.  He gave it an appraising look.  A smoky flame, perhaps two hours worth, maybe three.  It would have to do.  There were no guarantees ahead.  Behind him he suspected that the way involved more orcs than he could overpower.  With a grunt of resignation he entered the passage and pulled the gate shut.

The torch provided a halo of light for the first twenty feet.  He was in a rough hewn tunnel, sloping steadily upward, several feet wide and tall enough for him to stand upright with a few inches clearance.   The floor was dusty, but otherwise unmarked by any evidence of occupation.  His fresh footfalls kicked up a plume of fine powder that left an acrid taste in his mouth. 

He went on for some time this way, time in fact having no meaning other than the slow erosion of the torch.  There was a moment when he thought he heard the faint echo of shouts and cries behind him.  He had tensed, gripping the blunt orcish sword.  Then the sounds faded into a distant mean spirited laughter, fading into an indistinct cackle.

Eradan’s ears strained for more, standing there ready for the sound of orcs footsteps and snarls of revenge for their fallen comrade left behind in his cell.  But there was nothing further. 

It both relieved and surprised him.  It would have taken little skill, even for orcs, to have divined his escape up the passage.  Yet they did not pursue.  The thought suddenly occurred to him that maybe they didn’t have to, that perhaps this was just a dead end and he would have to turn around and return to the gate, and the laughter of awaiting orcs.

Well that would have to be proven to him.  The torch was halfway burnt down now.  If there was an escape it would have to be soon.

Eradan went forward now, increasing his pace purposely, despite the aches and pains that still dogged his every step.  Some minutes later he felt a current of air and an intensification of the odor he could not identify earlier.  Then the corridor came to an end or almost an end.  Ahead there was little more than a rock wall, where the tunnel abruptly ended, its artisans quit for reasons unknown.

But off to the right, a narrow crevice continued, a small winding natural gap in the stone foundation of Dol Guldor.  And there was a new odor on the air from this opening, faint but unmistakable, the smell of vegetation and outside air.  Eradan squeezed himself into the fissure, forcing himself through, driven by the scent of freedom, temporarily distracting him from the growing rank odor of something else.

This path was different than the tunnel.  His feet now trod on an irregular floor, sometimes covered in a soft, almost spongy accretion he could not identify.  Other times he had to trust to the now dimming light of the torch he carried to guide him through passages where the floor fell away into sharp defiles and crevasses.  There he was forced  to press his back hard against the rough stone protuberances of the natural gap in the stone, carefully placing his feet from one ledge to another.

The winding cleft in the rock corridor he navigated varied from tight pinches where he could barely make his way through to small caverns where the torch light glimmered on pale dripping stone.  All the time the current of air maintained itself, taunting him with the hint of the outside world, while turning his stomach with another, increasingly dense stench that comes with a concentration of living things in a small space.

He felt a sudden crunch beneath his feet.  Bending over, he put the torch low, spying a scrap of what appeared to be a brown, semi-transparent shell-like material, the size of his hand.  Though curious, there was little time for detailed inspection.  He had barely half an hour left with the torch.  Half an hour to find an exit at the end of the stream of air, or be plunged into darkness, fumbling about, lost under the mountain, or worse, a retreat back to the cell.

Eradan pressed ahead.  Along with the ebbing torch he felt his reserves of strength leaving him, his limbs becoming increasingly sluggish, a fuzziness creeping into his thoughts.  The crackle of the unknown shell-like material beneath his plodding feet faded into the background of his surroundings.  His pauses for breath, leaning against the raw ragged walls of the stony fissure, became more frequent.  Still, the hard core of his being that gave no quarter and would demand survival at all costs sent him on.

The torch became his measure of time.  And now precious moments had passed and it was down to a nub barely six inches long, erratically lit.  He was now shuffling through ankle deep layers of the brown shell material.  The stream of air running through the fissure maintained itself, the scent of outside vegetation competing all the more with a now powerful stench of organic decay and acrid closeness.  He paused again, right hand against a rock outcrop, catching what breath was available in the heavy air. 

Then the sound hit him.  A rustle, not unlike the soft scrape of boot upon stone, yet magnified, echoing restlessly.  A slender finger of fear worked its way up from his bowels to his chest.  He caught his panting breath, stifling it behind his left hand while his right tightened its grip on the short orc sword. 

Eradan edged forward a few more paces.  The rock wall he’d leaned on had bent sharply right as if into a larger opening.  Cautiously he extended the stub of the torch out in front of him.  At first he could see little in the last flickerings of the flames.  Then his eyes adjusted and he could see that the fissure had opened into a cavern perhaps a hundred feet across and twenty feet high.  Its floor glistened strangely in the last of his torchlight and seemed to undulate, synchronized with the rustling sound he’d heard moments ago. 

Then the torch gave up its last light, now just a smoky stump in his left hand.  Again his tired eyes had to adjust.  At the far end of the cavern he thought he could detect a vague gray light high up in the far wall.  The floor before him was dim now, just picking up a trace of the gray light as an occasional fleeting glint.  But the rustling sound was picking up in volume, becoming more of a scraping noise, like a chorus of a thousand tiny claws on stones or plates.     

Now he could make it out clearer, the light at the far end of the cavern.  It was daylight, or what was left of it, a fading twilight peeking in from the outside world.  Eradan’s pulse quickened.  He was just a hundred feet away from freedom.  But he knew there was something between him and that opening, something that made that scraping noise…something alive.

Eradan gauged the distance.  A quick dash across the cavern, then a vault up the far wall, clutching at whatever rock outcrop would allow him to haul himself up to the gap, then drag himself through to the outside.  He readied himself for the burst of effort, what might be his last real surge of strength, took a few deep breaths, tightened his grip on the short orc sword…then gasped as his right ankle was pierced on both sides.

Eradan let out a growl of pain and anger, stamping his foot, which had no effect on the pain.  He reached down instinctively with his left hand to whatever might be the source of the pain.  His hand closed around an object the size of a loaf of bread.  He gave it a yank and grunted in pain as it became clear that it was attached to his ankle…and was moving, wriggling frantically, unwilling to give up its purchase on him.  Eradan pinned it to the floor and stabbed repeatedly at it with the sword.  A horrible odor stung him, he could feel the creature, whatever it was, writhing in its death throes.  A moment later it subsided and he was able to pry it off his leg.

It had felt hard to the touch, as if its surface was armored, yet it gave no great resistance to his sword.  Eradan stabbed at the floor with his sword and found its corpse.  He raised it in the air, wanting to know his adversary.  The light was too dim to see clearly.  He held it up against the gray light in the distance, looking for a silhouette, a rat perhaps, or a some squat cave lizard. 

His breath caught in his throat as he turned the object impaled on his sword in the dim light.  Eight short articulated legs attached to a chitinous body sporting two pincers at its head each the size of his ring finger and twice as strong.  Repelled, he heaved the thing off his sword, its body still dripping vile ichors.  His mind raced first with fear, then with a fevered search for what it was. 

Then it came to him, a childhood memory, late one day, as dusk in the royal garden.  He’d discovered a small bird, just barely hatched and fallen from a nest in a high tree.  It was twitching, dying from the fall, but also in agony from the swarm of insects that had emerged from a small hole in the ground and overwhelmed it.  It was a horde of beetles each just a half an inch long, armed with merciless little pincers at their heads, remorselessly attacking the pitiful creature, taking it quickly to its death before dragging it away to be devoured.

Now he knew what stood between him and freedom, some perversion of nature that had been bred in this dark place for what purpose he knew not.  Only now he knew why the floor shifted, what the scraping and rustling was.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them in heaps he knew not how deep.  They were night hunters, coming out as the dusk faded into dark. 

Ahead the light from the gap to the outside was fading fast.  Before him, the masses of giant carnivorous beetles were becoming increasingly restless, prompted by their nocturnal cycle or perhaps the smell of prey in their midst.  Rustling that had become scraping, the sound of their limbs on bare stone and each other, had become highlighted by a sharp clicking sound, of pincers awakening for deadly duty.

There was no time.  If he was to live, he had to run the gauntlet before they fully awakened.  His ill-fitting orc armor would be of some help, but his face below the eye visor, his forearms and most of his legs would be exposed, as would his bare feet, however callused.   There was a path he could barely make out, a slight ridge of limestone rock between shallow basins where heaps of beetles were becoming restive.  It wound unevenly towards the far wall. 

He felt two of the beetles scuttling around his ankles.  In a moment they would be gouging his flesh.  Eradan took a deep breath and charged ahead towards the fading ashen light. 

Ten seconds to go, just focusing on his footing, keeping his balance. 

Eight seconds… the far wall was becoming clearer now, a ten foot climb to an upper shelf where the gap to freedom opened. 

Six seconds…the beetles were becoming fully awake, aroused by the death of one of their brothers and the scent of prey walking amongst them. 

Five seconds…the narrow ridge of stone between the basins was disappearing, becoming immersed in the ebb and flow of monster insects, swarming now. 

Four seconds…Eradan tried to retain his mental imprint of where the ridge had been as his feet crunched down upon a wriggling beetle the size of a house cat.

Three seconds…he felt sharp pains in both calves as two of the insects leapt up and secured a hold with their pincers.  There was no time to dislodge them, any pause and he could be overwhelmed. 

Two seconds…he could see the far wall in detail now.  A surge of energy as he recognized that its rough surface would allow him to find hand and footholds to haul himself out. 

One second to go.  The pain in his legs was sharpening as the pincers tightened their grip.  He felt the impact of other beetles making desperate lunges.  One succeeded, now clambering up his back.

Eradan gritted his teeth against the pain and revulsion of the insectile parts clutching and puncturing him.  He grunted with effort, launching himself up to the rock face just as a swarm of beetles closed upon the spot where he had stood an instant before.   His hands found grips on ragged sharp stone.  He pulled up hard, tucking his legs up beneath him, trying to clear enough distance from the boiling horde below him. 

His feet found purchase and he pushed up with his legs, allowing his hands to grab higher on the rock face.  He could feel the beetle on his back probing for a gap between the ill-fitting helmet and the layer of metal studded leather armor over his shoulders.  The ones on his legs were beginning to gnaw away at his skin, having secured their position with their pincers.

Then his head cleared the top of the ten foot rock wall and he found himself on the shelf and just twenty feet from the opening to the outside.  A rush of adrenaline kicked in at the prospect of freedom so close.  Eradan hauled himself up over the top of the wall and scrambled to his feet. 

But he had company.  Just behind him the rock wall was now covered with hungry, maddened insects, clambering up with the aid of the tiny claws on each of their eight legs.  He staggered towards the opening, just a few yards in front of the wave of remorseless pursuers.  It was a tight squeeze, costing him two valuable seconds to force himself through.  The snapping tide of death behind him took full advantage, narrowing the gap in pursuit to just a few feet.

But his was outside now.  No matter that his legs were bloodied and raw from the predations of the two parasites that had fixed themselves on his human flesh or that some alien horror was tethered to his shoulders in search of a living meal.  He was free now and unafraid to deal death to any adversary regardless of the odds. 

From some unknown reservoir of strength he forced his legs to pick up speed, his breath coming in harsh gasps.  The peril of escape from the cavern was receding enough that he became aware of his surroundings.  It was late dusk.  He was in a forest.  That much was clear after he caromed off a stout tree trunk.  The footing was uneven, the forest floor  spongy with rotted vegetation. 

There was a sound behind him, rustling, snapping.  They had not given up.  Eradan  pressed harder, trying to distance himself from the horde in the hopes that they might give up, find another source of prey.  But the woods would have none of that, throwing more obstacles in his path, great gnarly roots, tangles of thorny vines.      

There would be no flight to safety, that much was dawning upon him.  And so his instincts narrowed to that of the cornered wolf.  If only he could find a high rock to make a last stand and take as many with him as he could.  He pressed on, but his pace was slowing, the weight of his disgusting passengers attached to his body beginning to slow him down.  His breath was coming in ragged rasps.  A root caught his sluggish steps and he went sprawling, striking his head upon a small stone jutting from the damp, rotting vegetation of the forest floor. 

He sensed a blur of movement leaping over him.  Sinking into blackness he thought he saw four pale golden green orbs before him, then the sound of hissing, snarling, and the satisfied gnashing of teeth.  His last thought was that the teeth were feasting on his exhausted flesh, then all was black and pain was no more.