when people started settling on this long mountainous
peninsula and the flat swampy islands of the bay it encloses. In any event, while the
inhabitants of the Reunited Kingdom do not utter the word `N  menor' without a reverential
sigh, a gaze at the sky, and an upraised index finger, the Umbarians sincerely scratch their
heads: "N  menorians? Man, who can remember all those barbarians! Have you any idea
how many of them we've seen here?" Two circumstances have determined Umbar's fate as
a great sea power: an excellent enclosed harbor and the fact that the highest point on the
peninsula is 5,356 feet above sea level; these are the only real mountains on the entire coast
south of Anduin. In these arid latitudes `mountains' spell `forests,' `forests' spell `ships,'
and `ships' spell `sea trade,' which organically blends with privateering and -- let's be honest --
plain piracy. Add to that a fantastically advantageous location in the middle of everything:
it is a true World's crossroads, an ideal transit point for trade, and the terminus of the
caravan routes from the Eastern countries.
     A solid line of defensive works on the Chevelgar isthmus joining the peninsula to the
mainland plus a superior navy to guard against enemy landings made Umbar unassailable,
which makes its being constantly conquered by all and sundry very puzzling. To be more
precise, every time an attack loomed the Umbarians averted action by acknowledging the
sovereignty of whatever continental power it was and paying tribute, quite sanely figuring
that a war, even a victorious one, would cost their trade republic a lot more in all respects.
Their attitude can be likened to that of a businessman who pays `protection money' to a
racketeer, with neither pleasure nor undue upset, building this expense into his prices; he
cares nota whit which criminal cartel his `partners' belong to, but only that they do not stage
gunfights next to his store.
     On the mainland long sieges followed awesome battles; storied kings (ever concerned with
winning new lands rather than wisely governing those they already had) were tempted time
and again to order their finance ministers beheaded for daring to interrupt the grandiose
flights of royal fancy with their pedestrian: "The treasury is empty, sire, and the army hasn't
been paid since last September!" -- in other words, life went on. In the meantime, behind the
Chevelgar fortifications the Umbarians kept beautifying their swampy islands, joining them
with dams and bridges and splitting them with canals. The mega polis that rose from the
azure waters of the lagoon was rightly considered the most beautiful city in all Middle Earth:
its merchants and bankers swam in money, so for four centuries and counting the best
architects and sculptors have labored here dawn to dusk.
     In the last three hundred years or so Umbar got powerful enough to eschew paying tribute to
anyone. An absolute sea power, it turned instead to a tactic of temporary defensive alliances --
now with Mordor against Gondor, then with Gondor against Mordor, then again with
Khand against both of the above. Last year, though, the situation changed drastically:
Mordor sank into oblivion (not without Umbar helping by supplying Aragorn with a landing
fleet at the crucial moment, so as to get rid of a caravan trade competitor for good), Khand
was being torn apart by a religious civil war and had no influence in the seashore regions,
while a new threat arose in the South, one with which there was no negotiation -- the
Haradrim. As a result, the Republic faced a Hobson's choice between southern savages and
northern barbarians. The Senate chose the latter, hoping to hide from the Haradi invasion
behind Aragorn's swords, although it was crystal clear that this time the protection price
would be direct occupation of the tiny country by its `great northern neighbor.' No few
citizens were of the opinion that Umbarian independence and civil liberties were quite
worthy of defending with their lives.
     Most denizens of the city, though, never dwelled on these sad matters, or at least tried hard
not to. Happy cosmopolitan Umbar with its gauche and intimately corrupt authorities led its
usual life of the World's Crossroads. It had active temples of all three major and scores of
minor religions, while a merchant from anywhere could celebrate a deal in a restaurant of
his national cuisine. Here, information was gathered, traded, and stolen by diplomats and
spies from countries no one in the Reunited Kingdom had ever heard of, and who in their
turn cared nothing for the snowy outback beyond the Anduin. Here one could find any
merchandise ever produced by the Arda's soil, water, or mines, or created by the minds and
hands of its inhabitants: from exotic fruits to rarest medicines and drugs, from a magnificent
platinum tiara encrusted with famous Vendotenian emeralds to a Mordorian scimitar that
can split stone and then be wrapped around your waist like a belt, from oversized fossilized
teeth (supposedly dragon's and magical) to manuscripts in dead languages. (Consider the
popular joke: "Does the Ring of Power really exist? No, else it could have been bought in
an Umbar market.") And how did blood mix here, what fantastic beauties surfaced regularly
from this universal melting pot! In any case, on his way from the Fish Market to the Three
Stars Embankment Tangorn had counted at least half a dozen such irresistible lovelies.
He stopped by a familiar dugout bar to drink some of his favorite Golden Muscat. Its
sweetness and tartness balance each other so perfectly that the taste seems to disappear
altogether and the wine turns into materialized aroma, seemingly simple and even somewhat
crude, but in reality weaved from a multitude of shades -- multiple meanings and hints. Let
some of it linger on your tongue, and you will see the topaz berries warm with the afternoon
sun, slightly sprinkled with limestone dust, and the blindingly white path through the
vineyard, and then the enthralling Umbarian six-line verses -- takatos -- will begin creating
themselves right out of the noon haze...
     It's strange, really, he thought while climbing up the stairs back into the street (another
check -- still no tail), it's strange but he used to believe that fully appreciating the taste of
this magic drink would lead him to a full understanding of the soul of the city where it was
born. Umbar -- the wonderful, damned, tender, fickle, mocking, depraved, ever avoiding
real intimacy Umbar... A bitch of unbelievable beauty and charm who gave you a love
potion to drink, precisely so she could then openly flirt with all and sundry in your full view,
leaving you the choice of either killing her or accepting her as she was. He chose the latter,
and now, back after a four-year absence, knew with certainty: baron Tangorn's Gondorian
phase was nothing but a prolonged misunderstanding, for his real home is here...
He stopped by the parapet, leaned on the warm pinkish limestone, swept his gaze over the
majestic view of both of Umbar's bays -- Kharmian and Barangar -- and suddenly realized:
this was the very place where he met baron Grager on his first day in Umbar! The resident
listened to Tangorn's introduction and said coldly: "I don't care for Faramir's
recommendations! Young man, I won't give you any real work for at least six months. By
then you must know the city better than the police, speak both local languages without an
accent, and have acquaintances in all strata of society -- from criminals to senators. That's
just for starters. If you fail, you can go home and do literary translations, you're pretty good
at it." Truly everything comes around...
     Did he manage to become a local? That doesn't seem possible... Be that as it may, he
learned to write takatos well appreciated by connoisseurs, to understand ship's rigging, and
to easily converse with Kharmian smugglers in their gaudy patois. Even now he can guide a
gondola through the maze of Old City canals with his eyes closed; he still remembers a
dozen open-ended courtyards and other such places where one can lose a tail even when
openly tracked by a large team... He had weaved a pretty decent agent network here, and
then he had Alviss -- this city held no secrets from her... Or, perhaps, she had him?
Alviss was the most glamorous of the Umbar courtesans. From her Belfalas mother who
kept a humble port brothel called The Siren's Kiss she had inherited sapphire eyes and hair
the color of light copper that instantly drove any Southerner crazy; from her father -- a
corsair skipper who wound up on a yardarm when the girl was barely a year old -- a man's
mind, an independent character, and a penchant for well-considered gambles. This
combination of qualities enabled her to rise from the port hovels of her birth to her own
mansion on Jasper Street, where the cream of the Republic's elite gathered. Alviss' outfits
regularly caused major indigestion in wives and official mistresses of high officials, and her
body was the model for three large canvasses and the cause of a dozen duels. A night with
her cost either a fortune or nothing but a trifle like a well-dedicated poem.
That was precisely how it happened with Tangorn, who dropped by her salon once (he had
to establish contact with the secretary of the Khand embassy, who was a regular). When the
guests started to leave, the beauty confronted the funny northern barbarian and said with
indignation belied by sparkles of laughter in her eyes:
     "Rumor has it, Baron, that you claimed my hair is dyed!" Tangorn opened his mouth to
deny this monstrous lie, but realized immediately that this was not what was expected of
him. "I assure you that I'm a natural blond. Would you like to confirm that?"
     "What, right now?"
     "Sure, when else?" Taking his arm, she marched from the living room to the inner
chambers, purring: "Let's find out if you're as good in bed as on the dance floor..."
It turned out that he was even better. By morning Alviss had signed an unconditional
surrender pact to which she stuck quite well over the years that followed. As for Tangorn, at
first it seemed nothing more than an exciting adventure to him; the baron realized that this
woman had stealthily taken up more of his heart than he could afford only when she
bestowed her characteristically generous attentions on Senator Loano's young son -- an
empty-headed pretty boy fond of writing sickeningly sweet verses. The duel that followed
made the whole city laugh (the baron inflicted blows with the flat of his sword, using it as a
club, so the youngster got away with only a set of mighty bruises and a concussion), made
Grager furious, and totally confused the Umbarian secret service: a spy has no right to
behave thusly! Tangorn took the drubbing from the chief indifferently and asked only to be
reassigned away from Umbar -- to Khand, say.
     Somehow he had no consistent memories of the year he spent in Khand: only the sun-
bleached adobe walls, windowless like the forever veiled faces of the local women; the
smell of overheated cotton oil, the taste of bland flatbreads (the moment they cool they
resemble mortar in both taste and texture), and the incessant whine of the zurna over it all,
like the maddening buzz of a giant mosquito. The baron tried forgetting Alviss by losing
himself in work -- he found out that the syrupy caresses of the local beauties could not do
that. Strangely, he did not connect Grager's sudden order to return to Umbar to his reports.
However, it turned out that one of the ideas he mentioned in passing (analyzing the real
trade volume between Mordor and the other countries beyond Anduin) had seemed so
fruitful to Grager that the latter decided to pursue it himself right there, in Khand. To
Tangorn's total amazement Grager appointed him chief of station in Umbar: "Sorry, but
there's no one better; besides, you know the Southern saying: to learn to swim, you gotta
swim."
     The very next day a woman wearing an opaque Khand burka found him, gracefully turned
up the veil and said with a shy smile that astounded him: "Hello, Tan... You'll laugh, but
I've waited for you all this time. I'll wait more if I have to."
     "Really? You must've devoted yourself to serving Valya-Vekte," he scoffed, trying
desperately to surface from those damn sapphire depths.
     "Valya-Vekte?"
     "If I'm not mistaken, she's the goddess of virginity in the Aritanian pantheon. The
Aritanian temple is only three blocks from your house, so this service won't be too
burdensome..."
     "That's not what I mean," Alviss shrugged. "Sure, I've slept with a bunch of people this past
year, but that was just work, nothing else." Then she looked straight at him and fired a
broadside: "But you know, Tan, you shouldn't have any illusions that the so-called decent
folks would think your work any less shameful than mine -- I mean your real work here."
He digested this silently for some time, and then found strength to laugh: "Yeah, you got me
to rights, Aly!" With those words he put his hands on her waist, as if about to spin her in a
dance: "And let them all go to hell!"
     She smiled sadly: "I've got nothing to do with it; nor have you... It's just that we're
sentenced to each other, and there's nothing to be done about it."
It was God's honest truth. They parted numerous times, sometimes for a long time, but then
always started from the same place. She greeted him differently on his return: sometimes
one look of hers chilled the room with an inch of hoarfrost; sometimes it seemed that Arda
split to its very hidden core and an blazing protuberance of the Eternal Fire sprang forth;
sometimes she simply stroked his cheek with a sigh: "Come in. You look thin; want to eat
something?" -- a model housewife meeting her husband after a routine business trip. Both of
them understood with absolute clarity that each of them carried a lethal dose of poison in
their veins, and only the other had an antidote, a temporary one at that.

     <h3>Chapter 38</h3>

     Of course, Tangorn's life in Umbar was not limited to travails of love. It should be noted
that the baron's professional responsibilities left a certain imprint on his relationship with
Alviss. Since she let him know that she was aware of the true nature of his business, at first
the baron thought that his girlfriend was somehow connected to the Umbarian secret service.
He learned otherwise in a fairly aggravating manner, when twice he planted on her some
information meant for his `colleagues,' and twice it got nowhere; the second time the mix-up
almost cost him a well-designed operation.
     "Aly, why do you think that your secret service has so little interest in me that they haven't
even asked you to look after me?"
     "Of course they asked me, right after you came back. And left empty-handed."
     "You must have had trouble..."
     "Nothing serious, Tan, forget about it, please!"
     "Maybe you should've agreed, at least for show."
     "No. I don't want to do it, not even for show. You see, to inform on a loved one, one has to
be a highly moral individual with an ingrained sense of civic duty. But I'm just a whore
who knows nothing of those things... Let's not talk about this anymore, all right?"
This discovery gave the baron the idea to use Alviss' boundless connections for his own data
gathering -- not of the secret kind (God forbid!), but public information. He and Grager
were most interested not in the new generation of warships being built at the Republic's
shipyards or the recipe of the `Umbarian fire' (a mysterious flammable liquid used to great
effect during sieges and sea battles), but rather in such mundane matters as caravan trade
volumes and price fluctuations on the food markets of Umbar and Barad-Dur. Another keen
interest of the baron's were the technological advances that more and more defined the
civilization of Mordor, which he had always sincerely admired. Amazingly, it was
Faramir's semi-amateurish team (whose members, it should be mentioned, were not in state
service and received not a dime from the Gondorian treasury during all these years) that had
intuitively arrived at the style that intelligence services have only widely adopted in our
days. It is well known that these days it is not the swashbuckling secret agents toting micro-
cameras and noise-suppressed pistols who obtain the most valuable intelligence information,
but rather analysts diligently combing newspapers, stock market news, and other openly
available sources.
     While Tangorn, on Alviss' advice, perused the activities of Umbarian financiers (the magic
of the White Council was a child's game in comparison), Grager became Algoran, merchant
of the second guild, and founded a company in Khand to export olive oil to Mordor in
exchange for products of high technology. The trading house Algoran & Co. prospered;
with its hand always on the pulse of the local agricultural markets, the firm kept increasing
its export share and even managed to corner the import of dates for a time. The head of the
company avoided visiting his Barad-Dur branch (having no reasons to believe that Mordor's
counterintelligence service was staffed with incompetent fools), but his position did not
require that: the commander's place is not in the front ranks but on a nearby hill.
The result of all this activity was a twelve-page document that historians now call `Grager's
memorandum.' Putting together the rising profit margins of the caravan trade (as it was
followed by the stock and commodity exchanges in Umbar and Barad-Dur), the introduction
of a number of protectionist bills in the Mordorian parliament by the agrarian lobby (a
reaction to the sharp increase of local growing costs), and a good dozen of other factors,
Grager and Tangorn proved conclusively that import-reliant Mordor was incapable of
waging prolonged war. Being totally dependent on caravan trade with its neighbors (a
position totally incompatible with war), it was interested in peace and stability in the region
above all else, and therefore posed no danger to Gondor. On the other hand, the safety of
trade routes was a matter of life and death to Mordor, making it likely to react harshly and
perhaps not too judiciously to any threat to these. The spies concluded: "Should anyone
wish to force Mordor into a war, it would be very easy to accomplish by terrorizing caravans
on the Ithilien Highway."
     Faramir took these conclusions to a special session of the Royal Council in another of his
attempts to prove, facts in hand, that the much-belabored `Mordorian threat' was nothing but
a myth. The Council, as usual, listened respectfully, understood nothing, and ruled on the
matter by addressing the prince with its by now familiar litany of reprimands and
instructions. These boiled down to two points: "gentlemen don't read each other's mail"
and "your spies have gotten lazy and do no real work." Thereafter Grager's memorandum
was sent to the archives, where it gathered dust with the Faramir's intelligence service's
other reports until catching the eye of Gandalf during a visit to Minas Tirith...
When the war began exactly following their script, Tangorn realized with horror that it was
all his doing.
     "...'The World is Text,' eh, man -- just the way you like it. What's your problem?" Grager
smirked woodenly, pouring yet another shot of either tequila or some other moonshine with
an unsteady hand.
     "But we wrote a different Text, you and I, totally different!"
     "Whaddya mean -- different? My dear aesthete, a text exists only in its interaction with a
reader. Everyone writes their own story of Princess Allandale, and whatever Alrufin himself
wanted to say is absolutely irrelevant. Looks like we managed to create a real work of art,
since the readers," the resident waved a finger near his ear, so it was impossible to say
whether he meant the Royal Council or some really Higher Powers, "managed to read it in
this rather unexpected way."
     "We betrayed them... We got played like little kids, but that's no excuse -- we betrayed
them..." Tangorn repeated, staring fixedly into the murky opalescent depths of his glass.
     "Yep -- it's no excuse... Another one?"
     He could not figure out which day of their binge it was -- not considering themselves in any
service, they did not keep track. They started the day the head of the trading house Algoran
& Co. heard of the war and raced to Umbar, running down several horses, and learned the
details from him. Strangely, they more or less held up when apart, but now, looking each
other in the eye, they recognized clearly and at once -- this was the end of all they held dear,
and they have destroyed it with their own hands. Two well-meaning idiots... Then there
was the nightmarish nauseating hung-over dawn when he awoke because Grager poured a
pitcher of ice-cold water over him. Grager looked his usual self, quick and sure-footed, so
his bloodshot eyes and several days' growth of beard seemed a part of some not too
successful disguise.
     "Up!" he informed drily. "We're in business again. We've been summoned to Minas Tirith
to brief the Royal Council on the possibilities of a separate peace with Mordor. Immediately
and with utmost secrecy, of course... Hot damn, maybe we can still fix something! His
Majesty Denethor is a practical ruler; looks like he, too, needs this war like a fish needs an
umbrella."
     They have worked on their document for three days with almost no sleep or food, running
on coffee alone, putting all their souls and all their expertise into it -- they had no right to a
second mistake. It was a true masterpiece: a meld of unassailable logic and inerrant
intuition based on an intimate knowledge of the East, expressed in a brilliant literary
language capable of touching every heart; it was the road to peace with an exhaustive
description of the dangers and traps lining that road. On his way to the port Tangorn found a
minute to drop in on Alviss: "I'm going to Gondor -- only for a short while, so don't feel
lonely!"
     She paled and said almost inaudibly: "You're going to war, Tan. We're separating for a
long time, most likely forever... could you not say a proper good-bye, at least?"
     "What're you talking about, Aly?" he was sincerely puzzled. He hesitated for a couple of
seconds then decided to breach security: "To be honest, I'm going there to stop this stupid
war. In any case I hate it and I'm not about to play those games, by the halls of Valinor!"
     "You're going to war," she repeated despondently, "I know that for sure. I'll be praying for
you... Please go now, don't look at me when I'm like this."
When their ship had passed the gloomy stormy shores of South Gondor and entered the
Anduin, Grager muttered through clenched teeth: "Picture this: we show up in Minas Tirith
and they stare at us: `Who are you guys? What Royal Council -- are you crazy? It must be
some joke, nobody called for you."
     But it was no joke. Indeed, they were impatiently expected right at the Pelargir pier: "Baron
Grager? Baron Tangorn? You're under arrest."
     Only their own could have taken the two best spies of the West so easily.

     <h3>Chapter 39</h3>

     "Now tell us, Baron, exactly how you sold the Motherland over there, in Umbar."
     "Maybe I'd sell it, on sober reflection, but who the hell would buy such a motherland?"
     "Let the record reflect: suspect Tangorn admits planning to switch to the enemy's side and
didn't do it only because of circumstances beyond his control."
     "Yeah, that's it: maybe he was planning something, but didn't manage to do anything. Put it
down like that."
     "Just the documents you brought are enough to have you drawn and quartered -- all those
`overtures of peace'!"
     "They were written at the direct order of the Royal Council."
     "We've heard this fairy tale already. Can you show us this order?"
     "Dammit, I must have calluses on my tongue already from telling you: it came under the G-
mandate, and such documents are to be destroyed after reading!"
     "Gentlemen, I do believe it's beneath us to plumb the customs of thieves and spies..."
This `investigation' has been dragging on for two weeks already. Not that the spies' guilt or
their impending sentence were in any doubt on either side; it was just that Gondor had the
rule of law. This meant that an out-of-favor nobleman could not be simply sent to the
gallows with only a flick of the royal wrist; proper formalities had to be observed. Most
importantly, Tangorn never had a feeling that what was happening was unfair. That
traitorous feeling had sometimes undone many brave and straight-thinking individuals,
causing them to write useless and demeaning pleas to the authorities. The spies were about
to be executed not in error or on a false report, but precisely for what they did do -- for trying
to stop a useless war their country did not need; everything was honest and above board and
no one was to blame. So when Tangorn was roused from his cot one night ("Out, with your
possessions!"), he did not know what to think.
     In the prison office he and Grager saw the Chief Warden of the Pelargir prison and Prince
Faramir, dressed in the field fatigues of a regiment unknown to them. The Warden was
glum and perplexed; clearly, he was being forced to make some very unpleasant decision.
     "Can you read?" the prince was inquiring coldly.
     "But your order..."
     "Not mine -- the Royal order!"
     "Yes, sir, the Royal order! Well, it says here that you're forming a special volunteer
regiment for especially dangerous operations behind enemy lines and are empowered to
recruit criminals, like it says here, `even right off the gallows.' But it doesn't say here that
this includes people charged with treason and collaboration with the enemy!"
     "Nor does it say the opposite. What's not forbidden is permitted."
     "Yes, sir, strictly speaking that's true." Tangorn deduced from the fact that a mere warden
was addressing the heir to the throne of Gondor simply as `sir,' rather than `Your Highness,'
that the prince's fortunes were in real bad shape. "But that's an obvious oversight! After
all, I have a responsibility... in time of war... Motherland's safety..." The official perked
up a bit, having found something to fall back on at last. "In other words, I can't permit this
without a written approval."
     "Certainly we must not blindly follow the letter of our instructions in those trying times --
we must confirm it with our patriotic sense... You're a patriot, as I can see, right?"
     "Yes, sir... I mean Your Highness! I'm glad you understand my motivation..."
     "Now listen closely, you prison rat," the prince continued in the same tone of voice. "Pay
attention to my mandate, paragraph four. Not only can I accept serfs, criminals, and such as
volunteers; I can draft, in the name of the King, the officials of all military-related
institutions, of which yours is one. So: I will leave here either with those two, or with you,
and -- by the arrows of Orom  ! -- there, beyond Osgiliath, you'll have plenty of opportunities
to prove your patriotism! Which is it going to be?"
     They embraced only when the prison walls were far behind. Tangorn remembered that
moment forever: he stood in the middle of the dark street, leaning on the prince's shoulder in
sudden weakness; his eyes were closed and face turned up, and cold night fog, imbued with
city smoke, was settling on it... Life and freedom -- what else does a man really need?
Faramir led them to the harbor through muddy dark streets of Pelargir without delay.
     "Dammit, guys, why did you violate my order to stay put in Umbar? And what's the story
with your recall here?"
     "We haven't received that order. As for the recall, we expected you'd explain it to us as a
member of the Royal Council."
     "I'm not on it any more. The Royal Council doesn't need defeatists."
     "So that's how it is... And this regiment of yours -- did you invent it just to get us out?"
     "Well... let's say -- not just for that."
     "That's really sticking your neck out."
     "Whatever. I'm in a wonderful position right now -- they can neither exile me any further
than the front lines nor give me less than a battalion -- so I'm milking it for all it's worth."
At the harbor they located a small ship. Two unusual-looking soldiers bundled in
camouflage cloaks were snoozing right on the pier nearby. They greeted Faramir in a
decidedly not-by-the-book manner, looked the two spies over appraisingly and started
getting the ship under way -- quite competently, as far as Tangorn could tell. "Leaving
before dawn, Prince?" "You know, that there's no caveat about traitors in that order is
indeed an oversight; you want to stay to see how long it will take them to figure it out?"
Faramir was prophetic -- the very next morning a courier brought `Amendment No. 1 to the
Royal Decree 3014-227: No extension of amnesty for the criminals wishing to defend the
Motherland to those guilty of crimes against the state' to Pelargir. By that time the prince's
ship was halfway to the port of Harlond, where the Ithilien regiment was forming. They
would not have been safe there, either, but when the policemen with an arrest warrant
showed up in the Ithilienians' camp, it turned out that the wanted men had just left -- what a
pity, less than an hour ago! -- for the other shore of Anduin as part of a scouting party. Yes,
the raid will be long -- a month, maybe more; no, the party is working independently with no
communications; if you wish, you can go beyond Osgiliath yourselves and look for them
among the Orcs. What? Well, then I can't help you, my apologies. Sergeant! See our
guests off, they have urgent business in Minas Tirith!
     Truly it is said that war excuses everything -- in a short time the `traitor spies' were simply
forgotten for other, bigger things. Tangorn spent the entire war in Ithilien, fighting without
much enthusiasm but bravely and skillfully, protecting his soldiers with all he had -- just like
he used to protect his agents. This was actually the norm in their regiment, where the
relationship between soldiers and officers was markedly non-traditional. Serfs working for
their freedom, bandits working for their amnesty, foresters who had spent their lives
guarding royal deer and poachers who had spent their lives hunting these same deer,
adventurous aristocrats who used to hang out with Boromir and intellectual aristocrats from
their pre-war circles -- all blended in an amazing alloy that carried an indelible impression of
their demiurge, Captain Faramir. Not surprisingly, Aragorn ordered the regiment disbanded
right after the Pelennor victory.
     Tangorn got to Mordor on his own, as a private person -- a murderer drawn to the scene of
his crime. The Cormallen battle over, all he saw was the victors' feast on the ruins of
Barad-Dur. Watch, he ordered himself, watch the fruits of your work, and don't dare turn
away! Then he accidentally ended up at Teshgol right during the `mop-up,' and snapped...
Ever since then he lived with a firm conviction that the Higher Powers have granted him a
second life, but only so that he could expiate the evil he inadvertently did in his pre-Teshgol
life, rather than for free. Intuition told him back then to join Haladdin, but how was he to
know that he made the right choice?..
     Suddenly he realized with an absolute, other-worldly clarity: this second life had been
granted to him as a loan, not permanently, and will be taken back the moment he succeeds in
his mission. Yes, precisely like that: if he guesses wrong (or pretends to), he will live to a
ripe old age; if he guesses right, he will obtain redemption at the price of his life. He has a
right only to this unhappy choice, but this right is the only difference between himself and
Aragorn's dead men.
     This last thought -- about Aragorn's corpses -- brought Tangorn from his memories back to
the twilit Three Stars Embankment. All right, consider the dead men. Most likely no one
will ever find out where they came from (the Elves are real good at keeping secrets), but the
Umbarian ships that delivered that nightmarish cargo to the walls of Minas Tirith are
another matter: they all had owners, crews, registrations, and insurance policies. No doubt
the Elvish agents have worked to bury this information, too (already a legend is circulating
that this had been a pirate fleet about to sack Pelargir), but these events are recent and some
tracks might not have been obliterated yet. These tracks will lead him to people who
chartered the ships, and those will lead him to so far unknown Elandar. It makes no sense to
start the Game he and Haladdin proposed to play with L  rien at any lower level.
The funniest thing is that no one other than Mordorian agents will assist him in his search --
the same people he and Grager were accused of conspiring with four years ago. Would he
have ever thought that one day he will indeed be working with these guys? He could
probably investigate this himself, but his network has been put to sleep and it would take at
least two weeks to re-activate it. That's time he doesn't have, whereas Mordorians ought to
have a lot of material about this event, otherwise their chief of station should be summarily
dismissed. The question is whether they will want to share the information or contact him at
all -- he's nothing but a Gondorian to them, an enemy... In any event, tomorrow it will all
be clear. The contact method Sharya-Rana gave them was as follows: come to the Seahorse
Tavern in the harbor on an odd Tuesday (that's tomorrow), order a bottle of tequila and a
saucer of sliced lemon, pay with a gold coin, talk about anything at all with one of the
sailors at the bar, spend ten minutes or so at the table in the back left corner -- and then walk
to the Great Castamir Square, where the meeting and the exchange of passwords will occur
behind the rightmost rostral column... So: shall he stroll the embankments a little longer and
then head unhurriedly back to the hotel?
     Someone called him: "You're waiting for a lady, noble sir -- buy her a flower!" Tangorn
looked around leisurely, and his breath seized for a moment. It was not that the flower girl
was beauty personified; rather, her little basket was full of purple-golden meotis orchids,
exceedingly rare this time of year. Meotis was Alviss' favorite flower.

     <h3>Chapter 40</h3>

     All these days he had been putting off seeing her under various pretexts -- "never revisit the
places where you have been happy." Since she had so unerringly prophesized that he was
going to war, a lot of time passed and a lot of blood was spilled. Neither one of them was
what they had been, so why walk the ruins and engage in necromancy? As he had found
out, Alviss was now a respectable dame: her brilliant intuition had helped her make a sizable
fortune on the stock market. She did not seem to be married, but was either engaged or
betrothed to one of the pillars of the local business establishment -- what the hell would she
need with a restless and dangerous ghost from her past? Now all these wonderful deep
defense fortifications lay in ruins.
     "How much for your flowers, pretty one? I mean the whole basket?"
The girl -- she looked about thirteen -- stared at Tangorn in amazement. "You must not be
from around here, noble sir! These are real meotis, they're expensive."
     "Yes, I know." He dug in his pocket and realized that he was out of silver. "Will a dungan
be enough?"
     Suddenly, her brilliant eyes lost all sparkle; bewilderment and fear flashed through them,
replaced by tired disgust. "A gold coin for a basket of flowers is way too much, noble sir,"
she said quietly. "I understand... you will take me to your place?"
The baron was never overly sentimental, but now his heart lurched with pity and anger.
     "Stop it this second! Honestly, I only want the orchids. You haven't earned money this way
before, right?"
     She nodded and sniffed childishly. "A dungan is a lot of money for us, noble sir. Mama and
sister and I can live for half a year on that."
     "So take it and live on it," he grumbled, putting a golden disk bearing Sauron's profile in her
hand. "And pray for my fortune, I'll need it real soon..."
     "So you're a knight of Fortune, not a noble sir?" Now she was a wonderful blend of
curiosity, childish excitement and fairly adult coquettishness. "I'd never guess!"
     "Yeah, something like that," the baron grinned, picked up the meotis basket, and headed
towards Jasper Street, followed by her silvery voice: "You will be fortunate, sir knight,
believe me! I will pray with all my might, and I have a lucky touch, you'll see!"
Alviss' old housemaid Tina opened the door and reeled back as if she had seen a ghost.
Aha, he thought, so my appearance is a real surprise and not everyone here will like it. With
this thought he headed towards the living room and the sounds of music floating from there,
leaving the old woman's sad dirges behind -- Tina must have realized that this visit from the
past was not going to end well... The company in the living room was small and very
refined; the music, superbly performed, was Akvino's Third Sonata. At first, no one paid
attention to the baron when he noiselessly appeared in the doorway, and he had a few
moments to watch Alviss in her form-fitting dark blue dress from behind. Then she looked
around, their eyes met, and Tangorn had two simultaneous thoughts, one stupider than the
other: "Some women benefit from everything, even age" and "I wonder if she'll drop her
goblet?"
     She moved towards him very, very slowly, as if against resistance, obviously external one; it
seemed to him that music was the culprit -- it had turned the room into a mountain stream
rushing over boulders, and Alviss had to walk upstream, against the current. Then the
rhythm changed, Alviss was trying to reach him, but the music resisted: it had turned from a
foot-dragging mountain stream into an impenetrable blackberry thicket; Alviss had to tear
through those prickly vines, it was difficult and painful, very painful, although she tried not
to show it... Then it was all over: the music gave up, falling to Alviss' feet in a spent heap,
and she ran the tips of her fingers over his face, as if not yet believing:
     "My God, Tan... my darling... you're back..."
     They must have stood in that embrace for an eternity, and then she took him by the hand and
said quietly: "Come..."
     Everything was like it always had been -- and not. She was a totally different woman, and
he was discovering her anew, like the first time. There were no volcanic passions, no
exquisite caresses to suspend one on a thread at the edge of an abyss of sweet oblivion.
There was an enormous all-engulfing tenderness, and they both dissolved in it quietly,
having no other rhythm than the flutter of Arda pushing blindly through the prickly
starscape... "We're sentenced to each other," she had once said; if so, then today the
sentence had been carried out.
     "...Will you stay here long?"
     "I don't know, Aly. Honestly, I don't know. I wish it were forever, but it might be for just a
few days. Looks like this time it's the Higher Powers that will decide, not I."
     "I understand. So you're in business again. Will you need help?"
     "Unlikely. Maybe a few small things."
     "Darling, you know I'll do anything for you -- even make love in the missionary position!"
     "Well, I'm sure that such a sacrifice won't be required," Tangorn laughed in the same vein,
     "Perhaps a trifle -- risk your life a couple of times."
     "Yes, that'd be easier. So what do you need?"
     "I was joking, Aly. You see, these games are really dangerous now, not like the good old
times. Frankly, even my coming here was totally crazy, even though I checked real well...
I'll just have some coffee and plod back to my hotel now."
There was a moment of silence, and then she said in a strangely hoarse voice: "Tan, I'm
afraid... I'm a broad, I can foresee... Don't go, I pray you!"
She's really out of sorts, never saw her like this... Oh, really -- never? He remembered, from
four years ago: "You're going to war, Tan." This just keeps getting worse, he thought with
displeasure. Meanwhile she clung to him fiercely and just kept repeating desperately: "Stay
with me, please! I've never asked anything of you, not once in all these years... Just this
once, for me!"
     He gave in just to calm her down (what does it really matter from where I come to the
Seahorse Tavern tomorrow?), so Mongoose's team had waited for him in vain at the Lucky
Anchor that night.
     Very well -- he'll come tomorrow if not tonight. Rather than chase him all over the city,
better to wait for him near his lair, there's no hurry. Besides, it'd be imprudent to divide the
capture team: the baron is, after all, the third sword of Gondor, something to reckon with...
Mongoose knew how to wait better than anyone.

     ***

     The Umbarian Secret Service, well-hidden in the dusty ink-smelling burrows of the Foreign
Ministry under the deliberately ambiguous plaque DSD -- Department of Special
Documentation -- is a stealthy organization. Even the location of its headquarters is a state
secret: the Green House on Swamp Alley that `well-informed' high officials and senators
mention sometimes in appropriately hushed voices is actually only an archive holding
documents declassified after the one hundred twenty years prescribed by law. Only three
people know the name of the Department's Director: the Chancellor, the Minister of
Defense, and the Prosecutor General (the Office's employees may kill only on the
Prosecutor's sanction, although sometimes they obtain it after the fact), and only he himself
knows the names of his four Vice-Directors.
     Unlike the secret services that are set up on the police model (these tend to never lose their
penchant for pompous headquarters buildings on major streets and for scaring their own
citizens with tall tales of their omnipotence and omnipresence), DSD had arisen more like a
security service of a major trading corporation, and is above all concerned with always
staying in the shadows. The Department's organizational structure follows that of the
zamorro (the Umbarian crime syndicates): a system of isolated cells connected only through
their leaders, who in turn form the second- and third-level cells. The Office's employees
live under specially developed false identities both at home and abroad; they never carry
weapons (unless required by their assumed identity) and never reveal their employment
under any circumstances. The oath of silence and umberto (Grager had once described this
principle to Tangorn as "one dungan to enter, a hundred to leave") bond its members in a
kind of a knightly order. Hard as it may be to believe, knowing Umbarian mores, during its
three hundred years of existence there have been only a handful of betrayals in the
Department (which changes its official name with the regularity of a snake shedding its
skin).
     The Department's mandate is `to provide the top officials of the Republic with precise,
timely, and objective information about the situation in the country and beyond.' Obviously
only an independent and uninterested source can be objective, and therefore by law the DSD
only collects information but does not participate in related political or military decision-
making and bears no responsibility for the results of those decisions; it is nothing but a
measuring device that is categorically barred from interfering with the reality it measures.
This separation of duties is truly wise. Otherwise, intelligence services either placate the
powerful by telling them what they want to hear or get out of control, which leads to such
niceties as gathering compromising information on its own citizens, provocations, or
irresponsible sabotage abroad; all of the above is justified by carefully selected information).
Therefore, from a legal standpoint, everything that went on that summer evening in a certain
undistinguished mansion where the meeting between DSD Director Almandin, his Vice-
Director in charge of domestic operations and agent networks Jacuzzi, and Admiral
Carnero's chief of staff Flag Captain Makarioni took place (which required all parties to
overcome the eternal mutual dislike between the `spooks' and the `grunts' common to all
worlds), had a very definite name: traitorous conspiracy. Not that any of them lusted for
power, not at all -- it was just that the spies clearly foresaw the consequences of their small
prosperous country's absorption by greedy despotic Gondor, and could not follow their
cowardly `top officials.'
     "How's your chief's health, Flag Captain?"
     "Quite satisfactory. The stiletto only bruised the lung, and as for the rumors that the
Admiral is at death's door, that's our work. His Excellency has no doubts that in two weeks
he'll be on his feet and nothing will keep him from personally leading Operation Sirocco."
     "As for us, we have bad news, Flag Captain. Our people report from Pelargir that Aragorn
had radically speeded up the preparations of the invasion fleet. They estimate that it will be
fully ready in about five weeks..."
     "Thunder and devils! That's the same time as ours!"
     "Precisely. I don't have to tell you that during the last few days before deployment an army
or a fleet is totally helpless, like a shedding lobster. They're getting ready in Pelargir, we --
in Barangar, practically head-to-head; the advantage will be a day or two, and the one who
gains those few days will be the one to catch the other unprepared in his home port. The
difference is that they're preparing for war openly, whereas we're hiding our work from our
own government and have to waste two-thirds of our resources on secrecy and
disinformation... Flag Captain, can you speed up the preparations in Barangar in any way?"
     "Only at the cost of some secrecy... but we'll have to risk it now, there's no other way. So
the most important thing now is to throw 12 Shore Street off the scent, but that's your job, as
I see it."
     After the sailor made his goodbyes, the DSD chief looked questioningly at his comrade.
The spies made a funny pair -- the portly, seemingly half-asleep Almandin and the lean
Jacuzzi, swift as a barracuda. Over the years of working together they have learned to
understand each other with not even a few words, but a few looks.
     "Well?"
     "I've gotten our materials on the Gondorian chief of station..."
     "Captain of the Secret Guard Marandil; cover -- second embassy secretary."
     "The same. An exceptional dirtbag, even compared to the rest of them... I wonder if
they've shipped their worst dregs over here, to Umbar?"
     "I don't think so. These guys work the same way in Minas Tirith right now, except they
dump the bodies into outhouses rather than the canals... Whatever. Stay focused."
     "All right. Marandil. A real bouquet of virtues, let me tell you..."
     "Have you decided to recruit him based on a flower from that bouquet?"
     "Not exactly. Can't get him on anything from his past, since Aragorn had pardoned all their
sins. On the other hand, the present... first, he's appallingly unprofessional; second, he has
no spine and can't handle pressure at all. Should he make a really big screw-up on which
we can pressure him, he's ours. Our task is to help him screw up."
     "All right, develop this angle. In the meantime, toss them some bone to deflect attention
from Barangar Bay. Give them, say... oh, everything we have on Mordorian agents here."
     "What the hell would they want with it now?"
     "Nothing, really, but as you've correctly pointed out, they're appallingly unprofessional.
Shark reflex: swallow first, then consider whether it was a good idea. Surely they will now
eviscerate the Mordorian network, which nobody needs any more, and forget everything
else. This will also count as a goodwill gesture from our side; it will give us some breathing
room while you set a trap for Marandil."
     The thick DSD dossier on the Mordorian network in Umbar was delivered to 12 Shore Street
that same evening, causing a condition approaching euphoria. Among other tips it contained
the following: `Seahorse Tavern, 11 AM on odd Tuesdays; order a bottle of tequila with
sliced lemon and sit at a table in the back left corner.'

     <h3>Chapter 41</h3>
     Umbar, Seahorse Tavern
     June 3, 3019

     It was a few minutes to eleven when Tangorn pushed open the door (crudely fashioned out
of ship planking) and went down the slippery steps to the common hall that forever stank of
smoke, stale sweat, and vomit. Few people were there this early, but of those present some
were already well inebriated. A couple of waiters were unenthusiastically beating up a
weeping bum in a corner: must have tried to leave without paying or else stole some trinket.
Nobody paid any attention to the altercation -- it was obvious that such performances were
part of the service here. This Seahorse Tavern was some dive.
Nobody stared at the baron -- his choice of disguise for the day (a gaudy player's outfit) was
perfect. Four dice-playing `skuas1' (minor port thugs) with enormous golden rings on their
tattooed hands openly tried to estimate Tangorn's relative position in the underworld, but
having apparently reached no agreement, went back to their game. Tangorn leaned casually
on the bar and scanned the hall, leisurely pushing an oar-sized sandalwood toothpick around
his mouth. Not that he expected to figure out whoever was on watch here (he had enough
respect for his Mordorian colleagues), but why not try? Two sailors were drinking rum at
the bar, Anfalasians by the sound of them, one older, the other still a teenager. "Where'd
you come from, guys?" the baron inquired good-naturedly. The older man, as was to be
expected, looked through the landlubber and did not deign to answer, but the younger one
could not resist the temptation to respond with the classic: "Horses come; we sail." These
two looked authentic.

     [1] A kleptoparasitic species of seabird -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skua

     Having thus satisfied the `talk with a sailor' requirement, Tangorn imperiously tossed a
Vendotenian gold nyanma on the bar: "Tequila, barman -- but only the best!"
The barman, whose droopy moustache made him resemble a seal, sniggered: "We've only
one kind, man -- the best, same as the worst. Want some?"
     "Hell, whatcha gonna do?.. All right, slice me some lemon for a chaser, then."
Right after he settled down at a table in the rear left corner with his tequila he caught a
movement with a corner of his eye and knew immediately, even before identifying the foe,
that he was busted. They certainly were here before he was, which meant they hadn't tailed
him here; therefore, the contact itself is compromised -- they were waiting for a Mordorian
courier and now their wait paid off. What a stupid way to blow the mission! The four
`skuas' split up, two taking up positions by the front door and the other two heading his way,
smoothly navigating around tables, both with right hands inside their jackets. Had the baron
had the Slumber-maker with him, he could have dealt with those characters easily and
without even damaging them too much, but a sword would have been unharmonious with
his chosen disguise, so now, unarmed, he was their lawful prey. So much for "real pros
don't carry weapons!" For a moment he toyed with a really crazy idea: smash the bottle
against the table and... what the hell are you thinking? he restrained himself, a `rosette' is no
sword, it's no good against four; no, you can only count on your head now... your head and
your Fortune. But first, got to foul up their routine and buy some time. Which was why he
did not even rise to meet them; rather, he waited until an ominous "Hands on the table and
stay seated" sounded right above his ear, and then turned slightly towards the speaker and
spat through his teeth: "Idiots! To ruin such an operation..." Then he sighed and tiredly
told the one on the right: "Shut your trap, cretin, before a nazg  l flies into it!"
     "You're coming with us, and no fooling," that one informed him, but there was discernible
doubt in his voice: they had not expected the captured `Orc' to speak with a chiseled Minas
Tirith accent.
     "With you, of course, where else? To administer an acid enema to the imbeciles that stick
their noses everywhere without informing the HQ... But, with your permission," the baron
continued with mocking politeness, "I'll still have my drink -- to my captain's badge, now
nothing but a dream... Don't stand over me like the White Towers! Where am I gonna go?
Pat me down for weapons, if you want, I'm not carrying any."
The `skua' on the right looked ready to salute. The one on the left, however, either was not
impressed, or was, but knew the manual better. He sat down across from the baron and
motioned his comrade to take position behind their quarry.
     "Keep your hands on the table, otherwise... you know." With those words he poured
Tangorn a shot of tequila, explaining: "I'll serve you myself, just in case."
     "Wonderful!" smirked the baron (actually, there's nothing wonderful about the situation:
one foe is right in front, tracking his face and eyes, the other is behind, ready to smash his
head -- can't make it any worse.) "Will you lick my finger, too?"
When the man's eyes flared with anger, Tangorn laughed conciliatorily, as if just now
realizing his mistake: "Sorry, buddy, no offense meant. I just twigged that you must not
have been in this town very long and don't know how to drink tequila. You all probably
think it's moonshine, bad hooch, right? No, nothing of the sort. I mean, sure, if you drink it
by the glass without a chaser, then yeah, it stinks; but really it's great stuff, you just have to
know how to drink it. The thing here is," Tangorn relaxed against the back of his chair and
dreamily half-closed his eyes, "to alternate its taste with salt and sourness. Watch this: you
put a pinch of salt on your thumbnail -- have to lick it for the salt to stay there," with those
words he reached towards the small salt-and-pepper bowl in the middle of the table; the
`skua' tensed and put his hand inside his jacket again, but did not yell "Hands down!" --
apparently actually listening and learning. "Now you touch the salt with just the tip of your
tongue, and whoa!" Damn, damn, damn -- what rotgut they serve here! "Now the lemon,
the lemon! Ni-i-i-ce!.. Now, here's another great method -- pour me another one, since
you're my waiter today! This one is with pepper rather than salt." Again he reached for the
bowl, but stopped in mid-movement and turned to the other `skua' in annoyance: "Listen,
buddy, move back a bit, willya? I hate it when people breathe garlic in my ear!"
     "My position is according to the manual," the man answered, annoyed. Little fool, thought
the baron, the manual says first and foremost that you must not talk to me. His `g's are soft,
he must be from Lebennin... well, that's totally unimportant; what is important is that he's
not directly behind me but rather a step to the left, and is six feet tall less a couple of
inches... Is this it? Yes; the head did what it had to, now it's Fortune's turn.
A second later Tangorn, still carelessly slouched on his chair, reached the bowl of powdered
red pepper with the fingers of his left hand and tossed it behind his back in a swift casual
movement, straight into the Lebenninian's face, simultaneously slamming the toe of his boot
into the leg bone of his vis- ?-vis.
     It is a well-known fact that a startled person always inhales, so the peppered man was now
out of commission for the foreseeable future; the one in front gurgled: "Aw shit!" and
collapsed under the table in a twist of pain, but not for long: the baron failed to break his leg.
The other two were already charging at him from the door, one wielding an Umbarian
dagger, the other a flail, knocking chairs over, while Tangorn was still fishing inside the
jacket of the Lebenninian convulsing on the floor, thinking detachedly to himself: if he only
has some toy like brass knuckles or a spring knife -- game over... But no -- praise Tulkas! --
it was a large Umbarian dagger like the ones the mountain men of the Peninsula carry on
their belts: a half-yard pointed blade good for both stabbing and slashing blows; not that
much, but still a weapon of a warrior rather than a thief.
He engaged the pair and quickly saw that he would not get away cheaply: these guys were
no cowards and knew their short weapons almost as well as he did. When his left arm went
numb from a glancing blow with the flail, while the third opponent came up from behind,
limping but still in fighting shape, the baron knew that this was serious, and began fighting
in earnest.
     ...The glum gondolier, paid with a silver castamir, tied up at a decrepit cargo pier and
returned a few minutes later with new clothes for his passenger -- rags when compared to a
player's cockatoo garb, but with no blood on them. Tangorn changed on the run to save
time, putting away the captured dagger and the silver badge he took off the neck of one of
the `skuas' -- Karanir, Sergeant of the Secret Guard of His Majesty Elessar Elfstone, had no
further need of it. The third sword of Gondor had escaped, leaving a dead body and two
wounded behind; actually, the wounded were most likely already dealt with, since the
patrons of the Seahorse Tavern liked secret policemen no better than those of any port dive
in any of the worlds.
     He himself got away with two minor wounds -- scratches, really; the numb arm was a bigger
problem, but it was the least of the baron's current worries. After all, he had a few remedies
from Haladdin's medkit with him. So what's the situation? Four `skuas' have disappeared
without a trace: they won't be missed for two or three hours, but this timing advantage is all
he has. Pretty soon the entire Gondorian spy force will start hunting him, along with -- and
this was much worse -- the local police. Corrupted as they are, they know their business
second to none; in less than two hours their informants will let them know that the
performance at the Seahorse Tavern was given by none other than their old friend Baron
Tangorn, whereupon they'll immediately stake out the port and start combing the city closer
to evening. In spy slang his position is known as `leper with a bell': he has no right to either
call on his old agents for help (his pre-war information on that network may very well be at
the Gondorian station), or to appeal to the Umbarian Secret Service (they will only cover
him if he admits to being Faramir's man, which is flatly impossible). The saddest thing is
that he had lost all possibility of contact with the Mordorian network here -- the only people
who could have helped him reach Elandar. To make a long story short, he failed his task
and is now marked for death; that none of it is his personal fault is totally irrelevant --
Haladdin's mission will now never be completed.
     So now he has no agents, no contacts, no safe houses; what does he have? He has money --
lots of money, over four hundred dungans in six caches -- plus the well-hidden mithril coat
that Haladdin gave him to sell in case he could not locate Sharya-Rana's gold. He has a
couple of reserve hideouts from the old times, which will be dug up in a couple of days at
most; he has some old connections in the underworld, which could be stale. That seems to
be it... He doesn't even have the Slumber-maker -- the sword is still at Alviss' house, and
returning to either Jasper Street or the Happy Anchor is absolutely out of the question.
By the time the gondolier let him off near the harbor warehouses, it was clear to him that the
only sane tactic in such overwhelmingly appalling circumstances was to bluff without
restraint -- to mount an attack rather than crawl into a hidey-hole.

     <h3>Chapter 42</h3>
     Umbar, 12 Seashore Street
     June 4, 3019

     Mongoose walked unhurriedly down the embassy's corridors. The worse and more
dangerous a situation is, the more deliberate, unhurried, and polite must the commander be
(at least in public); to judge by the serene smile firmly plastered to Mongoose's face, the
situation was the worst it could possibly be.
     He found the chief of station, Captain Marandil, in his office.
     "Hail, Captain! I'm Lieutenant Mongoose, here's my badge. I am carrying out a top-secret
assignment here in Umbar. Regretfully, I'm having some problems..."
Marandil did not even stop gazing at his nails; it was obvious that some invisible shred of
skin on his left pinkie was of much more interest to him than some visitor's problems. Just
then the door banged open, and a burly guy almost seven feet tall pushed the lieutenant aside
most unceremoniously:
     "Time to start, boss! The girl's first class!"
     "You guys must've gotten yours dipped already," the captain grumbled good-naturedly.
     "No way, sir! The boss gets first dibs, we regular folks follow... but the lady's already
undressed and waiting impatiently."
     "Let's go, then, before she gets a chill!"
The big man guffawed; the captain started getting out from behind the table, but caught
Mongoose's look. Something in that look suddenly made him feel that he had to explain:
     "She's from last night's catch, a Mordorian agent! The bitch'll wind up in the canal
anyway..."
     Mongoose was already dispassionately studying the kitschy ornaments on the ceiling (rather
tasteless stuff, really); he was genuinely concerned that the overwhelming fury he felt was
about to spill out through his eyes. Sure, spying is a cruel business; sure, a third-degree
interrogation is, well, an interrogation in the third degree; sure, the `girl' should have
understood the risks before she got into these games, that's all fair and by the book... What
was not by the book was how these two colleagues of his behaved -- like they were not in
His Majesty's service, but rather... Actually, to hell with them all -- so far, at least,
straightening out the resident spies was not within Task Force F ?anor's ambit. The
lieutenant addressed Marandil again in such a gently persuasive tone that any competent
person would have immediately guessed how serious he was:
     "My apologies, Captain, but my business brooks no delay, believe me. I'm sure that your
subordinates can handle this job adequately without you."
The big guy positively bent over with laughter, and then drawled, encouraged by his boss's
sneer: "Forget it, Lieutenant! You know how they say: three out of four problems solve
themselves, and the fourth is unsolvable. Better come with us to the basement -- the cutie'll
service you first, you being a guest and all. She'll lick you or you can lick her..."
Marandil surreptitiously enjoyed this put-down of the visitor from the capital. Of course,
he'll have to assist, but first let the man understand that here, in Umbar, he's nobody, and his
name is nothing ...
     "How are you standing in front of a superior officer?" Mongoose inquired in a flat voice,
looking Marandil's henchman up and down, lingering on the tips of his boots a bit.
     "What's wrong with how I'm standing? I'm not falling over, right?"
     "That's an idea," the lieutenant said thoughtfully and moved forward in a light dancelike
move. He was a foot shorter and half as wide as his opponent, so the big man struck
carefully to avoid accidentally killing him with his melon of a fist. He struck and froze in
amazement: Mongoose did not even dodge the blow or move back -- he simply disappeared
into thin air. The man stood gaping until someone tapped his shoulder from behind -- and he
actually turned around, the fool...
     Mongoose stepped over the prostrated body -- fastidiously, as if it was a pile of manure --
stopped in front of Marandil, who involuntarily retreated behind the table, panic clearly
visible in his eyes, and said drily:
     "Your subordinates can barely keep their feet. Are you starving them or something?"
     "Hey, you're cool, Lieutenant!" the other managed to say. "Don't be offended; I just wanted
to see you in action..."
     "I figured as much. Have you seen enough?"
     "Are you maybe one of those, what's their name -- nin'yokve?"
     "That's a different technique, albeit based on the same principle. Back to business.
Regarding fun in the basement -- I'm afraid you'll have to wait, perhaps even skip it. Tell
your people to start without you. Oh, and let them remove this impudent youth."
Mongoose turned down both wine and coffee and got straight to business.
     "Yesterday your people tried apprehending Baron Tangorn at the Seahorse Tavern. What
does this mean? Have you forgotten that Ithilien is a vassal of the Crown of Gondor?"
     "We had no idea it was Tangorn! He gave Mordorian recognition signals, so my boys
thought he was their courier."
     "Aha!" Mongoose closed his eyes for a second. "This changes things. So he is undoubtedly
tied to Mordor. Well, he's useless to them now, too."
     "Don't worry, we'll get him before nightfall. It's not just us looking, we've activated the
Umbar police. They've already found one of his lairs, he'd left it literally half an hour
before they showed up..."
     "That's why I'm here. You must immediately stop looking for Tangorn. Tell the police that
this was an accident, a miscommunication between two friendly secret services... especially
since this does resemble reality."
     "I don't understand how you..."
     "You don't have to understand anything, Captain. Are you familiar with the letter G?"
Marandil took one look at the square of silk in the lieutenant's hand and visibly blanched.
     "The baron is my responsibility, and he must not concern you. Call your people off, but
most importantly -- I repeat -- stop the police immediately! Should Tangorn fall into their
hands rather than mine, it'll be a catastrophe that will cost us both our heads."
     "But, Lieutenant, sir... He killed four of my people!"
     Mongoose shrugged. "He did the right thing. Fools that get into conversations with their
targets ought to be killed on the spot. Now: you stop looking for Tangorn and simply wait.
It's not unlikely that he'll show up soon one way or another..."
     "Show up? Is he nuts?"
     "Oh no, not at all. However, he's apparently in a bind, and as far as I understand him, he's
inclined to bet the farm in such situations. Should you learn anything about him, let me
know right away: have a Dol Amroth pennant hoisted under the Gondorian flag on the
embassy roof, and soon someone will pay you a visit. Thereafter you'll forget ever hearing
the name Tangorn. Understood?"
     "Yes, sir! Listen, Lieutenant, we've learned that he used to have a broad here..."
     "Seven Jasper Street?"
     "Ye-e-es..." Marandil drawled in disappointment. "So you know already?"
     "Certainly. It looks like he'd spent the night before last there. So?"
     "So shouldn't we shake something out of her?"
     Mongoose grimaced tiredly. "What do you expect to shake out of her? What positions
they've used and how many orgasms she's had? What else can she tell? Tangorn is not
enough of an idiot to talk business with his lover."
     "Still, maybe..."
     "Captain, I repeat: forget everything that has anything to do with Tangorn -- these are my
problems now. Should you meet him in the street, just cross to the other side and then have
the Dol Amroth pennant hoisted, all right? By the way, concerning your problems: I
understand that you're now harvesting the old Mordorian network. Forgive my question,
but -- what for?"
     "What do you mean -- what for?"
     "Is it any kind of an obstacle to you? In any event, why have you started grabbing the
agents, instead of putting a watch on them to figure out their connections?"
     "We were in a hurry, just in case the DSD is double-dealing..."
     "DSD?! Was it they who gave you the Mordorian network?"
     "Well, yes. A goodwill gesture..."
     "Captain! That's a fairy tale for retarded children! Try thinking this over one more time --
why would they make you such a princely gift? What do they want in exchange? Well,
whatever, those are your problems, like I said; do what you think best. Goodbye!"
Mongoose headed for the door, but turned around half-way:
     "Oh, and one more thing, Captain. In anticipation of your professional enthusiasm..." He
hesitated, as if choosing the right words, then put scruples aside: "Anyway: if any of your
men comes any closer than three arrow-flights to Jasper Street, I'll feed you a salad of your
own balls. Understand?"
     Their eyes met for only a moment, but it was enough for Marandil to comprehend clearly:
this one will follow through.
     ... Mongoose's foresight came true the very next day. A certain Inspector Vaddari, one of
Umbar police operatives, desired an urgent meeting with Marandil downtown. The
inspector was not one of those policemen who worked for the Gondorian embassy directly,
but was quite aware of all these games: he was an old and experienced detective who knew
the seamy underside of life like no one else. He should have made commissar long ago both
by seniority and by merit, but had not -- and therefore took bribes with no qualms. It should
be mentioned that corruption was a hallowed tradition of the Umbar police (both colleagues
and honest citizens treated a policeman or a customs officer who would not be bribed with
cautious suspicion: "Better not turn your back on this guy"), but unlike some of his
coworkers, Vaddari always delivered the services purchased and never blamed
circumstances beyond his control.
     "Mister Secretary, your people were looking for a certain Tangorn when suddenly the search
was called off yesterday. Are you still interested in this man?"
Marandil leaned forward cautiously: "Well... I suppose I am."
     "I'm prepared to tell you exactly where he's going to be tonight, if we agree on the price."
     "May I ask where the information comes from?"
     "You may. He sent me a letter with a meeting proposal."
     "And why did you decide to sell out a potential client?"
     "I haven't even considered that. It's just that he hasn't listed secrecy as one of the
conditions of the meeting, so I'm strictly following the letter of the agreement. If this
Tangorn doesn't foresee such a possibility, then I don't want to deal with such a fool."
     "Hmm... So how much do you want?"
     "Three dungans."
     "What?! Are you freaking nuts, man? Like, totally disconnected from reality?"
     "My part is to offer..."
     "You should know that I really don't give a crap about this whole business!"
     "Who're you kidding, buddy? I'm an operative, not a mark! First you turn the city upside
down for a day and a half looking for this dude, and then -- so sorry, there's been a mix-up!
An idiot would know that there's some other outfit looking for him now, and the police's
been shunted aside. So I'll have to figure out myself who these other folks are, while time's
a-wasting!"
     "All right -- two!"
     "I said three and I meant three; I ain't a peanut seller. Quit haggling already, it's not like
you're paying with your own money!"
     "All right, whatever. Two now and the third when we take him on your info."
     "'Whatever' is right -- I tell you when and where, the rest is your problem. All three right
now."
     "What if you're cheating me?"
     "Listen, we're adults in business, no? I'm not some wino offering you a pirate treasure map
for a bottle, am I?"
     Having pocketed the coins, Vaddari laid out the set-up:
     "Know Castamir Square?"
     "The one with a lake in the middle and three canals opening into it?"
     "The same. The lake is round, a hundred fifty yards across; the canals open into it a hundred
twenty degrees apart -- counting from the rostral columns, at twelve, four, and eight o'clock.
The embankment isn't unbroken -- there are stairways down to the waterline, two between
each pair of canals, that makes six. Seven in the evening I must be at the stairs to the right
of the eight o'clock canal, dressed in a scarlet cape and a hat with black plumage. A water
taxi will arrive by one of the canals; the gondolier will let me board after seeing those signs
and will then follow my directions. I'm supposed to cruise from stair to stair, not one after
the other, but rather crossing the lake: seven o'clock, eleven, three, and so on. Get it?"
     "Yes, quite."
     "There's almost no traffic on the lake at that time of day; if any other gondolas show up, I'm
supposed to park and wait until they leave. Tangorn will come down one of the stairs once
he's sure that there's no danger, and board my gondola. He will be in disguise and I will
know him when he takes out a purple handkerchief and waves it twice. That's it. Good
luck, Secretary, and good evening."
     Vaddari got up and headed out of the coffeehouse where they have met, thinking in passing
that he'd bet his life on Tangorn making fools of these guys.
The captain returned to the embassy and filled out a field agent expense report first thing: 4
(four) dungans. He was tempted to put in five, but restrained himself: greed kills, while a
birdie pecks a little here and there and is satisfied. So, should he raise the Dol Amroth
pennant, and hand Tangorn to that cutthroat from the capital on a silver platter? Like hell,
he suddenly decided. Such opportunities come up but once in a lifetime; I'll capture him
myself, and the winner is always right. He remembered Mongoose's eyes and shivered:
maybe he should play it safe? Then he calmed himself: no, this is a sure thing. I have the
time and place of the meeting, I have thirty-two operatives and five hours to prepare -- the
sun-like demiurge Aritan supposedly managed to create the entire Arda in five hours,
complete with fish in the water, birds in the air, beasts on the ground, dragons in the fire,
and man with all his disgusting habits...

     <h3>Chapter 43</h3>
     Umbar, Great Castamir Square
     June 5, 3019

     "How many have you counted, Jacuzzi?"
     "Thirty-two."
     "I can only see twelve..."
     "I'd rather not point them out."
     "Heavens, no! You, after all, are the operative, while I'm just an analyst, so you rule here."
Almandin relaxed against the back of a wicker chair, enjoying his wine. They were sitting
under a striped awning of one of the many small open cafes on Castamir Square, almost
directly under a rostral column liberally studded with the prows of captured Gondorian
ships, lazily observing the milling of the idle evening crowd. "If there's indeed thirty-two of
them, then Marandil has brought out his entire staff, save the embassy guards. Do you see
our performer, by any chance?"
     Jacuzzi looked over the bustling embankment of the grubby round lake one more time.
Gentlemen and naval officers, street vendors and gaudy street women, itinerant musicians
and fortune-tellers, mendicants and knights of Fortune... He immediately recognized all the
Gondorian spies among the throng (although most of them, to their credit, were pretty well
disguised), but to his great disappointment he could not identify the baron. Unless, of
course... no, that's crazy.
     "It looks like he had recognized these guys, too, gave up and tiptoed away."
     "That's what a professional would do," nodded Almandin, "but the baron will do something
else entirely... want to bet?"
     "Wait a moment!" the Vice-Director of Operations glanced at his chief in surprise. "Do you
consider Tangorn to be a dilettante, then?"
     "Not a dilettante, my dear Jacuzzi, but an amateur. Do you understand the difference?"
     "To be honest -- no, not quite."
     "A professional is not the person who's mastered all the techniques of his craft -- the baron
has no problems in this regard -- but the one who always delivers on his orders, regardless of
the circumstances. It so happens that the baron had never worked for hire; he is bound by
neither oath nor umberto and is used to the unbelievable luxury of doing only things he
himself approves of. If an order contradicts his notions of honor or runs against his
conscience, he will simply ignore it, and to hell with the consequences -- both for himself
and his goals. You can see that such a man belongs in a Vendotenian monastery, rather than
in any intelligence service."
     "I think I know what you mean," Jacuzzi nodded thoughtfully. "The baron lives in a world
of moral scruples and stereotypes that are unthinkable to you and me... By the way, I was
refreshing my memory of his dossier the other day and came across an interesting tidbit of
friendly banter over a few drinks. Someone asked him whether he could hit a woman if he
had to. He had spent some time seriously thinking about it, and then admitted that perhaps
he'd be able to kill a woman, but never to hit one, under any circumstances. His dossier is
anyway a rather curious read -- it's more of a literary review than a dossier; about half of it is
poems and translations. I even thought that no one outside of our Department has a more
complete collection of Tangorn's takatos..."
     "Too bad that they won't be published until a hundred twenty years from now under the
declassification law... Aha! A gondola! So, would you like to bet that he's going to pull
some crazy stunt and fool all of these guys?"
     "I think that it would be more appropriate for us to pray for his Fortune, or rather Marandil's
blunder..."
     A small three-seater gondola touched shore at one of the stairways descending to the water
to take on a gentleman in a scarlet cape and a hat with black plumage, and started to cross
the lake leisurely. Suddenly a sleepy expression appeared on Jacuzzi's face; he unhurriedly
took out a gold-plated sandalwood pencil, wrote a few words on a napkin, turned it over and
handed the pencil to Almandin, saying: "All right, it's a bet." The other man also wrote
something on another napkin, and both returned to silently watching the developments.
The gondola described a not-quite-complete triangle and came back to the stair next to the
one where it started. That spot was perennially occupied by a band of lepers, wrapped in
head-to-toe striped robes, who solicited alms there. The so-called cold leprosy is both fatal
and incurable, but unlike the `hot leprosy' it is not particularly contagious (the only way to
catch it is by squashing one of the many small boils covering the leper's face and hands, or
by doing something like sharing his cup), so its sufferers were never expelled from human
settlements. The Hakimians of Khand even considered them especially desired by God.
Every day those mournful figures in their striped robes silently appealed to the citizens'
mercy, as if inviting them to compare the lepers' plight to whatever they considered
troublesome in their own lives. They were motionless to the point of appearing to be some
architectural element like the gondola tie-up posts, so when one of these cloth-draped statues
suddenly got up and headed towards the stair, limping slightly, it was clear that something
was afoot.
     The leper stepped on the top stair and took a purple handkerchief out of his sleeve.
Immediately a bunch of idle men surrounding a street performer who was juggling three
daggers about twenty yards away split up -- two headed left and right, cutting off the robed
man's escape routes, while the other two and the juggler himself, snatching the flying blades
out of the air, went straight for the prey. It became clear that the man had miscalculated -- he
started his descent while the gondola was too far away, about fifteen yards from the shore.
He might still have made it to the safety of the boat if not for the cowardice of the man in the
scarlet cape: when he saw the three armed pursuers, he panicked, and the gondolier, obeying
his frantic gestures, began pulling away, abandoning his partner. The man in the robe ran
down to the last step and halted -- there was no escape or help coming. A couple of seconds
later the `idlers' caught up with him; two pinned his arms behind his back while the
`juggler' hit him in the liver, followed up with a chop to the neck on the rebound. It was
over, the prey bagged.
     However, when they dragged the `leper' up to the embankment, an enraged crowd gathered
instantly: the locals were unused to sick people being treated that way. Two Hakimians in
yellow pilgrims' caps who happened to be nearby intervened for `the man of God,' and the
scandal began swiftly developing into a scuffle. Marandil's men were fiercely pushing their
way towards the scene through the thickening throng, and a police whistle was already
trilling unnervingly somewhere close. Meanwhile, the man in the scarlet cape came ashore
three stairways from the fray, let the gondola go and left unhurriedly; it was clear that the
false leper's fate was not of much concern to him.
     "What do you think of the performance, dear Jacuzzi?"
     "Excellent. Truly, the theater had lost a great director in Tangorn."
The Vice-Director of Operations' facial expression did not seem to change, but Almandin
had known his subordinate for years and could tell that the terrible tension that had gripped
him for the last ten minutes was gone, and a hint of a triumphant smile was beginning to
form in the corners of his mouth. Well, this was his victory, too...
Jacuzzi called on a passing waiter: "A bottle of N  rnen, my friend!"
     "Aren't you afraid of spooking our luck?"
     "Not at all. It's all over, and Marandil is as good as ours."
Waiting for the wine, they watched the proceedings with interest. The fight ended abruptly,
although the noise increased, and an empty space cleared in the middle; the robed man was
lying there, trying in vain to get up. Meanwhile, the `idlers' and the `juggler' had suddenly
lost all interest in their victim: not only did they let him go, but they were trying to melt into
the crowd; one of them was looking at his palms with abject horror on his face.
     "See, chief, they've finally figured out that the leper is a real one. This is definitely not a
case of `better late than never...' While apprehending him they must've squashed a dozen
boils on his hands and got smeared in pus, so all three are dead men now. Can't blame their
emotional reaction; to learn that you've got less than three months to live (if you can call it
life) must be quite, quite disconcerting."
     "The leper must have profited by all this, I suppose?"
     "That's for sure! I think that each blow must've netted him at least a silver castamir:
Tangorn is not one of those idiots who try to save on small details. What do they call it in
the North: creaming crap, yes?"
     When the golden N  rnen bubbled in their goblets like a mountain brook, Jacuzzi asked
impudently (today he had the right): "Who's paying?" Almandin nodded, turned over the
napkins, compared their notes, and acknowledged honestly: "My treat." His napkin bore a
single word: gondolier, while the Vice-Director of Operations' inscription was: T. is
gondolier; diversion onshore.

     <h3>Chapter 44</h3>

     When the last vestiges of the scandal died down and the leper regained his customary place,
Almandin asked with curiosity:
     "Listen, suppose you were planning this instead of that idiot Marandil. I'm not asking
whether you'd capture the baron (that'd be an insult), but I'd like to know how many people
you'd need as against his thirty-two?"
     Jacuzzi spent half a minute considering something while scanning the embankment, and
then concluded:
     "Three. Not any kind of super-swordsmen or hand-to-hand experts, either; the only
necessary skill is facility with silk throw nets. Note that all three canals join the lake under
low bridges, less than ten feet clearance. I'd put a man on each bridge; that the target was
the gondolier was pretty obvious, but in any event we'd have prearranged signals. When
he's passing under the bridge, the operative would drop the net, then jump down straight
into the gondola and prick him with a mantzenilla-smeared needle... You're absolutely
right, chief -- this whole adventure was a fool-trapping scheme. The leper diversion was
very good, but that doesn't change the fact that no professional would have risked his neck
like that. He is, indeed, an amateur -- a brilliant and lucky one, but he'll be lucky once or
twice and the third time he'll break his neck..."
     "Look at that," Almandin interrupted, pointing with his eyes across the square, "our
incomparable Vaddari already has poor Marandil by all the private parts in his rough hand!
This one will get his every time... By the way, are you going to recruit the captain yourself
or send somebody?"
     ...The caf ? looked exactly the same as the one where the DSD bigwigs sat -- the same
wicker chairs, the same striped awning -- but the mood at the table was much less
celebratory. The Gondorian chief of station sat in stunned silence, staring at the badge on
the table in front of him (Karanir, Sergeant of the Secret Guard of His Majesty Elessar
Elfstone), nodding dumbly to the phrases Vaddari was doling out:
     "Today the baron was simply checking whether you mistook him for someone else back at
the Seahorse Tavern, or were actually hunting him. Now it's clear, so he's sending you this
badge and the following message, quote: `I never bothered you, but if you want war, you'll
get one. Since seven dead bodies isn't enough for you, I'll hunt your people throughout
Umbar, and you'll find out what a lone master can do to a bunch of fat bums.' But these are
your affairs, I don't care about them. We have our own business."
     "What business?" It looked like Marandil did not care any more. Even his musclemen,
watching from a table in another corner, could see that the boss was in bad shape.
     "Very simple. If Tangorn failed to meet me, that's one thing. Whereas if he did but you
guys messed up and didn't twig who the gondolier was -- that's quite another. Dunno about
your head, but you'll lose your officer's cords for sure. I'm gonna have to write my report
about the meeting now, since Tangorn's letter arrived at our station by regular mail and was
duly logged... Stop that crap! Signal your gorillas to sit down -- I'm not alone here, either!
You think offing me will save you? Good... yes, like that... sit down quietly. What's with
this northern habit of grabbing by force what you can buy? It doesn't matter any for my
report who the gondolier was... Well? Say something!"
     "I don't understand."
     "Man, this screw-up must've struck you dumb. It's a simple deal -- five dungans, and there
was no gondolier. I mean, of course there was one, but he wasn't Tangorn. Whaddya think --
is your captain's badge worth five dungans?"
     ...By the time Vaddari got back to his inhospitable bachelor pad, he had had enough time to
consider Tangorn's offer. Of course, it was not to dispatch three Gondorian operatives and
officially declare war on Marandil that the baron risked everything today. His real
objective, strange as it may seem, was simply to meet Vaddari to offer him a certain delicate
assignment. The job was to be fairly simple (although on a tight schedule -- only a week)
but extremely dangerous -- a single misstep would land the inspector straight in the basement
of 12 Shore Street, a place that would forever stink with blood, burnt flesh, and vomit. The
baron was willing to pay a hundred fifty dungans for success, an inspector's salary for
twelve years of impeccable service. Vaddari weighed the risk and decided that it was worth
it; he was no coward and always finished the job he started.

     ***

     "Dear Jacuzzi, your expression suggests that congratulations are in order."
     "It was even easier than I expected -- he broke immediately. `If we let Minas Tirith know
about the escaped gondolier, it will demonstrate that you had Tangorn twice and twice let
him escape. No counter-intelligence professional will believe in such a coincidence. The
way it will look to them is that you're working together with the baron and even had seven
subordinates killed in cold blood covering for him. They'll send you to the basement, wring
a confession of working for Emyn Arnen out of you, and liquidate you.' This logic seemed
flawless to him and he signed the agency agreement. Please tell Makarioni to speed up the
work in Barangar -- the Gondorian spy station is now deaf and blind... Do you know what
he wanted as his fee? It turns out that there's another team working in Umbar now, directed
straight from Minas Tirith."
     "Ah so."
     "Fortunately, those guys aren't interested in Barangar. Rather, they're hunting Tangorn for
some reason and have barred the locals from doing so. Their commander is one Lieutenant
Mongoose, who carries a G-mandate and is a professional of the highest caliber, according
to Marandil."
     "Very interesting."
     "Marandil had violated his direct order to forget about Tangorn and may be arrested once
the lieutenant finds out. The captain wants us to get rid of this Mongoose and his men, just
in case. I find this request to be reasonable: we have to protect this scoundrel like the apple
of our eye now, at least until Operation Sirocco. In other words, chief, you'll have to ask for
the Prosecutor's sanction. Our dearest Almaran is big on law and order and always makes a
major stink over liquidations, but he'll have to go along with us here."
     "Aren't you afraid that he'll ask you the following question: how long will a man who
authorized the killing of a Gondorian intelligence officer live, and what kind of death might
befall him?"
     "Almaran is a fussy shyster, but not a coward. Do you remember the Arreno affair, when he
disregarded both the threats and the pleas of two senators and sent three zamorro bosses to
the gallows? In Mongoose's case everything is clear: he's here illegally on false papers and
is setting up a kidnapping and a murder. We shouldn't have any problem."
     "No problem on that end, true. The real problem is finding these guys."
     "Oh, we'll find them!" the Vice-Director of Operations responded with some levity. "We're
still masters of this city. We'll find Tangorn in a day or two and use him as bait to pick up
those hunting him."
     "We'll see."
That last comment proved prophetic. DSD operatives scoured Umbar from stem to stern,
but did not find either Tangorn or Mongoose; both lieutenants seemed to have vanished into
thin air. By the fourth day of the search it became clear that neither wanted man was still in
town; most likely the baron's body was at the bottom of a canal while Mongoose must have
already disembarked in Pelargir to report mission accomplished. Well, good riddance, then --
Marandil is out of danger, so why poke into all those Gondor-Ithilien messes?
Most interestingly, the Umbar Secret Service's conclusion that Tangorn was no longer in the
city was absolutely correct. By that time the baron was long aboard a felucca named Flying
Fish which he had chartered to lay adrift about ten miles off Cape Jurinjoy south of Umbar,
away from the main sea lanes. The three smugglers crewing the felucca (one Uncle
Sarrakesh and two of his `nephews') found this behavior strange but kept their opinions to
themselves, rightly believing that a man who paid half-a-hundred dungans for a three-week
charter was entitled not to be bothered with questions or advice. Even if they had managed
to get themselves involved in some grandiose affair like the last year's raid on the Republic
Treasury's gold cargo ship, their pay was worth that risk; in any event, the passenger did not
look like a criminal, even though he came recommended by Lame Vittano himself (the man
who was jokingly called `the Prince of Kharmian' behind his back). The previous night of
the twelfth the crew finally had a chance to demonstrate their skill to their employer -- the
Flying Fish slipped into the maze of small islands on the western side of the Kharmian Bay
right under the noses of the swift coast guard galleys. After a customary exchange of signals
in an inconspicuous cove they took on the baron's mail and then retreated back beyond
Jurinjoy.
     One letter was from Vaddari. The inspector reported success: he had found out the
addresses of two Gondorian safe houses and assembled complete information on their
owners and warning signals. The other inquiry came up empty (as Tangorn had expected):
all persons having anything to do with Aragorn's ships have either died from sudden
illnesses or accidents, or have completely lost all memory of the affair, while all the relevant
documents in the harbor office, going back years, turned out to have been doctored (without
any visible signs of an alteration); it appeared that a whole bunch of Umbarian ships have
never existed. There was more: the two senators Vaddari had felt out on the subject insisted
that while they themselves could not remember the details of the Senate session which held
the vote to support Gondor in the War of the Ring, such details could surely be found in the
Senate minutes of February 29th; the honorable legislators treated all attempts to remind
them that this year was not a leap one as a bad joke. The whole business reeked of some
ominous witchery, so Tangorn wholeheartedly approved of Vaddari's decision to avoid
drawing any further attention to his interest in the ship affair, lest another fatal accident
befall him.
     This made the second letter even more valuable. It contained information gathered by
Alviss and relayed through Vaddari and further through Vittano's men. She had talked to
her numerous friends in the arts and business circles on a topic innocuous enough not to
alarm any of the spooks likely to keep tabs on her these days, whether from DSD or 12
Shore Street. As usual, the most important information was lying openly in plain sight, and
it painted a most interesting picture.
     About three years ago, as the war was heating up in the North, a fad for all things Elvish
swept the Umbarian youth. The simpler ones made do with Elvish music and symbols,
whereas the more sophisticated were offered a comprehensive ideology. In Alviss' telling,
at least, this ideology was a screwball concoction of the teachings of Khandian dervishes
("own nothing, fear nothing, want nothing") and Mordorian anarchists (reorganization of
society on the basis of absolute personal freedom and social equality), seasoned with bucolic
claptrap about "all-encompassing unity with Nature." One could only wonder why the
young Umbarian intellectuals went for such primitive drivel, but they did, big time.
Moreover, it soon transpired that not sharing those views was unseemly and even dangerous:
all persons who had the ill grace of expressing anything other than admiration and support
for them were ostracized and persecuted -- "children are always cruel."
A year later it was all over as suddenly as it began. All that remained of the movement (and
it was, beyond doubt, an organized movement) was the Elfinar school of painting -- a rather
interesting version of primitivism -- and a dozen crazy gurus ecstatically preaching the
impending conversion of the entire Middle Earth into Enchanted Forests; however, their
main activities were denouncing each other and screwing their stoned underage followers.
The serious young people have dropped all these games and returned to the bosom of their
families, from which they have been totally estranged over the course of the previous year.
Their explanations did not vary much -- from "devils made me do it" to "whoever is not a
revolutionary when young has no heart; whoever is not a conservative when old has no
brain" -- but what family cares for elaborate explanations when they have their dear child
back at the dinner table? All of the above could have been written off as nonsense that
deserved no special attention (youth fads are legion) if not for a peculiar circumstance -- all
of the `returnees,' including the offspring of the most prominent families of the Republic,
have suddenly acquired an unusual penchant for government service, which was something
previously unheard of among the elite youth. A transformation of a semi-bohemian dreamer
or society playboy into a model public official looks weird in general; when such cases
number in the dozens and hundreds, they make a disturbing pattern. Add to that the fact that
all these youngsters have made brilliant careers in the past two years (while exhibiting an
amazing degree of unity and mutual assistance -- better than any zamorro), advancing quite
far up the administrative ladder, and the picture turns really scary. There was no doubt that
in seven or eight years precisely those boys will be in charge of all key government
positions -- from the Foreign Ministry to the Admiralty and from the Treasury to the Secret
Service -- and then they will have acquired all the levers of real power in the Republic
without firing a shot. The most fantastic part was that no one in Umbar seemed to care
about it, other than some old minor bureaucrats mumbling sentimentally: "We really
shouldn't castigate our young men! Look at them working for the good of the Motherland!"
...Tangorn put down Alviss' list of about three dozen `returnees' and was now watching a
seagull trailing the Flying Fish, deep in thought. The bird seemed to hang motionlessly in
the windy blue expanse, resembling a checkmark in a margin -- the checkmark that he
should now make next to the name of his next contact. The problem was not the difficulty
of this particular choice; the sad part was that he felt a genuine affinity to these boys, based
on what little he knew about them. Money-shunning idealists whose honesty could compare
only to their naivet ?... Unfortunately, he had no chance to explain to them that the real
L  rien (rather than the one created by their youthful imaginations) had not a trace of either
freedom or classless equality, as far as he could tell, or that the `rotten selfish pseudo-
democracy' that had reared them had certain advantages over theocratic dictatorship.
So: he is looking for the most likeable and maybe even kindred-spirited people in Umbar.
He is looking for them in order to kill them.
     What was that Haladdin used to say? "Do the ends justify the means? Stated generally, the
problem lacks a solution."

     <h3>Chapter 45</h3>
     Umbar, Lamp Street
     Night of June 14, 3019

     The Umbarians all say that whoever has not seen the Big Carnival has not seen anything
worthwhile in his life. Arrogant as it sounds, there are solid grounds for saying so. It is not
the beauty of the fireworks and costumed processions, although they are magnificent. The
most important part is that on the second Sunday of June all societal barriers crumble into
dust: streetwalkers turn into highborn damsels and the damsels turn into streetwalkers, while
a couple of comedians performing a skit making fun of famously slow-witted inhabitants of
the Peninsula may turn out to be a senator and a member of the paupers' guild. It is a day
when time runs backward and everyone can reclaim their wonderfully reckless youth, like
the warm gentle lips of some girl in a black mask you just stole from her previous partner; it
is a day when profiting is sinful and stealing is just d ?class ?. On that day everyone is
allowed to do anything except breach another's incognito...
In that sense the actions of two noble sirs who had fallen behind a bead-strung firecracker-
popping procession making its way down Lamp Street at the Mint Alley intersection should
be termed improper, although said actions were apparently well-intentioned. Those two
persons -- one in a multicolored bodysuit of a circus gymnast, another decked out in jester's
bells -- were bending over a third one, in a blue-and-gold stargazer's cloak, who was
prostrated on the ground. Not too skillfully trying to revive him ("Hey, man, wake up!"),
they have removed his silvery mask; it was plain that the would-be rescuers themselves were
barely on their feet.
     A chirping flock of three girls in assorted dominos emerged from the alley straight onto the
scene. "Partners, partners!" they chorused, clapping, "and just the right number! The
gymnast is mine! Come along, pretty boy!"
     "Easy, sisters, easy!" the gymnast responded. "See, our third friend is kinda out of it..."
     "Oh, poor kid! Drink too much?"
     "Dunno. Just been dancing his feet off in the procession and then suddenly whoa! and he's
down. Not as if he's been drinking much..."
     "Maybe I can bring him back to life with a kiss?" the blue domino purred coquettishly.
The jester grinned: "Go ahead, baby -- maybe he'll throw up, it'd help for sure!"
     "Yuck! Jerk..." the girl was offended.
     "There, my beauties, don't get all upset, all right?" the gymnast said amiably, hugging the
purple domino a bit below the waist with a steady arm (rewarded with an immediate sultry
     "Ah, the cheek!"). "You're all total hits, we love you all to death and all that. Got any
wine?.. Too bad. Here's what we'll do: you take the Mint to the seashore, buy enough
N  rnen for all of us," with those words he handed the girl a small pouch full of small silver
coins, "and, most importantly, stake out some seats close to the musicians. We'll catch up
with you in a few minutes, as soon as we drag this character to that lawn over there, let him
sleep it off on the grass... Imagine being saddled with this on Carnival!.."
When the girls disappeared in the alley, their heels clicking loudly on the flagstones, the
jester let out his breath and shook his head, as if disbeliev