Chapter 408: Into the Volcano
Uruk-hai were Saruman's creation, bred from Orc and human blood. They had shed the common Orc's weakness to sunlight and stood larger, stronger, and more dangerous than their kin. They knew it, too, and made no secret of their contempt for ordinary Orcs, whom they considered inferior and expendable.
The Orcs, for their part, were not inclined to accept that judgment. They had been made by Morgoth himself, the first and greatest of the Dark Lords, and they had served Sauron far longer and in far greater numbers. The Uruk-hai's presumption of superiority rankled constantly.
Conflict between the two was nothing new. But with Aragorn and the others quietly working among them, casting Confundus charms and slipping Confusion Draughts into the food, the old friction ignited into something far worse. The Uruk-hai commander and the Orc chieftain both died in the chaos, finished off by Aragorn's group using the brawl as cover, and their deaths pulled every restraint away. The encirclement around Mount Doom collapsed into a full-scale battle as Orc and Uruk-hai turned on each other with unrestrained savagery, roaring and hacking and tearing with no thought for anything else.
The uproar drew almost every eye in Mordor. Including the Eye of Sauron atop Barad-dûr.
Frodo and Sam were crouched behind a cluster of broken rocks, Invisibility Cloak drawn close, watching the slaughter unfold not far from where they hid. The cordon that had sealed the mountain was quietly dissolving.
"Now." Frodo didn't hesitate. He took Sam's hand, and they moved, keeping low beneath the cloak, threading carefully around the fighting masses, and began to climb.
Past the broken line, they pressed upward, choosing the narrow, hidden paths where no patrol had reason to walk. Perhaps it was the Felix Felicis. Perhaps it was luck of a simpler kind. Either way, they moved without encounter, step after careful step, and the mountain's deadly watchers passed them by.
Then, without warning, they nearly walked into a werewolf.
It was enormous, far larger than a warg, its eyes burning with cold malevolent light, dark power writhing around its body like smoke. It stopped. Its nose lifted. It turned its head slowly, scenting the air.
Frodo and Sam went completely still, their faces draining of colour, not daring to breathe.
The werewolf's eyes narrowed with suspicion. It sniffed again.
Then the wind shifted.
A gust came rolling off a nearby lava channel, thick with the sharp stink of sulphur. The werewolf flinched at the smell, shook its head, lost the thread of whatever it had been tracking, and loped away into the dark.
Frodo and Sam let out a long, silent breath together. Their legs felt weak beneath them. For a moment, neither of them could move.
They climbed on, slower now and more careful than before, not speaking a word, hands clasped, hidden beneath the cloak. They slipped past great spiders and warg patrols, froze each time a giant bat or crebain swept overhead, pressed flat against the rock whenever a fell beast passed above. Once, the Eye of Sauron swept across their section of the mountain and they threw themselves into a crack in the rock face, pressing into the narrow darkness until the burning gaze moved on.
Every step was its own crisis. Every breath felt borrowed.
Then the crack they were hiding in revealed itself to be something more.
It was a tunnel. An old lava channel, long since emptied, its flow stopped by some shift in the mountain's internal structure. The entrance was barely wide enough for two small Hobbits to crawl through on their bellies, but once inside the space opened, and within a short distance they could stand upright and walk side by side.
They had no idea where it led. But inside the mountain was safer than the slopes outside, where every shadow might hide something waiting to kill them. That was enough.
Frodo drew the Phial of Galadriel. The light of Eärendil filled the tunnel with a soft, steady glow, and they walked deeper together.
The tunnel was not a kind path. It widened and narrowed without pattern: at times vast enough to hold hundreds of people, at times so pinched that even Frodo and Sam had to squeeze through sideways, nearly stuck. At one point, the passage turned almost vertical, climbing at close to ninety degrees. They drove Sting and Sam's knife into the stone for handholds, hauled themselves upward a few inches at a time, and emerged at the top breathless and shaking.
Then came the forks. The tunnel branched and branched again, each passage leading into a different darkness, with no sign of what lay ahead. One wrong choice and they could wander for hours, or days, with no way back.
Choose wrong here and everything ends, Frodo thought. He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the Felix Felicis settle through his blood, and followed where it pulled him.
He didn't know if the direction was right. He couldn't know. He only kept moving and hoped.
They had entered the tunnel at roughly mid-slope. Inside it, direction was impossible to judge with any certainty, but the overall trend felt upward, and that thin sense of progress was enough to keep them going.
While Frodo and Sam made their way through the dark, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli were still at the mountain's foot, sustaining the chaos that was buying them time.
They had no way of knowing how the Hobbits were faring. They could only fight and hope.
The brawl between the Uruk-hai and Orcs had been brutally crushed by the Nazgûl. And when the Nazgûl swept their gaze across the battlefield, they found the three infiltrators.
Polyjuice Potion could change a face, a body, a voice. It could deceive nearly every mortal eye and withstand magical detection. What it could not change was the soul beneath.
When Bilbo had worn the One Ring and looked at those around him in the unseen world, Elves appeared as shining presences, dark creatures appeared as shadows, and Men appeared as themselves. Nazgûl, existing between the worlds, saw the same way. Among a crowd of dark shadows, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli stood out clearly. Legolas most of all: to the Nazgûl's eyes, the Elf blazed like a star in the dark, a point of pure radiance impossible to miss or mistake.
"Take them!" The Nazgûl's voice came down from above, sharp and cold, the command given in Black Speech.
The disguise was finished. Aragorn didn't bother to maintain it.
His wand was in his hand in the same motion. "Bombarda Maxima!" The blast tore outward, hurling the Orcs and Uruk-hai nearest to him in every direction.
Legolas pulled his magical longbow from his dimensional pouch and sent a rapid volley of light-arrows streaking upward toward the Nazgûl overhead. The Nazgûl deflected them, and the impacts detonated in bursts of light and force. The arrows had not been aimed at the riders. They had been aimed at the fell beasts beneath them. Several of the creatures screamed and plunged, crashing to earth in ruin.
Gimli had no magic. It did not seem to matter to him. He raised his axe and waded into the nearest enemies with the pure, uncomplicated enthusiasm of a Dwarf who had been waiting for exactly this.
The commotion was spectacular.
The Eye of Sauron on Barad-dûr fixed on the three of them with the full force of its attention, blazing with fury and killing intent. Its will spread through every available channel: take them, no matter the cost.
Nazgûl, werewolves, vampires, Trolls, Uruk-hai, Orcs. Everything still standing on the mountain or within its shadow converged on Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli from every direction.
But though the Eye was fixed on the three of them, it found no trace of the One Ring. It swept across the mountain in a frantic search, probing every shadow and crevice, reaching for even the faintest flicker of the Ring's presence. Hundreds of giant bats, crebain, and vampires darkened the sky above the mountain, combing over it from above. Below, tens of thousands of great spiders, wargs, and werewolves swept across the slopes without pause, leaving no patch of ground unsearched.
In Eriador, the news reached Sauron.
The last of his composure broke.
"You would destroy the Ring?" The red light in his eyes turned wild and absolute. The dark force around him became something ungoverned, raging beyond shape or direction. "I will burn away this form and every shred of strength it holds before I let you."
A destructive presence erupted from him without restraint. The sky changed. The earth shook. The magma surging up from below rose harder and faster, the ground convulsing beneath it.
Gandalf's face went white. "He's going to self-destruct!"