Vox Popoli

In a scrub oak on the western ridge above the valley, two crows sat on a branch and watched.

They were crebain, the black spy-birds of Dunland, large and clever and thoroughly unpleasant, with oily feathers and eyes like wet pebbles. They had been posted to this ridge six days ago, one of fourteen pairs stationed along the approaches to Rivendell, and they had spent those six days in a state of bored, malicious alertness, eating beetles and surveilling the comings and goings of the Elves below with the joyless diligence of creatures who serve darkness not out of conviction but out of a fundamental meanness of spirit that finds employment in darkness more natural than the alternative.

They had seen the eagle land the previous evening. They had taken note of it. They had thought nothing of it, of course, because eagles came and went from Rivendell with some regularity and the crows had not been briefed on what, specifically, to look for. They were told only to watch, and report, and be suspicious of everything, which came naturally to them.

But what they saw this morning was different. This was three great eagles, flying purposefully in formation at dawn, climbing hard and fast toward altitude, heading south. Even a crow could see that this was an event of some import, and perhaps even the reason they’d been sent here.

The first crow turned to the second and let out a series of harsh, rapid calls, the crebain’s equivalent of an alarm, a sound like a stick being dragged across a fence. The second crow took up the cry, louder, harsher, and together they launched themselves from the branch and flew upward, screaming into the brightening sky, circling and calling with a frantic, rasping urgency that carried far in the still morning air.

Far above them, so far above that the crows were invisible, mere specks against the grey-green earth, two dark flyers heard their cries.

The Nazgûl rode their fell beasts in a slow, wide patrol circuit above the southeastern approach to the valley, just as they had been ordered. They were high enough that the Elves below could not see them against the overcast, high enough that Elrond’s wards did not prickle and burn as they did at lower altitudes. The fell beasts were ancient, reptilian things, their vast leathery wings beating with a sound like wet canvas in a gale, they stank of carrion and old leather, and the Nazgûl upon their backs sat motionless as iron statues, only their hooded heads turning slowly, slowly, watching, and waiting.

They heard the crows before they saw anything. The crebain’s alarm carried upward through the cold air, shrill and insistent, and both Nazgûl turned their mounts toward the sound. The one called Ren, who in life had been a sorcerer of Harad and who retained, even in undeath, a certain professional attentiveness, extended his awareness downward to read the pattern of the crows’ distress, and then looked up higher, above the clouds.

He saw them.

Three bronze shapes, far to the south and climbing, already above the lowest cloud layer and pulling away with a speed that made the fell beasts’ labored flight look like the floundering of moths in honey. Eagles. Great Eagles, unmistakable even at this distance with their vast wingspans, the impossible speed of their ascent, and the way they caught the upper winds and floated on them like invisible rivers in the sky.

And from the lead eagle’s talon radiated an aura of power. It was a sensation that was more felt than seen.

The other Nazgûl felt it too. They turned to each other across the gap between their mounts, and between them passed a communication that was not language but something older and colder, a shared understanding that moved at the speed of dread.

The Ring.

Hoarmurath drove his fell beast upward, clawing for altitude. Ren followed. The fell beasts shrieked in protest, for they were creatures of the low airs, the murky thermals above battlefields and swamps, and the thin cold above the clouds was agony to them, but the will of the Nazgûl was irresistible and the beasts climbed, their wings beating faster, their reptilian lungs heaving in the thinning atmosphere.

But the eagles were already above them and pulling away. Gwaihir flew at the ceiling of the world, where the air was so thin that a Man would have lost consciousness in minutes, and his wings found purchase on winds that the fell beasts could not even reach. The gap between them widened, slowly, inexorably, the way dawn widens from a crack of light into the fullness of day.

Ren watched the eagles shrink against the depthless blue, and he knew that the fell beasts could not hope to catch them. Not in the open sky. Not at this altitude. They were built for strength, not for speed, and against the children of Thorondor they were as a carthorse to a king’s mount.

He raised one gauntleted hand and began to whisper.

The words were in the Black Speech, the language of Mordor, forged by Sauron in the dark years and spoken willingly by no living thing. The words flowed from Ren’s hood in a low, continuous hiss, like steam escaping from a crack in the earth, and the air around his outstretched hand darkened and thickened and began to hum with a frequency that was felt in the bones rather than heard in the ears. He cast a spell of far-speaking, a thread of dark will flung southward across hundreds of leagues toward the tower of Barad-dûr, toward one of the stones that could receive it, and it carried with it a single, urgent message:

They fly.

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The sun had not yet cleared the Misty Mountains when Gwaihir the Windlord stepped to the edge of the terrace and opened his wings.

It was, by any measure, an extraordinary sight. The Great Eagles of the Misty Mountains were the noblest of all flying creatures in Middle-earth, descended from Thorondor who had scarred the face of Morgoth himself in the Elder Days, and Gwaihir was the greatest of his line. With his wings outstretched, he was thirty fathoms from wingtip to wingtip, his plumage a deep tawny gold shading to white at the breast, his eyes like polished amber set in a head the size of a horse. When he spread his wings on the terrace of Rivendell, the displaced air bent the grass flat in a circle forty feet across and set the pennants on Elrond’s house snapping like whips.

He stood there for a moment in the grey predawn light, his talons gripping the stone at the terrace’s edge, and looked out over the valley of Imladris. Below him the Bruinen ran silver and dark between its wooded banks, and the waterfalls caught the first thin light and held it in long threads of white. The air smelled of pine and cold water and the faintest trace of the kitchens, where someone was already baking bread, because in Rivendell someone was always already baking bread.

On his left talon, buckled with straps of pale leather so fine they might have been spun from spider-silk, hung a pouch no larger than a man’s fist. It was beautiful work, Elvish leathercraft at its most meticulous, with every stitch placed with the precision of a jeweler, and it contained an object of such malice that even Gwaihir, whose mind was as far from the concerns of rings and power as a mind could be, felt a faint unease in the talon that held it. A warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. A weight that had nothing to do with mass.

He ignored it. He was a creature of air, not earth. It was a thing of great earthly power, but whatever it was, it could not touch him.

Behind him, on the terrace, stood Gandalf, leaning on his staff, and Elrond, and the Hobbit — the small one who had offered to carry the thing himself, and who watched now with an expression that Gwaihir, had he been inclined to read the faces of Halflings, might have identified as something between relief and a lingering, wistful sense of having been made unnecessary. Beside the Hobbit stood another, stouter Hobbit who was holding a packed breakfast and looking up at Gwaihir with the frank, uncomplicated awe of someone who has never in his life pretended to be unimpressed by anything.

Gandalf raised his staff. “Fly well, Windlord. Fly high and fly true!”

Gwaihir turned his great head and regarded the wizard with one amber eye. He did not speak — not here, not in the lesser tongues of the earthbound — but he dipped his beak once, a gesture of acknowledgment between peers, and then he stepped off the edge.

For one held breath he fell and dropped like a stone past the terrace’s edge, past the carved balustrades and the trailing ivy, down toward the rushing water far below. Then his wings caught the air and he rose. The downdraft of his ascent shook the trees on both banks of the Bruinen and sent a flock of starlings scattering like thrown seeds. He climbed in a great spiral, each turn carrying him higher, and the morning light found him as he broke above the tree line and caught the gold of his plumage and set it ablaze, so that for a moment he burned against the pale sky like a second dawn, like a fragment of the sun itself given wings and will and sent forth over the world.

It was a sight that even the ancient Elrond, who watched the great eagle’s departure from the balcony of his private residence, found magnificent.

Gwaihir climbed. The valley of Rivendell shrank beneath him. The house of Elrond became a cluster of rooftops among the trees, the Bruinen but a silver thread, the mountains a rumpled cloth of green and grey. The air thinned and cooled and he welcomed it, breathing deep of the upper atmosphere where the wind ran clean and fast and tasted of nothing but sky. He turned south and east, toward the distant shadow on the horizon that was, even from this height, even in the early light, unmistakable. Mordor.

He was not alone.

From the high eyries of the Misty Mountains, where the peaks rose above the snow line into the uttermost airs, two more shapes detached themselves and rose. Landroval, Gwaihir’s brother, and Meneldor the swift. Meneldor was younger and smaller than the others, but, as his name suggested, swift, perhaps faster in flight than any eagle living. They had been waiting since before dawn, perched on the bare rock above the clouds, and now they fell into formation on either side of Gwaihir in a wide arrowhead, three golden shapes climbing in unison toward the roof of the sky.

This was Gandalf’s addition to the plan. Not one eagle but three — an escort, a guard of honor, a redundancy. If one were forced to turn aside, another could take the pouch. If the Nazgûl came, then two could fight them while the Windlord flew on. It was, Gandalf had argued, simple prudence. Gwaihir had accepted this reasoning with the tolerant patience of a creature who did not believe he required any assistance but understood that wizards always needed to feel useful.

The three eagles rose through a thin layer of cloud and emerged above it into a world of blinding white and depthless blue, and they turned their faces toward the East, and they rose higher into the sky.

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