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You didn’t know Bauglir, when you came here. You’ve had to learn all you can through his gloating eyes, through the scars viciously engraved in Russandol’s skin. Bauglir’s hands are here and there and everywhere. Slave that you are—yes, you, Gwindor, who was once a soldier and a brother and gun—
You can’t shy away from what disgusts you.
So. Bauglir. Bauglir will play with his prey as a cat will. He has far more knowledge than wisdom, which is what happens to men who think themselves gods.
(Look at any war, which you used to do, when you were young and reading, young and figuring, young and believing that others’ history mattered for your future. All men who shape the world believe that they are gods.)
You didn’t hear what Bauglir said to Russandol, before he shot Elias with that first gun. You didn’t need to.
Gothmog is not like Bauglir at all. When you and Lem and the other men—men who wanted only to follow a leader to freedom—set fire to the barracks, he sets fire to the guardhouse.
Gothmog is blood and bone-deep in his humanity. He isn’t ready to die. That makes him more dangerous than a man who thinks he can’t.
Fire’s only justice is deathly. It will treat friend and foe the same. Insatiably, flames lick the walls and roofs you built. Smoke greets your eyes and your lungs. The men have rallied against the overseers, but there are women and children to protect, and their weapons are crude.
Where—did Russandol tell you where, exactly, she was kept? He did, didn’t he…he told you so much and yet so little.
That makes him the same as you, as her. Belle.
(Russandol had a family. Russandol came from comfort. You can see it in the way his body is only newly ruined. Russandol came from grief. Even Bauglir couldn’t ruin a man so utterly as Russandol is ruined.)
Lem breaks the door with his shoulder. Embers fall on his head and shoulders, and he swears. The gust of heat that huffs out stifles you both, making you stagger back.
“Belle,” you say, and he nods. Stupid, solid, short-sighted fellow that he’s always been, he nods. (You’ll remember him like this.)
“I’ll take ‘Mog.”
(The creatures of the fields and the birds of the air must have picked over Gelmir’s separated bones. Mairon took one of his hands, and left the other lying a few yards away from the wrist it once belonged to.)
Belle looks dead. Painfully thin, her skin as dry as paper. Her only eye is shut, bruised purple with exhaustion.
You are standing at the center of hell.
“Russandol sent me,” you whisper, as if that will bring her back. As if you did not know each other, and trust each other, before Russandol came like fire and water, building a new world.
Belle does not answer. She is light in you arms, almost a child, but the pain in your shoulder makes you gasp.
He carries her out, and they fall together. He does not see his men; does not see much of anything.
Breathe, Belle—and he strikes at her chest as best he can, while his own throat closes.
Gothmog’s men will find and kill them. They have weapons. Some of them even have guns.
Gwindor waits for a bullet. There might have been a shot, amid the snapping of timbers and tumult in the yard.
There might have been a shot, he cannot be certain.
He is certain that he hears the horns.