Chapter 401: Gollum the Guide
The moment the others noticed Legolas's shift in posture, weapons were in hand before anyone spoke.
Whatever was hiding in the dark flinched, and the soft scramble of panicked feet followed. Legolas caught the sound before it faded and loosed an arrow without hesitation.
A sharp yelp cut through the silence. A small, scrawny figure tumbled into the open, barely twisting clear of the arrow before rolling to a stop at their feet.
Everyone stared.
"What in the world is that?" Sam kept his eyes fixed on the creature, his voice tight with wariness. It was ghastly pale, with enormous eyes and small, pointed teeth, belonging to no race any of them recognised.
The others shared his unease. None of them had ever seen anything like it
Legolas kept his bow raised, brow furrowed. Something stirred at the edge of his memory. "I think I have seen it before. Decades ago, in Mirkwood. It moved as if searching for something. Our warriors gave chase, but it slipped away."
"Mirkwood decades ago, and now here, at the gates of Mordor?" Frodo looked at the trembling, hunched figure with open suspicion. "Could it be one of Sauron's servants?"
The thought was difficult to dismiss. They were a stone's throw from Mordor, and a creature like this had no reason to be here unless it served something dark.
Gimli raised his axe, his expression flat and certain. "Doesn't matter what it is. We cut it down."
He took a step forward.
The creature scrambled backward in terror, its voice rising into a high, grating rasp. "Don't kill Gollum! Gollum is not Mordor's! Gollum was sent by the Black-Robed Wizard! Gollum is here to guide you!"
Everyone stopped.
"The Black-Robed Wizard?" Aragorn held up a hand to stay the others, then stepped forward and looked the creature in the eyes. "When you say The Black-Robed Wizard, do you mean Lord Kael?"
Gollum's head bobbed in frantic agreement. "Yes, yes! Kael! That terrible wizard!"
Still afraid they did not believe him, he thrust out a bony arm and bared the inside of his wrist. There was a mark there: two trees, their trunks intertwined. "Look! The Black-Robed Wizard put this on Gollum! Gollum belongs to the Black-Robed Wizard now!"
They saw it at once. The twin-tree shape was unmistakable, the same emblem of the gold and silver trees that stood for Hogwarts.
Some of the tension in the group eased, though not all of it.
Frodo pressed forward. "You say Lord Kael sent you to guide us. Do you actually know a way into Mordor? A way that doesn't go through the checkpoint?"
The moment Frodo spoke, Gollum's attention snapped to him. Something in Frodo's presence, something sensed rather than seen, ignited a raw, burning hunger in those enormous pale eyes. Gollum's body drifted toward him before he consciously chose to move.
"Precious. My precious…"
Frodo stepped back sharply, unnerved by the fixation in that gaze.
Aragorn and the others tensed at once. Aragorn brought Narsil up between Gollum and Frodo, the blade level and steady.
The sight of that keen edge and the weapons rising around him snapped Gollum back. He shrank away and pulled himself into something small and meek.
"Answer him." Sam's voice was cold and hard. He had no trust in this creature and made no effort to hide it. He already had a clear idea of what Gollum had been staring at.
Gollum flinched as though Sam's tone had struck him physically, huddled in on himself, and finally spoke. "Gollum has been near Mordor a long time. Gollum knows a secret path. A safe way in, yes, a safe way…"
A secret path was worth considering. The group was still wary, but after a short, hushed discussion, they agreed: Gollum would guide them. They would follow and watch him every step of the way.
Under Gollum's guidance, they skirted wide of the Orc checkpoint at Cirith Ungol and began picking their way through the rocky mountain paths nearby.
The direction he was taking them was straight toward Shelob's lair.
Gollum moved ahead of them with eager, attentive energy, all helpful haste on the surface, while his pale eyes slid sideways toward Frodo again and again, searching, reaching, drawn toward something he could feel but not see.
Both Aragorn and Legolas noticed. Neither said anything, but their watchfulness sharpened.
Gollum's face told its own story as he walked. His expression kept shifting through something that looked less like thought and more like an argument, cunning sliding in at one moment, fear rushing back the next.
"We lead them to the spider," he murmured, barely audible even to himself. "Spider eats them. Precious comes back to us." The words were thick with eagerness.
Then his face tightened, and he shook his head in a quick, anxious jerk. "No. No, no. The wizard will punish us, yes. The mark, precious… the mark will hurt us."
His eyes dropped to the symbol on his arm. He looked at it with naked revulsion. He had tried to remove it more times than he could count: clawing at it, picking at it, scrubbing at it until the skin bled. Nothing had ever touched it. And whenever that terrible wizard willed it, the mark came alive like something burrowing under the skin. It drove into flesh and bone the way needles might if there were thousands of them all at once, reaching every part of him simultaneously. The memory of that pain was enough to make his entire body convulse in phantom agony.
The two halves of him wrangled in silence.
The cunning half won.
"We are taking them to the secret entrance," Gollum whispered, talking himself into it, slyness spreading back across his face. "We only forgot to mention the spider nearby. That is not our fault, is it, precious?"
They moved on through a broken landscape of heaped boulders and jutting rock. Twice, they pressed flat and held still while crow patrols swept overhead; once, a cluster of enormous bats passed close enough that they could hear the beat of heavy wings.
As the path curved closer to Shelob's lair, a barely contained excitement crept into Gollum's eyes, bright and restless.
Aragorn caught it immediately. He drew Narsil in one smooth motion and signalled the others to be ready.
"What is it?" Gimli asked under his breath.
Aragorn scanned the rocks in every direction. "Something is off. It is too quiet, and the darkness here is heavier than before."
His gaze snapped back to Gollum just in time. The creature had begun to inch sideways, testing the edges of the group's attention.
Aragorn flicked his wand and conjured a thin silver chain that wound itself around Gollum's wrist before he could take another step. He fixed him with a look that left no room for argument. "Where do you think you are going, Gollum?"
Gollum stared at the chain on his wrist, then at Aragorn's face, then at the closed expressions surrounding him. His neck shrank down between his bony shoulders.
"Gollum only wanted to look ahead, check for danger, yes. Please, master, the chain is so tight, Gollum hurts so much…"
Aragorn was unmoved. He pressed the flat of the blade against Gollum's throat, his voice quiet and absolute. "You will behave yourself. You will keep your tricks to yourself. If you do not, I will cut your head from your shoulders without a second thought." He let the silence hold for a moment. "And if you lead us somewhere dangerous on purpose, you will be the first thing standing between us and whatever comes."
Gollum could hear the certainty behind the words. He nodded quickly and repeatedly until Aragorn lowered the sword.
Whether it was the threat or fear of the mark's punishment, Gollum stopped angling toward Shelob's lair and turned toward the actual entrance of the secret path.
They had not gone looking for the spider.
But the spider had come looking for them.
With so much of Mordor's army emptied out and marching to war, the stream of prisoners fed to Shelob had all but dried up. Hunger had driven her out of her tunnels and into the mountain paths around her lair, hunting for whatever prey she could find.