Salgant hadn’t expected to wake up again. He had spent the start of the battle chasing after Tuor, full of the horrified knowledge that he’d just set off a Kinslaying and ensured the death of at least one friend, but neither a crippled leg nor a terrified palfrey lent themselves to speed, and he’d been cornered with only a few members of the Mole and Wing that he’d shouted into rallying together when the walls began falling and the orcs came for them.
Salgant’s men, such as they were, had kept the orcs busy long enough for Salgant to Sing the creatures out of the courtyard they’d found themselves in. Some had even survived the first Balrog’s appearance, he thought, but Salgant’s concentration had become absolute when the second Balrog joined the struggle. The third had been his undoing entirely, and when Salgant’s voice finally gave out, he had seen no other living beings in the destroyed courtyard. Not that he’d had much time to look before he collapsed.
Waking up in the same battered body, rather than the Halls of Mandos, was not in any future he’d anticipated.
A black-clawed foot kicked the elf in his side.
“On your feet.” The balrog rumbled, filling the cell with the reek of hot metal. She was small for her kind, but still loomed too huge for the scale of the room, crouching and furled and in obvious discomfort. “UP, you tub of seal-lard, before I drag you out!”
Beyond the door waited an escort of orc jailers, eyeing the captive with a mix of curiosity and wariness, shackles and a gag at the ready.
“One note out of you and you’ll have to answer Sauron in writing, because your tongue will be hanging from a hook on my belt, understand?” she hissed, her breath smoking. “To think a little runt like you held off two of my brothers… If they’d been free to join the battle at the Fountain, Gothmog might still be alive. So give me one excuse to kill you on the way up the stairs, ‘hína, and the lieutenant will need to find himself another prisoner to question.”
She chuckled, and the outline of her jagged grin glowed like the inside of a furnace. “There are a lot of stairs.”
___
The Pit of the Iron Hells spiraled miles into the earth, half prison, half mine shaft; its stairway chiseled roughly out of the black rock with no regularity or rails to keep one from tumbling into the endless dark. To climb the stairs from top to bottom would take a man a day or more to reach the surface, if he did not rest or tire. The orcs and other guards had ways of ascending vertically by means of pulleys and lifts, but the prisoners working in the deeps made the climb on foot each day, when they were herded back to their cells.
It was lucky then that Salgant had been held near the surface in one of the less remote dungeons, or Sauron would have been waiting a long time to begin his interrogation.
When the balrog dumped the minor lord of Gondolin onto the floor of his chamber he noticed the elf was limping, and wondered if that had been a result of the climb or of a less recent injury.
“Sit, please,” the maia gestured to a chair, giving the balrog a curt nod of dismissal as his guest oriented himself. “That leg of yours must need a rest.”
The room he’d chosen to meet the unexpected Song master in was ornate and glittering; its walls lined with the polished obsidian ubiquitous to the upper floors of Angband, its sinister fixtures in the shape of serpents and spiderwebs wrought of gold, garnet eyes seeming to wink in the light of the fire which blazed in a maw-shaped hearth. Despite its somewhat grim decor, it was a luxurious change from the pit below and the fortress outside; elegant and impeccably maintained.
“Our source of intelligence notified us of two Song masters in Gondolin,” he did not say Maeglin, though there could be no other informer. “We were unaware there was a third.”
Sauron turned to his guest and captive, his tone neither threatening nor plainly read. “You are Lord Salgant of the House of the Harp. I have not heard of you,” he scrutinized the battered elf, crossing his hands behind his back. “Why have I not heard of you?”
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