Chapter 403: Infiltrating in Disguise
With Polyjuice Potion in hand, their chances of slipping into the heart of Mordor had improved significantly.
Aragorn divided the contents of the bottle into five equal portions and dropped a single Orc hair into each one.
The group stared at the results. The potion was already an unpleasant shade of green, and the addition of Orc hair had done nothing to improve either its colour or the smell rising from it. Expressions of revulsion passed through the group without a word being spoken.
"Ugh, what a stench." Gimli tipped his portion back in one determined swallow, then immediately began dry-heaving. "That tastes exactly like my father's socks after six months without washing."
Legolas, who had always possessed an exacting sense of refinement, had gone the colour of old bone. He looked as though he were about to drain a vial of poison rather than a magical draught.
Aragorn drank his own portion in measured sips, his expression perfectly composed, as though he had somehow switched off his sense of taste entirely.
Frodo and Sam pinched their noses, forced it down in a single grim effort, and then doubled over in dry heaves with tears streaming down their faces.
Within moments, Frodo felt his heartbeat quicken and heat rush through his body. His bones began to stretch at an alarming speed. His skin crawled as his muscles shifted and reshaped themselves. He watched, genuinely astonished, as the ground dropped further and further away, his line of sight rising until it sat two or three times higher than it had a moment before.
His clothes, which had fitted perfectly a few seconds ago, were now stretched tight across a body that had no business fitting into them.
Around him, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Sam were going through the same transformation, each of them swelling and coarsening into a broad, ugly Orc frame.
Gollum watched all of this with enormous eyes and a look of pure, baffled disbelief.
"Ha! Look at yourself, Pointy-ears!" The Orc with Gimli's personality turned to examine Legolas and let out a delighted laugh. "Want me to find you a mirror? I think you might cry."
Legolas had taken on the body of an Orc, but his movements and the quality of his bearing remained entirely, unmistakably Elvish, creating an effect that was difficult to describe and slightly disturbing to look at. He fixed Gimli with a flat stare and said with great dignity, "You are hardly an improvement."
The two of them had been like this ever since the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where a wager of some kind had bound them together. They still bickered constantly, but the edge had gone out of it. The arguing was almost affectionate now.
Frodo was examining himself and his companions with wide eyes when something occurred to him. "Our voices," he said. "They haven't changed."
Aragorn nodded. "That's right. Polyjuice Potion transforms appearance but leaves the voice untouched. Once we're among the Orcs, no one speaks. Not a word. If they hear us talking, it's over."
Legolas agreed. "The dark races of Mordor use the Black Speech. Anything else would draw attention immediately."
"Then we play dumb," Sam offered. "Pretend to be mute. Use hand signals if we need to communicate. Less chance of anyone noticing something is wrong."
It was agreed without argument.
Aragorn turned his attention to Legolas specifically. "Work on the way you carry yourself. You move like a lord of the Elves even in that body. Watch an Orc sometime: they slouch, they lurch, they look like they are spoiling for a fight at all times. Try to feel less graceful."
He swept his gaze over the rest of them. "That goes for all of you. Frodo, Sam, in particular, your eyes are too kind. Orcs don't look at the world like that. Put some menace into it."
He walked them through it patiently, coaching Legolas, Frodo, and Sam on how to move, how to stand, how to hold their faces. Gimli required no coaching whatsoever. Freed from any obligation to restrain himself, he was already more convincing than most actual Orcs.
Aragorn raised his wand next and transfigured everyone's clothing into ragged, battered hides of the sort Orc soldiers wore. He did the same to their weapons, giving each one the appearance of dull, pitted, half-rusted ironwork, the kind of thing Mordor's foot soldiers carried.
"Are we ready?" Gimli asked, visibly impatient. "Can we just walk through now?"
Aragorn looked them over once more and then shook his head. "Not quite. Orcs don't look this clean. Everyone roll in the dirt."
He dropped to the ground immediately and set the example, coming back up coated in dust and grime.
The others followed without enthusiasm.
Then Aragorn dug into his dimensional pouch and produced a small bottle filled with black spheres. The moment he unstoppered it, an odour of extraordinary violence hit the air.
The group recoiled as one, hands flying to cover their noses and mouths, several of them stumbling backward.
"What in the name of all that is holy is that?" Gimli's voice was strangled. "I think I'm going to be sick."
Aragorn looked faintly pained but held his ground. "These are Dungbombs," he explained, speaking with some effort through the smell. "They sell them at the joke shop in Diagon Alley. Apparently, Peeves of Hogwarts invented them at some point. If you get hit with one, the smell clings to you for hours, and almost nothing will wash it out." He paused to breathe through his mouth. "Wargs have exceptional noses. Even if we look like Orcs, I can't guarantee they won't smell the difference. So everyone puts one of these on. I know. I know. Just bear it."
The logic was sound, and they all knew it.
That did not make it easier.
One by one, with expressions of profound suffering, each of them picked up a Dungbomb, broke it, and rubbed the contents across themselves.
Broken Dungbombs were worse than intact ones. The smell intensified to something that almost had a physical presence, and even Gollum scrambled as far back as his rope would let him, pressing himself against the rock with his face averted.
Legolas sat down on the ground, looking like someone quietly enduring a natural disaster. The others were in similar states, hanging limply where they stood or sat, pale and miserable, heroically suppressing the urge to bring up the Polyjuice Potion they had only just managed to keep down.
The general consensus, shared without words, was that the Polyjuice Potion had not been so bad after all. Not compared to this.
Whoever had decided to manufacture something like a Dungbomb was a person whose reasoning they could not begin to understand. In sufficient quantities, it would be a more effective battlefield weapon than almost anything else available. No army could fight while incapacitated by this.
Gradually, mercifully, something in them adapted. The smell did not go away. But after enough exposure, they stopped noticing it quite so acutely, and the world came back into focus by degrees.
"What do we do about Gollum?" someone asked.
Everyone looked at him.
The question was genuine. Gollum knew these paths and could still navigate them toward Mount Doom, which made him irreplaceable. At the same time, he had already tried to feed them to Shelob, and his interest in the One Ring was barely concealed. If he were to start screaming in the middle of an Orc patrol and expose them, the entire mission would be finished.
He was, in every sense, an unstable element.
Gollum could feel the mood in the group and had made himself as small as possible in his corner of the rocks, doing his best impression of something harmless.
Aragorn looked to Frodo. "Your call."
Frodo studied Gollum for a moment. The creature really did look pitiful when it wanted to. He felt a reluctant, complicated sympathy. "We take him with us," he said. "We still need him to find the way to Mount Doom."
Aragorn accepted that. "Agreed. But we can't risk him giving us away." He raised his wand. "Langlock."
Gollum's mouth shut and stayed shut, his expression cycling rapidly through alarm and frustration as he realised he could not produce a sound.
Aragorn tied the rope firmly around him and addressed the group. "Our cover story is that we're a small Orc scouting party that stumbled across this creature and we're bringing him to Barad-dûr. We walk in, we say nothing, we keep moving."
Heads nodded around him.
They descended from the rocks and came out onto the road.
Aragorn, in his Orc form, took the lead. Legolas fell in on his left, Gimli on his right, and they walked forward into Mordor.