Where the Shadows Lie by Ridpath Michael

Author:Ridpath, Michael [Ridpath, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Thriller
Publisher: Corvus
Published: 2010-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Several time zones to the west, it was early morning in the woods of Trinity County, Northern California. Isildur looked out of his study over the little valley towards the waterfall tumbling down from the bare rock face opposite. The morning sunlight glistened off the rain-washed greenery. In the garden he could see the life-sized shapes of Gandalf, Legolas and Elrond, bronze sculptures he had commissioned at great expense from a San Francisco artist.

It was a beautiful spot. He had bought it with a fraction of the money he had made from selling his share in 4Portal the year before. He had been looking for a hideaway in the woods to concentrate on his projects and had found the perfect place. Alpine mountains on three sides, a small winding road on the fourth leading down through forests to the nearest very small town ten miles away.

It was a place where he could think.

He had named it Rivendell, naturally, after the sanctuary that the Fellowship of the Ring had rested in. He remembered when he had first read of Rivendell, when he was seventeen, and he had had a clear vision in his mind of the place, surrounded by woods, mountains, running water, peace, tranquillity.

This was it.

He had been working on two projects. The one that had taken most of his time was his attempt to coordinate the collation of an online dictionary of two of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin. The project had turned out to be much more frustrating than he had thought. Tolkien had never laid down hard and fast grammar rules and vocabulary, so there were many differing interpretations of the two languages. Isildur knew that: the whole point about his dictionary was that it would be flexible enough to deal with the different dialects that had grown up over time. Trouble was his collaborators were not of a flexible frame of mind.

The project had descended into acrimony and abuse. He had hoped that as the provider of the money he would have the final say. It turned out that he was indeed a unifying figure: the authority they all loved to hate.

His other project was to try to track down Gaukur’s Saga. He had first become aware of it a few years before, through an Internet forum. He had put together a Danish academic who had discovered echoes of the lost saga in an eighteenth-century letter he had turned up, with Gimli, an Englishman whose grandfather had studied at Leeds University under Tolkien. The details were frustratingly vague, but Isildur was willing to spend big money to flesh them out.

And he did all this from the computer in his study at Rivendell.

He had never been overseas. He had been brought up in New Jersey, and spent all his vacations as a child with his family on the Jersey Shore. He had majored in electrical engineering at Stanford in California, and spent his career in Silicon Valley. He was a gifted programmer, intuitive, focused, able to make connections.

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