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The stone passageway got narrower and lower as we
progressed. It branched occasionally, and the air got mustier. Soon,
Katy M had to stoop, and moments later I felt the bristles along the top
of my neck brushing the tunnel’s ceiling as well. The dwarf bounded
happily along at waist-level.
“This used to be a mine,” he said, his accent
thick. “When they were first building the mansion behind us they
discovered it behind some bushes. Decided to build the mansion up to it
and throw some guest bedrooms in the back.”
“Whose mine?” I asked, stooping further.
“Humans,” said the dwarf. “We think. It’s as old as
Old Town, maybe older. We think they used this stone to build the Old
Abbey, south of here, back when the North End was Northshire.”
“Cool,” I muttered. M grunted. The tunnel, which
had been slanting down, deeper into the mountain, had begun to level
off. The light bulbs dangled from the ceiling at increasing intervals,
with long stretches of murky darkness between them. “Old humans,” I
said, after a moment, “they never had vertical writing, did they? Like,
up and down, with weird kind of roundish symbols?”
“Not that I know of.” Madoran looked up curiously
at me. “Why?”
“No reason,” I said. M had glanced at me in a
flash, and was now expressionless.
The passage ended abruptly in a blank wall. The
dwarf turned to the passage’s right wall, and felt around a bit. He
pressed his hand flat against the wall at a certain point, pushing, and
rotating. A circle of stone, with no markings that I could see to
discern it, slid inwards and rotated. Cracks appeared around a large
section of the wall, and suddenly Madoran wasn’t pushing on a wall any
more, he was pushing a stone door open.
“This part,” he said, “we’re pretty sure was built
by dwarves.” He grinned.
Behind the door was a short passageway, thankfully
tall enough for me to stand upright in, ending at a claustrophobic,
ascending stairway. “Ever wondered how tall a mountain is?” growled M.
Madoran strode forward and started climbing
briskly. “After you,” said M gruffly.
The stairs had clearly been cut by craftsmen, each
edge a near-perfect right angle. The center of each step was warn
smooth and slightly depressed: we weren’t the first ones to climb them.
I could only see Madoran’s heels as he rounded the perpetual bend in
front of me, and I could hear M’s hooves clumping behind and below me.
Conversation was difficult, and so we avoided it. Every couple of turns
of the spiral, I saw a small, black fissure at horns-level, going off
into the stone depths of the mountain. A faint, cool, moist breeze
drifted out of some of them. I called up to Madoran, asking what they
were.
“Air vents,” he responded. “We’ve tried to see
where the air is coming from, but we haven’t found a gnome brave enough
to crawl in.” He was starting to get a little out of breath. His legs
were half as long as ours, and he was climbing at the same speed. I was
running out of breath as well. Katy M clumped along stoically, showing
no signs of fatigue.
* * *
I’d been counting the stairs as I climbed. I began
to fall into the rhythm, and suddenly wasn’t sure if I was on 452 or
453. I counted the number of stairs up the next spiral, did some quick
mental arithmetic, and started counting spirals instead.
“Enough!” said Madoran, stopping so suddenly I
nearly bumped into him. He was breathing heavily. “Oxygen break!” I
silently thanked him.
He thunked himself down on a step. I followed suit.
M stood where she was. “Did we go this way last time?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Wow,” I said. She'd carried my unconscious body,
and I wasn’t a skinny bull.
“Yup,” she grunted.
Moments later, Madoran leapt to his feet again.
“Excelsior!” he said, pointing onward and upward. We started climbing
again. I was still out of breath, but Madoran climbed with renewed
vigor.
* * *
I lost count of spirals at two hundred. I started
counting rest breaks instead. At five, we took a food break. At eight, I
became petulant. “Are we there yet?” I said.
“I’d say we’re about half way up,” said the dwarf.
“We’re almost there,” said M. The dwarf grunted in
disappointment, something about ruining his joke.
Some twenty minutes later, the staircase suddenly
became a hallway again. I’d been going around and around for hours, and
had no idea which direction we were heading. After so many stairs, my
tired calves and quads felt like they were walking blissfully downhill.
The hallway again ended abruptly with a nondescript
stone wall. Madoran turned to the left wall this time, and repeated his
door-conjuring trick. The moment cracks began to form, I felt cold air
begin to seep in. As he pushed, it grew into a wind, then a gale, and he
pushed it open and some dirt fell across the doorway, blowing in at us.
We stepped outside, onto a narrow ledge. It was night, and the full moon
shown down on us. I looked down, and regretted it immediately. We were
high on a cliff, overlooking a steep foothill and, on its other side,
Storm City. I could see the Old Abbey’s steeple, lit from below by huge
electrical lights supplied by some goblin company or other. Beyond the
North End and over another small row of hills was Old Town. The
electricity there was still out, and it was glowed ember-red. I sighed,
and whispered goodbye to Storm City. The wind tore my words away, and
cast them into the abyss. I turned and looked at M, her white bull face
glowing softly in the moonlight.
“Always takes my breath away,” she said, dimly in
the wind, quietly enough that the dwarf hadn't heard her. I nodded.
“Plenty of time for gawking later!” yelled Madoran.
M nodded, and we turned right along the ledge, against the wind, and
began slowly picking our way north.
Katy M led the way, testing each stretch of ledge
before we moved onto it. I went second, and Madoran brought up the rear.
The ledge was narrower at spots, where it had crumbled away days or
decades before. The whole thing looked to have been carved out of the
mountain face, by the same sure hands that had hollowed out the spiral
staircase. I asked, and Madoran confirmed it.
* * *
Storm City receded out of view behind us as we
wound our way along the mountain range's spine. After several hours of
slow progress, as our mountain ridge's peaks were no longer the only
ones in view, the cliffs on either side of us began to be less severe,
spotted with grass here and there. Soon the wind was lessening and the
ledge broadening, until we were striding northeast and upwards through a
mountain meadow. We were in the mountains now, not perched precariously
at their edge.
We were above the tree line, but there were
sporadic clumps of underbrush in the meadows. Though the air smelled
different, the rolling grasses in the moonlight reminded me of my
homeland at night. Without quite meaning to, I began quietly humming. It
was a lullaby, from my calfhood. It floated above the meadow, and I
closed my eyes for a moment, pretending it wasn't my own voice singing
it, but my mother’s.
I opened my eyes. Katy M’s husky, baritone voice
had joined mine, humming a harmony which I had never heard but which fit
beautifully. I glanced at her. She was looking off into the distance,
lost in thought. It was how I must have looked a moment before. I began
to sing the words, as I remembered them.
“Husha-bye,
don’t you cry
go to
sleepy little baby.
When you
wake, you shall find
all the
pretty little calves.”
M looked at me, strangely, not singing, but she
continued humming the harmony.
“Dapple and
grey, auburn and bay,
All the
pretty little calves.
“Way down
yonder, in the meadow,
Someone’s
calf is crying, Mammy.
Birds and
the butterflies, flutter ‘round his eyes,
Someone’s
calf is crying, Mammy.
“Dapple and
grey, auburn and bay,
All the
pretty little calves.
“That’s all I remember,” I said lamely. “My mother
used to sing me to sleep with it. She told me it was originally sung by
a servant-woman, who had been forced to leave her own calf and sing her
master’s calf to sleep.”
“That tune had other words when I learned it,” said
the other tauren, “although those were beautiful.”
“Other words?” I said. Madoran had fallen slightly
behind us, listening in respectful silence.
“It’s a very old song,” she said, “from one of the
old tauren tribes, back when we were a nomadic people.” She was silent
for a moment, and then began singing. It was the same melody, but the
words were in a language that sounded like my native tongue but wasn’t.
I listened in silence as we walked.
“It goes on for many verses,” she said, after a
bit. “It’s a dirge, a song of mourning, in Old Taurahe. A mother is
singing about her son, a warrior named Beran Thunderhorn, who fought in
wars against the centaurs. Each verse is a great deed that he performed:
saving his brother’s calves, killing enemies by the dozen, with his bare
hands after his mace breaks, saving his village, killing the enemy
chief, bringing glory to his tribe. He dies, though, at the hands of the
centaur chief’s son. The refrain is his mother saying, she doesn’t care
about glory or heroes, she wants her son back. I learned it when I was a
calf,” she concluded. "Reminds me of home."
I didn’t respond. I missed home too, though. We
walked on, lost in thought.
* * *
The sky began to grow lighter in front of us. We
were heading east now. Madoran noted the impending dawn, and a few
minutes later we had set up camp under a rocky overhang. We broke out
supplies, and in a few minutes more I had boar meat roasting over a
little fire.
I set my cat carrier on the ground and opened it.
Ajax poked his head out curiously, sniffing the predawn mountain chill,
and stretched. He padded to the edge of the campfire, and sat staring at
the boar meat.
“Cute cat,” said the dwarf. “Where’d you get ‘im?”
“Bought him three years ago, off a crazy cat lady
in Storm City. She disappeared,” I continued. “Never did find out what
happened to her.”
“What’s his name?” asked M, rummaging in her own
bag. I told her. She pulled a folded, curled-up shape out of her bag. It
lifted its tiny green head, snuffed, and blinked sleepily. It unfolded
its leathery wings, and hopped out of M’s hands into the air, flapping
about lazily. Ajax looked at it with some alarm, and scooted away to the
opposite side of the fire.
“Cute dragonling, M!” I exclaimed. I’d seen a black
one, some years ago, flapping about after a dignitary I was tracking for
the Scarlet Resurrection. They hadn’t told me why I was tailing him, but
his body was discovered face-down in the Storm City canals two days
later. The dragonling had remained, guarding the body, spitting fire at
anyone who tried to get near.
The little green dragon flapped over towards me,
and landed on the ground for a moment, sniffing my hooves, before taking
off again. M smiled at him. “I rescued his egg from a raptor almost
twenty years ago. He imprinted on me, and has been eating nonstop ever
since.” The tiny dragonkin screeched a high-pitched screech, and then
burped a little puff of green fire. “I named him Screech,” she said, as
close to affectionately as I’d seen the gruff bull do anything.
“Rescued him, did you?” said the dwarf. “They’re
quite popular with the aristocracy, an’ the aristocracy don’t rescue
theirs, they buy ‘em for a pretty penny. An’ do you know how the vendors
get 'em?” He paused for dramatic effect. “They slaughter hundreds of
grown-up dragonkin, and cut them open! And once in a great while, one of
‘em has an egg inside, that’s not crushed, and that’s just ready to be
hatched.”
I raised my eyebrows at the grisly image.
“Aye,” muttered the dwarf darkly, “they cut them
out of their own mothers.”
“It’s true,” said M distastefully. “I did rescue
Screech, though,” she added, just a bit defensively.
Ajax had crept slowly around the campfire to where
Screech was hovering, tail dangling. The cat gathered himself, back end
twitching, ears perked, and after a moment of careful planning he leapt
up and swatted the whelpling’s tail. Screech screeched, and flapped up
out of reach. He landed on top of Katy M’s head, hissing like a
teakettle and glaring at the offending cat, who, instead of reacting,
had begun grooming himself.
The pair maintained their fragile truce through the
end of breakfast. Ajax licked my fingers, and Screech snapped scraps of
boar meat out of the air, tossed to him by M. Then, satisfied and
exhausted, the dwarf, the dragonling, the cat and I curled up under the
rocky overhang, and fell fast asleep.
* * *
Katy M shook me awake around noon. Madoran was
dumping water on the fire’s embers, and our supplies were packed. Even
Ajax had woken up before me, and he was perched perkily on top of my
bag. I got up and crated him.
The day’s trek took us across the mountain range’s
spine. We shivered in the wind, and waded through knee-deep snow which
hadn’t melted yet and which might not melt before it snowed again in
late summer. My legs had started the day stiff and painful, but they
felt better as we walked and day wore on.
We rested at sunset, at our trek’s highest point,
looking at the far distances of Az fading off into the bright west and
the dusky east. Far behind us, we could see a green smear on the
horizon, which was the northern reaches of Elwynn Forest. The mountains
glowed orange in the sunset.
We began the descent down into the night-fallen
half of the world. While the steep bits were hard on the knees, we let
the walk be a controlled fall and made good time. By the time the moon
was lighting our way, we were nearly to the tree line. Ahead of us and
slightly south, the darkness was speckled with red points of light, what
looked like campfires.
“The refugees of Storm City,” said Katy M,
following my eyes into the moonlit darkness. “Lakeshire has taken in as
many as it can hold, and the rest are sleeping under the stars tonight.
Most of them are never going to return home.” She spoke quietly, and not
particularly to anybody. There was suppressed regret in her voice.
Never return home? I thought. I had seen buildings
burning, but was it that bad? What forces had simmered in the Storm City
underworld that it could change, completely and irrevocably, in one
night? I wanted to ask her more, what she knew, how she knew it, what
she thought and felt and had planned, but the dwarven prince was not in
her confidence.
“That’s a bit dour, don’t you think?” said the
dwarf, echoing my thoughts. M didn’t respond.
* * *
We marched on, through the night. The trees thinned
a bit, and the rock outcroppings had begun to take on a distinct reddish
hue. I had been in the area a couple of times before: we had entered
Redridge.
We skirted north of Lakeshire and the flickering
encampments. A short ways east of the town we came upon a road, running
across our path. “I was worried it wasn’t here any more,” said the
dwarf. We turned left, onto it, heading north.
The sky was beginning to grow light again, and I
was beyond exhausted. I mentioned it.
“Oh, me too,” said Madoran. “We’ve got a
destination tonight, though, an’ we’ll sleep better there than we will
under the stars.”
* * *
As we marched along, we kept awake by singing songs
we knew, teaching each other bits and pieces, choruses so we could sing
along. Storm City, during my time there, had not been a place which
fostered such culture, but I remembered more tribal songs from my
calfhood, and drinking and brawling songs from my days in Orcmar.
Madoran knew his own fair share of drinking songs (most of which
translated perfectly into the rhythm of the road), as well as a dwarven
ballad, telling the story of Thane Madoran, the Bronzebeard clan’s
patriarch, who banished the Dark Iron Dwarves from Ironforge almost a
thousand years before. “My namesake, that one,” said the dwarf proudly,
“in case you didn’t notice.”
The sun had well risen, and Madoran and I had run
out of songs, when the road ended abruptly. Its terminus lay between two
steep cliffs, at a huge, ancient, black gate, long since fallen to ruin.
We picked our way carefully over its corpse, avoiding sharp and snaggled
edges. “Beaten down by an army of men, four hundred years ago,” called
the dwarf, back to us. “Dwarves helped.”
“So did Orcs,” said M to me. “There was a great
battle to defeat the evil of the place, and afterwards, the Blackrock
volcano went dead.”
“Just up ahead now,” Madoran said once we had
landed on the soft grass on the other side. There was no more road to
follow, but the late-morning sun and the rolling grasses made the walk
almost pleasant. We followed the eastern red-rock cliff, and before
long, a few buildings came into view on a small rise in the distance.
“There’s bread and beer and sleep!” said the dwarf, pointing.
As we got closer, I noticed a wall of spiked logs
around the base of the hill, with a gate on the area’s north side. And
at the top of the hill, low to the ground, I could see a row of roosts,
with an enormous, beautiful, golden-brown bird sitting in each one, head
tucked under wing. “Griffins!” I exclaimed. I’d only seen them in books.
“Of course!” said Madoran cheerily. “Ye didn’t
think we’d be walkin to Ironforge, did ye?”
A dwarf, sporting a winged helmet and a thick red
beard, greeted us at the gates. He bowed low to Madoran, and said,
“Welcome, my lord, to Morgan’s Rest.”
“Our rest, as well,” said M. For the first time
since we’d met, she looked like she wanted nothing more than to lie down
and sleep. I shared the sentiment.
The nearest building was an inn, built into the
ground, and we walked down a set of broad stone steps to enter it. A
trio of young dwarves took our cloaks and our bags, and bid us follow
them to our three rooms. A plate piled high with piping hot venison was
waiting on a small table in mine. I let Ajax out to play, and sat
heavily on the bed. I pulled the plate and accompanying (tiny) fork to
myself, and devoured the food ravenously. No more than ten minutes
later, I was lying down and fast asleep.
XI
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