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XVIII
The next night’s journey didn’t begin until
midnight. I felt better, fully healed and fully rested. We walked
north, through the swamplands, through the singing peepers and the
croaking frogs and, occasionally, a distant, unidentified, chillingly
predatory screech.
Dawn came, blank and dreary, and it brought with it
no change in our surroundings. “Do these swamplands go on forever?” I
asked.
“Patience,” said Allyndil, sounding for a moment
like the Murloc, soothing my impatient curiosity so many nights ago. I
wondered where he was now, if he knew that his partner in Law had passed
on. “We’re a couple hours from the north end of this continent,” added
the elf.
Madoran’s faith in the elf’s knowledge of the land
turned out to be well-placed, and a couple hours later, we emerged from
the fetid land, into some low, rolling hills. The ground reminded us
what it felt like to not sink into it with a squelch, and the air began
clearing. The morning sun shown clearly again. We moved into the
hills, towards a point of which the Elf was perfectly sure, and, an hour
later, we quite suddenly came to the edge of the world. In front of us
was a pair of ancient stone pillars, with rubble between them as though
the pillars had once been an arch. We clambered over the rubble.
Beyond it was the first hundred feet of what was once a mighty bridge,
ending jaggedly and abruptly. Beyond that was nothing. Below us was a
high cliff, and below the cliff was the ocean. Seagulls soared about
below us, preening or catching fish for lunch.
“The Thandol Span,” said Madoran. “Once the
greatest bridge in the world, half a mile long. Built by my fathers in
ancient times, and destroyed by my fathers in less ancient times, during
the Scourge war, after the northlands went sour.” He pointed. Far in
the distance, across the shallow sea, another cliff rose out of the
ocean, tipped with what looked to be the ancient terminus of our
crumbled bridge: that land was Lordaeron, and a thick pall hung over
it. I shivered.
“How do we get there?” I said, hoping the answer
was, We can’t, let’s go home.
“Dive!” said Madoran.
I looked at him in alarm. “Are you nuts?” I said.
The elf laughed.
“Aye,” said the dwarf sadly, as though disappointed
that cliff-diving a thousand feet into uncertain waters was a bad idea.
He gestured us forward, and as we reached the end
of the bridge, he clambered over its right edge. There, out of sight
from the mainland, were the ruins of an enclosed spiral staircase, long
exposed to the weather and sprouting grass between the cracks. The
enclosure stuck off the edge of the bridge, which was much thicker than
I’d supposed it to be – thick enough to house substructure, I thought.
Madoran was scampering down into the stairwell, which twisted him
quickly out of sight. Allyndil, who looked as confused as I felt,
looked at me and shrugged. Then he vaulted in after the dwarf.
I looked down, past the weeds growing out of
cracks, past the crumbling stones and mortar which held the stairwell,
to the thousand-foot drop below. Swallowing my fear of heights,
squeezing my eyes shut, I forced one leg over the edge of the bridge.
Hoof met stone, and I pressed down: it felt stable enough. I lowered my
other leg, and carefully descended the stairs.
True to my hunch, the staircase led to a set of
rooms built into the underside of the bridge, full of explosives, of all
things. They were covered in dust, and Madoran reassured me that they
had been long since rendered inert. We walked down an open stairway
within the explosives room, down a level. I forced myself not to think
of the unknown strength of the stone between me and a thousand feet of
seagulls.
We stood in front of the chamber’s back wall, the
one nearest the cliff. “The day the bridge blew is the stuff of legend
now,” said Madoran, feeling across the wall in what by now I recognized
was a search for secret passages. “They tell us stories of a tide of
zombies and worse washing across the Span, and a few heroic engineers on
suicide missions to set precision charges and blow them before the
Scourge could reach our side of the bridge. They succeeded. The
Shallow Sea’s floor is covered with its rubble and the army of the
undead, blown to their doom.” He found what he was looking for, and a
stone in the wall slid inward with a click. “The Scourge was eventually
defeated, of course. This bridge was not the greatest loss in that
war.” The elf closed his eyes for a moment, in pain at some private
thought. “Luckily for us,” continued the dwarf, feeling about in the
stone recess, “the holy soldiers who fought that fight – the Argent
Dawn, before it fell apart,” he said, glancing pointedly at me, “found
it necessary to build a new, less visible, less accessible access to the
northlands.” The wall swung open. Madoran clapped in triumph, and
strode into the darkness beyond.
“After you,” said the elf.
We had moved from the bridge’s substructure into
the cliff, and it was pitch black. “Built before the goblins
electrified everything,” explained Madoran, “and built secretly.” The
dwarf called occasional warnings back to us – “Turn left,” “Staircase
going down!” – but otherwise there was no conversation. The staircase
was made of wide, easy, shallow stairs, and ran straight, heading (what
I was fairly certain was) west. We descended it for an eternity in the
blackness.
* * *
I had fallen completely into the rhythm of the
three distinct footfalls echoing in the silence – light elf, heavy
dwarf, and my own hooves – when Madoran called, “Bottom, turn right and
level out!” Then, “Stop fer a moment.” I stopped.
There was the sound of stone grinding on stone, and
then, ahead, the darkness tore open, split by a slice of bright light
coming from the floor. It expanded into a square hole, with a
Madoran-shaped shadow across it, as the dwarf pulled the stone covering
aside. He gestured us forward. The elf ducked through the trap door
first, dangling for a moment, swinging back and forth with a grunt
before letting go.
I squeezed myself through, and hung by my hands,
into a wide, metallic tunnel running ahead and behind me. Exactly in
the middle of the tunnel’s floor was a single, thick track running its
length. Along its walls were twin platforms, narrow, lined with twin
guardrails, and studded with rusty pipes and old, broken gauges. The
bright light which had so blinded me moments before was behind me,
casting long and lengthening shadows indistinctly ahead of me into
darkness.
“Just drop,” called the elf from behind me and to
the side, up on the left ledge. “You’re big enough.” I did as told,
and turned around.
The source of light in the tunnel turned out to be
its very walls and ceiling. A few dozen paces along the tunnel, and for
hundreds of paces beyond that, the dull metal turned to brilliant,
shimmering glass, beyond which was beautiful, shimmering sunlit water.
We were out of the cliff and under the ocean.
Allyndil pointed me to a ramp, a few feet back into
the darkness, and I ascended onto the uncomfortably narrow platform.
Madoran had slid the stone trap door shut and dropped down behind me;
he, too, scampered up.
We walked out into the ocean, alternating between
picking our way slowly along the rusty platform and staring up and out
in wonder. The bottom of the glass was even with the ocean floor, and
rocks and sand mixed with seaweed waving gently in the currents.
Sunlight lanced down through the wind-whipped surface, landing in
playfully modulating patterns on anything and everything. A hammerhead
shark swam lazily past, and off to our left sat the aging hulk of a
sunken ship.
Madoran recited the tunnel’s history for us as we
walked. “In the early days of the Scourge war, when the races were
still squabbling among themselves, the necessities of quickly moving
troops between fronts presented the dwarven-human Alliance with a
challenge.”
“Elven, too,” interjected Allyndil.
“Aye, there were still some elves left,” muttered
Madoran. Outside, the hammerhead darted suddenly into a forest of
seaweed, coming up moments later looking pleased with itself.
“Night-elven,” countered Allyndil easily.
“Aye, and the night elves,” said Madoran, “whom we
haven’t seen hide nor hair of in half a millennium. Some heroes
they.” Allyndil grunted in what sounded to me like agreement. I’d
heard of the night elves before: they were generally believed to be
a dead race.
“Anyway,” huffed the dwarf. “The gnomes, as it
turned out, were the ones to rise to this challenge, by way of thanks to
their new dwarven hosts: they built a tram, entirely underground, all
the way from Ironforge to what was then Stormwind. It was one of the
first places electricity was used en masse.” He paused for a
beat. “During design and construction, though, the gnomes screwed their
calculations right up, and the tunnel they built overshot to here, miles
off-course. They didn’ realize it until the tunnel flooded with
saltwater, drowning a fair few of their best crew. The gnome president
at the time, a white-haired little man with an eye for flare, decided
that the tunnel would proceed from that point, bending slowly back
around to Ironforge, out under the water, as a living monument to the
engineers and workers who had died.”
“An effective one,” said the elf, gazing up at the
ocean above.
“Why didn’t we just take this tunnel here from
Ironforge?” I asked, memories of the bitter cold nights fresh in my
head.
“Hasn’t been used in centuries,” Madoran replied.
“It’s collapsed along most of its length. This stretch was built to
last, as having a small length of tunnel lost to stone is more fixable
than having the whole thing flooded with ocean. It was also maintained
longer, as it is part of this route to Lordaeron.” I shivered, wishing
he’d stop saying that word.
The ocean became rockier as we progressed. Here, I
could see the subtle curvature of the tunnel, bending slowly off ahead
and behind us.
Before long, Madoran halted. He had been counting
slowly, out loud, for five minutes, and now he stared intently at our
platform’s floor. “Yup!” he said, after a moment, and without further
explanation he vaulted over the platform’s guardrail to the tunnel’s
floor below. The elf did the same, and I shrugged and followed.
Madoran had little trouble finding his secret door
this time: he glanced over the floor tiles, finding the one dark purple
one and pressing it. It receded, and he rotated it. There was another
click. He lifted a trap door open, revealing another dark hole, and
gestured us down. With a last glance at the sun-lit ocean above us, we
climbed in.
We were in another tunnel now, danker than the last
but just as pitch-black, and heading (I assumed) north. It was lower
than the last one, and I had to walk stooped. With our return to pitch
blackness, the will to conversation died once more, and we moved
silently through the thick darkness.
* * *
Hours on, we stopped for food. It was difficult
rustling through our packs in the dark, and I offered to light some
tinder. Madoran forbad it. “Too far to go and not enough o’ that stuff
anyway,” he muttered. So we sat on the tunnel’s wet floor, munching
blindly on cold bread.
We finished, repacked, and headed off down the
tunnel in silence again.
* * *
Another endless stretch of darkness, and then there
was the noise of a toe stubbing on stone. Madoran hissed in pain. Then
he said, “Staircase goin up.”
These stairs wound erratically through the
mountain, not turning back on themselves like a normal staircase, but
bending here and there as though feeling their way haltingly to the
surface. Eventually, as I was certain that I would go mad from the
darkness, Madoran called a halt, and, after a moment of feeling around
on a wall, he clicked open what I hoped would be the last secret door I
would ever see, and led us through.
* * *
We stood at the top of the cliff which had been
visible on the horizon that morning. Thick, unhappy clouds hung heavy
above us, and a stiff wind whipped up from the ocean below. The cliff
we had stood on that morning was barely visible on the southern horizon,
and the ruined Span stood proudly, far off to the east. To the south,
over the ocean, we could still see the sky, burning red to the west.
There, the sun was setting slowly, below the reaches of the northland
shroud, turning the underside of the clouds to pinks and purples.
“Enjoy it,” said Allyndil grimly. “It’s the last sunset you’ll see in
these lands.”
The cliff itself was barren, made of jagged rocks
and bristly, wind-beaten grasses. Thirty paces behind us, inland, were
the beginnings of a thick, dark, twisted-looking forest, stretching as
far as I could see in either direction. It looked unpleasant.
We camped on the wind-beaten cliff. In a nook
between jagged rocks, I set stones in a circle for a fire while Madoran
searched for fuel. Between us, we built a magnificent fire, a rousing
vote in favor of the sunset and against the darkness that lay ahead of
us.
Allyndil disappeared into the woods and returned,
as the sun sunk to the distant horizon, with a pair of lean rabbits.
The fire was now roaring, and we skinned them, spit them and roasted
them slowly. “Reduces the toughness,” said Allyndil, knowingly.
It had limited effect. The meat we managed to peel
off the rabbit bones was sparse, and by no means tender. It did the
job, though, and I lay back against a rock, feeling at least satisfied
enough to drift into sleep.
Suddenly, a searing pain lanced through my head, as
though something were tearing apart my mind and stitching it back
together. I cried out, clutching my head. Madoran and Allyndil leapt
to their feet.
“Horse,” said the elf, distantly, through my
intensely ringing ears. “Are you alright?”
For some reason, I put my hand in my pocket. It
closed around a piece of parchment, and I pulled it out: it was the one
I had taken from the desk in Ironforge. It hadn’t changed: the one,
large symbol on the front, written in black ink, a line, with half an
arrow at one tip, bisecting a circle – so similar to the writing I’d
seen on the wall in the mountain back in Storm City, and to the figures
which had splashed themselves across the sky in my moment of vertigo on
the griffin ride to Ironforge.
My headache intensified. Madoran and Allyndil
gathered around me, but my eyes were locked on the parchment.
“Find me,” it read.
I did a double take. The symbol, which moments
before had been perfectly meaningless to me, now very clearly said “Find
me” in its alien language.
I jumped up, and pushed passed Allyndil, clutching
the parchment. Quite sure of what I was doing, I plunged into the
evil-looking forest, head pounding, ears ringing.
Another symbol leapt out at me, scratched into a
tree trunk. “Warmer,” it read. My head felt ready to explode. Another
symbol, depressions in moss: “colder”. I veered right, following the
symbols, flashing Warmer and Colder at me from trees and stones and
patterns in leaves. The ringing in my ears crescendoed as I entered a
small glade, and I tripped on nothing and fell to my hands and knees and
the ringing ceased –
“Hello, Horse,” said a voice in the silence.
I looked up. Standing in the dusky clearing was a
dwarf, with a thick black beard and an impossibly long, thick droopy
black moustache. He wore thick denim pants and a dark blue shirt, with
an azure blue travel cloak on over it all. Perched on his head was an
old, ungainly, silver horned helm. He was smoking a cigarette. Of the
hundred questions I had, I picked the most immediate: “What were the–” I
started, but the dwarf interrupted.
“My name’s Ordinn,” he said down to me, “I know
you’ve heard of me. We don’t have long, so shut up and listen up.”
Ironforge’s ex-administrator, I thought, and
another agent of the Law. I wondered if he knew that Katy M was dead.
He spoke with rapid and flippant authority, though, and I kept silent.
“You may be irrationally terrified of this place,”
he said, “but you have no honest idea what you’re getting into. You're walking
into great danger, and we wanted to make sure that you didn’t walk in
entirely blind.”
“We?” I interrupted.
Ordinn pulled hard on his cigarette, creasing his
brow in annoyance. Then, after a beat, he said, “What did I just say
about shutting up?” He pulled again. “We can’t help out directly with
this stage of your journey, for a bunch of reasons which you’ll probably
never figure out, which is fine, one of which is that Madoran probably
isn’t very happy with me right now. Anyway, we’ll be helping out behind
the scenes where I can, but it’s not much.” He pulled on his cigarette
again before continuing. “Your role in this big game is about to unfold
pretty clearly, so all you have to do to pass the test is follow it. As
long as you do that, and aren’t an idiot, we’re fairly certain you’ll
make it. An unfortunate part of the plan, and it sucks, but stick to
it.” He paused for a pull. “An unfortunate part of the plan is that
even given the opportunity, you can’t try to save anyone, got it?” He
jabbed his finger at me, emphasizing each word. “Your eventual goal is
to get to the capital city of Lordaeron. Good luck with that,” and he
winked, smiling humorlessly. He pulled on the cigarette. “That’s all.
Oh, one more thing. You’re being followed. That big brilliant ‘Look at
me!’ bear move you pulled back in Ironforge got you noticed, and some
people that have been after you for the better part of three years have
finally picked up your scent again.”
He could only be referring to my Orcmar creditors,
and to Fang’s promise to shield me from them as long as he could. My
eyes widened and nose grew cold.
“Your trip through the Argent Dawn tunnel bought
you some time, but there’s only so many places a big bull could be
heading in the northlands, so you won’t stay hidden for long. Again,
I’ll do what I can. But you keep your head on straight. Got it?”
I nodded.
“Seriously. No liquor. Too dangerous for you to
go stumbling around drunk, and we really do want you to pass this
thing.”
“Pass?” I said.
“Survive,” he responded. He pulled on his
cigarette.
Behind me in the woods, towards the cliff, there
were shouts, from Madoran and Allyndil, searching for me and getting
closer.
“Well, gotta go,” said Ordinn shortly. “Do me a
favor, and don’t tell them,” and he jerked his head towards Madoran’s
shouting, “about me.”
“What should I tell them?” I said, desperately.
He shrugged. “Think quick. It’s a skill you’ll
have to develop one of these days. Sorry about the no time for
questions, I’ve heard how curious you are. You won’t see me again, at least not for a long time.” He
stepped over to me, and snatched my parchment away, the one with the
mysterious symbol, the one I had taken from his desk days before. “I’ll
take that back,” he grunted, and extinguishing his cigarette on it.
“Good luck,” he said, sounding finalistic. “You’re sure as hell gonna
need it.” He turned and walked to the edge of the clearing.
I stared dumbly. Then, “Katy M is dead!” I called
after him.
He paused for a moment, facing away. Then he
turned back around. His face wore his humorless smile again. “I’m sure
she’s in a better place now,” he said. Then he turned away again, and
disappeared into the evil, twisted, night-fallen woods.
END OF PART THREE.
Part Four
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