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VI
“That was pretty stupid of you,” said a gravely
voice at the edge of my consciousness. I swam upwards towards it, until
I found myself back in my body, just under awake, and lying face-down on
something amazingly uncomfortable. There was a crackling noise, and I
smelled wood burning.
I opened my eyes.
The other tauren sat across a small campfire from
me. My body hurt, but I felt whole, nothing but muscle soreness and a
slight ache somewhere inside me. It felt as though the Tooth had
punctured my soul. I was lying on sticks and leaves. We were in the
woods.
I tried to sit up. Nope. Muscles really, really
sore.
“I can’t win,” I muttered.
“Not against me and Fang, you can’t, for damn
sure,” growled the other. That wasn’t what I’d meant.
“Look,” I said. “If you want my help, you have to
tell me what’s going on. This shroud of mystery you two are keeping me
in, I can’t do it. I came along partly because I had no choice, but
also because I wanted answers, to questions that everyone in Storm City
asks every day, and to ones that I hadn’t even known existed.”
M looked over at me and smiled, just a little.
“Fang knew that quite well,” she said. “Now you’ll be coming along
because we can only protect you from your past if you do. I guess I can
answer as many of your questions as I can now, since it’s not bait any
more.”
I went to grind my teeth in annoyance, but my jaw
was too sore. “What did you hit me with back there?” I said.
“Anger,” she said simply. “It’s a druid thing,”
she continued, staring deeply into the fire, her face devoid of
expression. “You wouldn’t know anything about it.”
I looked around. The woods were thick and
oppressive, but here around the fire they opened up. It lifted my
spirits a bit, and I tried to sit up again. I pushed myself up and
rolled into a sitting position. It hurt, but not as bad as the sticks
in my face.
“Where’s Fang?” I said.
“He was attacked,” she growled. “Or weren’t you
there?”
“Oh,” I said.
“He’s fine. As far as the Dawn knows, we were
attacked in our room by forces unknown, and I spirited you to safety.
Having missed us, they left Fang unconscious and disappeared.” She
glared at me slightly. “Quite a job you did,” she said, “waking the
whole damn place up. The Dawn isn’t the only organization that uses
that mansion, although it is the most secret.” Hence why they had spent
the entire night silencing me in the hallways.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lamely, and M harrumphed.
Then I remembered why I’d attacked Fang in the first place. “The Law,”
I said. “Tell me what it is.”
She looked down into the fire again, and her eyes
narrowed, focusing, as though she were reading distant memories in the
embers. She was silent for a time. Finally she looked up, at me.
“What is it to you?” she said.
“To me?” I paused. Then for a bit longer. It
wasn’t an easy question after all. “It’s the authority in Storm City.
It’s like a king and his whole government, except there’s no face, no
sense of pride in our own king, like in the old days. Except for Fang,
of course, and we were always afraid of him.” It was still a strange
feeling to be on a first-name basis with him. Then I remembered that I
had attacked him. I regretted it now, and I hoped we were still on a
first-name basis. “Which is funny,” I added, “because he was on our
side, wasn’t he? They always said if you had a problem with the Law you
should talk to the Murloc, he’d sort it out.”
The other tauren nodded slowly, but didn’t
respond. “M?” I said, after a moment.
M shook her big head, pulling herself out of a
thought I wasn’t privy to. “Do you remember your Orcmar days?” she
said. Sure I did. Not fondly. “Do you remember the Shadow Council?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was a group of seven people,
mostly Orcs, who ruled the place. They would pass their decrees up from
the Cleft, and that was… that was the law,” I said, and faltered. “And
we never saw them. Just their representatives.” In ten years I’d never
put it together. “It’s the same people, isn’t it, in both places. The
dwarves, too! I’ve heard!” A shadowy government, ruling the world and
pitting city-states against each other in a never-ending bid to keep
power. Amazing. “And you work for them!” I scrambled to my feet.
Then I sat back down on my rump, very hard. Muscles still hurt. “You
didn’t heal me very well.”
“What fun would that be?” growled M.
“I’m not going to work for world domination,” I
said bluntly. “I don’t like where this is going.”
“Good thing you’re almost completely wrong.” There
was a twinkle in M’s eyes, although her jaw was set hard. “The Law, the
Shadow Council, the dwarven Stone King, they are all connected, but the
Law isn’t people, it’s not a vast worldwide conspiracy. The Law doesn’t
care about power.” She paused, and looked back into the fire. “It is
power.” She spoke with reverence.
There was silence for a while, and night forest
noises. I was digesting what I had heard. All my life, whenever I’d
thought about the state of the world – which I’d done, not nearly enough
– I’d always compared the old days of Pride and Honor to the new days,
with its splintered, prideless world. But according to what I was
hearing now, it wasn’t splintered at all. Just, prideless. I felt sick
to my stomach.
“The Law is power,” I repeated. It had sounded
dramatic and meaningful when M said it, but hearing it from my own
mouth, it made no sense.
“It’s a force in the universe,” she replied after a
moment. “It has been moving and pushing events since the beginning,
since before the beginning of everything,” she said.
“The creators?” I said.
“Who do you think created the creators?” she said,
and winked.
Just hearing the phrase made my brain hurt. I spent
a moment trying to wrap my head around it, but down that road lay
madness, I decided. I looked at the other tauren, across the void,
filled with sparks, flying upwards from mere reaction to mere oblivion.
She knew what the Law was, but she couldn’t find words for it. That
alone told me something.
“To what end?” I asked, after a time. “Why is a
force which has no interest in power holding power in every major city
in the world?”
“The minor ones, too,” she said. Then paused. “For
thousands and thousands of years, this world was at peace. And then
there were wars, some of them just and some of them absurd, and
thousands and thousands of people died. There were wars over magic, and
wars over power, and wars over land, and survival, and so many things
besides.
"Then, six hundred years ago, the Law started
working towards peace, towards a breaking up of the old alliances. We
worked to slowly and carefully seize power everywhere, until the cities
of the world were each disunited and alone. For the first time, I think,
ever, the Law started reaching into the world and taking direct action,
enforcing its rules harshly and secretly. Fang was in Storm City merely
as a figurehead." She paused. "He was really bored, actually."
She was silent for a moment, but she wasn't
finished, just collecting her thoughts. I was staring at her, rapt
again.
"And now suddenly, this week, the Law is pulling
out. Out of Storm City; out of Orcmar; out of everywhere,
simultaneously. The agents of the Law are all moving back out into the
wilds again, adventuring again, doing real work. Fang's thrilled." She
cracked a tiny smile. Then she frowned and looked right at me. "And I
don’t know why, and none of us know why, but it serves the purpose of
the Law. It wants chaos, or lawlessness, something," she said. She
stopped, and looked back down into the fire, with a strange look on her
face, maybe bemusement. I wondered suddenly if Fang had kept some of
these answers from me simply because he didn't have them.
"There have always been agents of the Law," she
said, finally. "Me, Fang, Medivh, other names I’m sure you’ve never
heard, even Illidan, sometimes.” She gritted her teeth. “All of us, all
of our lives, have worked to shape the world, on blind faith the Law had
a plan.” She went silent. She looked at me, then down in the fire, then
up through the dark fingers of the trees, to where the always-full moon
was looking peacefully down upon the world. A branch in the fire cracked
loudly, and somewhere off in the forest behind the other tauren, some
creature startled and ran off through the underbrush. I watched her,
waiting.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “The Law, it’s
not a law. It’s a design. It’s the reason we all exist, the whole
purpose of all this.” She looked up at me, earnestly, gesturing around,
at the universe, I thought. “It’s not a force of good, or evil, after
all is said and done. It’s just a direction.”
“A purpose,” I muttered. Not a bad reward, plus
eighty silver, for going to investigate a missing murloc. Not bad at
all.
END OF PART ONE.
Part Two
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