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Part Three - The Battle of Ironforge
XIII
“Set your charge, and then wait for my signal,”
whispered General Madoran through the murky darkness to a goggled gnome
engineer whose name I had forgotten. The gnome nodded, and scampered up
the dark stone stairway in front of us, around its corner and out of
sight. Three other goggled gnomes scampered past us after him, each
wearing long, colorful robes and armed with tiny gnome-sized wands.
Three heavily armored dwarves wearing stolen red tabards followed them.
The last red-clad dwarf stopped where the staircase bent, watching
above. Madoran turned to the small battalion of stout dwarves and one
gnome behind him, armored green and bearing heavy hammers across their
backs. “You know what to do,” he said to them. “If you think our cover
has been compromised, send the alarm back, but quietly!” He glanced up
at me, hulking, next to him, nearly the height of the stairway, my arm
in a sling. “If Beren does his job, we won’t have to worry about that,”
he muttered. He glanced up at the cave’s high, jagged crystal ceiling,
as though saying a prayer, then down at the tightly-wound pocket watch
clutched in his hand. It read five minutes past one.
I had woken up fifteen hours earlier, on a dwarven
bed, in a cold, stone, dwarven building. A pale elven priest had been
tending to me. Madoran was summoned the moment I’d opened my eyes, and
came running in a minute later with a huge mug full of hot mulled cider,
relieved to see me alive and awake. “Was sure we’d lost ye when ye
jumped off the griffin,” he said, handing me the mug. I sat up
slightly, painfully, and took a sip. It warmed my insides, and I began
feeling better immediately. “If ye’d died, I’d’ve berated yer corpse
for bein a damn fool, but ye acted in the heat of the moment and ye
lived to tell the tale.”
The heat of the moment, I thought, and a swell of
grief welled up inside me. “Is she…”
Madoran shook his head sadly. “You saw her fall,”
he said. “We would be fools to hold out in hope where there was none.”
I nodded. “It is a great loss to all of us,” he said gently. Then he
stood up, bowed, and left. There was no time for mourning: for now, at
least.
In contrast to the other ancient capitals,
Ironforge was still home to few but dwarves and gnomes: because, as
Madoran put it, “Who else'd voluntarily live in a giant cave with lava?”
The Stone King, of course, had fallen silent and his representative
disappeared two weeks previous, at the same time as Fang the Tooth was
disappearing himself from Storm City. In the power vacuum which ensued,
the Bronzebeard family had attempted to reassert its ancestral command,
but with their leader and figurehead off in Storm City, they were
confused and disorganized. A quasi-religious cult who called themselves
the Heralds of the Titans swept them aside, declaring all Bronzebeards
to be in league with the Stone King and traitors. They secured the
city, banishing Madoran’s family and his loyalists, and anyone who would
not declare themselves an ally of the cult. The gnomes had chosen
banishment en masse, having pledged eternal gratitude and fealty to the
family of Magni Bronzebeard hundreds of years prior when an unfortunate
radiation incident had rendered their own homeland uninhabitable. (“Oh
great,” Madoran had muttered good-naturedly when he’d heard this news.)
All the exiles had placed themselves at the prince’s command, and
Madoran had been busy. I’d learned all this in bits and pieces,
overheard snatches of hurried conversations, and from Madoran himself
when he had half a moment’s pause to speak to me.
The building I’d woken up in was within the cluster
of buildings which Madoran had referred to as the airstrip, high up in
the Ironforge mountains, where our green-clad allies had taken off
from. In the nearly two days that I’d slept after my fall, the place
had blossomed with activity. Madoran had dispatched messengers: squads
of dwarven soldiers had snuck up from their refugee camps in the valley
below; human and elven allies had been gathered; and a small corps of
gnome mages had formed, studying and meditating together on top of one
of the low stone buildings.
With the aid of the elf, whose name was Allyndil, I
was walking again within an hour and fully healed by that evening. Only
my shoulder stubbornly refused to be healed by magic, and the elf tied a
sling for my right arm until it repaired itself.
That was how I stood: arm in a sling, breathless
and waiting, at the bottom of a stone staircase carpeted in ancient,
faded, threadbare carpet, the sounds of gnomish rustling and scraping
drifting down towards us from – what I was told was – a very thick, very
old, nearly impenetrable door above us.
* * *
Madoran had called a council earlier in the
evening, with his closest and most trusted, to lay out his strategy. He
had put Beren Bronzebeard, his younger cousin, in charge of an aerial
assault on Ironforge’s front gate. One of the low buildings had turned
out to be the entrance to a small hangar, within which were five flying
machines, amazing contraptions the likes of which I’d only heard about,
never before seen.
Beren’s assault was to commence at an hour past
midnight. It was a dangerous time to fly, but a necessary one: the
frontal assault was merely a diversionary tactic. The hangar had carved
relatively recently into the mountain out of a much older tunnel, which
still existed, under a stone trap door at the back. This tunnel led
down, through the mountain, into a small network of rooms and tunnels
beneath Ironforge proper. This news, delivered by Madoran, was greeted
with surprise and much muttering by the other dwarves. I took this a
good sign that the back end assault, to begin exactly fifteen minutes
after Beren’s, would be a surprise to the separatists as well.
At the end of the meeting, Madoran had made a
pronouncement which surprised everyone present, including myself: he
would not be staying to retake his kingdom. Once the battle for
Ironforge was acceptably under way, in a day or two, he hoped, he would
be temporarily transferring command of the armies and the kingdom to
Beren (whom he made a general on the spot) and heading north on vital
business. He had bowed to the speechless Beren, professing his
confidence in the younger dwarf’s capabilities, and thanking him in
advance for his service to his family and the people of Ironforge. The
rest of us had been dismissed to rest up for the coming battle, while
General Madoran and General Beren had cloistered themselves in close
discussion.
* * *
Madoran stared at his watch, nodding slightly to
himself as the seconds ticked by. The sounds from the stairwell ceased,
and after a moment the dwarf on the stairs turned and nodded to me. I
nudged Madoran, who didn’t respond.
The only sounds to break the near silence were
breathing beneath armor, the occasional stifled cough, and, some five
minutes on, a single faint drip of water, echoing up through some deep
unseen cleft. Slightly above the silence, blending into our thoughts,
was the regular ticking of Madoran’s watch.
I looked down at it. It read just shy of fifteen
minutes. He held a fist over his head, and the red-clad dwarf in the
stairwell did the same. The sudden increase in tension in the cave was
palpable.
Then, Madoran’s fist pumped once in the air, and
the stairwell dwarf’s fist pumped once in the air, and a
hoarsely-whispered “Fire in the hole!” came from above, and the
stairwell dwarf ducked away, and a sharp crack! of an explosion
and a shower of stone debris rained down on him, and he charged up the
stairs into the cloud of stone dust, followed by General Madoran, and a
battalion of green-clad dwarfs, and me. Above us came the sound of a
stifled scuffle, a few half-shouts. We rounded the stairway’s corner,
and at its top was a small, jagged hole in the darkness, disappearing
for a moment as the dwarf ahead of us clambered through it, and we
charged up towards it, and reached it, and Madoran nodded to me and
clambered through himself. The dwarven battalion was charging up the
stairs behind us, and I motioned one dwarf through the hole in the door
at a time, in quick succession. The last one scooted through, and the
battalion’s lone gnome stopped on the last stair, stood at attention and
saluted me. I nodded back, got down on all fours, and, mindful of being
watched, squeezed painfully through the narrow, blasted hole in the
stone.
The other side of the hole seemed bright as
daylight to my sensitized eyes. We were in a round, high chamber, with
a pair of dwarf-sized desks on each wall and a throne at its far side.
Immediately to my right, opposite the throne was a high, empty doorway,
leading to an enormous empty cavern, glowing red. Two of the three
red-clad dwarves we’d brought stood at attention outside the chamber,
having replaced the separatist guards which had stood there moments
before. With luck, we would avoid arousing immediate suspicion.
I glanced quickly around the chamber. The gnome
mages and the green-clad dwarven warriors stood or kneeled or sat around
the inside edge of the chamber, where they could not be easily seen from
the doorway. One dwarf – the first of the red-clad ones to have emerged
– and one gnome – one of the mages – lay unconscious or dead on the
ground, also against the wall, tended to by compatriots. Several large
burlap sacks lined the walls as well. Sticking out of each were four
sheep legs. With a distinctive pop, one of the sheep turned suddenly
back into a dwarf, who managed to shout half a muffled word before he
was knocked solidly over the head and unconscious. Madoran had given
strict orders that no dwarf or gnome was to be killed, if at all
avoidable.
We all stood still for a moment, listening, holding
our breath. There was no sign that the separatist dwarf had been heard.
One dwarf from each side of the chamber, the
sergeants, nodded affirmative at me. I glanced up at the throne.
Madoran sat on it, looking, for the first time since I’d met him,
regal. He nodded to me, unsmiling. I knelt at the hole in the great
door which we’d climbed through, and whispered, “All clear, move them
forward!” to the gnome waiting on the other side. The gnome whispered,
“Yes sir!” and scampered back down the stairs. I moved quickly around
the edge of the chamber, and stood behind Madoran’s throne, out of
sight.
Then I breathed. My shoulders slumped, and I
realized that, from the moment we had arrived in the chamber below,
through the whole operation, I had been terrified out of my wits.
I breathed deeply, slowing my heart rate back down.
We were all silent, waiting and listening. Faintly, in the distance, I
could hear the sounds of a pitched battle, Beren’s five flying machines
against the griffin army of Ironforge. Nearer to us, there was no sign
of movement.
We had achieved the operation’s primary objective:
securing a foothold within Ironforge. For now, we wanted to remain
undetected; when the larger force of dwarves and gnomes arrived below,
we would secure the throne room and strike out from a position of
strength. “Now what?” I whispered.
“D’you like secret ancient libraries?” Madoran
muttered. Then, after a moment in which I looked confused and Madoran
turned his ear against the cavern silence, he stood up, and beckoned me
to follow.
He whispered urgently to each dwarven sergeant,
reviewing the procedures should we be discovered. He signaled to the
gnomish engineer, who scooted back behind the high, broken door, to
begin laying precision charges along its lock and hinges. He stood for a
moment in the chamber’s doorway, looking back at me. I looked over his
head, finally taking a moment to absorb the view. It was an enormous,
domed cavern – the ceiling carved ornately, with too much detail to see
from such a distance – and there were two deep, dully glowing pits on
either side of the center aisle. Twin pillars stood from floor to
ceiling, one at the inner edge of each pit, black and organic as though
they had poured and cooled there out of liquid rock. At the very center
of the cavern was a huge anvil, glowing dully with internal heat. The
whole place was deserted. Madoran smiled proudly at me: this was his, or
would be his again soon.
Across the cavern from us was an enormous arched
hallway, falling back into the mountain. Within, in the dim, flickering
torchlight, I could barely make out what appeared to be an enormous bird
skeleton hanging from the ceiling. “That’s our destination,” said
Madoran quietly, pointing. “I don’t know how much distraction my cousin
has afforded us, so we have to be careful.” I nodded. “Stealthy, if you
will,” he said, looking piercingly at me. “Follow me.”
We scooted past our red-clad guards, towards the
center of the great cavern. I ran as quickly and as quietly as I could,
but hooves on stone make a distinct, insuppressible noise. We ducked
behind the far side of great glowing anvil, out of sight of the throne
room. Madoran looked at me with some perplexity. “Horse,” he said, “our
aim is stealth. Though I don’t know why, I know you keep it a secret,
and I respect that, but now would be a perfect time to shape-shift into
something a little bit quieter!” he concluded with exasperation. I
raised my eyebrows. “You were a big cat when you jumped off the bird. I
haven’t told anyone.”
Since fleeing Mulgore ten years ago, I had kept my
shapeshifting abilities a secret. It had started out as one part
paranoia, one part resentful distaste at the life I was running away
from, and one part a strange, tingling feeling that it would be in my
eventual self-interest to keep the fact that I could change into three
different animals a secret. I hadn’t told anyone in my time in Orcmar,
and in Storm City I had trusted only Rhy, Tidus and, for some reason, M,
when she had been a cheetah. The thought of Rhy made me miss
her, and wonder, again, where she was. Tidus I also missed, and hoped
that he’d made it out of Storm City. Katy M…. I had a flash of emotion.
It hurt from a depth in my soul that I hadn’t felt since my father had
died, when I was a calf. Why? I thought. I met her a week ago.
“Horse!” whispered Madoran sharply. There were
dwarven shouts echoing through the cave from somewhere behind us,
growing louder. I took a breath, shook my head and forced my mind back
to the situation. “Cat form! Now!” He spoke urgently but with command,
and I squeezed my eyes shut, and shifted. The dwarf prince and I
sprinted across the great cavern, past some shops that had been locked
up for the night, down the high hallway, across another narrow hallway
running parallel to the cavern, and under the enormous hanging bird
skeleton. We were in a museum: to our left and our right was a series of
cluttered exhibits, pottery and skeletons and artifacts, encased in high
glass cases. We ducked behind a column. The voices behind us had gotten
louder, and suddenly became clearer. They had entered the great cavern,
somewhere in the direction of the throne room. I prayed that our squad’s
presence wouldn’t be detected.
The voices got louder. They were coming across the
great cavern towards us, shouting and bantering in a language I
recognized as Dwarvish. “Why have all your dwarves spoken Common?” I
whispered to Madoran, shifting back.
“Because you were there, of course,” he whispered
back, shushing me. The dwarves were coming towards us, shouting
boisterously to each other. Madoran tensed up for a moment, and then
relaxed. My hand was on my mace, and I was taut. I realized I was
breathing loudly; I inhaled deeply, and held it. I realized I was
sweating. It suddenly occurred to me that we were alone in enemy
territory. The dwarves had come into the hallway leading to the museum,
and us.
But they continued their banter, tossing jumbles of
guttural syllables back and forth, turning down the narrow hallway,
curving away from us out of sight into the mountain. I let my breath
out.
“What were they talking about?” I asked.
“They were makin’ fun of the imperial guards,
saying they stand around outside the throne room all day doing nothing,
and are ranked higher and are paid better’n the lads that do the
fighting and the dying,” said Madoran. “They have a point.” He paused.
“They were goin home fer the night. Sounds like Beren’s air assault is
over. It did what we needed it to.”
XIV
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