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XIV
We stood up, carefully, and Madoran led the way
through the museum’s back doorway into a tall, dim, deep room lined with
books. The near end was rounded, and the bookshelves were ancient and
the books dusty. Farther along, the shelves were built of newer wood.
A balding dwarf with a gray beard sat at a table a
short way along the deep room, in a pool of electric light from the
table's reading lamp. His head was pillowed on his arms and he
snored quietly. Madoran looked at me, putting his thick finger to his
lips, and walked quietly over to the table. I followed quietly, on the
mercifully carpeted floor. Madoran sat down opposite the sleeping dwarf,
and smiled fondly. “Rothfus,” he said gently, “ye’ve fallen asleep on
the job again.”
The old dwarf grunted, rolling his head slightly,
and muttered something about using the damn card catalogue.
“Rothfus,” said Madoran, more firmly. “The books
I’m looking for aren’t in the card catalogue.”
The old dwarf shook his head foggily, picking it up
as though his neck were too weak for its great weight. He looked at
Madoran, and blinked, looking at first as though unsure if he was still
asleep, and then his eyes widened scrambling to his feet, knocking the
chair over with a carpet-muffled thump. He bowed low. “My lord,” he said
simply.
“Hello, Rothfus,” said Madoran. “How are my
people?”
Rothfus bowed low again. “My lord,” he said,
“they’re scared, and there're whisperes ye’ve abandoned ‘em.” He bowed
again. “But they keep faith, my lord. Those who were silent when your
family was banished, they were choosing their homes, not abandoning you
for the rebels.”
“I’ll never blame them for that choice,” said
Madoran, quietly, regally. “Will they fight, if they think they can
win?”
“Aye, most of ‘em,” said Rothfus. “There’s little
love for the traitors.” Madoran glanced up at me with a brief,
clandestine smile. It must have been a relief to hear the word finally
applied to his enemies. “They rule cruelly, like children afraid of the
dark.”
“Of course they do,” muttered Madoran thoughtfully.
“Any jackass can knock down a barn. Building one is a good bit harder.”
Rothfus smiled. “Ye allas surprise me when ye quote
yer old schoolbooks, lad. I swore to yer father that ye never once
cracked ‘em.”
Madoran laughed quietly. “I never needed to, thanks
to you,” he said. They paused for a moment. When Madoran continued, he
was a prince again: “I need to read, my friend.” Rothfus bowed, looking
uncertainly at me. “He needs to read too,” said Madoran somewhat
impatiently. Rothfus bowed again, turned, and began walking the length
of the library. Madoran followed the older dwarf, and I, curious,
followed the prince.
At the room’s far end, Rothfus turned to the wall on
our right. A ladder stood between bookshelves, attached to a track and
roller some fifteen feet above us. The elder dwarf pushed the ladder
over to a shelf nearer the room’s rounded end, and climbed slowly up it.
He scanned slowly across a row of books, selecting one and removing it.
He reached into the gap, and manipulated something. There was a sharp
click, followed by a dull grinding noise in front of us. Beneath the
ladder, the bottom four rows of books were receding mechanically into
the wall. With another click, they slid to the side, revealing a
dwarf-sized hole in the library’s high wall. “Welcome to the worst-kept
royal secret in Ironforge,” said Madoran to me, looking up and winking.
Rothfus replaced the book and climbed slowly back
down the ladder. “Go wake those you trust,” said Madoran when he had
reached the floor. “Tell them to ready themselves for battle. Then
return here. There will be no fighting in the library.”
“Fighting with what army, my lord?” said Rothfus.
“The Throne Room is ours,” said Madoran, smiling
slightly. “We took it from below less than half an hour ago.”
“Old Ironforge,” muttered Rothfus, his eyes
widening. Then he bowed again, turned and began walking towards the
room's far end. He paused, turning back around. “We're all glad you're
back, Prince,” he said, smiling.
“I'll be glad when I can sleep in my own bed again,”
muttered Madoran.
* * *
Gesturing for me to follow, Madoran walked through
the gap. I ducked low, almost to my knees, and squeezed in after him. It
was dark for a moment, and then there was a click and lights along the
room’s walls flickered on. It was a wide, round room, some forty feet
across. Around its edge was low and cramped – there was barely enough
room for me to stand upright – but the middle tiered down, opening up
widely. There was a set of shallow stairs immediately in front of us,
leading down into the room. Each tier was lined with small desks, and
the lowest sported a long, plain wooden table with chairs around it.
Opposite us on our tier was a large desk covered in papers.
“The royal conference room,” said Madoran
distastefully. “That desk was Ordinn’s, before he disappeared.”
“Ordinn?” I said.
“Aye,” said Madoran, “Ordinn the Dwarf, emissary to
the Stone King. I’m told he locked himself in here three weeks ago, and
simply stopped issuing edicts. Days later Rothfus found this chamber
abandoned, and then everything went to hell. Sound familiar?” He
glowered slightly, glancing up at me, just short of accusatory, or maybe
I was imagining it. I wrinkled my forehead noncommittally and didn’t
respond.
Madoran walked down the stairway towards the center
of the room. I walked around its circumference, to the desk of Ordinn
the Agent of the Law. The papers were in fact parchment: the same kind
on which I’d received my letter from Fang days and half a continent ago.
They were half-finished letters, along with a couple of notes and what
looked like a grocery list. I remembered Fang’s spotless office, and
wondered what had happened that Ordinn had left all his documents
behind. Maybe his exodus had been rushed, made under duress. Maybe
Ordinn had more freedom to leave as he saw fit: this office was secret,
while Fang’s had been one of the most well-known in Storm City. Maybe he
was simply less organized, not as good a worker as Fang. That must be
it. Lazy dwarf! I found myself thinking.
One parchment, folded carefully and set to the
side, caught my eye: its outside was labeled with a single character: a
line, with half an arrow at one tip, bisecting a circle. It looked
familiar.
“Find something?” said Madoran. The dwarf was on
his hands and knees, facing away from me, feeling about under a
second-tier desk for something.
“No,” I said, stuffing the parchment hurriedly into
a pocket.
There was a click, and a grinding noise. “Gotchya,”
said Madoran. At the center of the room, beside the table, a circle of
stone had begun receding into the floor. A wedge broke away and stopped
receding, and then an adjacent one: a spiral staircase began to form. I
hopped down the tiers towards Madoran. “This one is the best kept
secret,” he said jauntily, grinning. “We dwarves love our secret
entrances. Might be a tight squeeze for ya, but out the other end is
quite roomy.”
We descended the stone stairs, which led to a long,
low hallway. There were light bulbs dangling every so often. Some thirty
paces down, the tunnel ended at a door. Hanging on the door was a thick,
deep purple banner with a silver starburst in the center. Madoran
whispered some guttural syllables in a language I didn’t recognize, and
the door creaked open.
Beyond was dark. Madoran stepped through, gesturing
me in after him, and shut the door. A moment later he flicked a switch,
and the darkness was swallowed up by brilliant, white, dazzling light.
I gasped. The room in which we stood was beautiful.
It was perfectly round, at least thirty feet high and twice as wide.
Above us, the domed ceiling gleamed with silver leaf, or cloth, flowing
from the room’s high center out towards the walls in vertical waves. The
light came from a crystal chandelier hanging from the center of the
waves, and was reflected off a thousand folds of cloth and crystal
before it fell on us, below. Spaced evenly around the room were ten
wide, high bookshelves made of polished dark wood inlaid with patterns
and filled with thick, dignified tomes. The top of each was labeled by
topic, with silver inlay: "The World"; "The People of the World";
"Ancient History"; "Tactics"; and so on. Between each bookshelf, the
wall was covered with polished silver reliefs. The floor was made of a
deep, unworn, majestic purple stone, and a great white starburst was at
the room’s center, identical to the one outside the door behind us, and
apparently made of mother of pearl. It was flanked by two thick tables
made of polished dark wood. I stared about in wonder.
“The central repository for the collected knowledge
and wisdom of the Argent Dawn,” said Madoran. “The pretentious among us
call it the Silver Sanctum. It was built here more than five hundred
years ago as the Dawn removed itself from the general consciousness.
Ironforge was the farthest north of the capital cities of the age, and
the closest to the dead lands. As for the grandeur of the place… well…”
he paused. “The Dawn has included some very wealthy members over its
years, whose money was better spent making a secret library beautiful
than helping the cause of the Dawn, or of the world.” He spoke as though
unsure whether to love this place or resent it.
The dwarf stood in reverie for a moment, and then
strode across the wide floor towards the “World” bookshelf. I began
walking slowly around the room, examining the silver friezes. Each one
depicted a scene, running from (I thought) top to bottom, of some event
or other. The theme of beautiful good triumphing over ugly evil was
prominent in many of them, and in nearly every one the bottom panel was
large, and prominently displayed the Argent Dawn starburst and a
victorious culmination of the frieze’s story.
A third of the way around, I found one that looked
familiar: it showed humans and dwarves and orcs and (I was pleased to
see) a couple of tauren fighting zombies and giant spiders. The zombies
were suitably horrific, with decaying limbs and guts falling out of
their rotting bowels. I shivered. Farther down the wall was a panel with
the spiders sitting at a table with the other races. These must be the
Nerubians, I thought.
I looked over the rest of the frieze, piecing
together the story that Madoran had told me on our griffin ride days
earlier: here was the Lich King defeated by a dreadlord, here was the
dreadlord ascendant as the new commander of the Scourge. There were
panels that filled in gaps in the dwarf’s story: a fleet of ships
bearing the Argent Dawn flag arriving on a vast, dead, rocky shore. The
bottom panel of this frieze was strangely lacking in victorious imagery,
and there was no starburst to be seen. It depicted a lonely, desolate
tower, impossibly thin and twisting up into the sky above a desert
tundra.
“The frozen tomb I told you about,” said Madoran,
standing next to me. I jumped. “Varimathras himself is imprisoned at its
peak.” He clutched a thick, brown leather book with the word “ATLAS” on
its spine in big, worn gold letters. Pages and folded sheets of paper
and parchment were stuffed in haphazardly and threatened to spill out at
any moment. He moved towards the nearest table, thumping the atlas down
on it and pulling a pair of seats out. “Over here,” he said.
I took a last look at the bottom panel. It looked
so sad, so barren, compared to the others. No victory here, it seemed
to say. I pulled away and walked to the table.
“My intention,” said the dwarf, rustling through
the atlas, “was to have these maps copied by scribes before you set out
north. Circumstances,” and he paused, busying himself in the enormous
index, “have changed, of course, and as I will be accompanying you
north, I hope I can trust me with the originals.” He looked up at me.
“If I lose ‘em, though, I’m gonna slap me silly. Just so we’re clear.”
I nodded. “Clear as day, General.”
“Good soldier,” said the dwarf, thumbing through
the loose-leaf pages. “Here,” he said at last, pulling one out and
handing it to me. “Memorize this, as close as you can.”
It was Lordaeron, mapped as it had been centuries
ago. The proud capital city sat at the north tip of a great lake: it had
spires drawn in, and ramparts, and a mighty iron gate that could
withstand the greatest of enemies. “All ruins, now,” said Madoran sadly,
following my eyes. “Armies couldn’t bring it down, so it rotted from
inside. Arthas was its prince.” I nodded. I knew the stories.
He pointed to others points on the map. “Brill,
crumbled to dust and lost into the forests. This map has it here,” to
the west of the continent’s capital. “Others have it here, to the east.
Records are inconclusive, and the ruins, if they still exist, are not
intent on being found. Southshore and Tarren Mill, overrun after decades
of ceaseless fighting. Stratholm,” he said, pointing farther north and
east, “the site of Arthas’ turn to darkness. Flames took ten years to
consume it. No one knows what that was about.” He shrugged. “Andorhal,”
he continued, pointing. “A few foundations still peek through the
undergrowth, and one of its legendary towers still stands. If we follow
the ancient road signs to here, we'll find our first destination.” He
took the map back, folded it, and placed it gently in his backpack.
He pulled another map out of the atlas. Its back was covered in tiny,
spidery handwriting. “A more modern version,” he said, tucking it
quickly into his pack. He shut the atlas with a thump.
* * *
We retraced our steps,
down the low hallway, up the spiral stairs and out the conference room,
shutting secret door after secret door behind us. Madoran scooted
through first and I squeezed out the last doorway back into Ironforge’s
public library. Rothfus sat at his table, alert this time. “Your people
are armed and ready, my lord,” he said proudly. “They await command,
which I did not consider myself qualified to give.”
“Thank you, my good
librarian,” said Madoran, “you’ve done more for this battle than all
your librarian fathers ever did for battles before.” Rothfus smiled
wide, and bowed from his waist. “Be safe,” said Madoran.
We walked to the front
of the museum. Ironforge was silent. Far off, down the huge hallway and
across the great cavern was our small army: our red-clad guards stood,
still at attention, and barely anything could be seen beyond.
Madoran turned to me.
“Horse,” he said, “get back to the throne room. If our army has arrived,
proceed with securing it and, if possible, the flanking tunnels. I’m
going to rally the civilians.” I nodded. Madoran trotted off to the
right, pausing at each corner, checking carefully behind them, moving
rapidly and silently off into the mountain.
XV
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