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XVII
The next night's walk
began, again, as the sun set behind us and the temperature began
dropping. We walked in pitch-black silence for half an hour, then in
dim moonlit silence for several more hours. Madoran and Allyndil, a few
paces ahead of me, muttered to each other occasionally. The night,
again cloudless and frigid, was as uneventful as the previous night. I
was better prepared in my mind to deal with the mountain night chill,
and bore it stoically.
Some time well past
midnight (the moon had reached its apex and was sinking towards the
horizon behind us), we came to a fork in the road. A lamppost, the
first we’d seen all night, stood between its tines. We stepped off the
road a short distance to the right, over a small rise and out of sight,
and silently roasted some meat over a weak fire. Minutes later we were
on our way again, taking the left fork, which wandered off into the
mountains, peaks to either side, heading north at last.
Another two hours on the
moon had set, plunging our ever-narrowing valley into pre-dawn
darkness. Here, though, the lamp posts came more and more frequently,
glittering ahead of us between the snow-covered trees. Finally, the
mountains which had been slowly constricting about us since we’d turned
north completed their pincer move and our valley ended at a cliff. The
road, still immaculately maintained, plunged on into the cliff’s face,
through an archway, carved with knot-work and flanked ominously by dark
red Ironforge banners. “I really am going to have to do something about
that,” said Madoran, glancing at the banners’ golden hammers as we
walked past them into the mountain. “Nothing like a fascist regime to
destroy a beautiful symbol.”
The stone tunnel slanted
steeply down, and a howling wind tore through it, from behind us to
whatever lay ahead, biting painfully into my exposed nose and hands.
Flickering electric lights studded the walls, strung along at about head
level. Every ten paces or so was another similarly carved arch, jutting
slightly into the tunnel from the curved walls and ceiling, and more red
banners hung between them. We walked down, the air growing warmer, for
what seemed like an hour. The stiff wind grew warmer.
Then, the light began to
soften, blue early-morning light filtering up from below us and mixing
with the harsh electric light, and then the tunnel ended. We stepped
through the last archway, with the cold wind still blowing at our backs,
and in front of us the path turned left, northwest, away from the edge
of another high cliff, and into another tunnel. In front of us, at the
edge of the cliff, stood a lone mountain goat, blinking laconically at
us before leaping lithely off the edge of the cliff to his natural,
vertical habitat.
I had only a moment to
absorb the view. The path had been outdoors for only a few feet,
perched on a small outcropping of rocks on the side of an enormous
cliff. Looking up, I saw rock and snow; looking down I saw a flat,
green park-like woodland glowing in the pale dawn light, with a river
running through the middle of it, down into a deep brown ditch, over a
pile of what looked like ancient ruined masonry, and away. Then, we
plunged back into the mountain, descending still, and left the ram and
his idyllic view behind.
This tunnel was nearly as
long as the last, and emptied finally onto the valley floor. The air
here felt and smelled like summer, and I pulled my thick walking coat
off to stow in my pack as we walked along our winding path. After a
short ways, a low, round tower peeked between the trees and over a small
rise ahead of us, and our road proceeded around it and to the left. The
trees were thin and coniferous, and the grass was soft and green. I was
tired, and my legs begged to be relieved of their weight. Compared to
shivering in the snow, camping here would be positively pleasant.
It was not to be. As we
rounded the base of the tower, a loud, brass voice called, “Halt!” from
the top of it. Madoran swore under his breath. We halted.
“Travelers!”
Four red-clad dwarves
marched towards us from behind the tower, broad axes hefted and ready.
Above us, a dwarf stood in the tower’s slit window, behind a big gun
mounted on a tripod, swiveled and aimed directly at me. Why me? I
thought. Because you’re a big easy target, I responded. I glowered up
at the gunner.
“Let’s see your papers,”
said one of them. The Herald, along with being generally fascist, had
apparently imposed travel restrictions as well.
Madoran stood to his full
height (impressive, certainly, to the dwarves), and called to them,
“Whom do you serve?”
“Our creators the
Titans,” called back the leader, “and the rightful rulers of Khaz Modan.
Who do you serve?”
“The people of Khaz Modan,”
replied Madoran darkly. “The Heralds of the Titans have been routed,
and banished from Ironforge. As for the rightful ruler of Khaz Modan, I
am Thane Madoran the second, and your king.”
The dwarves halted, taken
aback by the news. They began talking among themselves, muttering
worriedly and glancing at us.
“Be prepared to run,”
Madoran said sideways to the elf and me.
“Madoran…” I said,
jerking my head upwards towards the gunner, but the four red-clad
dwarves turned back around at that moment and claimed his attention.
“Prove it,” said one of
the dwarves insolently. The others nodded somewhat stupidly.
In my mind, Thane Madoran the Second threw off his dark green traveling
cloak, revealing
his regal armor, donned a regal crown and held his regal sword or hammer
or axe aloft, glowing with the light of his ancestors, and our enemies
fell to their knees and wept at the beautiful sight. In my mind, his
two traveling companions stood behind him, ominous black silhouettes
with fiery eyes.
He didn’t, of course.
The real Madoran was much more pragmatic, and turned towards us. “No
way to prove it,” he shrugged. “Ready to run?”
“Madoran, there’s a gun
in the tower and it’s aimed right at me,” I muttered to him. The four
dwarven guards were getting impatient behind us.
“Well, you’d better start
running then, hadn’t you?” said Madoran.
I boggled at him for a
moment, but he jerked his head north, along the path. Without further
ado, I took off, beating my hooves against the ground. The other two
followed me, and the dwarven guards took off after us. There was a
terrific bang from above, and the crack of a bullet on stone behind me.
I hadn’t heard a gun go off in years, and I’d forgotten how loud they
were. I stumbled for a moment, but the bullet had missed me. Quickly,
as though the dwarf had reloaded by magic, there was another gunshot:
this time, though, there was no subsequent crack. There was a grunt,
and a shout from Madoran.
I turned around, and
Allyndil had fallen to the ground, bleeding from a round wound in his
shoulder. He pushed himself back to his feet, getting quickly out of
the tower’s line of sight, but he was stumbling and dwarves were steps
behind from him.
I pounded quickly back
towards them, falling onto all fours for added speed, and then, on an
instinct, shrunk my fingers to paws and claws, and charged full-force
into the dwarves as a bear. I should have been doing this for years, I
thought, as the dwarves yelled in fear and scattered. One of them swung
an axe, and it bit painfully into my flesh, but as a bear I had enough
flesh to shrug the wound off.
They regrouped, hefting
their axes and trying to flank me, but I fell back, snarling. Suddenly,
more dwarves appeared on the road from the direction of the tower,
coming towards us, backup for the guards.
“Horse,” called the elf
back to me, sounding winded, “come on, I can make it.”
I turned back around, and
shifted back into a bull. Still on all fours, feeling the wind and the
grass and the plains of my childhood fly by beneath me, I ran after the
other two, themselves running, with a battalion of angry red dwarves
behind us, and nothing but a cliff in front of us. We followed the
road, directly at the cliff, our lungs burning and our feet hurting,
until we reached – another tunnel. We charged inside. It was identical
to the other two, sloping down, and we followed it, running, sliding,
sometimes nearly tumbling down its length. The dwarves had entered the
tunnel behind us, and we could hear them shouting and cursing as they
fell slowly behind. We neared the bottom of this tunnel as they slowed
down. “Leave our kingdom!” shouted one of them, finally giving up the
chase. “Don’t ever come back!”
“Oh, don’t worry,”
Madoran gasped between breaths. “By the time I come back, all of it
will be my kingdom.”
We stopped for a moment
to catch our breath. My side hurt. I put my hand to it, and it came
away with blood. The axe, I remembered. I didn’t say anything.
The tunnel led to
another, and in the great outdoors between them (where another few
mountain goats frolicked on the rocks) I got a view that caused my
breath to catch in my throat. Above us, at snowy heights, was a high
cliff that might have been Ironforge (but surely wasn’t, we were too far
east), and below us was the green mist into which Katy M had fallen to
her death. I could see through it, now, and some distance below us was
a wide, soggy plain, interlaced with channels of fetid water and
overhung with saggy, soggy trees. It was the color of it, though – the
color that had killed M, and it made me sad and sick to my stomach all
at once. I closed my eyes, and moved on, physically.
* * *
We reached the wetlands
some half an hour later, the tunnel opening up onto a dirt path at the
top of a dirt hill at the edge of the swamp. The path, so
well-maintained throughout the whole of the dwarven lands, was now
merely a shadow of an ancient route, and at the bottom of the dirt hill
it disappeared immediately into the swamp. We were on our own.
My side was hurting
more. Allyndil looked paler than usual, a difficult feat. “I want to
get well into the swamp before we sleep,” said Madoran to the both of
us, “but you need medical attention. We can stop.”
Allyndil waved
noncommittally, with his good arm. “I’m fine,” he said. I had stopped
bleeding, at least, and I followed his cue. We struck off into the
swamp, following the elf.
* * *
Our journey that morning
consisted of carefully fording shallow reaches of standing water,
brackish and unpleasant, then hiking up onto dry ground for a few
blessed steps, before fording back into unpleasant swamp water. Even
dry ground was wet, soggy and unpleasant. The whole place was hot and
sticky and smelled like rotting plant-matter. The sky above it was a
familiar, unhappy, hazy green. To our left, in the distance, the range
of mountains rose like dull clouds. “Careful of the snakes,” said the
elf, shooing one away with his thickly booted foot.
* * *
We walked several hours
into the day, the elf leading us north. The mountains to our left had
disappeared into the mist and the sun, pale and nearly unseen behind the
hazy sky, had nearly reached its apex before we halted for the day.
Immediately, all pretensions of health gone, Allyndil slumped to his
knees, breathing hard. Concerned, Madoran supported him while he pulled
out his blanket. I spread it on the ground behind him and lowered him
to the ground.
He pulled his shirt off
his shoulder, exposing a nasty wound. The small, round, bleeding bullet
hole had swollen, and turned an unhealthy purple-blue. Veins, radiating
from the hole, were too visible. The wound smelled vaguely of rotting
almonds. Allyndil gritted his teeth.
Madoran bent down to
inspect the wound, producing a small first aid kit. “The bullet is
still in there,” he mumbled to himself, and produced a pair of
tweezers. Wiping them clean with an alcohol swab, he glanced at the
elf. “You okay for this?”
The elf nodded, eyes
narrow.
Madoran plunged the
tweezers into the wound. Allyndil inhaled sharply past his teeth, but
otherwise did not flinch. Madoran felt around for a moment, eliciting
another hiss from the elf, before producing a metal slug, black and
burnt at the tail end and pointed at the front. The sides were scarred
cyclically with rifling. Madoran looked closely at it for a moment,
before offering it to the elf. Allyndil waved it away, as though
dismissing a wayward servant. Madoran let it drop into his own hand,
and hurled it off into the swamp. Somewhere, it kerplunked
loudly.
“That’s a bit of a
wound,” said Madoran dryly.
“I can heal it,” said the
elf, somewhat less than airily. “I need watercress, cottonmouth venom
and a fire. The watercress has waxy, entire leaves set opposite along a
thick, light green stem. The cottonmouth is a black snake, and very
poisonous.” Madoran nodded, jumping up and walked smartly off into the
haze, eyes darting across the ground.
I dropped my pack,
letting my orange cat out of his carrier (he sniffed the air delicately,
and then climbed atop his carrier and sat down, paws dry) and produced
flint and tinder. Some five minutes earlier, we had passed a downed log
sticking high enough out of the bog that it might provide dry fuel. I
told the elf of my intentions, reassured Ajax that I would return
shortly, and struck off after it. The elf began chanting a prayer under
his breath.
The log was where I had
remembered it, and I broke off an armful of dry branches and crumbly,
rotted wood. The return trip required me to call for Allyndil a couple
of times, but within minutes I was back at our camp and building the
required fire. Allyndil had finished chanting, and already the swelling
seemed to have gone down. He was pressing a cloth to it, wiping the
cloth across his brow from time to time, absorbing sweat for the
compress.
“Incidentally,” I said,
placing logs over tinder, “when you’ve finished your own wound, I got
one as well, though quite a bit less dire.”
“There’s nothing dire
about my wound,” said Allyndil, a bit proudly, I thought. “Let’s see
yours.”
I struck the tinder, and
blew on it, and a moment later it flared up, lapping flame at the wood.
The dry rotted wood caught quickly, and began lapping at the thicker
branches. I pulled my traveling jerkin off, and lifted my shirt enough
to show the elf the gash on my side. Allyndil squinted at it from his
vantage, declaring, “Axe wound. Not a bad one, though. You were a bear
when you took it?”
I still disliked having
my talent brought up by others. My instinct towards keeping it a secret
would be hard to shed, and I still wasn’t convinced it had been a smart
thing to do. Nonetheless, I nodded.
"You're a shape shifter,"
the elf said bluntly.
"I am," I said. "Always
was."
"Not true," said the
elf. "That’s a skill you learn, and not from wet-nurses or bartenders."
My eyebrows shot up. He
was right, of course: controlling my body enough to pull its very bone
and muscle structure into new shapes had taken years of practice under
the patient tutilage of an old bull, advisor to the tauren high chief
and friend of my mother after she had lost my father. The old bull had
believed in me, in a way I never quite understood, and to my knowledge,
he was the only one in my homeland who knew that I'd run away. The sad
look in his eyes when he'd agreed to keep it in confidence gave me such
a twist inside to remember that the first time Tidus had asked me how
I'd learned to shapeshift, I'd lied, and the story had stuck.
The elf was looking
piercingly at me again, waiting to see if I'd respond to his challenge.
I didn't. After a moment, he nodded, and spoke again. "I knew
another,” he said, “another tauren who could change his shape at will.
We aided each other years ago, to mutual benefit. A very powerful soul,
that bull.”
“M,” I said, nearly a
whisper.
“M was his name,” said
Allyndil. “You’ve met him?”
“Katy M was a female,” I
said, “and yes, she led me from Storm City to Ironforge last week.” Had
it been more than a week? I thought. It seemed like years.
“Was?” said Allyndil,
presciently. “Madoran told me you had suffered a great loss.”
I gritted my teeth,
unwilling to delve into such emotional territory with the stoic elf
around, but he looked at me solemnly and I nodded. “She fell,” I said,
“off the Ironforge mountains, into these wetlands. Her body must be
miles to the west of here.” I trailed off. Then I squeezed my eyes
shut, refusing to cry.
I missed Katy M, but I’d only known her for four
days. In that time, she’d trusted me, and warned me, and warmed to me,
and looked out for me, and been, for lack of a better word, motherly.
(Fatherly?) I’d been all but alone for hopeless ten years, and moving
forward, never upward. Having someone filling that role to me had
impacted me more than I’d realized, and having lost M, I had lost hope
in myself again. I folded my hands about my head, and, at the subtle
urgings of this stranger elf, the years of self-destruction and
suppressed self-pity which Katy M had touched within me came flowing
out.
When Madoran returned fifteen minutes later, I had
dried my eyes and calmed my breathing. I was sitting, back to the fire
and the elf, staring off into the fetid wetlands. Allyndil had sung
again, and it had soothed me inside. I wondered if it was a prayer for
his wounds, or a prayer for mine. Rest in peace, good druid, I thought.
Maybe you gave me the strength to grow up finally.
* * *
Madoran clutched a handful of light green plants
and a dead snake. Allyndil stopped singing and began instructing us
from his blanket: Boil a quarter of a cup of our drinking water over
four watercress leaves and one stem, broken up; extract the venom from
the fangs of the snake (“That’s all you,” I said to the dwarf, who
glared good-naturedly at me); add another quarter cup of water. We
brought the pot to the elf, who dipped his cloth in it. He pressed his
wet cloth into the wound, hissing lightly in pain, and then, eyes
closed, began singing again. He pulled the cloth out of the wound. The
purple color had receded, leaving pink and healthy flesh around the
wound, and there was a light, pure steam curling up from it. After
another dip and press, the wound had closed. I watched, mesmerized.
In a moment, he stood up, fully healed, and
motioned me to lie down on the blanket. I did so. He took the
watercress concoction and dabbed at my wound, washing blood away,
prodding at it. It felt for a moment like it was burning, reopening,
and then as though waters were flooding into the wound, over the severed
flesh, not soothing, but healing, mending. After a moment, the feeling
had gone, and my side felt stronger for having been wounded.
Then we ate, and then we slept, the rest of the day
and well into the night.
XVIII
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