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XXIII
We marched in double file, singing quietly, a song
of hope. Anduin and Madoran marched at the front, talking to each
other. Allyndil walked next, beside John. Long a wanderer of wild
places, the elf had developed an ear and a sense for tracking the sounds
of things too far to see. He broke off singing from time to time,
delivering hushed reports to the dwarf and the old man in front of him.
There were no shuffling armies though, no guttural clicks and groans.
The back of the line was brought up by Krull and
Grimble. I glanced back at Grimble occasionally: it could have been
mere paranoia, but I was sure that he was watching me.
I walked next to Jayksen, glancing down at him
occasionally. He was breathing easier, and I wondered at his strength.
“How are you doing?” I said, casually, when there
was a lull in the singing.
“Fine,” he grunted. After a moment he added, “She
prolly would ha’ broken my heart anyway.” He slurred it slightly.
I glanced curiously at him. By his grief, I’d
guessed they had been lovers or married for years. But I didn’t want to
pry.
“Look,” he said, glancing up at me, after another
moment, and mourning was in his eyes again. “Don’ gemme wrong, ah loved
‘er. Ah love ‘er still. Ah jes don’ wanna think on it yet.” He looked
back down.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No problem,” he said cheerily, and then snuck a
thick flask to his lips secretively. He took a long pull.
He glanced back at me. “Brandy,” he whispered,
grinning into his beard. “Grimble sold it to me fer a song. Tells me,
‘Finest brandy in the world, brought it all the way from the western
lands, you’ll have a sip and never want anything else,’” said the dwarf
in a fair imitation of the smarmy goblin. “Seemed in an awful hurry to
be rid of the stuff, so I made him let me sip it a’fore I bought it.
’Ee was lyin’ is face off, o’ course, an’ it tastes like floor cleaner.
But it does the trick, yeh? So I bought all he had for a handful o’
copper. It’s no beer, though. Want some?” He glanced conspiratorially
about, then thrust the flask up at me.
With that introduction? I thought. “Sure,” I
said. Why not.
“Don’t let the captain see it,” he said, gesturing
with his head to the front of the line where Anduin and Madoran marched
in silence. I nodded, took the flask and drank from it. He hadn’t been
exaggerating, and it took all my willpower to swallow it, but a moment
later I felt warmth flowing to my nose and hooves. “Thanks,” I
whispered, handing it back.
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” he grunted, taking
another hefty swig.
* * *
We skirted the cliff, against which the monastery
had been built, for nearly an hour. Then, after a water break and a
short consultation between Allyndil, Rayn and Anduin, we struck off to
the north. Twenty minutes later there was another plague-ichor stream,
this one narrower and spanned by an ancient, crumbling stone bridge. We
picked our way carefully across it, one at a time, holding our
collective breath and praying that the old thing didn’t collapse and
plunge one of us into certain undeath. It held, though, and we formed
up again on the other side.
Before long, I noticed the ground becoming
uncharacteristically uneven. Poking out through the brown spongiform
ground, here and there, were angular, weathered white stones. Some had
split and some had crumbled, but they were clearly the remnants of
ancient stonework.
Then, up a short hill and in a clearing in which
the spongy ground gave way to white boulders and shale bedrock, stood
the proud husk of an ancient, round tower. Half of it had fallen away,
and what had been the thickness of the wall was now an accidental
stairway carved into the side. It ran up and around, to the last few
wide feet of the tower’s original parapet.
At its sight, Anduin called a break, and we all
unshouldered our packs and sat down on the boulders that littered the
ground. Allyndil ran lightly up the tower’s side to the parapet and
looked off to the west.
“Still solid?” called Madoran up to him.
“As the day it was built,” the elf called back.
Anduin began ascending, and Madoran motioned me over.
“Remember your map?” he said to me, referring to
the one he’d had me memorize in Ironforge.
“Yeah,” I said. “This is the tower of Andorhal.”
“North tower,” he said. “The rest of the city has
crumbled. You afraid of heights?”
“A little,” I said, honestly.
“Ye didn’t choke me to death on the griffin,” he
grunted, “so ye’ll be fine here.” He motioned me up the tower after
him.
The tower’s wall had been thick, and the impromptu
stairway was stable as we ascended. The steps were well-worn: we were
not the first to use it as a lookout, I thought. From the top, we could
see far into the distance over the great mushroom forest.
To the darkening east, it grew thicker, the
treetops knitting together until, in the distance, the Plaguewood
appeared to form a contiguous roof over the forest floor. I wondered
what it looked like within, if it was an endless chamber of plagued
mushroom stalks, the dimmest of sickly light filtering in from above.
Then I decided I didn’t want to know.
To the south, closer at hand, was the cliff against
which Uther’s Tomb had been built. It rose, slate-gray, out of the
mushroom forest, standing jagged and barren above the dead lands. Its
peak was as barren as its face, except for a small, scrubby but
healthy-looking bush jutting out against the brown sky. No ichor up
there, I thought.
Anduin and Madoran and Allyndil consulted as I
looked out over the forest’s speckled mushroom-cap canopy, under the
fading daylight. Our way led west, past a ridge of mountains that could
barely be seen on the horizon.
Allyndil and Anduin climbed back down. Madoran
paused for a moment. He turned to me.
“You can shift into a stealthy cat with horns and a
big brown bear with horns. Anything else?” he said.
“Yeah, a horse,” I said.
He laughed shortly. “Ah guess that makes sense.
Anything else?”
I shook my head.
“What about magic? History books say that those
who can shift shapes can control nature’s energies, and I saw Katy M
make some powerful light shows in her day.”
I shook my head, half disappointed and half
defensive. “I don’t know how,” I said.
The dwarf grunted.
“Why?” I said.
“Listing our assets,” he replied shortly, then
turned and walked down the tower.
We formed up again, and marched off into the west.
Soon, we were following a path, worn into the brown ground.
Periodically, the rusted husk of an ancient streetlamp stood or lay
along its side.
As darkness fell, Anduin and Madoran risked a pair
of small torches to better find our way. They threw flickering shadows
out a few feet between the strange trees, casting an otherworldliness
over the scene and creating the impression that we were walking through
a low, brown, endlessly pillared room. It made for better walking than
the pitch-blackness, though.
Camp that night was a cold, fireless affair, ten
minutes’ walk off the path. We gathered in a circle around the two
small torches, sputtering at the end of their fuel, and bowed our head
as the Order recited the prayer it had said at breakfast and lunch.
Then, before we doused the torches for the night, we picked lots for
guard duty: I drew the last shift before dawn, with Norin, and, tired
from the march and eager to get what sleep I could, lay down on my
blanket and fell quickly asleep.
* * *
Rayn, armored, nudged me awake with his toe an hour
and a half before dawn, and I stood up blearily. The great dark-skinned
man disappeared into the night. Across the camp, I heard him pulling
his armor off as quietly as he could.
“Hi, Horse,” said a voice not far above my knees.
“Hi, Norin,” I whispered back. “How’d you sleep?”
“Great!” he piped.
We paced the perimeter of the camp in the darkness,
listening to the distant screeches and thrums of the night.
There was a sudden noise, and I jumped, but it was just a loud dwarven
snore from Jayksen. Norin laughed quietly at me.
Another thrum echoed in the distance. “What
are those?” I said quietly.
“Grubs,” replied Norin, as quietly. “Great
sightless carrion grubs. They crawl through these lands and eat
anything dead. They eat live meat, too, if it’s dumb or asleep enough
to sit still for it, so it’s best to stay out of their path.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Ick,” I said.
“Yeah, no kidding,” said the young dwarf. “These
lands are the perfect place to challenge you to keep believing in the
Light, you know?”
“No kidding,” I echoed.
We chatted, quietly, until Rayn’s voice drifted up
from the ground near our feet. “Turn your ears to the forests and your
mouths to silence,” he growled groggily. We complied.
Dawn came, grudgingly, and we roused everyone. The
day’s march was hard but not grueling, and it was blessedly uneventful.
The scenery did not change much as we progressed: the same nearly flat,
brown, slightly spongy ground, and the same speckled mushroom-like trees
standing apart from each other. Where the tangled, plagued woods in
which we had begun our journey on this continent had been claustrophobic
and terrifying, these felt open, and ethereal in their own dark way. It
was as though they had lived with the evil of the plague so long that it
was no longer a dead land, no longer evil: just, different.
The ground began sloping up in late morning, rising
rockily to either side of us, and shortly before noon we traversed a
narrow pass between two high, rocky cliffs. The ground evened out on
the other side, and the plague forest continued.
As the day lengthened, I noticed that we were
beginning to cast distinct shadows, behind ourselves and to the right.
I glanced up at the clouds overhead, and they seemed distinctly less
oppressive than they had previously. Another hour along, and I thought
I could see the ghostly outline of the sun off to the west. I mentioned
it to Jayksen.
“Aye,” he said, “the clouds thin here. You’ll see
a sunset soon, and the stars will be out tonight.” I smiled. Allyndil
had been wrong, then, six nights ago.
It didn’t turn out to be a very impressive sunset,
though. The ghost sun merely descended to the horizon, lengthening
shadows, and then disappearing for the night.
XXIV
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