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XXV
I stared at her across our small clearing, lost for
words. Allyndil stared at her from beside me. She paused for a moment,
and then, in the same raspy voice she’d always had – how could I have
mistaken it for human? – she said, “You’ve all been marked for death.”
“What?” said Allyndil dully.
“Marked for death,” she repeated. “The undead your
allies from the monastery slaughtered three nights ago were part of a
Forsaken caravan traveling north towards home.”
The elf stared at her, uncomprehendingly. Then,
“Who controls you?” he challenged, grasping at an explanation.
“I control me!” snapped Rhy. “I’m Forsaken, not
some mindless plague zombie.”
“Forsaken?” said the elf, his challenge defeated
and his tenuous grasp on the situation gone again.
Rhy sighed. “The Forsaken. We’re undead, we’re
people who caught the plague, lost our minds and our lives, and had our
spirits returned to our bodies. We’re plagued beings that have
reclaimed our free will,” she said, proudly.
Allyndil shook his head slowly. “Living undead?”
“Thinking, feeling undead,” she returned.
Allyndil stood in silent thought for a moment.
“They thought they were killing mindless zombies,” he mumbled to
himself, looking at Rhy’s feet.
“I know,” said Rhy. “That’s why I came to warn
you. That, and Horse and I go back a ways.” She glanced over at me.
“Why has no one ever heard of this, of you?”
Allyndil said.
“We didn’t want to be heard of,” answered Rhy,
shrugging. “We helped out the Argent Dawn during the Scourge War, and
then in thanks for our help, the Dawn helped us fade away. Our Lady
Sylvanas tamed her necromantic ambitions, and we’re better for it.”
“Sylvanas!” said Allyndil, his eyes flashing. “She
died with her people, she’s no necromancer!”
Rhy shook her head sadly. “Arthas resurrected her,
made her his queen and his slave. She rebelled, though, and created the
first Forsaken, founded our kingdom, our prison, in the ruins of
Lordaeron.”
“Lordaeron!” exclaimed the elf, bewildered by the
procession of surprises. “The cursed city. No living person has ever
gone there and come back.”
“Yeah, well,” said Rhy, shrugging again, “we like
our privacy. If people keep away, we don’t bother anyone. We save the
ones that are stupid enough to come up here and catch plague, one or two
a year. They join us, and swear an oath to, among other things, keep
our secret.”
“A secret organization,” breathed Allyndil, “made
up of an entire race.”
“The world’s best-kept secret,” said Rhy. “We
worked hard to get that way, and we’ve worked hard to stay that way ever
since.” Allyndil stared off into the moonlit darkness, as though trying
to put pieces of the puzzle together and come to terms with it all at
once.
Rhy turned back to me. I was still staring, still
lost for words. “Horse,” she said, concerned, frightened for me, “what
are you doing here?” But I didn’t respond.
Allyndil narrowed his eyes at her, sizing her up.
“We’re questing for a book,” he said.
“The book!” said Rhy, glancing over her shoulder
into the darkness. Then she looked back, a look of feigned innocence in
her glowing eyes. “What book?” she said.
“A black book,” he said, apparently sizing her up
as trustworthy, “which may hold the key to releasing the Scourge Lord
Varimathras back into the world.”
She exhaled. “It does,” she said simply.
“It’s in danger,” said the elf urgently. “There’s
a group massing to the east of here that is planning to make a move on
it, possibly tomorrow.”
Rhy swore. “Tomorrow?” she said. “You’re sure?”
“We captured one of them,” said Allyndil. “He said
they knew where the book was and were planning to make a move on it
soon.”
Rhy looked down, blinking slowly. “We knew they
were coming north, but we didn’t know they were here and ready to
fight. How many are there?”
“Upwards of forty, we think,” said the elf.
Rhy swore again. She glanced at me, then back at
the elf. “Your party is in danger, and it seems that so is my city.
Who is your leader? I need to talk to him, no one else.”
“A dwarf and a man,” said the elf. He looked to
me, urging me to join the conversation, but I remained impassive. He
glanced back at Rhy. “Well, I’ll go get them,” he said. She nodded,
and the elf vanished into the dense underbrush.
* * *
Throughout the exchange, I’d stared blankly into
the darkness between them, replaying scene after scene in my head, the
little things about her that should have tipped me off: her peculiar
clothes, never showing more than her face and her bony hands; her
aversion to physical contact; that every time I had touched her, when I
grasped her shoulder on the last night I’d seen her in Storm City, I’d
been struck by how bony she was. Looking at her face now, so pale and
gaunt, I wondered how I had ever mistaken her for a human. And I
realized suddenly that in the three years I’d known her, I’d never
actually seen her asleep. I felt sick.
She looked at me from across the small clearing.
“Horse,” she said, sounding concerned again, “why are you here?”
Myriad questions lurched into my mind – Why are
you here? Why were you ever in Storm City? Do I even know you… but
none of them came out.
“Horse,” she said, plaintively, sadly, “say
something.”
“Who are you?” I said at last.
“Come on,” she said, shaking her head, spreading
her arms, “I’m me, I’m Rhy. I’m the same me, I haven’t changed!”
I laughed, harshly, suddenly, and it all came
pouring out. “You’re not the same as you always were, you’re a huge
lie. You’re one of them!” I pointed accusatorily off into the
woods. Then I dropped my arm back to my side. “Why didn’t you ever
tell me?”
Rhy sighed, looking down. “Because, among other
things, I swore an oath not to when I left Lordaeron. We’re trained
from rebirth to keep who we are a secret – from everyone. Even from our
best friends, if they’re not Forsaken.”
“Well you didn’t have a hard time walking up and
telling a stranger elf just now,” I said irrationally.
“Damnit, Horse,” she snapped, her yellow eyes
flashing emerald green, “I’m trying to save your life. I sneak out,
risking my own life for you, I’m breaking every oath I’ve ever taken to
my people, and I can probably never go back to them. And you throw this
crap at me!”
“It’s not crap,” I snapped back. “You were plagued,
the whole time you lived in Storm City. You could have infected me and Tidus!”
“Have more faith in me than that!” she exclaimed.
“The plague doesn’t spread that easy, you have to have an open wound.
I have to, like, bite you, or my blood has to get inside you. And it’s
not like I wasn’t careful. We’re trained in this stuff, before they let
us leave Lordaeron.”
I stared at her. No way, indeed – what if… but
what if she were telling the truth? As I cycled through infection
scenarios in my mind – What if she bled on me? What if her hand had
fallen off into my soup? – each seemed less likely than the last. The
seed of rationality at the base of my mind began quietly reasserting
itself: Maybe Rhy really hadn’t put her best friends in mortal danger.
And if she hadn’t done that, then maybe the rest of it wasn’t so bad
either.
“Why are we marked for death?” I said after a
moment. “Those things already destroyed the only non-plagued refuge in
this dead land,” I added, heatedly.
“You’re lucky that’s all we did,” she replied, just
as heatedly. “Horse, your paladin friends slaughtered six of my people,
with no provocation at all, none.”
“They were damn zombies!” I ejected, loudly,
without thinking. Then my face fell.
For a moment, I thought she would snap at me
again. Instead, her face fell too. “See why I never told you?” she
said sadly.
I closed my eyes and lowered my head. Of course I
saw. I saw perfectly why you would lie about something, to your best
friends, because you knew how they’d react, how they’d judge you.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said.
There was a sudden sharp swish and the sound of
something impacting in flesh, followed by a thump. I opened my eyes.
Rhy was lying face down on the ground, her head
turned to the side, her face frozen in an expression of surprise. Her
eyes were open and glowing, but she lay motionless. Behind her, vacant
expression fully intact on his thick face, stood Krull the orc. I
pulled out my mace and stepped towards him.
“Drop it,” said a thin, smarmy voice from behind
the orc. Grimble the goblin stepped out into the torchlight, holding a
thin metal tube in one hand. “Drop it or your undead friend loses her
prefix.” He pulled out a syringe full of a glowing blue liquid with his
other hand, jabbing it meaningfully in Rhy’s general direction.
“You’ve been after me this whole time,” I said,
eyes narrowed, stalling for time.
“You’ve been you this whole time,” returned the
goblin. “Drop it.”
“Allyndil will be back soon, with the others,” I
said, glancing about, desperately, looking for something to magically
appear and fix the situation for me.
“You’re killing her,” said the goblin easily,
moving his syringe closer to Rhy’s neck.
I dropped the mace.
“Kick it towards me,” said the goblin. I complied.
“Now,” he said, and suddenly he had lifted the thin
tube to his lips and blown, and I felt a sharp sting in my chest. I
looked down, and a small feathered dart was sticking out, just below my
sternum. I lifted my arm to pull it out, but my arm didn’t move – my
legs went suddenly numb, and I fell face-first to the ground, stiff as a
board.
Grimble ambled over to me. I stared at him, trying
to glare, but my face was frozen too.
“Krull?” said the goblin. “Mind rolling him over?”
The orc walked stiffly over to me and, with a
grunt, turned me face up. He returned to his position, guarding Rhy’s
motionless body. Grimble jumped up onto my chest, straddling it and
staring into my face, smiling at me. He waved the narrow metal tube
under my nose. “Not particularly clever,” he said smoothly, “but it’s
silent, endlessly adaptable, and boy is there a market for the stuff.”
He plucked the dart out of my chest. “This’ll resell nicely, too.
Thanks for not bending it.”
He leapt off me and began pacing in a circle around
my head. My eyes, now the only mobile part of me, followed him coldly.
He halted. “So,” he said easily. “Grew up in Khaz
Modan, did you? Couldn’t be more than one cow named Horse in all of Az,
though. Good thing you got your dwarf friend to lie for you, or you
woulda bit it days ago.” He glowered. “It’s not that I have anything
against killing the innocent, but there are precious few friends in this
land, and I didn’t want to squander that investment on the wrong bull.”
He started pacing again.
“Three years ago you disappeared,” he continued, “disappeared from Orcmar with no forwarding address and a mountain of debt. Punishment for that, as I’m sure you know, is, we kill you, and I cut something off, and bring it back to Orcmar to prove I got you.”
He paused, staring down at me. Then he started pacing again. “How you managed to disappear so completely, for so long, is beyond me, but you did, and we didn’t catch word of you again until the great Battle of Ironforge. Good job being the hero,” he smirked, “it’s gone and gotten you killed. My crew and I happened to be here in the east hunting down another worthless reprobate, so we went after you. Thought it would be an easy kill, but it wasn’t, was it?” He stopped pacing again. “There were four of us, originally. Along with me, the brains, we had two brutes – Krull, here, and a dear ogre whose name, near as we could tell, was Smash – and a human tracker named Mitchell. One of Mitchell’s hounds ate something plagued, and before we knew what had happened, it had infected the other one and bit half of Mitchell’s face off. Then, after escaping them, we ran into a clutch of those nasty wizards, and Smash took it in the chest. He died.” The goblin turned to Krull. “Show him, my half-wit friend,” he said.
Krull, sudden fear in his dull eyes, glanced over his shoulder at the dark woods. Then he pulled his shirt open. At the center of his chest was a familiar-looking wound, a perfectly round, partly healed red burn mark. “They didn’t get him,” said the goblin, “but they broke him.” In the blink of an eye, the goblin’s easy manner had evaporated. He stared at me with sudden fury. “You left me with nothing for company but a half-wit orc,” he gritted. “I lost a good tracker and one and a half bruisers to this cursed land, all to get my hands on your filthy, flea-bitten bovine neck!” A muscle at the corner of his eye twitched.
“Now, since you’re a bull,” he muttered to himself, and he reached into his pack and pulled out a nasty-looking hacksaw, “I think I’ll take...” and he stared down at my horns. He grunted, sounding satisfied. “Normally, I give my targets a choice, whether they want to be asleep for this part or not. Normally, though, my targets don’t cost me my entire crew. So you, you don’t get a choice.” The goblin grimaced horribly at me. “You get to sit and watch and feel every stroke of my saw until instead of hooves,” and he leaned in towards my ear, whispering, “you’ll have bloody stumps, a pair of nice big open wounds.” He sat back up, and his easy manner had returned, though his smile hadn’t. “I think I’ll soak them in some of your corpse friend’s ichorish blood and see how you take to the life you gave my tracker and his hounds.”
Gripping the hacksaw with sudden ferocious intent,
the goblin paced the length of my body. From the dark woods, in the
direction away from camp, I suddenly heard what sounded like a thin
voice hissing an incantation off in the darkness. Grimble came to my
hooves, and I felt the saw’s teeth against the flesh of my left ankle.
I struggled futilely against whatever force was holding my body hostage,
fighting with all my will to move anything, just a little, then I hissed
harsh breath between my frozen lips as he drew the saw back and the
teeth bit in.
Then, the saw fell away and thumped to the soft
ground. Grimble glanced about, itching intensely at his scalp, and then
there was a flash from the woods. “My face!” he screamed, clawing
desperately at it, “it’s melting!” A shadowy fire leapt up from his
shoulders, engulfing his head, and, screaming and cursing, he ran
headlong off into the night forest. A minute later, the woods had
returned to silence.
Krull shook his head sharply, as though clearing
cobwebs. He pulled a syringe of his own out of a pocket, knelt to Rhy
and injected it into her neck. She blinked, and then lifted her head
slightly. “Thanks,” she said, wiggling digits and slowly regaining the
use of her limbs.
“Never liked him much,” grunted the orc.
He crossed to me, with another, different color
syringe, and injected it into my arm. A warmth flowed from it, slowly
at first, up my arm and into my chest, and then suddenly from there to
my whole body. I blinked, and flexed my fingers into fists, and then
with a great feat of will I sat up.
“I’m tired,” grunted the orc. “Goin’ back to camp,
gonna sleep.” He turned and shuffled off into the darkness. I stared
after him, stunned.
Then I turned, and squinted off into the darkness
in the opposite direction, in the direction that I was sure I’d heard
muttering from. Someone out there had just saved my life, and lifted a
great weight from my mind. “Thanks,” I muttered.
XXVI
(Discuss chapter)
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