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VIII
I was at the south end of the Goldshire district.
The streets were empty, and sooty; doors were shut, and many
ground-floor windows had boards over them or were shattered. The only
life to be seen was the occasional face seen for a moment and quickly
disappearing behind second-story shutters. This was not the vibrant
youth culture it had been a day and some hours earlier. I galloped
north, and slightly east, following streets whose layout I knew pretty
well but whose appearance was alien. Occasionally, when the streets
aligned properly and the three- and five-story buildings parted for a
moment, I could see the Old Keep in the distance. Between me and it, and
a little west, black smoke billowed, the source of the lightly-falling
ash.
The Panda Pub’s front door was open, and slightly
off its hinges. Curiosity, and a feeling of foreboding, pulled me
towards it. I glanced around to make sure no one was looking, and
de-horsed. I walked through the human-sized doorway, turning right along
the short hallway that every pub and inn seemed to sport at the front
door, and entered the dim room. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. The room
was empty. Bar stools were upended, some hacked to bits. There were long
gashes in the bar, and what looked like a burn mark from a fireball.
“Beer or death?” came a voice behind me with a
thick pandaren accent. I whipped around. The fuzzy bartender was
standing in the shadows along the pub’s front wall, legs planted in a
battle stance. His ceremonial sword was unsheathed and held over his
head. There were dark splotches on the blade that did not look
ceremonial. The look on his face was half wary and half fury. He was
probably two short steps from ending me.
“Uh, beer please,” I said uncertainly.
The pandaren lowered his sword, and moved sideways
towards the bar. His eyes were on me, unblinking. I had only seen him
maybe three or four times in my life, and he was well-known as a large
and jovial presence. The shadow moving slowly away from me was shrunken:
not with weakness, but like a coiled spring. There was nothing cheerful
in his black, pinprick eyes. Nevertheless, it seemed that mere chaos and
civil war didn’t stop business at the Panda Pub. He half-sheathed his
sword across his back, pulled a two-pint glass out from under the bar,
and began to fill it. “Lager,” he said, “it’s all there is right now.
Please forgive me.” His face softened, somewhat.
I nodded. It would do. I could drink it faster than
stout, and once I got news I wanted to be moving on. I moved carefully
over to the bar, avoiding sudden movements. He set the lager down in
front of me, and for the first time in seemingly a lifetime, I threw
some coins to the bar.
“What happened?” I said, feeling that the question
was too inadequate to sum up how much had changed in such a short time.
“I saw you here yesterday,” said the panda, “you
weren’t here for last night?”
“I was out of town,” I said lamely.
“The Murloc is dead,” he said, “the Law is gone.
His body confirmed it, and now there is war in the streets.”
“Everything was calm last night,” I said. Strangely
calm, I thought, or was it my jarred memory playing tricks on me?
“Two hours past sunset,” said the panda, keeping an
eye behind me on the door. “There was an explosion in Old Town. They say
the cults are at war now, fighting with fire and bodies for power, now
that there is no one holding the peace. They came through Goldshire at
midnight, and tried to fight in my bar.” He growled the last few words,
with fierce pride. I didn’t have to guess how the fight had ended. "The
ones that wore black, no blood came out of them. The ones that wore red,
they bled the same color."
The red-cloaked ones could have been the Scarlet
Resurrection. I had no doubt that in a power vacuum that cult would take
the fight to the streets, hard and fast. I wondered vaguely who, or
what, the men in black had been, with no blood in them.
“And now,” he said, “no one comes into the street,
no one comes into my pub, except looking for money or vengeance for
crimes I did not commit.” He put his elbows on the bar and propped his
head up on them, sadly. “One night without Law, and we become savages,
we descend to madness. Yesterday, I ran a pub. Today I guard a
fortress.”
I nodded heavily. My beer was half drained, but it
was sapping me of energy, and I set it down. “It’s good,” I said
truthfully, “but I have to go.”
“Not the stomach for it?” he said, picking the
glass up and draining it himself. “Or not the heart? I wish you luck,
friend.” You mean, Not Enemy, I thought.
* * *
I horsed up and cantered north again. Concern for
my friends had waned with the beer, replaced with a heavy cloud settling
over my heart. Surely the Law had seen this coming, I thought. This was
Fang’s maliciousness, his clever plan. Or, if I believed Katy M, it was
the fault of his blind faith.
The streets stayed empty as I headed north. The
desolation increased, though, with thicker layers of ash and more broken
windows. A storefront had been blasted out, and there was a twisted
human body lying across the dirty cobblestone street from it, too burnt
to recognize gender. It was the first body I’d seen, and it hit me hard.
My hooves clip-clopped a bit slower for a moment, and I dropped my head
and whinnied.
I could hear a din in the distance now, growing as
I galloped towards the smoke, in the direction of Rhy and Tidus’s
apartment. The din resolved itself slowly, into shouts, and clangs of
metal upon metal, the crackle and blast of fire magic. I turned left,
west, and went a block or two away from the din, then headed north
again. I came to streets I knew by heart, and momentarily was at the
shattered, charred front door of my friends’ building. I nosed the
remnants of the door aside, and stepped into the building. The mailbox
set into the wall, which held your mail if you opened it, was hanging
open, and empty. There was a man sitting under it, eyes wide open and
limbs askew. He had been deanimated with an axe wound to the chest. My
heart leapt forward and caught in my long equine throat. I stepped
gingerly over him, trying and failing to avoid getting blood on my
hooves.
I nosed the broken stairwell door open and clopped
up a single flight, no mean feat in the stairwell’s pitch blackness. The
second floor hallway was cleaner, uncharred, and there were no bodies. I
turned left down the hallway, my hooves muffled on the hall’s thick
carpet. Normally I knew the place well enough to find their door in the
dark, but the body below, and everything that accompanied it, had
crushed my dead reckoning. I nosed a couple of doors, trying to feel the
bronze numbers. I found the one I wanted, and whinnied quietly.
A short silence followed. Then, the peephole, the
pinprick brightness in the door, went dark for a moment, and, “Crazy? Is
that you?” came through, in a husky, orcish, familiar voice. I breathed
a whinny of relief.
Several locks clicked open, and Tidus pulled the
door open. “Come in, quick!” he said. I did so, and pulled myself
together.
The place looked almost pristine, except for a
broken window. “Rock?” I said, pointing at it.
“Ice bolt,” he said, his voice sounding strained.
He started locking the door again. “Stupid mages. I tossed down a
grounding totem after that, it was my last one. Pulled a fireball and a
scary ugly glowy flying skull thing.” He shivered a little.
“You made it, though,” I said, relieved. I forged
through into the kitchen, hoping for leftover stew. “Where’s Rhy?”
“I don’t know,” he said, quietly, his eyes darting
over his shoulder towards the open window. He moved into the open living
room. “The skull came in through the window and hit my totem, and she
just got really quiet. I mean, we were both scared, but we can take care
of ourselves, you know? The electricity had gone out, and she had some
magic light glowing, and when that spell came in, she just got really
quite and scared. She couldn’t hold the light on. Then she just kinda
hugged me, and told me to be safe, and left. Told me to lock the door
behind her.”
I looked at him, across the kitchen counter. We
held eyes for a moment. “Rhy’s gone?” I said numbly. He nodded. “And she
left of her own accord. Like she had somewhere to go.”
“Yeah!” said the orc. “Like she was going out for a
bottle of milk.” He slumped onto the apartment’s paisley couch. “She
took Snowball, too,” he said. “I loved that damn cat.” I had never heard
Tidus speak anything but vile hatred of Snowball in the few months since
Rhy had bought him.
I closed my eyes for a moment, and leaned on the
kitchen counter. Rhy had seen some sort of glowy skull spell, and
deduced from it that she had to leave immediately. It didn’t make any
sense. I hoped she hadn’t gone after me.
I opened my eyes and watched him for a moment. He
looked lost. Rhy had told me her greatest fear one time – abandonment –
but Tidus was a chill orc. He could out-drink me and Rhy put together
(not to say that Rhy contributed much), and although he was pretty quiet
when he was sober, he got funnier and funnier as the drinks wore on. Now
he looked abandoned.
“What’s going on?” He looked at me, intensely. “Why
is this happening, now?” If you can’t trust your best friends, I
thought, who can you trust?
So I told him, everything. Fang was alive, and had
blackmailed me into helping him. I was working for the Law now, now that
the Law had abandoned power. He laughed when I told him I’d met the
Argent Dawn. “You’re nutters,” he said, and refused to be convinced that
I hadn’t been duped. Then I relayed Katy M’s explanation of the Law to
me over the campfire the night before. He listened, eyes wide.
“The Shadow Council is the same as the Law?” he
said, incredulously, when I’d finished.
“I know,” I said. “Blew my mind too.”
“And, in one night without it, we turn from Storm
City to chaos.”
I nodded. “The heart of darkness,” I said.
“Imagine how Orcmar is right now.”
“Jeeze.” It would be an all-out gang war. “I hadn’t
even thought about that. I wonder who’ll win?”
He shrugged. “What’s this all say about us, as a
people? As a city?”
I looked down. Not much, after all, I thought. Just
that we’d been set up. This was all part of the Master Plan. I didn’t
say it, though.
I turned around, finally, and opened the
refrigerator. It was warm inside. “Some vulture stew in a bowl at the
back,” he said. I pulled it out, and grabbed a serving spoon from the
silverware drawer. I ate ravenously.
“So, now I’m going North with a druid and a dwarf.”
If I found them again.
“Why?” he said.
“Quest,” I said.
“Fair enough,” he said. That was the exchange
whenever one of us was working on something we weren’t supposed to talk
about. I felt for a moment like Rhy had surely gotten up for a moment to
check her mail.
City sounds began to float in the shattered window
and into my consciousness. The din of disorganized battle echoed from
the high noon Old Town, and sounded like it was drawing closer.
“Listen,” I said. “Things here are going to get a
lot worse before they get better, I think. The fighting’s not going to
stop until people take control, and once they do, they’re not going to
be in any position to be fair, or just. I feel like a whole lot of
people are going to die.”
Tidus nodded numbly.
“You should pack. Get out of town.”
Tidus nodded. He started looking around, as though
planning what could fit into a backpack. “I’ll go home,” he said,
finally. “I want to see Orcmar again, even if it’s in ruins.”
Good luck, I thought. “Don’t get killed,” I said.
“I have to go and find the dwarf and the bull.” Tidus nodded and stood
up. I put the empty stew bowl in the sink. Normally I’d take care of
washing it, but that seemed like sweeping the halls in Azshara’s palace
now.
We stood in the living room, and shook hands
awkwardly. “Keep in touch,” I said.
“Damn right,” he said.
I bent down on all fours, stretched myself out and
leapt as a cat through the shattered window to the deserted street
below.
IX
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