by Greg Weisman
If not always his attention span. He was, he had to admit, easily bored. He had to practically force himself to focus on what Zathra was saying …
“Dey boarded a boat here. All four a dem, da woman, da boy, da gnoll, and da murloc.”
“And the yeti?” Valdread asked hopefully.
“No, mon. But it lookin’ like dey be herdin’ a live deer or fawn wid dem. Ta eat later, I suppose.”
“Could be night elf,” said Long-Beard. “Night elf shift to stag and go on boat.”
“Yes,” Valdread whispered, using dead lungs to force air up through his windpipe. “The night elf that we found buried back near Skypeak dug his way out of his grave, raced us here to meet his friends, and then decided boat travel is made more convenient when voyaging in the form of a stag.”
“Oh,” Long-Beard said, “Long-Beard forget night elf dead.” Short-Beard whapped his other head on the nose. “Ow.”
Slepgar yawned and said, “Maybe dead elf leave grave to walk.”
Guz’luk nodded and pointed at the baron. “Yeah. Like you.”
Zathra cut off the discussion impatiently. “Dese tracks not be stag tracks, bruddas. Dis not elf.”
Slepgar and Guz’luk both said, “Oh.”
Karrga, who had something of a pleasing knack for cutting to the chase, said, “What now?”
Zathra hesitated. Valdread, bored again, decided to speed things along. “With access to a boat, there are three routes to Gadgetzan from here. They can hug this shore and make their way via Tanaris. They can sail right up the center of the canyon. Or they can cross to the opposite shore.”
“Ya, mon,” Zathra said, having made her decision. “We be needin’ ta split up. I gonna stick ta dis side. Throgg, you take da dead tauren’s boat dere and da central route. But first you sail across and drop off Valdread. He gonna take da far way.”
Throgg asked, “Who take ogres?” Then, blushing, he quickly added, “Throgg take Karrga.”
Zathra said, “I be takin’ Ro’kull and Ro’jak wid me and Skitter. You and Valdread divide up da rest.”
Valdread scowled. The last thing he wanted was to be burdened with numbskull ogres. He whispered, “You can keep them all, friend Throgg. I don’t require companionship—or a transport ship, for that matter.” And to prove his point, he strode right into the water, leaving the rest of the Hidden behind …
Marching across the submerged floor of the flooded canyon was slow going. But the baron appreciated the silence and solitude after months of associating with ogres, trolls, arakkoa, and monomaniacal humans. Being dead was terminally boring, but being around the living grew tiresome, too. In fact, everything grew tiresome eventually.
He passed a village and the skeletons of drowned centaur picked clean by the marine life.
Life. There was that word again.
He missed life. Or living, anyway. Not this travesty of existence he whispered his way through now. His voice was a whisper. His movement was a whisper. His effect on those around him—even as a stone-cold killer—was hardly more than a whisper. He wasn’t a man any longer, but some kind of Whisper-Man.
It hadn’t always been that way. Once, long ago, he had led a life of boldness. He was SI:7. Stormwind Intelligence. One of the elite. (Back when the word elite meant something and wasn’t given out to every group of ogres serving at the whim of some minor, even temporary, despot.) No, Reigol Valdread had reported directly to and served directly under King Varian Wrynn of the nation of Stormwind. Served so well, in fact, that His Majesty had made Valdread a baron of the realm.
The baron had been a rogue, certainly. But a patriotic rogue. Based in Stormwind, assigned to Lordaeron, he gathered intelligence that benefited the kingdom of his birth at great risk to life and limb (back when his limbs weren’t reattachable). He was a dangerous man, and he took many lives, but he had principles then and killed only those that threatened king and country.
And the women …
He had been roguish in that pursuit, as well. Ghoulish as he was now, Reigol had been considered quite handsome in his day. But he was not unkind. Perhaps there were one or two former companions who had wished him dead when their time together had ended (though he doubted even they would have hated him enough to wish him undead). But he thought most would look back on their time together warmly. Even after becoming Forsaken, he had run into a pirate he had once loved after his fashion. And she had bravely brushed a kiss upon his cold, thin, stretched, pale lips for old time’s sake. It was the only touch of affection he’d been shown since dying. And though he had barely felt the contact, he thought back on it fondly. Almost as fondly as their original encounters nearly twenty years ago.
But, oh, those years, those intervening years …
Some eight or nine years ago, he had been at Stormwind Keep, relating intelligence of Lordaeron to the king.
Grateful as always, Varian had wondered with a smile if Valdread was ready to retire. After all, the baron was pushing forty, which made him nigh on ancient, relative to most of his SI:7 peers. “I gave you a title, my friend,” His Highness had said. “But you’ve taken no time to enjoy it. Should you wish it now, I would reward you handsomely for prior service and ask no more of you.”
And Valdread had considered it … for about sixteen seconds, at most. No, he enjoyed the work too much—and he enjoyed the pleasures and other perquisites that accompanied it.
So when word came of a plague in the north, Baron Reigol Valdread volunteered to investigate. He found a mystic disease that brought both death and undeath. And then came the Scourge, the Lich King’s undead army, murdering everything in its path. And once dead, its victims rose again to join that army.
Valdread never severed so many heads in his life. But it mattered little. The plague weakened him, and even before he had succumbed to it, the tide of the Scourge washed over him, and four Scourge swords pierced him from every side. He breathed his last and fell.
And then rose.
Reigol Valdread had always been strong in body and mind. Strong enough in the latter to know he no longer controlled his own actions. He was a walking puppet of flesh and bone, prey to the puppet master Lich King’s every whim. He killed people he had once loved and barely had enough self-possession to notice, let alone stop himself.
This was the darkest time. A small piece of him still had wished for a true death. But that piece was buried deep and had no force behind it. He shambled on and on and on …
Thank the gods for the Banshee Queen!
In life, Sylvanas Windrunner had been a high elf and the ranger-general of Silvermoon, capital of the kingdom of Quel’Thalas in northern Lordaeron. Defeated by the Lich King’s champion, she had been raised into undeath. But somehow, she found a way to break the Lich King’s hold on her mind and will. Tearing herself away from the Scourge, she sought out others among them whose souls were merely buried—not obliterated.
She found Reigol Valdread. Her power freed his mind, his will, his soul, but could not restore his body or his life. He became Forsaken, swearing fealty to the Banshee Queen. He fought at Windrunner’s side against the Scourge and those who did or would control them. He marched against them throughout the north.
But at some point, it became clear that the march would never end.
He grew bored with killing the dead. He knelt before Sylvanas and asked her to release him from his vow. She was—begrudgingly—willing. Though she demanded loyalty, she would not hold her agents in thrall. She understood the call of freedom better than most. But she warned him that few in Azeroth would accept him as the Forsaken had. Even the most open-minded, who understood that his was not a condition he had chosen for himself, would ne’er be able to stay in the same room beside him for long due to the stench of death he carried with him everywhere he went.
Nevertheless, Baron Valdread took his leave of the Banshee Queen and the Plaguelands.
He doused himself—practically bathed himself—in jasmine water and traveled across
Azeroth, looking for something, anything, that could hold his interest for a time. He became a mercenary and paid assassin (though he had little need of money), because the jobs acted as little puzzles to occupy his mind.
Eventually, he encountered Malus, who offered a decent purse and tasks of superior complexity as a member of the Hidden. It was spy-work and death-work, the closest he had come to his days as a living man in SI:7. His new companions—Zathra, Skitter, Throgg, Ssarbik, Ssavra, and Malus himself—provided drama and amusement. And the individuals they were hunting, Captain Thorne and his son and the talented Makasa Flintwill—now, of whom did she remind him?—provided serious challenges to success.
It was not life. But it was a living.
For the length of two days—or so he estimated without confidence, since what meaning could time have to such a one in such a place?—he marched on through the cold, watery grave of a great many poor, drowned souls … and felt a kind of numbness not brought on by the frigid temperature.
He finally emerged on the far shore of Thousand Needles. He stripped to dry his clothes, trying hard not to look down at the withered, white, and ravaged mockery of the man he once was. He opened a brand-new sealed bottle of jasmine water and sprinkled it liberally over himself.
Then he dressed and moved on, marching onward swiftly—for the dead don’t tire, do they?—in search of Aramar Thorne, Makasa Flintwill, their gnoll, their murloc, and the compass.
For what better occupation could a thing such as himself be expected to find?
Thorns. The entire shoreline was composed of a grand barricade of colossal thornbushes that curved up and over into a massive dome of razor-sharp thorns, admitting no entry to the quilboar lands of the aptly named Razorfen Downs. Aram was instantly reminded of the ogre king’s unnatural dome of thorns—much smaller by comparison—that held prisoner the cubs of the wyvern One-Eye in Dire Maul, where Thalyss had been mortally wounded. He said a silent prayer that their sojourn into Razorfen would not be as costly.
The White Lady was taking her monthly rest, and the Blue Child was playing peekaboo amid dark clouds, allowing the two boats (and their grateful passengers) to approach under cover of darkness. Amberhide, or rather her silhouette, signaled from her boat, indicating the only place of entry, an arched gap in the dome, nearly invisible to any who didn’t know where to look.
It was guarded by two quilboar sentries. But the magistrix, or rather her silhouette, removed a hand from the pocket of her robe. She held her palm out flat, and Aram saw her lean in and heard her blow upon it. A kind of dust or powder floated into the air, sparkling in the minimal light and wafting toward the sentries. One coughed. The other sneezed. And in Rendow’s boat, Aram, Makasa, Hackle, and Murky waited …
When the harpies had fled and Drella was found to be missing, her sworn protectors had all raced back into Thalia Amberhide’s hut, hoping against hope that the dryad was safe inside. But instead of Taryndrella, they found a large hole torn right through the hut’s canvas rear wall. Thalia and Elmarine seemed briefly convinced that a harpy had ripped her way inside and taken Drella. But Makasa wasn’t buying it. For starters, the wall was damaged from the inside out. Also, harpies were sky raiders and would never risk being confined indoors.
Finally, Drella was not the only one missing. Shagtusk was also nowhere to be found.
Makasa had become violent then, slamming the substantial Amberhide down into a wooden chair with enough force to buckle the thing, leaving the tauren on the floor among shattered fragments of wood—with Makasa’s cutlass at her throat.
Makasa wanted answers and wanted them now.
Thalia cooperated, answering every question without hesitation. Elmarine helped to fill in the blanks. The rest came down to logic.
The travelers had not been wrong. Everyone on Freewind Post was afraid. But not, as was now plain, of the Grimtotem—but of the harpies, who attacked irregularly, but easily once every three or four nights. This had little to do with Drella, except that the bird-women had provided the perfect distraction for her true kidnapper.
It was Shagtusk who had most likely taken Drella, and Elmarine thought she knew why. There were rumors of unnatural magicks being practiced in the quilboar lands on the far shore of the canyon. Because of the dome of thorns there, the rumors were hard to confirm. Elmarine had sought to learn more by questioning Shagtusk on several occasions. The young quilboar scout was, well, reticent, to say the least. But her silence spoke volumes to Elmarine of Shagtusk’s grave concern over the activities of her fellow quilboar in Razorfen.
And here, Elmarine accepted the blame for what happened to Drella. In relating Drella’s abilities at dinner that night, Elmarine had presented Shagtusk with a possible solution to the problems in Razorfen. The magistrix now believed that Shagtusk had abducted Drella in the hope that she could fix things there. That was the good news. Shagtusk needed Drella and would not harm the dryad.
And the bad news?
Drella was young, immature, and inexperienced. Her ability to cleanse Razorfen of all unnatural magic, particularly when there must be one or more quilboar magi intentionally practicing that magic, was going to be limited at best. And when Shagtusk discovered that this particular daughter of Cenarius was not as useful as had been suggested, would she still keep Taryndrella alive?
They had to act fast.
Within minutes, Aram, Makasa, Hackle, and Murky were in Rendow’s boat, following the tauren and the quel’dorei in Amberhide’s boat. Thalia had explained that neither she nor Elmarine could enter Razorfen with Aram and the others. If a magistrix from Freewind or any of the post’s tauren were caught—dead or alive—in Razorfen, then the Freewind Post détente would collapse. Makasa thought this a convenient excuse for them not to trouble themselves with solving a problem they had largely created, so they offered to do what they could: they’d guide the travelers to the gap in the barricade, deal with the sentries, and secure Rendow’s boat so that Drella’s rescuers would have a quick means of escape—assuming they could find their way to Drella, rescue her, and then find their way back out again.
Makasa was still far from impressed with this offer, but Aramar had pointed out that it was better than nothing. So the two boats headed off together.
The two quilboar sentries were snoring. One had plopped down onto his rear and, still holding his battleaxe, had slowwwwwly tilted back until prone. The other was asleep standing up, leaning on his long lance, as his axe clattered to the ground. But before Makasa had disembarked, the lance snapped under the quilboar’s substantial weight, and the creature fell forward, bloodying his snout against the stone floor of the entry—all without waking.
Carefully and quietly, Makasa led Aram, Murky, and Hackle to shore. Hackle threw the boat’s rope to Elmarine, and Amberhide rowed softly away, towing Rendow’s vessel behind her own, to wait in the shadows for the rescue party to return.
Aram knew Makasa didn’t like trusting them even that much. But—again—what choice did they have? They tiptoed past the snoring sentries and entered a virtual labyrinth of thorns.
Within minutes, Hackle—like Soot on the trail of a rabbit—had Drella’s scent. With Aram holding his heavy club, the gnoll skimmed the ground on all fours, sniffing his way through the twisting thorn passages with a certainty that amazed and impressed his companions.
Some of these alleys were quite narrow, and more than once Aram caught a sleeve or some skin on the sharp thorns to either side of him. But he stifled any cries of frustration or pain. The last thing they needed was to attract attention.
Fortunately, at this late hour, the dome seemed nearly deserted. One large quilboar male, stumbling around drunk, forced them to duck down a side passage. He passed, belching and farting loudly, without any sign he was aware of their presence. Minutes later, a large quilboar female, also drunk, completely blocked their path as she stood there, swaying back and forth to the rhythm of some unheard music. Makasa borrowed Hackle’s club from Aram and clocked the
quilboar on the back of the head. She’d wake up tomorrow morning with an even bigger hangover than she deserved.
They saw no one else … until Hackle led them straight to Shagtusk, who sat on the ground—holding her knees to her chest—in a cramped cell of dense razor-sharp thorns. The thorns surrounded her on all sides within an inch of her fur and with barely enough room for her to raise her head and stare up miserably at Drella’s four friends.
“Where is she?” Makasa hissed dangerously. “Where’s the dryad?”
Shagtusk shook her head and moaned out, “Gone.”
It had been a wild impulse. Nothing more.
At supper, Shagtusk had listened to the magistrix talk about the powers of the dryad and how those powers were stronger now while it was summer. The quilboar didn’t understand why this Drella would be less powerful come spring, but spring was months away, so that didn’t seem important.
What seemed important was what the dryad could do. Destroy unnatural magic. That was what her tribe needed. Chugara was out of control, and Blackthorn … Blackthorn was just insane.
Then the harpies came. It was part of the détente with the blasted tauren that a quilboar scout be posted at Freewind every night to help fight the blasted harpies. But Shagtusk was sick of fighting the bird-women. So when Amberhide rushed out with her bundle of spears, Shagtusk took her time just to rise from the table.
When she did rise, she looked up to find everybody else was already outside. The tauren, the elf, the humans, the gnoll, and the murloc. The dryad stood in the doorway, watching the harpies’ attack and Amberhide’s counterattack.