“Jaina!”
She had already begun channeling her magic, opening a portal to whisk herself and the king to safety. But she heard him above the din of the storm and turned, her blonde halo of hair stirred by the shock of winds from the west. Without another word, she swiveled, the portal she had been making for herself and Anduin sputtering out into a single blue sparkle.
“Where?” she screamed.
“The shore!” Thrall thundered, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Dazar’alor!”
The portal opened, a shimmering mirage of the golden city there in its depths. Thrall grabbed Ji and tossed him inside, then watched the mage cling to her king before he too escaped the murderous sea, the wreck disappearing from under him as they plunged toward Zandalar.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Zeb’ahari
Apari felt the storm inside her. She carried it like a child, and thought of it just as fondly. It kicked and it raged and it drained the life out of her, but it remained strong. And hers.
She could not have children the usual way, not after the pillar crushed the lower half of her body and pulverized the bones in her leg, but that was all right. Apari had never wanted children, never understood the appeal, something she and her childhood friend had shared. New mothers often brought their infants to the gardens of the Great Seal to sit among the waters, where it was said the pools were formed from Rezan’s own tears and blessed one with health and longevity.
“All they do is cry and stink,” Talanji had said, then only eight. “But Father says it’s a queen’s duty to continue the line.” She had made a disgusted face, poking out her tongue.
The troll girls had crouched behind a vase taller and wider than them both, spying on the mothers cooing over their babies.
“When you are queen,” Apari had told her solemnly, with the confident wisdom of a child, “you will make ya own rules.”
“An’ you will be there with me.” Talanji had reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Nobody will tell us what to do.”
Apari had believed her. She always believed Talanji. She believed her when Rastakhan’s own advisers turned on him and Talanji begged for Apari to remain loyal. She believed her when she said the Horde could be trusted. And she believed her over her own mother, Yazma, who consumed her loa to cut off the head of the royal family. Apari had pressed her mother again and again, afraid of what would happen if Yazma went against their king and failed. In the young troll’s eyes, Talanji was all goodness and light, how could someone like that have an evil father? How could Yazma justify such rash action?
“Loa are meant to be used, Apari. Manipulated. They care not for our lives,” Yazma had said to her with the utmost seriousness. “Just as Rastakhan cares nothin’ for his subjects.”
“But Shadra has never hurt us!” Apari insisted. “Can’t we trust her? You’ve been her priestess all these years—”
“We trust poison, my daughter. We trust information and cunning. Shadra may possess these things, but she is a loa. When given the opportunity, Shadra will always choose what serves her best. And I will do the same. Put your faith in your own hands, Apari. A god is nothing without believers—and we do not have to submit to them, just as we will not submit to a crown that enslaves us to a loa’s whims.”
The next day, Yazma had helped set into motion a coup that nearly toppled King Rastakhan’s rule. She burned bright, bound by no gods or kings, and had fallen in battle. If only Apari had listened then, if only she had seen Talanji and her father for who they truly were, if only she had gone with her mother…would things have turned out differently? She could not say, but at least she would have died at her mother’s side.
That regret festered as viciously as the wounds in her leg.
Apari sat on the cliffs of Zeb’ahari, Tayo standing beside her. The village below went on as it always did, placidly removed from the chaos of the city, its inhabitants unaware of the Widow’s Bite followers hidden around them in the hills and trees.
“They…they disappeared.”
“How?” Apari demanded, slapping the spyglass out of Tayo’s hands. It dropped like a stone, smashed to pieces on the rocks below. “How!?”
Spotting the abandoned ship in the distance had been an accident. Each day, Apari commanded her followers to search the horizon and make certain no ships slipped the net of their storms. By chance, Tayo saw the wreck floating in safe waters, just beyond the edge of the squall, and there she had seen Jaina Proudmoore.
At first, Apari didn’t believe her. Couldn’t. Jaina Proudmoore? The human who had assaulted the Great Seal, killed Rastakhan, and left the palace in ruins? Left her life and her body in ruins? But Apari looked through the spyglass and saw with her own wide eyes the proof. With Tayo guiding her, Apari handed her back the glass and called out to the storm, commanding it. The sacrifice’s spirit, the dead noble, found new life in her body, a soul snatched away from Bwonsamdi, its unnatural existence fuel for her magic.
“Guide me!” Apari had called to Tayo. “Take me to her. Let the storm be her end, the sea her grave! I command the skies, they bend to my will!”
What a fitting end to her, ambushed and overcome by a troll she had never known nor even seen, but whose life Jaina Proudmoore had destroyed.
Ya don’t know me, human, she had thought, ready for the nourishing taste of revenge. But I know you. Oh, by my ancestors do I know ya.
All of a sudden, Apari was entrenched in memory, back in Zuldazar, a younger, more naïve girl. Alliance cannons bearing Kul Tiran anchors fired in deafening sequence, rattling her teeth in her skull. The noise was so overwhelming that it concealed the cracking of stone all around her. Concealed it until a palace pillar collapsed on top of her. “Loa…!” She had wheezed, all breath forcefully thrown from her lungs. “Help me…! Loa, please!” Who could tell how long she laid there, trapped and utterly alone? But she remembered the silence that followed her pleas as no gods or friends came to her aid.
“Apari.” Tayo stood, approaching her with the tentative steps of a child anticipating a scolding. “More shrines remain. We told the pale rider they would all be burned by sundown. Ya will have another chance to kill the Proudmoore woman one day.”
“No, Tayo. I won’t.” Daz flew in lazy loops up from the shore, gorged on some unlucky creature he had found below. The dreadtick landed on Apari’s shoulder, and she winced. Her body was growing frail, the infection in her leg sapping more and more of her energy. Only her own spite and the power of the sacrifice she had drained kept her from collapsing on the spot. “I don’t have much longer to live. Only enough time to see the traitor queen brought low.”
“That vulpera, I know she still be willin’ to take the leg and save you.”
Apari glared at her, quelling the urge to lash out and give Tayo a slap. “No. And we won’t speak of it again. One more word and I’ll toss ya off this cliff.”
A flicker of anger or resentment crossed the troll’s face, her left nostril twitching, but Tayo said nothing, simply bowing her head and disappearing into the trees where the remaining Widow’s Bite followers waited and watched.
However much Tayo had annoyed her, Apari did intend to finish the task the pale rider had set them. The blazes at Bwonsamdi’s shrines had brought gawkers and some worshippers trying to put out the fires. It was too dangerous to linger near them, but now it was time to seek the last three shrines and weaken the loa, a few more blows before the fatal strike. The bitter disappointment of missing her chance to drown Proudmoore had to be swallowed. One more mouthful of sorrow; she knew its acrid taste well.
She wrapped her hand around the badge hanging from her neck, the old, tarnished gold trinket Nathanos Blightcaller had offered as his own sacrifice. It thrummed with a strange, cold power.
“Widow’s Bite! Hear me now!” Apari turned to face the jungle, feeling the hidden eyes there find her, her secret audienc
e. “The evenin’ comes—our swiftest runners to the city, rouse our spies. Our fiercest warriors with me to the northern shrine. No rest and no hesitation—Bwonsamdi’s pain will be ours tonight, better food than fish, stronger drink than wine. Take it in and let it sustain ya!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dazar’alor
Thrall caught his breath beneath the great arch framing the Port of Zandalar. The massive, curved pillars invited one into a crush of bodies, merchants shouting their wares, porters balancing impossibly heavy baskets on their heads, and urchins weaving in and out of the throng looking for an easy pocket to pick. The scent of salted sea air fell away, the senses overrun by a hundred warring odors drifting down from the marketplace—the sweat of hardworking laborers; roasting spices that stirred the imagination as easily as the statues and emblems that gave the city its grandeur; the perfume of meat on the spit; the lush vegetable tang of vines and flowers dripping from the terraces.
“It will be a long climb.” Ji sighed and pushed his way into the crowd milling before the immense, troll-headed fountain central to the port. “We should get started.”
Before them, the great city of the Zandalari trolls rose like a golden promise, the top of the pyramid so tall it was shrouded in thin tendrils of mist.
“She could have dropped us closer,” Thrall groused. “But perhaps it is better to make a slow approach instead of falling out of the sky and into the throne room.”
“Any competent queen would have spies littered all over her city,” Ji added in an appropriately low voice. “She will know of our coming before we even reach the Terrace of the Speakers.”
“Then she will be warned.” Thrall spoke it with his voice but did not feel it with his heart. Why did Talanji refuse their help? Could she not see this was the most expedient path to victory? She may have been competent, but she was also proud. Too proud. Any leader must understand their limitations. Talanji had clearly reached hers; now it only remained to see if she would set aside her personal grievances for the safety and betterment of her people.
Personal grievances. It occurred to Thrall then that Jaina might have placed their portal to the city so far from the palace exactly because of those grievances. How would Talanji greet them if she watched them drop out of a portal unannounced into her throne room? Her suspicious mind might go immediately to the worst-case scenario and, in this instance, the correct one.
The last thing they needed was another reason for Talanji to mistrust them.
They began the long, long journey toward the palace, an untold number of stairs lying between them and their goal. The humidity and noise did nothing to ease Thrall’s troubled mind and tight stomach. Fortunately, they stood out less than he expected, the popular port drawing a diverse crowd, from reptilian tortollans to towering vrykul from the Broken Isles. Even the odd enterprising pandaren merchant wandered by. Many of the sailors and purveyors stood in clumps, complaining bitterly about the storms raging around the island, preventing the flow of commerce. Each and every one of them seemed ready to blame the queen for their financial woes.
“When we reach the bazaar we can hire a beast to make our journey shorter,” Thrall said, shouldering his way through the crowd.
“If we reach the bazaar.”
Thrall glanced down at him, brow lifted with concern.
“We are being followed,” Ji whispered. “They have kept us in their sights since we arrived at the port. Trolls. Six of them. White paint on their faces.”
The orc took his time appraising the situation and their odds, picking out the trolls Ji described. They looked thin, underfed, but he noted an intensity in their eyes that he did not like. Sometimes, the starved and the desperate were the most difficult opponents.
“Draw them out,” Thrall muttered back. “Follow me.”
They climbed to a terrace that overlooked the port. The Grand Bazaar proved less busy, as the stall owners shooed away anyone who didn’t seem ready to actually spend their coin. Thrall continued higher, leaving behind yet more of the concealing crowd. Only a handful of stragglers continued up the grand flight of stairs overseen by an immense, gilded pterrordax, whose white eyes seemed to see everything and nothing. She rustled her wings, then calmed and settled back down on her magnificent jeweled perch. Few dawdled in her shadow. If he and Ji managed to stay out in the open, he doubted the trolls would strike.
He was wrong.
Just before his foot landed on the final stair, a lanky, green-skinned troll darted toward him. Thrall anticipated the blow, aimed with a spear, and whirled, grabbing the weapon as it missed his right flank. Using the troll’s own momentum against him, he spun, fast, sending the troll flying toward the base of the sky queen’s perch. Ji faced the remainder of the ambushers head on, feet planted wide, furred hands curved like talons, his weight shifting from side to side.
“Death to the traitor queen and her Horde allies!”
A scream went up, and a young vulpera carrying a basket filled with bread on his head was shoved aside as a female troll in a simple black dress lifted a blow gun to her lips and blew. The boy toppled down the stairs, bread spilling in every direction. They were drawing an audience.
Thrall raised his right arm, his thick gauntlet protecting him from the dart. He knocked it away with a grunt, then unsheathed the axe strapped to his back. Swinging in a wide arc, he won them some space, the loud whoosh of the axe head frightening the ambushers back, putting them at a disadvantage and giving Thrall and Ji the high ground. The pandaren leapt into action, propelling himself with the fury of the wind down the stairs, leg outstretched, his foot slamming into the throat of a masked and hunched troll. It was more than enough to stagger him, and the troll slid back down with the boy and the bread, his dagger clattering to the stones.
Blow Gun wasn’t finished. She charged Thrall, shrieking, trading her darts for a mean little hunting knife. She slashed like a whirlwind, like she was possessed, and managed to land a hit. A glancing blow. Thrall shrugged it off. He snatched up the troll by her neck and shook her, hard, then threw her with a rasping bellow against the stone pillar at the top of the stairs. Unconscious, the troll slid down to join her friend, slumped and still beneath the Sky Queen.
“Step aside! Step aside, I said!”
Thrall recognized the voice. Darkspear Chieftain Rokhan slammed a pair of tortollan gawkers out of the way. Two heavily armed and armored Rastari enforcers emerged to tamp back the masses, using their staves horizontally to nudge them away from the commotion.
“Thrall!” Rokhan half laughed, half shouted, drawing his daggers and standing shoulder to shoulder with the orc. “Didn’t expect to see ya here, and certainly not startin’ a fight in the Grand Bazaar!”
“Ambushers,” Thrall told him in a snarl. “Rebels. We’ve come to speak with the queen. Urgently.”
“Take the pterrordax! I’ll deal with dis rabble! Enforcers, to me!”
The pterrordax presiding over the ambush flapped her wings, buffeting the crowd and Thrall with a sudden gust of wind. She let loose a primal, deafening cry, swooped down from her perch, and landed, shaking the tiles beneath Thrall’s feet, sending dust into the air. Ji somersaulted away from the stairs, catapulting himself on the final bounce onto the creature’s back. He ducked down, offering Thrall a hand.
“Go!” Rokhan assured them, delighting in the chance to let his daggers dance. “See to da queen!”
Thrall nodded and took Ji’s hand, hoisting himself onto the beast’s back, holding tightly to the harness decorated with gems and slivers of bone. At once, the beast pushed off, the force and speed of it drawing awed cries from the crowd.
They soared above the Terrace of the Speakers, spinning higher and higher, the Great Seal no longer just a distant, formless mountain. Now tower and waterfalls, manicured palms, balconies and windows came into view. The seat of Zandalari power and the queen
’s throne was spread beneath them, though with rebels openly challenging her allies in the streets, it was a throne she might not hold much longer.
* * *
—
“Who has come? Why was I not warned of visitors to my throne?”
Queen Talanji was ready for them. Little eyes, little spies, had carried word of the ambush and bloodshed in the Grand Bazaar to her on swift wings. Those spies, dismounting their pterrordaxes, had gone at once to Zolani, and Zolani had gone at once to the queen, and now Talanji stood before the Golden Throne, fists tight at her sides, eyes blazing. Just sitting upright was an ordeal now, her body growing weaker by the moment, but she refused to show her faltering health to those who depended upon her.
Even warned, their intrusion stung. Talanji had not extended an invitation to the Horde leadership, and they had already insisted on embedding Zekhan with her. That was more than enough. Between Rokhan and Zekhan, they should have been satisfied with her cooperation. But no, there they were, appearing in her port, causing trouble in her city, and now striding toward her as if they had every right to be there.
Zekhan hurried up from the council chambers below, huffing for breath, his cheeks stained pink from his haste. He bowed several times to Talanji before trying to meld into the wall beside the throne. She glared.
“Did you know of this?”
“N-no, majesty! No! I would have told ya!” Zekhan sputtered.
“I apologize for the intrusion.” Thrall stomped his way to the throne, pausing to show her the expected courtesy. He was visibly sweaty, spattered with blood, boots as wet as if he had just walked out of the surf. The pandaren, Ji Firepaw, bowed gracefully. Behind them, framed by the purple glow of dusk hovering on the horizon, the Sky Queen waited to take flight.
“You will explain the intrusion,” Talanji corrected. “Now.”
“A new threat rises, Queen Talanji, and we have come to offer our guidance and our aid,” Thrall replied.
Shadows Rising (World of Warcraft: Shadowlands) Page 18