The man shoved the first arrow up into a troll and twisted it. Even before his victim shouted, he leaped back to the middle two and drove them up, one with each hand. They yelped as he got to the last arrow and stabbed it up too.
Chen bounded up the stairs and didn’t even bother to search for a lever. He barreled through the door. Wood cracked. Crockery and wooden bowls flew into the room a half second before he did. To his right, the silent troll lay on his left side. The arrow had run through his upper arm and into his chest. He reached for a knife with his right hand, but Chen lashed out with a foot. The Zandalari’s head snapped back, smashing into the stone wall.
Chen spun and stopped. The two talkative trolls thrashed on the floor. An arrow had come up through one’s belly. The other appeared pinned by the spine. As each tried to sit up, the four-edged arrowhead snagged in the crack, catching them firmly. Blood sprayed with their screams as their heels beat against wood and fingers clawed curled splinters from the floorboard.
The commander, a shaman, stood by the door. Dark, pulsing energy gathered in a ball between his hands. His dying comrades’ cries had alerted him to his danger. The arrow meant for him had only sliced his ribs. He stared at Chen with black eyes boiling with venom and snarled something cruel in the troll tongue.
Chen, knowing what would happen if he did nothing—and knowing it would happen even if he did something—set himself and leaped. Not fast enough.
A heartbeat before his flying kick carried him to his target, and half a heartbeat before the shaman completed his spell, an arrow splintered the floor. It flashed past Chen’s ankle, between the shaman’s hands and his body. It caught the troll under the chin, popping up through his skull and pinning his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
Then Chen’s kick landed, blasting the Zandalari back through the door and out into the storm’s darkness.
Tyrathan, bow in hand with arrow nocked, appeared at the top of the stairs. “Lever stuck?”
The pandaren nodded as the trolls thrashed out the last moments of their lives. “Stuck. Yes.”
The man checked the silent troll, then slit his throat. The two in the middle of the floor were obviously dead, but he checked them anyway. Then he moved to where the commander had laid his things, and located a satchel with a book and a small box with pens and inks. He flipped through the book for a second, then returned it to the satchel.
“I can’t read Zandali, but I caught enough of their conversation to know they’re scouting just like us.” He looked around. “We’ll drag the other one back in. Burn the place?”
Chen shook his head. “Probably best. I’ll tap that keg in the cellar and use my breath of fire to light it. I’ll also remember this place and will make it right for these people.”
The man looked at him. “You’re not responsible for them losing their farm.”
“I may not be, but I feel I am.” Chen took one last look in the farmhouse, tried to remember how it had been, then turned it into a pyre and followed the man into the storm.
• • •
They headed west, toward the monastery, and found a cave complex that curled down and around. They dared make a small fire. Chen welcomed the chance to make some tea. He needed the warmth and needed the time to think while Tyrathan studied the book.
Chen had never been a stranger to combat. As he had told his niece, he’d seen things he’d just as soon forget. That was one of the small miracles of life: the most painful things could be forgotten, or at least the memory of them would dull. If you let it dull.
He’d seen many things. He’d even done many things, bloody things, but never quite had seen what Tyrathan had done in the farmhouse. It wasn’t the shot through the floorboard that would stick with him—even though that had probably saved his life. He’d seen enough soldiers with shields pinned to their arms by arrows to know wood offered inadequate defense against a good archer. Granted, the man was a spectacular archer, but what he had done there came as no surprise.
What Chen was uncertain that he’d ever forget was the calm and determined way in which the man had prepared the arrows he’d used from below. He’d designed them deliberately, not just to kill, but against the probability that they would not kill. He’d meant them to trap the trolls. He twisted the shafts after they went in to make sure the arrowheads would catch against ribs or other bones.
There was honor in combat, in fighting well. Even what Tyrathan and Vol’jin had done at Zouchin, in remaining behind to snipe at the Zandalari and slow them down, was honorable. It allowed monks to save villagers. The Zandalari might have thought it cowardly, but then using siege engines against a fishing village completely lacked honor.
Chen poured tea and handed a small bowl to Tyrathan. The man accepted it, closing the book. He breathed the steam in, then drank. “Thank you. It’s perfect.”
The pandaren forced a smile. “Anything useful in there?”
“The shaman was a good little artist. He drew maps well. He even had a few flowers pressed into the pages. He did sketches of local animals and rock features.” Tyrathan tapped the book with a finger. “Some of the later pages are blank, save for a random series of dots in the four corners. There’s that on pages he’d already written on, and he actually repeated the pattern on a couple that didn’t have it. The blank pages had the symbols inscribed, I think, by someone else.”
Chen sipped his tea, wishing it would warm him more. “What does that mean?”
“I think it was a means of navigation. Put the bottom edge of the page on the horizon and look for constellations matching the dots. That points you in your new direction.” He frowned. “Can’t see the night sky now, of course, and the constellations are different here, but I’m betting we can work out which way they were going when the weather clears.”
“That would be good.”
Tyrathan set his tea down on the book’s leather cover. “Should we clear the air in here?”
“What do you mean?”
The man pointed back in the farm’s general direction. “You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet since the farmhouse. What’s the matter?”
Chen looked down into his tea bowl, but the steaming liquid revealed no answers. “The way you killed them. It wasn’t combat. It wasn’t . . .”
“Fair?” The man sighed. “I assessed the situation. There were four of them, and they were better suited to the fight we’d have than we were. I had to kill or incapacitate as many as I could as quickly as I could. Incapacitate meant making sure they couldn’t attack us, not effectively.”
Tyrathan looked up at Chen, his expression faintly haunted. “Can you imagine what would have happened had you burst in there and the two on the floor weren’t stuck like that? The one in the corner also? They’d have cut you down and then they would have killed me.”
“You could have shot them through the floor.”
“That only worked because I was below him, and his spell was making a lovely light.” Tyrathan sighed. “What I did was cruel, yes, and I could tell you that war is always cruel, but I won’t show you that disrespect. It’s tha— I don’t have the words for it. . . .”
Chen poured him a bit more tea. “Hunt for them. You’re good at that.”
“No, my friend, I’m not good at that. What I’m good at is killing.” Tyrathan drank, then closed his eyes. “I’m good at killing at a long range, at not seeing the faces of those I kill. I don’t want to. It’s all about holding the enemy at bay, keeping them at a distance. I keep everyone at a distance. I’m sorry that what you saw disturbed you.”
The anguish in the man’s voice squeezed Chen’s heart. “You’re good at other things.”
“No, actually, I’m not.”
“Jihui.”
“A hunter’s game—at least the way I play.” Tyrathan half laughed, then smiled. “This is why I envy you, Chen. I envy your ability to make people smile. You make them feel good about themselves. Were I to go out and kill enough beasts for a banquet and then t
urn them into the most exquisite food anyone there had ever tasted, it would be memorable. But if you came and told just one of your stories, you would be remembered. You have a way of touching hearts. The only way I touch them is with steel at the end of a cloth-yard shaft.”
“Maybe that’s who you were, but that isn’t who you have to be now.”
The man hesitated for a moment, then drank more tea. “You’re right, though I fear that’s who I am becoming again. You see, I am good at this killing bit, very good. And I fear I come to like it far too much. Thing of it is, it obviously scares you. It scares me even more.”
Chen nodded silently because there was nothing he could say that would touch the man’s heart. He realized that this was the end of Huojin in the eyes of most pandaren. Giving way to impulsiveness meant giving too little value to anyone and anything. A faceless enemy at a distance was easier to kill than someone a sword’s length away. Huojin, carried to the extreme, made all life valueless, and was simply the harbinger of evil.
But the reverse, Tushui, would logically lead to someone who spent so much time in consideration of everything that no action was possible. That would hardly be the antithesis of evil. Which was why the monks stressed balance. He looked at Tyrathan. A balance my friend is finding elusive.
• • •
The question of that balance remained on Chen’s mind for the rest of their trip back to the monastery. Chen sought his own balance point, which seemed centered on whether he should raise a family or continue his exploring. He found it easy to imagine doing both with Yalia by his side, allowing him to have the best aspects of life.
As they traveled, Tyrathan took reckonings using the troll’s journal. “It’s a rough guess, but they’re heading for the heart of Pandaria.”
“The Vale of Eternal Blossoms.” Chen looked to the south. “It’s beautiful, and ancient.”
“You’ve been?”
“I only know its splendor from attending my duties along the Serpent’s Spine wall to the west, but I have not trodden its soil.”
Tyrathan smiled. “I suspect that will change, and very quickly. That’s where we’ll find the Zandalari, and I have a feeling none of us are going to enjoy that reunion.”
19
“Understatement be overrated in a time of war, Lord Taran Zhu.” Vol’jin nodded to Chen and Tyrathan. “I’m glad you both be back.”
The man returned the nod. “Glad to have made it. And glad to hear your voice recovering.”
“Yes, very glad, Vol’jin.” The pandaren brewmaster smiled. “I can make some tea that could help further your recovery.”
The troll shook his head. He noticed some distance between Chen and the man, but now was not the time to explore it. “This be as good as it gonna be getting. For now. With all due respect, Lord Taran Zhu, we be needing to know about this place.”
“Do not judge the pandaren harshly, Vol’jin. Doubtless you will find flaws with how we have done things. You already believe our lack of a formal military, despite millennia without successful invasions, is a mistake. You may yet be proved correct.” The Shado-pan leader gathered his paws behind his back. “From what Chen has told me of the world beyond the mists, you, too, have been faced with catastrophes that could not have been predicted. You could argue that our logic in this matter is flawed, but for millennia it has been valid, so much so that it has become as much a truth as the sun rising with dawn and setting at dusk.”
“Your words be not terribly informative.”
“Save that it alerts you to your prejudices, which could impair your judgment about what you will see.” Taran Zhu nodded toward the map. “References are minimal, but the vale is not unknown. It is even populated, and refugees from recent incursions have been given sanctuary there. Still, we have no survey or tactical information of the sort that you desire.”
“It is as if you hoped, by keeping the vale hidden, you could insulate Pandaria from what lurks within.” Tyrathan looked at the map. “Hiding a problem does not eliminate it.”
“It does, however, slow those who would unleash the problem.” The elder pandaren drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “What I will show you has been passed from Shado-pan lord to lord, extending back to a time before the Shado-pan existed. I can show you only what I have been shown. I do not know if the fears and biases of my predecessors have shaded things. I do not know what has been forgotten or embellished. What I will share with you I have done so with no monks.”
His paws appeared again at his waist, then spread apart. Dark balls of energy crackled in the palm of each. He held one low and one high, both off to the side. A window radiating golden light appeared in the space between them. Within that window images began to move.
“This area is hidden within the Tu Shen Burial Ground. The Thunder King—the first mogu tyrant and the one with whom your Zandalari treated back in the dawn of time—had under him a circle of trusted retainers. His warlords were slain as their master was dying—perhaps to forestall their usurping his throne and plunging the empire into civil war. We do not know. What we do know is that there is a belief among the mogu that death is not always final and that the dead, or parts thereof, can be revivified for later use. I would guess this is the purpose for their invasion of the vale.”
Vol’jin peered closely, catching sight for the first time of a mogu—instead of just sensing them as he had in the cave. His mouth went dry and his throat began to ache. Taller than even a Zandalari, thickly thewed and merciless of expression, the mogu warriors might have been carved from a basalt dolmen. Vol’jin granted, as Taran Zhu warned, that memory might have made them more fearsome than reality. Even so, to reduce them by half would still make them formidable.
In the vision, they strode across Pandaria, using sword and fire to extend their dominion over subject peoples. The pandaren were reduced to a race of slaves. The lucky ones clowned enough to entertain their mogu masters. Those pandaren lived in stone palaces, and their lives knew relative luxury. But that luxury ended when a joke offended and only the snapping of a spine or the popped removal of a head could inspire more mogu laughter.
The vision shifted for a moment, and Vol’jin’s stomach knotted. He was back in the cave where he died, but it was more than a wet, moldy place covered in bat guano. Mogu sorcerers worked within. Clutches of lizard eggs, crocolisk, perhaps—Vol’jin couldn’t tell, but it hardly mattered—were sorted and buried in sands warmed through magic to very precise temperatures. And then when the creatures hatched, they were conveyed to another part of what the troll now recognized to be a rookery.
There, in the chamber where he died, the mogu touched the magic he’d felt. Titan magic. The magic that had shaped the world. In that place, mortals worked with the stuff of divinity to take simple creatures and transform them into the saurok. They used the lizard people as surrogate troops to maintain their empire, allowing the mogu to enjoy the fruits of their conquest.
The process was terrible to watch, yet Vol’jin could not look away. Bones snapped and stretched. Joints reset themselves and muscles ripped. As they grew back together, angles reorganized to provide more power. The saurok stood tall. Fingers grew and thumbs shifted. From lizard to scaled warrior in a matter of minutes—a testament less to the skill of the mogu than to the sheer power of the magics with which they played.
The troll shivered. Did the titan magic staining that place make it so I not be dying? The moment the thought occurred to him, he wanted to laugh. It would be just like Garrosh to plan his murder in the one place it could not possibly happen.
Laughter caught in his throat as the scene shifted again, to one of fire and blood, much darker than the conquest. The skies darkened over. Red lightning flowed from above like lava and splashed over the landscape. Magic warped reality as monks cast down their mogu overlords. Monks led the fight for freedom and valiantly won the day.
In the aftermath of the mogu empire’s fall, as the skies grew lighter and blood drained from rivers an
d streams, the pandaren took up their slain enemies and entombed them in the Tu Shen Burial Ground. The respect they showed the mogu warlords surprised him. Had Vol’jin met Tyrathan on a battlefield and slain him, he’d have mounted the man’s head on a stick and posted it at a crossroads so travelers would know of his victory.
This be going back to their sense of balance. The fear and hatred be offset by respect. Vol’jin watched as the tombs were sealed, the clues were hidden, and the mists were raised to shroud Pandaria. That, too, is balance. The peace of camouflage—invisibility—versus war’s terror. Their kindness be for healing, just as the hiding be outta necessity.
As the vision faded, the troll met Taran Zhu’s gaze. “I be understanding, Lord Taran Zhu. I do not judge.”
“But you wish things were otherwise.”
“Things past counting. Wishing, however, be not winning battle.” Vol’jin pressed a finger to the Tu Shen region on the map. “People be living there, you said. What can they tell us?”
“Scant little. They are largely content and do not explore, nor do they communicate with outsiders. They are happily hidden in their paradise.” Taran Zhu smiled. “And those pandaren who were of the adventuring nature were encouraged to chase the turtle.”
Chen’s head came up. “So we would not disturb the tombs of mogu warlords and emperors.”
“You understand, Master Stormstout. Though some mogu survived, they never presented much of a threat. What little we knew of the Zandalari came from the mogu viewpoint. They understated the power of the Zandalari. We labored under the belief that no one had the ability or desire to resurrect the mogu. It would appear that your Zandalari have taken steps to do so. They removed the Thunder King from his tomb, and . . .”
The man folded his arms over his chest. “. . . now they’re going back for the Thunder King’s warlords?”
“They amplify his will and his power.”
The Thunder King be seeing them the same as Garrosh does the leaders of the Horde’s other contingents. Vol’jin nodded. “So, then, it be logical to be thinking two things. The reestablishment of his reign be the first goal for the Thunder King.”
World of Warcraft: Vol'jin: Shadows of the Horde Page 15
