“There is a small standing force; the queen must have sent them,” Visrynn reported, her eyes shining brightly against the red flowers tattooed on her face. “But we outnumber them.”
“They do not stand a chance, sir,” Lelyias agreed. “The camp is largely pilgrims. We could take prisoners and forego bloodshed.”
Sira fidgeted with her helmet, displeased.
“You have thoughts, Sira?” Nathanos drawled, clearly poking at her.
“They should suffer as we suffer,” Sira replied. The round, red moon hanging above them drew her gaze, and she spat. “Unlife’s only pleasure is to spill blood before Elune. The goddess did not save me. I wonder, will anyone come to save this loa?”
“A pity there are only a handful of soldiers and pilgrims to dispatch.” Nathanos plucked the glove from his right hand and gave a short whistle. The celebrating in the clearing died down, and slowly the Widow’s Bite rebels came to mingle with them near the road. Apari could hardly walk, but she held her head high, that loathsome little tick perched on her shoulder. A distinct odor of infection came with her, and Sira could see the other Zandalari trying not to hold their noses around her, and visibly keeping their distance.
“The ruins are ours to take,” Nathanos announced. “Prepare yourselves, I shall tolerate a short rest once we secure the ruins and make camp before our final assault.”
The trolls swarmed to the east, following Visrynn and Lelyias as they led the charge. Apari stood before him, her face and hair damp with sweat behind her unsettling mask. It made for a wretched sight, yet the troll smiled with beatific calm, watching her troops stalk toward the ruins under the blood moon.
“You do not look well,” Sira remarked. “Lelyias is a skilled healer; she can ease the pain of your leg.”
Apari trembled, her green skin patchy and pale. It looked as if even drawing breath gave her great discomfort. But the troll waved her off. “No. That will not be necessary.”
Her bodyguard, Tayo, flinched.
“The Widow’s Bite are loyal to you and you alone,” Sira continued, impatient. The troll’s pride astounded her. Such foolishness would lead her to an early grave. “We need you to survive until the loa is no more.”
Behind her mask, Apari’s eyes danced, bright. “That is all I live to see,” Apari replied. “Bwonsamdi’s end and the traitor queen powerless.”
Startled shouts rose from the ruins, the ambush beginning as the rebels overran the small encampment, and the dark rangers circled the perimeter, drawing their bows and finishing any who tried to escape. There were more civilians pouring out of the ruins than Sira expected. A young male troll draped in furs appeared between a gap in the wall, wedged himself free and sprinted toward them, orange hair mussed from sleep, blood splattered across his face and tusks.
Sira donned her helm once more and drew her crescent glaives. The troll neared their hiding spot off the road, so close that Sira heard his frantic breathing as he hurled himself away from the carnage.
“Another one for you, Sira,” Nathanos said, bending down to pick up his pack, preparing to join the others in the ruins. “Perhaps allow him one last piss in peace before you strike.”
“One more soul for the Maw.”
Sira’s curved blades flashed with ruthless precision, and the troll’s head fell to the ground, his look of terror frozen there, his body slumping into the bushes at their feet. While his head still rolled away, Sira stepped over his torso, matching Nathanos’s easy stride. It was time to claim yet another small victory.
“Not much of a prize for your mistress,” Sira murmured, inspecting the broken pillars and vine-covered walls of Zo’bal. There were no more screams from within the ruins. All had gone quiet, and then the Widow’s Bite trolls began singing and a fire was lit, the smoke rising high above the fractured columns. “But everything in this accursed jungle is pathetic. Destroying it would feel like a favor.”
Nathanos shook his head, pausing outside the entrance to the camp. Bodies littered the ground. They had suffered no casualties on their side, though several Widow’s Bite members were being treated for wounds near the building fire. Apari and Tayo went ahead, joining their singing and dancing kin.
“Every victory we hand her matters,” Nathanos told Sira bluntly. The flames reflected in his eyes, flickering and hot. “I claim this one with pride, just as I will claim the Necropolis and destroy Bwonsamdi. He will no longer be a threat to Sylvanas. Little stands in her way now, and soon nothing will. Nothing ever stands in her way for long.”
* * *
—
Nathanos Blightcaller had no use for sleep. The fragile still-living bodies of the Widow’s Bite trolls, however, required it. Even the witch Apari and her faithful bodyguard found a corner to claim and a wall to nestle against. The tarnished badge Nathanos had given Apari to fuel her magic against the shrines glinted around her neck. Many times, he considered taking it back from her, either stealthily or with force. But each time, he heard the silken whisper of his queen, urging him to let such things go.
Trinkets and trifles, her voice reminded him. The impermanent, unimportant relics of life.
His loyalty to Sylvanas did not hinge upon such things, even without a physical reminder of their bond. Nathanos considered it a tangible thing, as real as the stones beneath his feet and the sludgy water lapping at his boots and the cricket song filling the swamp. He patted his coat pocket, feeling again the vial there. Now that he had given his badge away, it was the only gift from Sylvanas that remained in his possession.
Dark rangers kept the watch, posted at the corners of the ruins, sinking into the shadows with their dark hoods pulled low over their faces. They too had no need to rest and stood as silent sentinels, as unmoving as the statues carved into the stone pillars of Zo’bal.
To the north, waiting upon its own small island, the Necropolis rose, its pronged central tower spearing up toward the blood moon as if its arms were raised in supplication. He wandered to the edge of the broken bridge that once joined the Zo’bal Ruins to the Necropolis and its large, open court. They could still pass unimpeded, the water no deeper than his ankles. Still, something kept him from venturing farther across the shattered bridge.
Always on the eve of battle he felt restless, but this was something else. He felt the hounds of memory biting at the heels of his mind, something invisible and dangerous pursuing him. It was good that he did not sleep, for he knew it would only invite tormenting nightmares.
The winds there howled as if in pain. He had a letter to write, a message for Sylvanas letting her know of their progress and their impending victory, but something in the stirring mist called to him. An archway yawned open at the center of the Necropolis temple, blue flames glowing at its corners like eyes. Eyes that saw him and knew him, eyes that sent a chill down his spine.
“Hello, Nathanos.”
A coin splashed into the water near his feet. Nathanos hunched and then crouched, reaching down to fish the sliver of gold out of the muck. He traced his thumb across its face, revealing a familiar etching.
“You are not real,” Nathanos said, both to the coin and to the voice. But when he stood and turned, he came face-to-face with his cousin, Stephon Marris. “You died a long time ago.”
It was like looking into a forgiving mirror. Stephon had always been the more handsome of the two of them, with twinkling hazel eyes and a thick mop of dark hair that turned auburn at the edges. He had lips prone to smirking, dimples curved around his mouth, hiding in his beard. His skin still held the ruddy pink hue of a living man, further proof that this was only a hallucination of some kind.
Stephon Marris was long dead, ending as little but a greasy smear on a table, his body the raw materials that built Nathanos anew, and in Stephon’s image.
My one regret.
“Why did you let her do it?” Stephon asked softly.
“I was your cousin, Nathanos. I looked up to you, I wanted to be you, but not like that. Not like this.”
The gold coin in his palm had the weight of the real thing. He sighed and closed his fist around it. When his cousin Stephon was just a young lad, Sylvanas had given him the coin, a gift to fund his first sword. Stephon always wanted to be a paladin and serve the Silver Hand, and had indeed achieved his dream, a dream that was soon ended when he became the clay to shape and rebuild Nathanos. His body had been ripped to shreds by an abomination, and then he had risen as a thrall of the Scourge, a mindless ghoul until Sylvanas freed him from that fate. The process had left him renewed in undeath, but in a mangled body that grew ever weaker. Sylvanas sought to repair that crumbling form.
And used Stephon to do so.
“I had no choice,” Nathanos replied, unable to meet his cousin’s eye. “My bones were falling from their sockets, my sinews torn and useless, I needed a new body…”
“When you stole my flesh.”
Nathanos flinched. “Sylvanas made that decision. I could not be made whole without the sacrifice of a family member.”
Stephon shook his head sadly, regarding Nathanos not with rage or disgust, but pity. “And yet still you serve her. After what she did to me. After what she did to our family. I am the only ghost that moves you, but how many ghosts have you given others? How many men now live, tormented by the loved ones you murdered in service to your vicious queen?”
Whatever guilt he felt over Stephon’s end vanished. Nathanos stared back, suddenly emboldened.
“Did you know,” Stephon taunted, his face changing slightly, no longer so friendly or handsome, an odd, blue light suffusing his skin, “Your queen has made some nasty friends on the Other Side. The power she has been granted can be taken away, the lords of death will never let her win. Her power is nothin’ next to theirs. As she is chained to undeath, she is chained to the forces of the Shadowlands.”
“You know nothing of it,” Nathanos spat. “You do not know her as I do.”
He squeezed his hand, obliterating the coin put there by trickery and magic. Bwonsamdi. Of course. Stephon’s face dissolved into a hideous, grinning skull, a white bone mask hovering in the place where his cousin had been.
“You are in my world now, boy,” Bwonsamdi jeered. “This be my game, and we be playin’ it with my rules. Good luck to ya.”
“You’re finished,” Nathanos replied, cold.
“We be seein’ about that.”
With that, the loa, or the vision he had sent, vanished into a twist of mocking laughter. Nathanos sneered, returning to the ruins with his hand still tightened into a fist. There was work to be done, a letter to write. He roused a dark ranger posted at the ruins entrance, her red eyes the only part visible in the darkness.
“Make yourself ready, I need you to deliver a message. In one hour you depart for the Banshee’s Wail,” Nathanos instructed her. One more precaution, he thought. Like it or not, we are in Bwonsamdi’s territory. “Have our mounts at the ready. I refuse to meet my end in this swamp.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dazar’alor
“They have taken Zo’bal, my queen. Blightcaller and his rangers have been sighted moving on the Necropolis. What are your orders?”
Perfectly still, Talanji’s eyes fixed on the road ahead, the shaded avenue that led through the Zocalo to the Old Merchant Road, and then deep, deep into the green crush of the jungle, taking them over bridges and past waterfalls, down steep hills, to the Rivermarsh, to the Zul’jan ruins. At the end of that path, many miles of marching away, the destiny of her people awaited.
Zolani shifted. “My queen?”
“Then there is no more time,” Talanji at last replied. One last push, she told herself. Patch yourself up, find your last shred of strength. Hold your head high, let your people see it. March. “We march on the Necropolis.”
Alone.
It was difficult to find her voice. She had spent a sleepless night kneeling beside Zekhan on his cot, listening as Rastari enforcers, reserves, and what volunteer militia could be roused arrive to round out their forces. Zekhan twisted in his sleep, mumbling of spirits and shadows, his body covered in thick bandages applied by her priests. At some point in the night, she had drifted off, one arm resting on the bed, her head pillowed there, dreaming of the mighty Horde battalions that would be waiting outside come morning.
But her dream was just that, a dream. Thrall had not returned, and with much pain, Talanji washed and dressed, preparing for battle, schooling her face into an expressionless mask, knowing that when she beheld her forces in the Zocalo it would be an underwhelming sight.
“Is this all?” she had asked Rokhan and Zolani. Forty soldiers. Hardly enough to guarantee victory against the sly, skilled rangers of Sylvanas. “So few…”
“Many refused to come,” Rokhan informed her grimly. “The Widow’s Bite took hostages, made threats. Dazar’alor quakes, afraid of their wrath.”
“That ends today,” Talanji said. She meant it. Either they managed to chase the rangers from their shores and disbanded the Widow’s Bite, or the rebels won, and they would bring their chaotic rule to the Great Seal until the Horde came to avenge her.
At least she hoped. Perhaps they would not even do that.
I waited too long. This is the cost of my pride.
“We should go now,” Zolani advised. “Before it grows too hot for marching.”
“Give the signal,” Talanji agreed. It was time to decide their fate, even though she felt like a walking corpse, it was time. The others had noticed her state, of course, but nobody dared suggest she was too frail to lead.
Rokhan swung himself up onto his armored raptor, daggers glistening on his belt. He had wrapped leather straps studded with spikes around his great tusks for the occasion. Behind him, the pyramid sparkled in the morning sunlight, sleepy merchants and nobles beginning their day, oblivious to the gravity of the moment. Rokhan blew the war horn, her warriors shouted their response, and the Zandalari army followed her to war.
I will keep my promise to you, Bwonsamdi, though it may mean the end for us both.
They had passed beneath the magnificent golden arch of the Zocalo when a second, softer war horn blew in the distance.
“Did you hear that?” Zolani reined up her raptor, turning it back toward the city.
Talanji spurred her own mount, Tze’na, down the column of Zandalari soldiers, riding ahead of Zolani and Rokhan. She crossed the bridge back into the city, reaching the other side to hear another horn blast, this one closer. The tops of banners crowning the spikes appeared, the ground beneath her shaking rhythmically. From the zigzagging ramps of the Great Seal pyramid, Wardruid Loti, green hair flying behind her, raced toward Talanji. Breathless, she skidded to a stop beside Talanji’s raptor just as the first banners cleared the tops of the stairs leading up from the bazaar and port below.
“The Horde! They just started appearing, your majesty!”
“I see them, Loti.” Talanji didn’t bother suppressing her joy.
“There’s more.” Wardruid Loti finally caught her breath. “People are going mad in the markets. They think it’s an invasion.”
Talanji had feared as much. With the storms raging around Zandalar, any travel into the continent would have to be by magical means. Thrall must have used portals to transfer the troops.
“Find Lashk, go with him to the bazaar. Quell whatever fears you find there and then join us at the Necropolis.”
Loti fled without another word. There would be challenging times ahead, Talanji realized, for even if they succeeded in protecting the Necropolis, her city had suffered greatly from the Widow’s Bite meddling, threatening, and spreading false rumors. But first, Bwonsamdi must be protected and the efforts of Sylvanas and Apari halted.
Riding swiftly to meet the vangu
ard, Talanji encountered Thrall atop an armored gray wolf, red-and-black Horde banners hoisted behind him. First Arcanist Thalyssra could be seen riding among the soldiers, radiant in purple and blue, silver feathers shining on her pauldrons, a small host of nightborne elves marching in the wake of her manasaber. Her presence explained the portals, and the speed with which the Horde had arrived.
And last, but certainly welcome, the tauren chieftain Baine Bloodhoof joined them, accompanied by several shaman in elaborate headdresses, totems the size of tree trunks strapped to their backs.
It was, in all, a company of no more than what Talanji herself could muster, but that doubled their odds.
“You came!” she greeted Thrall, beaming. “I thought…”
“Forgive the lateness,” he replied. He wore a war harness that crisscrossed his chest and his usual battered leather gauntlets and grieves, an axe held in his right hand. His wolf shook out its great head, whining a little, and Thrall ruffled the fur on its forehead. “Easy, Moonpaw. This is all that could be gathered without leaving Orgrimmar undefended. It put considerable strain on Thalyssra to teleport all of us here. Will it be enough?”
Talanji inclined her head respectfully. “It will have to be. It is far more than we had, thank you. Zandalar will not forget this.”
Baine lifted the war horn he had brought to his lips and blew twice. The orc warriors, tauren shaman, and nightborne archers marched faster, and together, Talanji, Thrall, Baine, and Thalyssra gathered to lead the Horde forces toward the Zocalo, there to meld with the Zandalari army.
“How many cavalry?” Baine asked, immediately to business.
“Only us, Rokhan, and Zolani. Wardruid Loti will ride to the Necropolis when my people have been reassured this is not an invasion,” Talanji explained.
Shadows Rising (World of Warcraft: Shadowlands) Page 22
