World of Warcraft: Vol'jin: Shadows of the Horde (14 page)

The troll flicked at the snow with a finger, scraping through the crust. “If you be assuming the mantle of the man you once were, you be him again. If you are a new man, this be your home valley.”

“So shadow hunters are philosophers, then.” Tyrathan Khort smiled. “I had seen you before, before the monastery. I was with the forces from Kul Tiras—I’d been lent to Daelin Proudmoore. I was much younger then, darker of hair and smoother of skin. You’ve not changed, really, save for some scars. Another hunter wanted to bet ten gold he could kill you. I heard later on that he died hunting trolls.”

“You did not take that bet.”

“No. Fix on a target, you lose track of the others.” The man
sighed, his breath jetting in white vapor. “Had I been commanded to kill you, on the other hand . . .”

“You be doing your best in the hunting.”

“Hunting men or trolls—any thinking creature—reminds me that we’re all animals. I’ve killed men and trolls, too many of each. I don’t have a count.” Tyrathan shivered. “I know hunters who do. Disrespectful, I think, morbid. It reduces people to quantities. I’d like to think I’d be more than a scratch in someone’s journal.”

“
You
think that, or the old you?”

The man bowed his head. “Both of us. More now. There is something about the way the monks live and conduct themselves that is more respectful of life. That idea of balance, and seeking harmony. Do you wonder, Vol’jin, if the new you can balance the old?”

“You wonder.”

“I do.”

“I be knowing.”

“For me or for you?”

The troll opened his hands and stood. “Both. You said it. The child be hauling no burden. The child be knowing no limits. But the child be lacking experience, so cannot choose balance. We can.”

“We can’t escape our pasts.”

“No? I be Vol’jin, leader of the Darkspears. You be a man, a troll killer. Why be we not dead or bleeding from a fight between us?”

“Fair point.” Tyrathan scratched at his goatee. “Here, we are not enemies.”

Again the image of ships came to Vol’jin. He smiled. “You see your past as burden. You wish to drop it. If you do that, you are free, but you do not know who you be. Think of it as a shipwreck. You can never be making it whole again. Be salvaging from it. This place here, now, may be your home. But it be feeling like home because of the memory you salvage.”

“Run aground, that was certainly me.”

Vol’jin nodded. “The hunter who died. Who was she?”

Tyrathan shook his head, a gloved hand rising to cover his mouth. “I don’t really know.”

“Your sense of her be very strong.”

“Her name was Larsi. I met her before sailing. Never seen her before. But she thanked me and said that when she heard I was traveling to an uncharted island, she knew it would be an adventure she would not miss.” He hugged his arms around himself. “She— If I needed a volunteer, she was there. She made sure I had hot food, that my tent had been erected. We weren’t lovers. We didn’t talk much. I just got the sense that she felt she owed me something. And since she was there because I was there, and . . .”

“You plunder the pain. You be dishonoring her.” The troll nodded solemnly. “You would honor her by salvaging her belief in you.”

“That belief got her dead.”

“No. Her death be not yours to possess. It was her choice. Happy she be to know you still survive.”

“That would be one.” The man turned to face northeast and the jagged coastline. “My old life, so much debris scattered up and down the beaches. Salvage will take a long time.”

“Consider it child’s play.” Vol’jin stepped forward and joined the man at the mountain’s edge. Sunlight shimmered silver off the distant sea. They were too high up to see anything but the play of light on the water, but Vol’jin allowed himself to imagine his own life broken and scattered.
What be I salvaging?

Something brushed over his face, light and ethereal. It felt like a spider’s web. He went to scrape it away but found nothing. Instead, he remembered being a spider, floating, and looked seaward again.

His vision changed, sharpened by a lens that bent time. Out there, riding the waves, came the black fleet he’d seen in his vision. But he’d been wrong. The vision had showed him another time but not a distant one. What he saw now, what he had seen in the dream, was bare days away, and not in the past but in the future.

“Come quickly; we have to be seeing Taran Zhu.”

Alarm opened Tyrathan’s expression. He stared out at the ocean, then looked at Vol’jin with a lack of comprehension. “Your eyes aren’t that much better than mine. What did you see?”

“Trouble, great trouble.” The troll shook his head. “Trouble I be not certain we can limit, much less prevent.”

They raced back down the mountain as best as they were able. Vol’jin’s longer legs made for strides that ate more ground, but much too soon pain stitched his side. He dropped to a knee to catch his breath, which enabled Tyrathan to reach him. Vol’jin waved him on, and the man went, his limp barely noticeable.

One of the monks on the walls must have seen them coming, because Taran Zhu met them in the courtyard. “What is it?”

“Charts. Do you have charts? Maps?” Vol’jin sought the Pandaren word but wasn’t sure if he’d ever learned it.

Taran Zhu snapped a quick order, then took Vol’jin by the arm and led him inside. Tyrathan Khort followed. The elder monk guided them to the chamber where they’d shared Chen’s brew, though the table had long since been cleared. Another monk arrived with a rice paper scroll.

Taran Zhu took the scroll and unrolled it across the table. Vol’jin had to come around so he could face north. He couldn’t read the symbols, but there was no missing the monastery or the mountain peak to the east. He looked a bit farther east, then tapped a spot on the northern coast.

“There, what be there?”

Chen Stormstout bounced his way down the stairs. “That’s Zouchin. That’s where I’m building a new brewery.”

Vol’jin studied the map to the north and northeast. “Why be the island not on the map?”

Chen raised an eyebrow. “What island? There’s nothing out there.”

Taran Zhu looked at the monk who had brought the map and gave him a command in Pandaren. Chen started to turn away and
follow. “No, Master Stormstout, stay. Brother Kwan-ji will gather the others.”

Chen nodded, returning to the table. The smile with which he’d accompanied his announcement about Zouchin had completely vanished. “What island?”

The Shado-pan monk clasped his paws at the small of his back. “Pandaria is home to more than the pandaren. There was a time when another race, a powerful race, the mogu, ruled this island.”

Vol’jin straightened up. “I be aware of the mogu.”

Tyrathan blinked, taken by surprise. Chen’s eyes tightened.

“Then you know their time is past. That you know it, however, does not mean they know it.” Taran Zhu touched the map near the northeast corner. An irregular island slowly appeared, as if the mists that hid it had evaporated. “The Isle of Thunder. Many believe it a legend. Few know it is real. And if you know of it, Vol’jin, then others who know could cause great mischief.”

“I did not know until I had a vision.” The troll pointed at Zouchin. “I had another. A fleet has sailed from that island. It be a Zandalari fleet. Their only purpose can be great evil. And if we are to stop them, we have to be moving fast.”

F
oreboding slithered into Vol’jin’s guts as Taran Zhu stood as still as one of the stout stone pillars supporting the roof. “What would you suppose us to do, Vol’jin?”

The troll shared a disbelieving glance with the man, then opened his hands. “Send messengers to the village. Call up the militias. Prepare defenses. Call up your elite troops. Deploy them to Zouchin. Summon your fleet. Deny the Zandalari landfall.”

He looked at the map. “I be needing other maps. Tactical maps. More detail.”

Tyrathan stepped up. “The valleys make for choke points. We can— What is it?”

The old monk lifted his chin. “In your islands, Vol’jin, what resources have you prepared to deal with a blizzard such as the one we had here?”

“There are none. Blizzards do not happen in the Echo Isles.” The sense of disaster constricted his stomach. “Bad weather be not the same as an invasion.”

The monk shrugged stiffly. “If night never came, no one would maintain lanterns. The mists have been our defenses since before history began.”

“But you’re not defenseless.” Tyrathan pointed out toward the courtyard. “Your monks can shatter wood with their bare hands.
They fight with swords. I watch them shoot arrows. They are among the world’s elite fighters.”

“Fighters, but not an army.” Taran Zhu pressed his paws together at his breastbone. “We are few and spread across the continent. We are Pandaria’s only line of defense, but we are more than that as well. Our training in the martial arts imparts to us more than just the ability to kill. For example, we study archery not for its martial aspect—we study it for balance. It is a means by which we can connect two points through an intervening space, having to manage and balance distance and momentum, arc and the breeze, and the arrow’s nature. We defend Pandaria and defend the balance.”

Vol’jin tapped the map. “You talk philosophy. This be war.”

“Can you tell me, troll, that war exists only on a material plane? That it is only steel and blood and bone?” Taran Zhu’s eyes became dark slits. “The two of you have physical scars. And deeper scars. War has thrown you out of balance, or your hunger for it has.”

The troll snarled. “War be imbalance. If it destroys your balance, your balance was false.”

Chen stepped between them. “I have just come from there. Li Li will be returning there. Yalia’s family is there. The Zandalari will unbalance everything for those people. We have to do what we can to tip the balance back.”

The man agreed with a nod. “If nothing else, we have to warn the people. Evacuate.”

Taran Zhu closed his eyes and composed his face. “You three are of the world beyond the mists. Your experience makes you value urgency above ways that are comfortable here. Where you demand haste, you will see sloth as resistance. Where you are skilled at tactics, you will think me blind. My charge, as the leader of the Shado-pan, is to deal with larger things.”

Vol’jin crooked an eyebrow. “Maintaining the balance?”

“War will not always exist. War only wins if the world cannot recover from it. You look to stop war. I look to reconquer it.”

Vol’jin almost snapped off a harsh retort, but something in Taran Zhu’s words pierced his heart. They echoed something his father had shared, in a private moment, after a predawn rain had left the world clean. He’d said, “I be loving the world like this. No blood, no pain, the world wet with happy tears and the hopes for sunshine.”

The troll squatted and bowed his head. “Your monks’ skills still apply.”

“They do. You shall have resources. Not enough to win your war, but enough to dull their war.” Taran Zhu exhaled slowly as he opened his eyes. “I will give you eighteen monks. They will not be the biggest or fastest, but they will be those best able to accomplish your ends.”

Tyrathan’s open-mouthed expression revealed his heart. “Eighteen monks and the three of us.” He looked at Vol’jin. “In your vision, the fleet, that’s, what, two ships apiece?”

“Three. One be small.”

“That’s not going to dull the invasion; it will just knock some rust off it.” The man shook his head. “We have to have more.”

“I would give you more were I able.” The Shado-pan leader opened empty paws. “Alas, only twenty-one of you can reach Zouchin in enough time to be any help at all.”

•  •  •

Vol’jin had expected that girding himself for war might be familiar enough a ritual that it would reforge a link with his past. Pandaren armor, however, frustrated him. Too short and too large at the same time, the quilted silk felt too light to be effective. The strip scale metal—all bound together with bright cords, along with a lacquered leather breastplate—flopped in places it shouldn’t and made him round in places he shouldn’t have been. A monk worked quickly to extend the armor skirting from the breastplate, and Vol’jin vowed that the first thing he’d do was strip the armor off a Zandalari and use that.

Then he laughed. He was too tall for pandaren armor but too short for Zandalari. He’d dealt with them before. They stood at least a head taller than he did, and twice that if one measured arrogance. Though he disliked the way they viewed all other trolls as their inferiors, he could not deny that their clean limbs and ennobled features made them pleasing to look upon. He’d once heard that they’d been referred to—by a man—as the “elves of trolls.” The Zandalari had found that a great insult, and their discomfort amused him.

While he was fitted for his armor, much banging and clanging heralded the preparations for battle. Chen proudly presented him with a dual-bladed sword. “I had the swordsmiths knock the grips off two of the curved swords, then rivet the tangs together and wrap them in shark’s skin over bamboo. It’s not quite your glaive, but it’s scary-looking.”