World of Warcraft: Vol'jin: Shadows of the Horde (20 page)

Geography was easier. Ancient imperial charts had mapped the continent out in great detail. He still found some areas only vaguely described. This was especially true of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, where one map had clearly been inked over in the south central area.

Vol’jin pointed it out as Taran Zhu entered the library. “I be not finding many references to this area.”

“That is a problem we must take steps to remedy.” The monk half turned as Chen and Tyrathan, haggard and just a little bloody, entered the library behind him. “As your friends have discovered, it would appear that’s precisely where the invaders are headed.”

C
hen quickly blew out the lamp. Darkness filled the cellar. It amplified the sounds from above. As nearly as the pandaren could determine, an entire company of trolls had jammed themselves into the croft.

One of the trolls lit a candle. Thin slivers of light shot down through cracks in the floorboards. They striped both Chen and Tyrathan. The man had frozen in place, a finger raised to his lips. Chen nodded once and the man lowered his hand, but otherwise did not move.

Chen couldn’t understand a single thing the Zandalari were saying, but he listened intently anyway. He was less hoping to pick up any Pandaren geographical references than he was to identify individual voices. He caught one that seemed to be giving a lot of short, sharp orders, and two others that replied wearily. One of those also made whispered comments.

He looked at Tyrathan and raised three fingers.

The man shook his head and added another. He pointed toward where the commander stood, then the two Chen had identified. His hand then indicated a fourth, in the corner, whose presence was marked by a slow drip of water on floorboards.

Chen shivered. This was not at all like the time ogres had captured him. Not only were trolls smarter in general, but the
Zandalari prided themselves on being smart. And cruel. From what little he’d seen at Zouchin and heard about other battles the Zandalari had fought, he had no doubt that to be discovered was to be killed.

Because they’d been exploring the house, Chen and Tyrathan had not left their weapons or packs upstairs. They weren’t unarmed, but the cellar was not really a good place for an archer to ply his trade. While Chen could defend himself with martial arts, close-in fighting like this generally favored people wielding short, stabbity-type weapons. Any battle in the cellar would be nasty, tight, and even the victors would get bloodied.

We have to hope they don’t get curious and come down here. The storm will break, and they will go
. The wind’s shrieking intensified, mocking Chen’s hope.
At least we won’t go hungry
.

Tyrathan seated himself on the floor and selected eight arrows from his quiver. Each had a nasty, barbed head, half of them with two edges and the others with four. All the edges had a crescent cut back in toward the shaft so that once they went in, like a fishhook, they’d be tough to pull out.

He laid the arrows side by side, pairing a two edge with a four, and reversed the four. Using bandages, which he cut into short lengths with a skinning knife, he tied the arrows together, making them double-headed.

Though the partial light made reading his expression difficult, Chen could see Tyrathan’s face had a grim determination. As he worked he would glance up at the low ceiling. He’d watch and listen, then nod to himself.

After an eternity, the trolls settled down. Heavy thumps from above suggested they’d removed their armor for sleeping—three of them, anyway. The silent one didn’t, but blotted out enough light to mark where he lay. The commander was the last to bed. He blew out their final candle before he stretched out.

Silent as a ghost, Tyrathan reached Chen’s side. “On my
signal—and you will know it—go up the stairs. Find the lever to open the pantry. Kill anything you find.”

“They could leave in the morning.”

The man pointed toward where the commander lay. “He’s keeping a logbook. We need it.”

Chen nodded, then moved to the base of the stairs. In the main part of the cellar, Tyrathan took his double-headed arrows and slid the double-edged heads into the floor cracks. He twisted, lodging an arrow beneath each of the sleeping trolls. He positioned things for the commander first, then the two talkers, and finally the silent one. Remaining in that last place, he looked at Chen. He pointed to the four arrows, ending with the commander, then pointed at Chen and signaled for him to go up the stairs.

The pandaren nodded and prepared himself.

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 turn 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.”