The Last Guardian (18 page)

comfortable grace of a predator that fears nothing.

Sargeras.

Khadgar was stunned into silence and immobility. Surely the wards Medivh had maintained would keep such a beast at bay? Yet here it was, entering the tower, entering the Magus’s very room with the ease of a noble entering a commoner’s shack.

The Lord of the Burning Legion did not look around, instead glided to the foot of the bed. He stood there for a long moment, the flames of his beard and hair flickering without sound, as he regarded the unconscious form before him. The demon stood watching the sleeping mage.

Khadgar held his breath and looked around the worktable. A few tomes, the candle backlit by a mirror for greater illumination. A letter opener used to break the purple seals. The young mage slowly reached for the opener, trying to move without attracting the great demon’s attention.

His fingers wrapped around it tightly, his knuckles white.

Still Sargeras stood at the foot of the bed. A long moment passed, and Khadgar tried to will himself to move. Either to flee or to attack. His muscles felt locked in position.

Medivh shifted in his bedding, mumbling something unheard. The demon lord raised a hand slowly, as if to pronounce a benediction on the Magus’s inert form.

Khadgar gave a strangled cry and thrust himself up from his chair, letter opener clutched in his hand.

Only at this moment did he realize that he held the opener in his wrong hand.

The demon looked up, and it was a lazy, smooth motion, as if the demon himself was sleeping, or far underwater. It regarded the charging youth, hand raised in a clumsy attack with a short, sharp dagger.

The demon smiled. Medivh shifted and muttered in his sleep. Khadgar drove the letter opener into the demon’s chest.

And through the creature’s body entirely. The thrust of his blow carried him forward, through the form of

Sargeras, and sent him spinning toward the opposite wall. Unable to stop, he slammed into the wall, and the letter opener jangled to the stone floor.

Medivh’s eyes popped open, and the Guardian sat up. “Moroes? Khadgar? Are you here?”

Khadgar pulled himself to his feet, looking around. The demon had vanished, popped like a soap bubble at the first touch of steel. He was alone in the room with Medivh.

“What are you doing on the floor, lad?” said Medivh. “Moroes could have gotten you a cot.”

“Master, your wards!” said Khadgar. “They have failed. There was…” he stumbled for a moment, unsure that he should reveal he knew Sargeras by appearance. Medivh would catch something like that, and pester him until he revealed how he knew it.

“A demon,” he managed. “There was a demon here.”

Medivh smiled, looking well rested, the color returning to his face. “A demon? I think not.

Hold.” The

Magus closed his eyes and nodded. “No, the wards are still in place. It would take more than a catnap for them to run out of energy. What did you see?”

Quickly Khadgar recounted the appearance of the demon from the cloud of boiling red milk, of it standing there, of it raising its hand. The Magus shook his head.

“I think that was another one of your visions,” he said at last. “Some bit of time unstuck and displaced that fell into the tower, quickly banished.”

“But the demon…” started Khadgar.

“The demon you described is no more, at least no more in this life,” said Medivh. “He was slain before I

was born, buried far beneath the sea. Your vision was of Sargeras, from ‘The Song of Aegwynn.’

You have the scrolls there. Deciphering messages? Yes. Perhaps that’s what called that timelost
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wraith into my quarters. You should not be doing work here while I slept.” He frowned slightly, as if he was thinking if he should be more upset or not.

“I’m sorry, I thought…I thought it would be best to not leave you alone?” Khadgar twisted it into a question, and it sounded a bit foolish.

Medivh chuckled and let a smile creep across his weathered features. “Well, I didn’t say you couldn’t, and I don’t suppose Moroes would have stopped you, since that would reduce his need to be here.” He rubbed a finger and thumb over his lips and through his beard. “I think I’ve had enough broth for one lifetime. And just to reassure you, Iwill check the tower’s mystic wards.

And show you how to do it as well. Now, aside from demon visions, did anything happen while I was gone?”

Khadgar summarized the messages he had received. The rising tide of orc incidents. Lothar’s map. The mystery message about the Emissary. And the news of Guzbah’s death.

Medivh grunted at the description of Guzbah’s passing, and said, “So they’re going to blame Guzbah until the next poor sod gets sliced open.” He shook his head, then added, “Feast of the Scribes. That would be before Huglar and Hugarin died.”

“By about a week and a half,” said Khadgar. “Time enough for a demon to fly from Dalaran to Stormwind Keep.”

“Or a man on gryphon-back,” mused Medivh. “It’s not all demons and magic in this world.

Sometimes a simpler answer suffices. Anything else?”

“It sounds like these orcs are becoming much more numerous and dangerous,” said Khadgar.

“Lothar says they are moving from caravan raids to attacks on settlements. Small ones, but there are more people coming into Stormwind and the other cities all the time as a result.

“Lothar worries too much,” said Medivh with a grimace.

“He’s concerned,” said Khadgar flatly. “He doesn’t know what to expect next.”

“On the contrary,” said Medivh, letting out a long, mournful sigh. “If everything you tell me is true, then

I’m afraid things are goingjust the way I expected!”

Ten

The Emissary

With Medivh’s recovery things returned to normal, or as normal as anything was in the presence of the

Magus. When the Magus was absent, Khadgar was left with instructions as to honing his magical skill, and when Medivh was in residence in the tower, the younger mage was expected to demonstrate those skills at the drop of hat.

Khadgar adapted well, and felt as if his power was a set of clothes, two sizes too big, that only now was he growing into. He could control fire at will now, summon lightning without a cloud in the sky, and cause small items to dance upon the table at the will of his own mind. He learned other spells as well—those that allowed one to know when and how a man died from a single bone of his remains, how to cause a ground-fog to rise, and how to leave magical messages for others to find. He learned how to restore the age lost to an inanimate object, strengthening an old chair, and its reverse, to pull all the youth from a newly-crafted club, leaving it dusty and brittle. He learned the nature of the protective wards, and was entrusted with keeping them intact. He learned the library of demons, though Medivh would not permit any to be summoned in his tower. This last order Khadgar had no desire to break.

Medivh was gone for brief periods of a day here, a few days there. Always instructions were left behind, but never explanations. Upon his return the Guardian looked more haggard and worn, and would push

Khadgar testily to determine the youth’s mastery over his craft, and to detail any news that had arrived in his absence. But there was no further repeat of his comatose rest, and Khadgar
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assumed that whatever the master was doing, it did not involve demons.

One evening in the library, Khadgar heard noises from the common area and stables below.

Shouts, challenges, and responses, in low, illegible tones. By the time he reached a window overlooking that part of the castle, a group of riders were leaving the tower’s walls.

Khadgar frowned. Were these some supplicants turned away by Moroes, or messengers with some other dark tidings for his master? Khadgar descended the tower to find out.

He caught sight of the new arrival only briefly—a flash of a black cloak stepping into a guest room along the lower levels of the tower. Moroes was there, candle in hand, blinders in place, and as Khadgar slipped down the last few steps he could hear the castellan say “…Other visitors, they were less careful.

They’re gone now.”

Whatever response the new arrival made was lost, and Moroes pulled the door shut as Khadgar came up.

“A guest?” asked the young man, trying to see if there was any clue of the new arrival behind him. Only a closed door greeted his view.

“Ayep,” replied the castellan.

“Mage or merchant?” asked the young mage.

“Couldn’t say,” said the castellan, already moving down the hall. “Didn’t ask, and the Emissary didn’t say.”

“The Emissary,” repeated Khadgar, thinking of one of the mystery letters from Medivh’s great sleep.

“So it’s political, then. For the Magus.”

“Assume so,” said Moroes. “Didn’t ask. Not my place.”

“So it is for the Magus,” said Khadgar.

“Assume so,” said Moroes, with the same sleepy inflection. “We’ll be told when we need to know.”

And with that he was gone, leaving Khadgar to stare at the shut door.

For the next day, there was the odd feeling of another presence in the tower, a new planetary body whose very gravity changed the orbits of all the others. This new planet caused Cook to shift to a larger set of pans, and Moroes to move through the halls at more random times than normal. And even Medivh himself would send Khadgar on some errand within the tower, and as the young mage left he would hear the whisper of a heavy cloak on the stonework behind him.

Medivh volunteered nothing, and Khadgar waited to be told. He dropped hints. He waited patiently.

Instead he was sent to the library to continue his studies and practice his spells. Khadgar descended the curved stairs for half a rotation, stopped, then slowly climbed back up, only to see the back of a black cloak glide into the Guardian’s laboratory.

Khadgar stomped down the stairs, considering options of who the Emissary was. A spy for Lothar?

Some secretive member of the Order? Perhaps one of the members from the Kirin Tor, the one with the spidery handwriting and the venomous theories? Or maybe some other matter entirely?

Not knowing was frustrating, and not being trusted by the Magus seemed to make matters worse.

“We’ll be told when we need to know,” Khadgar muttered, stomping into the library. His notes and histories were scattered on the tables, where he left them last. He looked at them, and the schematics of his vision-summoning spell. He had made a few amendments since his last attempt, hoping to temporally

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refine its results.

Khadgar looked at the notes and smiled. Then he picked up his vials of crushed gemstones, and headed downward—putting additional floors between himself and Medivh’s audience chamber—to one of the abandoned dining halls.

Two levels lower was perfect. An ellipsoid of a room with stone fireplaces at each end, the great table put into service elsewhere, the ancient chairs lined across the wall from the single entrance.

The floor was white marble, old and cracked but kept clean by Moroes’s relentless industry and drive.

Khadgar laid out a magic circle of amethyst and rose quartz, still grinning as he laid out the lines.

He was confident in his castings now, and did not need his ceremonial conjuration robes for luck. As he laid out the pattern of protection and abjuration, he smiled again. He was already shaping the energy within his mind, calling the required shades and types of magic, conforming them to their requisite shape, holding that fertile energy in abeyance until it was needed.

He stepped within the circle, spoke the words that needed to be spoken, made the motions with his hands in perfect harmony, and unleashed the energy within his mind. He felt the release as something connected within his mind and soul, and he called the magic forth.

“Show me what is happening in Medivh’s quarters,” he said, his mind giving off a nervous tic, hoping that the Guardian’s wards did not apply to his apprentice.

Immediately, he knew the spell had gone wrong. Not in a major fashion, with the magical matrices collapsing upon themselves, but in a slight misfire. Perhaps the wards did work against him, redirecting his vision elsewhere, to another scene.

He knew he was off by several clues. First off, it was now daylight, Second, it was warm. And last, the location was familiar.

He had not been here before, exactly, at least not in this particular spire, but it was clear he was at

Stormwind Keep, overlooking the city below. This was one of the taller spires, and the room was similar in general design to that where the two members of the Order had met their end months earlier. Yet here the windows were large and opened onto great white parapets, and a warm scented breeze stirred diaphanous draperies. Multicolored birds perched within golden hoops around the perimeter of the room.

Before Khadgar a small table was set with white porcelain plates edged with gold, the knifes and forks made of the precious metal as well. Crystal bowls held fruits—fresh and unblemished, the morning dew still clinging to the dimples of the strawberries. Khadgar felt his stomach rumble slightly at the sight.

Around the table hovered a thin man unknown to Khadgar, narrow-faced and wide-foreheaded, with a slender moustache and goatee. He was draped in an ornate red quilt that Khadgar realized must be a dressing gown, cinched at the waist with a golden belt. He touched one of the forks, moving it a molecule’s length sideways, then nodded in satisfaction. He looked up at Khadgar and smiled.

“Ah, you are awake,” he said in a voice that almost sounded familiar to Khadgar as well.

For an instant, Khadgar thought that this vision could see him, but no, the man was addressing someone behind him. He turned to see Aegwynn, as youthful and beautiful as she had been on the snowfield. (Was it earlier than that date? Later? He could not tell from her appearance.) She wore a white cape with green lining, but this was made of silk now, not fur, and her feet were shod not in boots but in simple

white sandals. Her blond hair was held in place with a silver diadem.