The Last Guardian (21 page)

shard of lightning might be more effective, but the beast was surrounded by his books.

The bolt smashed into the creature’s face, staggering it back a pace. It growled and crept forward again.

He repeated the process like a ritual—clear the mind, fight the fear, raise a hand, and invoke the word.

Another bolt splanged off its ebony horns, ricocheting upward. The beast halted, but only for a moment.

Now its maw seemed a twisted, flame-filled smile.

A third time he invoked the power of the mystic bolt, but now the creature was close, and it flashed in its face, but save for illuminating its amused features, did nothing. Khadgar smelled its sour, burning flesh, and heard a deep clicking within the beast’s throat—laughter?

“Get ready to run!” shouted Garona, from somewhere to his right and above.

“What are you…” started Khadgar, already backing up.

“Run!”she shouted, and pushed off with her feet. The half-orc had climbed to the top of the bookcases, and now shoved them apart, toppling the cases like giant dominos. A deep crash of thunder resounded as each bookcase tipped over its neighbor, spilling volumes and crushing everything in its path.

The last bookcase smashed against the wall and splintered, the force of the impact driving it to the ground. Garona slid down from her now wobbling perch, long-bladed knife drawn. She tried to peer through the churning dust.

“Khadgar?” she said.

“Here,” said the apprentice, plastered against the back wall, where the iron pedestals rose to support the upper stacks on the balcony above. His face was pale even for a human.

“Did we get it?” she demanded, still in a half-crouch, expecting a new assault at any moment.

Khadgar pointed to the edge of what was until seconds before the end of the row of shelves.

Now the entire lower floor was a ruins of shattered cases and ruined volumes. Reaching out of the tattered wreckage was a muscular, mangled arm made of dull flame and twisted shadow. Its iron claws were already red with rust, and warm blood was already pooling on the floor. Its outstretched hand was a mere foot from where Khadgar splayed himself.

“Got it,” said Garona, sliding the knife back into sheath beneath her blouse.

“You should have listened,” said Khadgar, choking on the dust. “Should have gotten Medivh.”

“It would have sliced you open before I got up two flights of stairs,” said the half-orc. “And then who would be left to explain things to the Old Man?”

Khadgar nodded, and then a thought furrowed his brow. “The Magus. Did he hear this?”

Garona nodded in agreement. “He should have come down. We made enough noise here to wake the dead.”

“No,” said Khadgar, heading for the entrance to the library. “What if there was more than one demon?

Come on!”

Without thinking, Garona drew her knife and followed the human out of the room.

They found Medivh sitting in his laboratory, at the same workbench that Khadgar had left him no more than an hour previously. Now the golden instrument he was working on was in twisted pieces, and an iron hammer rested at one side of the bench.

Medivh started when Khadgar burst into the room, followed closely by Garona. The apprentice wondered, had he been dozing through all this?

“Master! There is a demon in the tower!” blurted Khadgar.

“A demon, again?” said Medivh wearily, rubbing one eye with the flat of his palm. “It was a
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demon the first time. The last time it was an orc.”

“Your student is correct,” said Garona. “I was in the library with him when it attacked. Large creature, bestial, but cunning. Made of fire and darkness, and its wounds burned and smoked.”

“It was probably nothing more than another vision,” said Medivh, turning back to his work. He picked up a mangled piece of the device and looked at it, as if seeing it for the first time. “They happen here, the visions. I think Moroes warned you about them.”

“It was not a vision, Master,” said Khadgar. “It was a demon, of the type you fought at Stormwind

Keep. Something has gotten past the wards and attacked us.”

Medivh’s gray brows arched in suspicion. “Something get past my wards again? Ridiculous.” He closed his eyes and traced a symbol in the air, “No. Nothing is amiss. None of the wards are tripped. You are here. Cook is in the kitchen, and Moroes is in the hall outside the library right now.”

Khadgar and Garona exchanged a glance. Khadgar said, “Then you should come at once, Master.”

“Must I?” said Medivh. “I have other things to worry about, of this I’m sure.”

“Come and see,” said Khadgar.

“We believe the beast to be dead,” said Garona. “But we don’t want to risk the lives of your servants on our beliefs.”

Medivh looked at the smashed device, shook his head, and set it down. He seemed irritated by it. “As you wish. Apprentices are not supposed to be this much trouble.”

By the time they reached the library, however, Moroes was standing there, dustpan and broom in hand, surveying the damage. He looked up, slightly lost, as the two mages and the half-orc entered.

“Congratulations,” said Medivh, the lines of his frown cutting deeply across his face. “I think it’s a bigger mess now than when you first arrived. At least then I had shelving. Where is this supposed demon?”

Khadgar walked over to where the demon’s hand had jutted out, but now all that remained was one of the bookcases pressed flat on the floor. Even the blood was missing.

“It was here,” said Garona, looking as surprised as Khadgar. “It came in, and attacked us.” She grasped

the edge of the case, trying to pry it up, but the massive oak was too heavy for her. After she struggled a moment, she said, “We both saw it.”

“You saw a vision,” said Medivh sternly. “Didn’t Moroes warn you about this?”

“Ayep,” confirmed Moroes. “I did at that.” He tapped the sides of his blinders for effect.

“Master, it did attack us,” said Khadgar. “We damaged it with our own spells. The Emissary here wounded it, twice.”

“Hmmph,” grunted the Magus. “More likely you overreacted when you saw it, and did most of the damage yourselves. These are fresh scratches on the table. From the demon?”

“He had iron claws,” said Khadgar.

“Or perhaps from your own mystic bolts, flung around like beads at a Stormwind streetfair?”

Medivh shook his head.

“My knife bit into something hard and leathery,” said Garona.

“No doubt some of the books themselves,” said the Magus. “No, were there a demon, its body would still be here. Unless someone cleaned it up. Moroes, do you happen to have a demon in your dustbin?”

“Don’t believe so,” said the castellan. “I could check.”

“Don’t worry, but leave your tools for these two.” To the younger mage and the half-orc he said, “I

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expect you to get along. In light of this, you two get to straighten up the library. Young Trust, you have betrayed your name, and so must make restitution now.”

Garona would not relent, “But I saw—”

“You saw a phantom,” interrupted Medivh in an authoritative tone, his brows knitted. “You saw a piece of somewhere else. It would not have harmed you. It never does. Your friend here,” and he motioned at

Khadgar, “tends to see demons where there are none. That worries me a bit. Perhaps you can try not to see any when you are cleaning up. Until you do, I am not to be disturbed!”

And with that, he was gone. Moroes laid the broom and dustpan on the floor and followed him.

Khadgar looked around at the debris of the room. More than just a broom would be needed here.

Cases were toppled and in a couple places shattered entirely, and books were flung randomly about, some with their spines broken and their covers torn. Could it have been a time-lost vision?”

“This was no illusion that attacked us,” said Garona moodily.

“I know,” said Khadgar.

“So why doesn’t he see it?” asked the half-orc.

“That I don’t know,” said the apprentice. “And I worry about finding out the answer.”

Twelve

Life in Wartime

It took only several days to put the library back in proper order. Most of the scattered books were at least near to where they needed to be, and the rarer, more magical, and trapped volumes were on the upper balcony and had been untouched by the fracas. Rebuilding some of the cases took time, however, and Garona and Khadgar turned the empty stables into a makeshift carpentry shop, and they tried to restore (and in some cases replace) the shattered cases.

Of the demon, there was no trace, save for the damage wrought. The claw marks remained in the table, and the pages ofThe Lineage of Azeroth’s Kings were badly mangled and torn, as if by massive jaws.

Yet there was no body, no blood, no remains to drop at Medivh’s feet.

“Maybe it was rescued,” suggested Garona.

“It was pretty dead when we left it,” responded Khadgar, at the time trying to remember if he had put epic poetry on the shelf above or below romantic epics.

“Something rescued the body,” said Garona. “The same person who popped it in here would have popped him out.”

“And the blood as well,” reminded Khadgar.

“And blood as well,” repeated the half-orc. “Perhaps it was a tidy demon.”

“That’s not the way magic works,” said Khadgar.

“Perhaps not your magic, the magic you learned,” said Garona. “Other peoples could have other magics.

The old shamans among the orcs had one way of magic, the warlocks that cast spells have different ones.

Maybe it’s a spell you never heard of.”

“No,” said Khadgar simply. “It would have left some kind of a marker. A bit of the caster behind. Some residual energy that I could feel, even if I could not identify it. The only spellcasters active in the tower have been myself and the Magus. I know that through my own spells. And I checked the wards. Medivh was right—they were all operating. No one should have been able to break into the tower, magically or otherwise.”

Garona shrugged. “But there are odd things about this tower as well, correct? Could the old rules not apply here?”

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It was Khadgar’s turn to shrug. “If that’s the case, we’re in a lot more trouble than I imagined.”

Khadgar’s relationship with the half-orc seemed to improve over the course of repairing the library, and when his back was to her, or she was in the stacks, her voice sounded almost human.

Still, she remained guarded about whom she represented, and Khadgar for his part remained watchful. He kept track of what references she used and what questions she asked.

He also tried to keep track of any communications she made, to the point of wrapping the guest quarters

with his own web of detection spells, to inform him if she had left the room or sent word out. If she had, her methods foiled even Khadgar’s detection, which made him more nervous as opposed to assuring him. If she was doing anything with the knowledge she had gained, she was keeping it to herself.

And true to her word, Garona began sharing her own knowledge about the orcs. Khadgar began to assemble a picture of how the orcs were ruled (by strength and warrior prowess) as well as the different clans within. Once she got rolling, the Emissary made very clear her opinion of the various clans, whose leaders she tended to think of as lumpen oafs who are only thinking of where their next battle is coming from. As she described the multi-clan orcish nation, the Horde, Khadgar quickly understood that the dynamics were ever-changing and fluid at best.

A large chunk of the Horde was the conservative Bleeding Hollow clan. A powerful group with a long history of conquest, the clan was less powerful in that its aged leader, Kilrogg Deadeye, had become more unwilling to throw lives away in combat. Garona explained that in orcish politics, older orcs become more pragmatic, which is often mistaken for cowardice by the younger generation. Kilrogg had killed three of his sons and two grandsons already who thought they could rule the clan better.

The clan known as the Blackrock appeared to have another large chunk of the Horde, its leader was

Blackhand, who had as his chief recommendation for leader the ability to thump anyone else who wanted the title. A chunk of Blackrock had already splintered off, knocked out a tooth, and called themselves the

Black Tooth Grin. Charming names.

There were other clans: Twilight’s Hammer, which reveled in destruction, and the Burning Blade, who seemed to have no leader, but rather served as an anarchic gathering within the chaos of the Horde. And smaller clans, like the Stormreavers, that were led by a warlock. Khadgar suspected that Garona was reporting to someone within the Stormreavers, if only because she had less to complain about with them than the others.

Khadgar took what notes he could, and assembled into reports for Lothar. A larger amount of communications was coming in from all points in Azeroth, and now it seemed that the Horde was spilling out of the Black Morass in all directions. The orcs that were considered mere rumors a year ago were now omnipresent, and Stormwind Keep was mobilizing to meet the threat. Khadgar kept the ever-worsening news from Garona, but fed to Lothar what details he could glean, down to clan rivalries and favorite colors (The Blackrock clan, for example, favored red for some reason).

Khadgar also tried to communicate what he had learned to Medivh, but the Magus was surprisingly disinterested. Indeed, the Magus’s conversations with Garona were not as common as they once were, and on several occasions Khadgar discovered that Medivh had left the tower without informing him.

Even when he was present, Medivh seemed more distant. More than once Khadgar had come upon him, seated in one of his chairs in the observatory, staring out into the Azerothean night.

He seemed moodier now, quicker to disagree, and less willing to listen than before.

His disaffected mood was clear to the others as well. Moroes would give Khadgar a painful,
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long-suffering look as he left the master’s chambers. And Garona herself brought up the subject as they reviewed the maps of the known world (which were made in Stormwind, and as such woefully incomplete even when talking about Lordaeron).