The Last Guardian (27 page)

Tatters of paper caught Khadgar’s eye, and he crossed to the shelves containing the epic poetry.

This was new. Fragments of a scroll, now smashed and torn. Khadgar picked up a large piece, read a few words, then nodded.

“What is it?” said Lothar, looking like he expected the books to come to life at any moment and attack.

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“‘The Song of Aegwynn,’” said Khadgar. “An epic poem about his mother.”

Lothar grunted a note of understanding, but Khadgar wondered. Medivh had been here, after they had left. Yet only to destroy the scroll? Out of harsh memories of the Magus’s conflict with his mother? Out of revenge for Sargeras’s decisive loss to Aegwynn? Or did the act of destroying the scroll, the cipher used by the Guardians of Tirisfal, symbolize his resignation and final betrayal of the group?

Khadgar risked a simple spell—one used to divine magical presences—but came up with nothing more than the normal response when surrounded by magical tomes. If Medivh had cast a spell here, he had masked its presence sufficiently to beat anything Khadgar could manage.

Lothar noted the young mage tracing symbols into the air, and when he was done, said, “You’d best save your strength for when we find him.”

Khadgar shook his head and wondered if they were going to find the Magus.

They found Moroes, instead, at the lowest level, near the entrance to the kitchen and larder. His crumpled form was splayed in the middle of the hallway, a bloody rainbow arcing along the floor to one side. His eyes were wide and open, but his face was surprisingly composed. Not even death seemed to surprise the castellan.

Garona dodged into the kitchen, and returned a moment later. Her face was a paler shade of green, and she held something up for Khadgar to see.

A set of rose-colored lenses, smashed. Cook. Khadgar nodded.

The bodies seemed to make the troops more alert now, and they moved to the great vault-like entranceway, and out into the courtyard itself. There had been no sign of Medivh, and only a few broken clues of his passing.

“Could he have another lair?” Lothar asked. “Another place he would hide?”

“He was often gone,” said Khadgar. “Sometimes gone for days, then reappearing without warning.”

Something moved along the balcony overlooking the main entrance—just a slight wavering of the air.

Khadgar started and stared at the location, but it looked normal.

“Perhaps he went to the orcs, to lead them,” suggested the Champion.

Garona shook her head. “They would never accept a human leader.”

“He couldn’t vanish into thin air!” thundered Lothar. To the troops he shouted, “Form up!

We’re going to head back!”

Garona ignored the Champion, then said, “He didn’t. Back into the tower.” She parted the troops like a boat cutting through a choppy sea.

She disappeared once more in the open maw of the tower. Lothar looked at Khadgar, who shrugged and followed the half-orc.

Moroes had not moved, his blood smeared across the floor in a quarter circle, away from the wall.

Garona touched that wall, as if trying to feel something along it. She frowned, cursed, and slapped the wall, which gave a very solid response.

“It should be here,” she said.

“What should be?” asked Khadgar.

“A door,” said the half-orc.

“There’s never been a door here,” said Khadgar.

“There’salways been a door, probably,” said Garona. “You’ve just never seen it. Look. Moroes died here,” she stomped her foot next to the wall, “And then his body was moved, creating the smear of blood in the quarter-circle, to where we found it.”

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Lothar grunted assent, and started to run his hands along the wall as well.

Khadgar looked at the apparently blank wall. He had passed it five or six times a day. There should be nothing but earth and stone on the far side. Still…

“Stand away,” the young mage said. “Let me try something.”

The Champion and half-orc stood back, and Khadgar pulled the energies together for a spell.

He has used it before, on real doors and locked books, but this was the first time he tried to work it on a door he could not see. He tried to envision the door, figuring how large it would have to be to move Moroes’s body in the quarter circle, where the hinges would be, where the frame would be, and, if he wanted to keep it secure, where he would place the locks.

He envisioned the door, and flung a bit of magic into its unseen frame to unfasten those hidden locks.

Half to his surprise, the wall shifted, and a seam appeared along one side. Not a lot, but enough to define the clear edges of a door that had not been there a moment before.

“Use your swords and pry it open,” snarled Lothar, and the squad surged forward. The stone door resisted their attempts for a few moments, until some mechanism within it snapped loudly and the door swung outward, nuzzling Moroes’s corpse as it did so, and revealed a stairway descending into the depths.

“He didn’t vanish into thin air,” said Garona grimly. “He stayed here, but went someplace no one else knew about.”

Khadgar looked at Moroes’s crumpled form. “Almost no one. But I wonder what else he has hidden.”

They moved down the stairs, and a sense grew within Khadgar. While the upper levels felt spookily abandoned, the depths beneath the tower had a palpable aura of immediate menace and foreboding. The rough-hewn walls and floor were moist, and in the light of the torches seemed to undulate like living flesh.

It took a moment for Khadgar to realize that as the stairs continued to spiral down, they now had reversed their direction, moving opposite to the tower above, as if this descent was a mirror of that above.

Indeed, where an empty meeting room would be within the tower, here was a dungeon bedecked with unoccupied iron chains. Where a banquet hall stood unused above the surface was a room strewn with detritus and marked with mystic circles. The air felt heavy and oppressive here, as it had in the tower in

Stormwind, where Huglar and Hugarin had been slain. Here was where the demon that attacked them had been summoned.

When they reached the level that mirrored the library, they found a set of iron-shod doors. The stairs continued to spiral down into the earth, but the company was brought up short here, regarding the mystic symbols carved deeply into the wood and dabbed with brownish blood. It seemed as if the wood itself was bleeding. Two huge rings of iron hung from the wounded doors.

“This would be the library,” said Khadgar.

Lothar nodded. He had noted the similarities between the tower and this burrow as well. “See what he keeps here, if the books are all upstairs.”

Garona said, “His study is at the top of the tower, with his observatory, so if heis here, he should be at the very bottom. We should press on.”

But she was too late. As Khadgar touched the iron-shod doors, a spark leapt from his palm to the door, a signal, a magical trap. Khadgar had time to curse as the doors were flung open, back into the darkness of the library.

A kennel. Sargeras had no need for knowledge, so he turned the room over to his pets. The creatures lived within a darkness of their own making, and acrid smoke wafted out into the
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hallway.

There were eyes within. Eyes and flaming maws and bodies made of fire and shadow. They stalked forward, snarling.

Khadgar sketched runes in the air, pulling the energy together in his mind, to pull the doors closed again, as soldiers struggled with the great rings shut again. Neither spellcraft nor muscle could move the rings.

The beasts let out a harsh, choppy laugh, and crouched to spring.

Khadgar raised his hands to cast another spell, but Lothar batted them down.

“This is to waste your time and energy,” he said. “It is to delay us. Head down and find Medivh.”

“But they are…” started Khadgar, and the large demon-beast in the front leapt at them.

Lothar took two steps forward and brought up his blade to meet the leaping beast. As he pulled his blade upward, the runes etched deep into the metal blazed with a bright yellow light. For a half-second, Khadgar saw fear in the eyes of the demon-beast.

And then the arc of Lothar’s cut intersected with the demon-beast’s leap and the blade bit deep into the creature’s flesh. Lothar’s blade erupted from the creature’s back, and he neatly bisected the forward portion of its torso in two. The beast had only a moment to squeal in pain as the blade pulled forward through its skull, completing the arch. The smoldering wreckage of the demon-beast, weeping fire and bleeding shadow, fell at Lothar’s feet.

“Go!” thundered the Champion. “We’ll take care of this and catch up.”

Garona grabbed Khadgar, and pulled him down the stairs. Behind them, the soldiers had pulled their blades, as well, and the runes danced in brilliant flames as they drank deep of the shadows.

The young mage and half-orc rounded the curve of the stairs, and behind them they heard the cries of the dying, from both human and inhuman throats.

They spiraled into the darkness, Garona holding a torch in one hand, dagger in the other. Now Khadgar noticed that the walls glowed with their own faint phosphorescence, a reddish hue like some nocturnal mushrooms deep within the forest. It was also growing warmer, and the sweat was beading along his forehead.

As they came to one of the dining halls, suddenly Khadgar’s stomach wrenched and they were somewhere else. It moved suddenly upon them, like a leading edge of a summer storm.

They were atop one of the larger towers of Stormwind, and around them the city was in flames.

Pillars of smoke rose from all sides, spreading into a black blanket above that snared the sun. A similar blanket

of blackness surrounded the city walls, but this was made of orcish troops. From their viewpoint Khadgar and Garona could see the armies spread out like beetles on the verdant corpse that had been

Stormwind’s cropland. Now there were only siege towers and armed grunts, the colors of their banners a sickening rainbow.

The forests were gone as well, transformed into catapults that now rained fire down on the city itself.

Most of the lower city was in flames, and as Khadgar watched, a section of the outer walls collapsed, and small dolls dressed in green and blue fought each other among the rubble.

“How did we get…?” started Garona.

“Vision,” said Khadgar bluntly, but he wondered if this was a random occurrence of the tower, or another delaying action by the Magus.

“I told the King. I told him, but he would not listen,” she muttered. To Khadgar she said, “This is a vision of the future, then? How do we get out of the vision?”

The young mage shook his head. “We don’t, at least for the moment. In the past these would come and go. Sometimes a good shock will break it.”

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A flaming piece of debris, a fiery missile from a catapult, passed within bowshot of the tower.

Khadgar could feel the heat as it fell to earth.

Garona looked around. “At least it’s just orc armies,” she said grimly.

“That’s good news?” said Khadgar, his eyes stinging as a column of smoke wafted over the tower.

“No demons in the orc armies,” noted the half-orc. “If Medivh was with them, we would see much worse as well. Maybe we convinced him to help.”

“I’m not seeing Medivh among our troops, either,” said Khadgar, forgetting who he was speaking to for the moment. “Is he dead? Did he flee?”

“How far in the future are we?” asked Garona.

Behind them, there was a rise of voices in argument. The pair turned away from the parapet and saw that they were outside one of the royal audience halls, now converted into a coordination center against the assault. A small model of the city had been laid out on the table, and toy soldiers in the shapes of men and orcs were scattered around it. There was a constant flow of reports coming in as King Llane and his advisors hunched over the table.

“Breech along the Merchant’s District Wall!”

“More fires in the lower city!”

“Large forces massing at the main gates again. It looks like spellcasters!”

Khadgar noted that none of the earlier courtiers were now present, replaced with grim-faced men in uniforms similar to their own. No sign of Lothar at the table, and Khadgar hoped he was on the front lines, carrying the battle to the foe.

Llane moved with a deft hand, as if his city was attacked on a regular basis. “Bring up the Fourth and

Fifth Company to reinforce the breech. Get the militia to organize bucket brigades—take the water from the public baths. And bring up two squads of lancers to the main gate. When the orcs are about to attack, then launch a sortie against them. That will break the assault. Bring two mages over from the

Goldsmith’s street; are they done there?”

“That assault has been turned,” came the report. “The mages are exhausted.”

Llane nodded and said, “Have them stand down, then, pull back for an hour. Bring the younger mages from the academy instead. Send twice as many, but tell them to be careful. Commander Borton, I want your forces on the East wall. That’s where I would hit next, if I were them.”

To each commander in turn, Llane gave an assignment. There was no argument, no discussion, no suggestions. Each warrior in turn nodded and left. In the end, all that was left was King Llane and his small model of a city that was now in flames outside his window.

The king leaned forward, resting his knuckles on the table. His face looked worn and old. He looked up and said to the empty air, “You can make your report now.”

The curtains opposite hissed against the floor as Garona stepped out. The half-orc at Khadgar’s side let out a gasp in surprise.

The future Garona was dressed in her customary black pants and black silk blouse, but wore a cloak marked with the lion’s head of Azeroth. She had a wild look in her eyes. The present Garona gripped

Khadgar’s arm, and he could feel her nails dig into his arm.

“Bad news, sire,” said Garona, approaching the King’s side of the table. “The various clans are working together in this assault, unified under the Blackhand the Destroyer. None of them will betray the others until after Stormwind has fallen. Gul’dan is bringing up his warlocks by nightfall. Until then, the Blackrock clan will be trying to take the Eastern Wall.” Khadgar heard a tremor in the half-orc’s voice.