Vol'jin: Shadows of the Horde

13

Foreboding 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.”

“Scarier yet when it drinks Zandalari blood.” Vol’jin took the blade by the central grip and twirled it around. He snapped the weapon so it was still, but the blades quivered and hummed curiously. Though it wasn’t his glaive, the balance matched favorably. “You be possessing more skills than just brewing.”

“No. Brother Xiao was one of those who drank with us.” Chen smiled. “I told him to make a weapon that was what you remembered from the brew.”

“He has done well.”

Tyrathan gave a low whistle as he entered the hallway. He wore a long leather surcoat with metal plates riveted onto it. His helmet came to a point and had a mail skirt to protect his neck. He carried two bows and a half dozen quivers of arrows. “Nice glaive. It’ll get lots of work.”

The man tossed Vol’jin a bow. “These are the best out of their armory. I scoured it and have the best of their arrows too. All field points—the combat arrows have been sent to monks elsewhere. These’ll fly true but won’t punch through armor.”

Vol’jin nodded. “You be needing careful shooting, then.”

“With trolls, I draw a line connecting the bottom of the ears, drop it three inches, and split it in half. Easy shot at the spine, and you get the tongue as you’re going.”

Chen looked aghast. “I think, Vol’jin, what he meant—”

“I be knowing what he meant.” The troll looked at Tyrathan. “These be Zandalari. Four inches. Their ears be set high.”

Chen and Tyrathan followed Vol’jin into the monastery courtyard. The monks who were part of the force most closely resembled the man in attire, save that each of them had the monastery’s tiger crest emblazoned on chest and back. They had a single strip of cloth—half of them red, half of them blue—dangling from their helmet’s point. Taran Zhu had not lied. These were not the monks Vol’jin would have chosen, but he accepted that the master monk knew his people best. It did surprise Vol’jin to see Yalia Sagewhisper among the eighteen, but then he recalled that they were going to defend her home and that her knowledge of the surrounding area would be invaluable.

Vol’jin also realized, as he came up the steps to the plane between monastery and mountain, why Taran Zhu could only send so limited a force. Eleven flying beasts, sinuous and languid, had been hitched up with double saddles and laden with some meager supplies in leather satchels. He’d seen smaller versions of the beasts carved into walls or as statues in niches throughout the monastery. He’d somehow assumed they were a pandaren artistic representation of dragons.

Yalia beckoned them forward and pointed each monk to a beast. “These are cloud serpents. In days past, they were feared, before a brave young woman befriended them. She taught us what they could do. They are not common these days. The monastery has access to a flock.”

Vol’jin glanced back at the monastery and caught sight of Taran Zhu at a balcony. The monk gave no sign of noticing Vol’jin, but that did not fool the troll. Though Taran Zhu professed ignorance of the ways of war, he understood well enough that information was power and that access to information had to be limited by necessity. Vol’jin should have been told immediately of the cloud serpents but hadn’t been.

I been told nothing that would benefit the Zandalari were they to capture me.

Irritation flashed through the troll; then he caught himself. He was going to war, but it was not his war. The Zandalari were invading Pandaria, not the Echo Isles. And yet, if it be not my war, why be I going off to fight it? That Chen may have a brewery on the north coast? Or to frustrate the Zandalari?

A thought echoed up through his mind, coming in a deep, distant voice. Bwonsamdi’s voice. Coming up from the void. Or be it to prove that Vol’jin be not dead?

Vol’jin had no answer, so he formulated one as he slid into the saddle behind a monk. I go to war, Bwonsamdi, to be giving you guests to welcome to eternity. You may be believing you no longer know me, but I be knowing you. It be time you are reminded of that fact.

At a sign from the monk acting as flight master, the cloud serpents slithered toward the edge of the mountain and hurled themselves from the heights. The beasts plunged toward the earth below. Vol’jin, who wore no helmet since nothing at the monastery had fit, felt the air tug at his red hair, and he howled exultantly.

Then the cold mountain wind flooded his lungs and reawakened the aching in his throat. He coughed and felt a sympathetic stitch tug at his side. The troll snarled, breathing in through his nose, resenting the pains from his last fight.

The cloud serpents coiled and sprang into flight. Their scaled bodies twisted and danced, playful and gleeful. Vol’jin might have taken pleasure in that another time, but the contrast of their flight with the grim nature of his mission knotted his stomach. What they were racing to prevent was the antithesis of pleasure, and he wasn’t at all certain they would make it before disaster unfolded.

They arrived in the mountains near Zouchin just in the nick of time. Vol’jin wished they had been much faster or more greatly delayed. Five ships had already entered the harbor. Out on the ocean a fishing boat was merrily burning to the waterline. Siege machines—although the smaller kind suitable to ships—hurled stones to bounce through the village. Their tumbling runs splintered houses and yet, somehow, left no crushed bodies in their wake.

Vol’jin studied the unfolding battle, then tapped his monk on the shoulder. He circled with a finger, then pointed toward the south, where a single goat track snaked out of the village. Already pandaren had begun to head that way.

Information be power. The Zandalari cannot allow alarm to be spread.

Tyrathan whistled loudly and pointed. He’d seen it too. Whether his eyes were really that good, or he’d just known where the Zandalari would lay their ambush because he’d have chosen the same location, did not matter. Vol’jin pointed as well, and the first two cloud serpents dropped from the sky.

The flight master soared down before them and brought his beast around in a long curve. It ducked below a line of hills, then landed on a small flat spot a hundred and a half yards west of the road. Without a word the monks alighted. Tyrathan had his bow strung already, and Vol’jin did the same a heartbeat later. The two of them moved to the fore and the monks followed.

This land might not belong to troll or man, but they knew the landscape of war better than the others. Chen, himself no stranger to war, took the blue squad and cut directly toward the path. The red monks, behind Vol’jin and the human hunter, drove north and pushed hard.

Up ahead, on a hillside, a Zandalari archer rose and drew back an arrow. Tyrathan saw him and fluidly nocked his own arrow. He measured the distance, drew, and loosed his arrow with well-practiced economy of motion. The bowstring hummed. The arrow ripped and popped through broad leaves. It angled up and transfixed the troll’s neck. It entered below the jaw on one side and jutted out beneath the opposite ear.

The Zandalari’s arrow hopped from the bow, its flaccid flight ending even before the troll had raised a hand to the shaft protruding from his neck. The troll tried to look down at the arrow—an act made impossible because the more he turned his head, the more the end hid from him. Then it caught on his shoulder and his eyes widened. His mouth opened, but blood gushed instead of words. He collapsed and rolled loose-limbed down the hill.

Then war unbalanced the world.