When a goblin Private Detective (Third Class) needs to leave town fast, she can't be too picky how she leaves it.
Eyebrows still smoking, I dashed up to an enormous Orc tightening the girth on the last kodo of his caravan. His four other kodo stood fully loaded with baggage, facing the great gate of the city, lined up and ready to go.
I tugged on the Orc's sleeve.
"Take me with you," I gasped. "I'll pay you well."
Straightening, the Orc turned to look down at me. He was massive, with a tree trunk of a neck protruding from buttress-like shoulders atop a granite wall of chest. His face was the greenish-yellow hue of a stagnant, scummy pond, broken by two small frog-like eyes, buried deep in the flesh of his face. Broken tombstone teeth rose crooked from a pinkish grey cemetery of gum. He was the ugliest Orc I'd ever seen, and that's saying something. I took an involuntary step back.
"How much you pay me?" he growled.
I was in no position to be choosy.
"A hundred gold. Fifty now, fifty when we get there." It was almost all I had. Not quite all. I was no fool.
He shrugged his massive shoulders, making the cracked leather creak and groan. He turned back to the kodo's harness.
Okay. I resisted the urge to pluck at his sleeve again. "A hundred and fifty."
Not bothering to look at me, he said, "Two hundred, up front."
Damn damn damn.
Shouts echoed from the Drag.
"Deal," I said.
He turned, slowly, like a great bull kodo, and held out a broad, flat hand. Like a plate. A plate with sausagey fingers and thick, cracked fingernails.
My lips pressed together, I yanked my money bag from my belt and emptied it into his palm. One hundred and sixty eight gold pieces.
I took off my hat, a soft brown felt thing with holes for my ears, my favorite hat, with little flat pockets inside the lining in case, you know, I ran out of pants pockets and shirt pockets - a goblin can't have too many pockets - and upended it over the pile of gold sitting in his palm. Nineteen more gold. Slipping my left shoe off, an old shoe whose sole was worn so thin I could feel the ground beneath my foot, gravely crunchy Azshara sand or hot soft ash from failed explosions or cold slickity-slippery puddles of rocket oil or soft warm fresh lumpy kodo muck, I'd stepped in them all, and I stuck my fingers under the shoe's tongue like I was gagging a goat and tipped eleven more gold pieces into his hand. Then I rolled up my right pants cuff, pants with knee patches I'd sewn myself, and pulled a handful of gold and silver and copper coins from inside an extra special inner pocket, and dumped them jingling into his hand.
Okay, I was a fool.
The Orc counted the coins one by one by one, pushing each one with his right forefinger up his left palm toward the fingers, his lips moving with the unaccustomed mental effort.
The shouts were coming around the corner now. Angry, accusatory shouts.
I gulped. "Please hurry," I said. "If it's short I'll make up the difference."
He drew his brows together. "Shut up," he said. "You make Drog lose count."
A bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck, tickling the soft, raised hairs beneath my collar.
The fingers continued flicking the coins one by one. "… Eighty eight… eighty nine…"
Cries echoed from the bank and auction house now. I took a step closer to him. Maybe, just maybe, his bulk would hide me. I was about the size of his great, bulging thigh – surely I could hide behind that? As long as smoke from my eyebrows didn't give me away.
Drog closed his thick fingers over the mound of money, pulled a moneybag from where it hung on his belt, and dumped the coins inside in a long, tinkling cascade of metal.
"You twenty gold short," he said. "Pay up."
Heat surged through me - I wasn't that short. But Drog grinned down at me, with his gleaming yellow tombstone teeth.
Slowly, cheeks burning, I pulled a thin silk purse from inside the sleeve of my shirt, a delicate purse sewn to my sleeve lining with a long thread of spider silk, unzipped its tiny zipper, and counted twenty more gold pieces into his palm. His smile broadened. My ears grew hot.
"Drog take you to Uldum now," he said.
Wait… Uldum?
But the Orc picked me up under the arms and swung me to the top of the towering pile of baggage on the last kodo as easily as though I were a lumpy bag of onions. Gripping one of the ropes with both my hands, trying to squeeze my fingers beneath it, I wished I had a third hand or a prehensile tail or an extra robotic arm attached to my belt to grip another rope too.
The luggage lurched to the left, pitched forward, rolled to the right, then swung left again. My stomach rose in my throat like a giant bubble of burning intestinal chili gas. The kodo had only gone two steps but already I hated riding on one.
The great maw of the Orgrimmar gate loomed over me, a mouth of giant iron and wood portcullis-teeth. As the great shadow of the gate covered me like a cold, blue-gray blanket and the angry shouting echoed in confusion around the bank and inn, I tried to press myself into invisibility against the knobbly baggage.
We were on our way.
We traveled all day. My kodo lurched from side to side like a little boat bobbing on a choppy, rolling ocean, hour after hour after hour. It was the most nauseating trip I had ever taken. My frothy-sour guts floated up next to my lungs and sloshed against my heart, which didn't want them, and threatened to escape out my throat. I kept my mouth tight shut. I might need those guts later.
The sunlight blistered the backs of my hands and the nape of my neck like radiation from a nuclear fusion reactor, which it was. The skin of my ankles cooked hot and tight and crispy. Sweat ran down my face onto the coarse gunny sacks, which chafed damp and harsh against my cheeks. I kept my eyes closed, mostly, but the brightness burned blood-red through my eyelids anyway, blood-red dotted with silver flashes of nausea around the edges.
When I did peek I caught sight of dry, red hills and gulleys and a brassy blue sky that shimmered with heat, and ahead of me, more pitching and rolling kodos, even less attractive from behind than they were from the front, if that is possible.
On the kodo directly in front of me rode another Orc, sitting upright on his pile of baggage, his stubby legs almost spread at right angles to his torso, a clutch of totems at his belt. His hair was tied into a short, stubby pony tail like a club, gathered at the back of his head. One arm looked smaller than the other, but I couldn't be sure. He rolled at the hips, adjusting his weight to the movement of the kodo. He looked a lot more comfortable than I felt.
Ahead of him I could just glimpse a small figure – another goblin, sitting sideways on his kodo, not even holding on, drinking easily from a canteen, his face shaded by the rim of a sand-colored pith helmet, which appeared to have beetles glued to it.
Trying to focus on the hat-beetles at this distance made me feel even worse, so I shut my eyes again and squeezed them tight closed, which didn't help. Time blurred into one long smear of iron-scented heat and I concentrated on not losing my breakfast. Smoked herring with garlic mayonnaise. Not, as it turned out, a good choice for breakfast today.
The sun hung low in the sky when the rolling and pitching stopped. Thank C'thun's many-tentacled eyeballs. I clung to my ropes, my eyes still tight shut, my inner ears still lurching back and forth, my stomach still floating on a turbulent inner sea of dead herring and even deader garlic.
Big hands felt around my body, lifted me down from my perch and set me on my legs. Drog's hands. My knees, no longer jointed, buckled beneath me. I fell flat on my face and hugged the ground. The sweet, sweet ground. I loved the ground.
"You don't travel much," said a female voice.
I opened one eye. One bleary, watery eye.
A female orc was bending over me, her edges watery against the cloudless blue. Her face was lined like an old green purse, and two yellow tusks protruded from her lower jaw like little bone fishhooks. Her ears were pierced with four grimy red-bronze rings. From the dirt ground into the hinges it looked like she never removed them. A scraggly, greasy red braid fell over one skinny shoulder. Her face was weary but kind, and her brown eyes shone bright with amusement, their edges crinkled in an almost-smile. She was ugly, yes, but it was a better ugly than Drog.
Behind her I saw plains of yellow grass, dotted with dotted with thorny acacia trees and bits of scrub bush. I lifted my head and immediately wished that I hadn't. But the blinding sparkle of the Southfury river and the red ridges of Durotar beyond told me that we were in the Northern Barrens. The road was nowhere in sight.
The caravan stood in a patch of bare earth pocked with gopher holes next to two acacia trees which cast their long, straggly, stick-bug shadows up the slope of a great, dry hill. Crushed dry grass showed where the kodo had tromped through the savannah to get to the campsite.
I sat up, a little wobbly.
"Well, the truth is, I only arrived from Azsha…"
Drog, busy unloading the kodo I'd ridden, right behind me, turned on her, "You no waste time talking, Harga!" he snapped. "Help Blackhoof with kodo!"
Harga flashed him a sharp, irritated look. A stinging paper-cut of a look. But she didn't look surprised. She flicked her eyes upwards in faint derision, then strode off to pull two kodo into the scanty shade of one of the acacia trees and tether them there. A Tauren was already there, pouring water into collapsible leather troughs with metal ribs, into which the thirsty kodo dipped their square-lipped faces and slurped noisily. Blackhoof, presumably.
"Useless woman," Drog muttered. "Should never have married her."
I eyed him distastefully, my hands holding my still queasy stomach in place. What a charmer.
Drog busied himself with my kodo, removing the bumpy bags from its back and dropping them heavily to the ground beside me.
I eyed the other people traveling with this lout.
The Orc shaman who had ridden in front of me had dismounted, and was unharnessing his kodo himself. Or at least, he was trying to. His right arm hung by his side, limp and inert, swaying slightly as he heaved at the kodo's girth strap with his strong left arm.
"Hey!" shouted Drog, "Stop! Not like that!"
Drog sprang toward the shaman's kodo but it was too late. Unmoored, the entire load of baggage slid from the kodo's back, slowly and inexorably, like a burlap glacier falling off the land into the sea. It crashed to the ground with a cracking, crunching sound, and broke into shattered boxes of potatoes, onions, and turnips. A beet rolled past my foot.
"Stupid, stupid Orc! Know nothing of kodo! Get away!" Drog shouted.
"I was only trying to be useful," said the Orc, in a stricken but well-educated voice. I looked at him curiously. I hadn't met many Orcs who spoke Common so well. I wondered if it had to do with his studies to become a Shaman.
I could see his face now – he was much younger than Drog. The line of his jaw was unblurred with age. So the wrinkles on his youthful face looked out of place: there were lines of endurance around his eyes, and of hardship around his mouth.
With his good arm Grum fumbled with one of the totems at his belt and thrust it into the ground, where it began to pulse – it was a healing stream totem – perhaps thinking it might help, but Drog kicked it over with his foot. It flew a few feet from its little round hole in the ground, trailing bits of dirt behind it.
"Drog fix. You no mess with kodo," Drog grunted, turning back to the kodo. "You useless."
Behind Drog's back, Grum's eyes flashed in anger. It was just a momentary expression, like a gleam of sunlight glinting off a knife blade, but he said nothing. He picked up his totem and tied it back onto his belt.
"Blackhoof! Clean this up!" Drog shouted.
The young male Tauren I'd seen pouring water for the kodo looked up. He had the height, but not the breadth, of an adult Tauren. His fur was chocolate brown, and horns and hooves were the deep, warm almost-black of cocoa beans. His gaze was steady and calm, the look of a person who'd worked his whole life among great beasts of burden, caring for them, soothing them, learning their ways. He hurried over to us, moving confidently between the kodo, pushing their great heads aside, slapping their necks in a friendly manner, until he got to the broken crates and spilled root vegetables, whereupon he knelt on the ground and began scooping them up with his hands and stuffing them into burlap bags.
I picked up the beet that had rolled by my foot, and a couple of parsnips too, and headed over to the spilled baggage to find a place for them. I'd spied four unbroken boxes made out of darker, stronger wood among the wreckage, sturdy boxes with iron corners. Perhaps these could be opened and their contents re-arranged to accommodate some additional vegetables.
But Drog stepped between me and the dark boxes, blocking my view of them, and held out his hand for the vegetables. I handed him the beet and parsnips. He nodded at me dismissively, and said, "Blackhoof will clear up. You go sit by campfire."
There was something in Drog's face that made me decide not to argue. If he wanted his kodo handler to do all the work, that was fine by me.
I retreated to the center of the campsite, where Harga had collected blackened stones and was forming them into a circle around an ash-filled depression in the ground. She dragged some logs from the surrounding weeds to use as make-shift benches. She knew right where to go. They had obviously camped here before.
I sat on one of the logs, joining a sullen Grum, not far from the third passenger, the shrewd-faced goblin with the beetle helmet. It was indeed covered with beetles, but they weren't real ones. They'd been carved from stone. Scarabs. Glued all over his helmet. He was dressed in tailored, well-worn sand-colored traveling clothes, and he looked cool and collected after the hot ride, as though he were sitting on his own shady porch with a tall glass of iced tea in his hand.
He leaned toward me. "I figure you paid about a hundred and ninety gold too much for this trip," he said, with a condescending grin.
I glared at him.
"Buketto Bolts," he said, holding out his hand. "Archaeologist. But you can call me Buck."
"Weezil," I said. "Hunter. Private Detective." Third Class, I added in my head.
Buck raised an eyebrow, "Hunter? Where's your pet?"
I thought of the hermit crab with the little microphone glued to his shell, wandering somewhere in Orgrimmar. I didn't think I wanted to go into that right now.
"I don't have one."
Buck's eyebrow rose further up his forehead, like a caterpillar, "What do you detect?"
"Cheating spouses, mostly. And lost pets. But I'm trying to land some bigger cases."
I tried not to sound apologetic. Project confidence, I told myself. Act like I could solve a theft, burglary, or even a murder if necessary. I tried not to think of the toy poodle I'd found for its owner last week, the high point of my career so far. I drew myself up. Weezil, Private Detective, Third Class, at your service!
I didn't feel very tall.
Buck seemed about to speak, but we were interrupted by a sleek, feline presence that flowed into the circle of logs. A gorgeous, pale gold wyvern dropped gracefully into a smooth patch of ground and leaned languorously against one of the logs. She spread her wings, taking full possession of her spot, as though she'd waited her whole life to lie in just this position right here before us. Her scorpion tail arched over her back in a great sweeping curve. She turned her face toward me. I peered into two amber eyes, deep and inscrutable, portals into another world. Her gaze took my breath away. I steadied myself on my log.
Grum and Buck were staring at the wyvern too. Only Harga, dragging more logs into the circle, was unaffected by Lady's presence.
"You like?" boomed Drog's voice over my head. I jumped.
Drog strode proudly around face us, like a giant strutting rooster, "She rare color. Never see another like her. I kill twenty wyvern to get to her. Her name Lady."
I got the impression that he made this speech a lot.
Lady shifted her eyes from my face to her master's. She gave him a long, unblinking stare. Released from her gaze, I breathed again.
Drog thumped his chest, "Drog go all over world to find rarest animals for his collection." Leering at her, he waggled his fingers. I winced.
"Is that why you're going to Uldum?" I asked.
"No, Drog have other business in Uldum. But it's why we camp here tonight, and not at Crossroads." Then, with his massive hand, he pulled back the edge of his tunic to reveal a curved brown-grey kodo horn with a mouthpiece of smooth, cream-colored ivory. The sweeping body of the horn was intricately carved with bas relief sculptures of lions. Lions running, lions crouching, lions bringing down gazelles. But the center of the horn reclined a single carving, larger than all the others, of a majestic, white lion.
Drog tapped the carvings with a fingernail. "Tomorrow," he said, "this lion will be mine."
Harga, rolling the last log into place, muttered, "Just what we need, another pet. He has a stableful of pets in Orgrimmar already, eating all our profits. But you'd never know it. He only goes about with his latest one."
I glanced at Drog, bracing myself for a cutting rebuke, but he didn't. He puffed out his chest and said, "If Drog is to be envy of all he sees, he must have different pet each time." Bending, Drog fondled Lady's ears. She arched her neck against his hand.
I glanced at Harga, who had paused after placing the last log, and now stood panting from her effort, her hands dark with dirt and sap. She was staring at Drog and Lady, and there was something in her face that twisted my stomach. Her upper lip was arched with contempt, yes, arched like a drawn bow, but her eyes burned as she watched Drog stroke the wyvern's head.
I wondered if Drog was ever as gentle with her as he was with his latest pet.
Harga and Blackhoof set up a small tent for each of the three passengers: Grum, Buck and myself. Blackhoof set up a worn tent for himself, made of reddish kodo hide, and a larger one for Drog and Harga to share.
Everyone took their personal belongings into their tents, and Drog, I noticed, pulled the four dark boxes inside his tent, but I had no luggage to speak of. I thought wistfully of my footed pajamas in my quarters in Orgrimmar. They were probably long gone by now. Harga kindly lent me some wolf skins to sleep on.
As the sun went down over the savannah, stippling the grasstips with orange light, we ate a dinner of black Orc bread and slabs of yellowish cheese by the crackling campfire. I still felt nauseous from the day's ride, and the sight of the greasy cheese set my stomach roiling again. I nibbled on it cautiously, listening to the other travelers talk.
Blackhoof, his chores done, stretched out his hooves to the fire. One of his hooves had a small crack. He pulled the cracked foot over his other knee, gingerly, as though it pained him, and pulled a file from his pocked with a ziiiiiiik. Harga scooted over to him on his log and cupped his ankle, her hands gentle, her face glowing softly in the firelight, while he began filing down the front edge of the hoof.
Grum leaned over to watch them, his face curious. Self-farriery was new to me, too.
Blackhoof looked up and smiled, "Imbalanced foot," he said, "Not serious. I've had it since I was a kid. I need to file it down so it sits flat, so the crack doesn't grow."
Grum nodded, then pressed his lips together. He held out his hand, and his fingertips glowed with a soft green light, the color of new spring leaves. Soft shoots of green wrapped around Blackhoof's foot, twining and throbbing with life. Blackhoof laughed a little nervously, "That tingles," he said.
When the green shoots faded, the crack was gone. Blackhoof thumped on his hoof with his knuckles, then grinned at Grum. "Thanks," he said.
"Looks like this caravan could use a good healing shaman," Grum said.
Drog looked up from his place by the fire, where he was taking big bites out of his bread and cheese. "One-armed shaman no use," he said. "Plenty two-armed shaman about."
"I'm a good healer," Grum said, turning to face him.
Drog jabbed a finger at him, "You so good, heal arm."
Grum's smile faded, "I don't know how, yet."
"Useless," Drog said, and went back to his meal.
Grum glared at him, silence emanating from him like a bruise. He said nothing more.
A chill fell on the company after that exchange. I crawled into my tent. My bread and cheese had defeated me in the end, and I lay shivering for a good long while as darkness fell. Damn savannah climate – scorching hot during the day, freezing at night. Scuffling and scraping noises told me the others were retiring to their tents, too.
I thought everyone was in bed when I heard Grum's low voice and Drog's rumbling, impatient answer. Grass crunched beneath their feet: they were moving away from camp, but still the voices droned on.
Drog's voice rose. The conversation was turning into an argument. I could only catch bits and pieces of what Drog was saying. "… doesn't remember… useless… Igrim… have no use… gold…"
Grum's voice was too low for me to hear.
I came bolt upright in my tent, heart pounding in my chest like a samophlange piston.
What was that?
Echoes reverberated in the distance. Echoes of… a horn?
There it was again!
A distant summons rang clear and bright, then faded into rolling echoes.
A few stars shone softly through the round smokehole of my tent, but the light around them was pale grey. It was just before dawn, and it was cold. Finger-numbing, nose-running, throat-slicing cold. Wisps of steam rose before my eyes. Laying back down, I pulled my wolf hide right up to my chin and folded my legs tight, tucking my icy left foot into the crease behind my right knee to warm it up. With any luck I could snatch another ten minutes of sleep before…
A defiant yell sounded in the distance, followed by multiple deep-throated growls and a muted roar.
Lions.
I clutched the hide closer. Drog must be out there, somewhere, taming his next pet. The kodo stamped their feet and blew nervously through their noses. They didn't like this any more than I did. My back ached with tension.
The growls died down.
I massaged the back of my neck, trying to get the muscles to unclench. All over. It was all over.
A single, distant scream tore through the silence.
This was unbearable. I tore off the furs, yanked on my clothes and hurled myself out of the tent.
