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| Details |
| Author: | inkie |
| Summary: | Rhys Castell, out for a nighttime hunt, finds a disturbing prey. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
He used to smoke, before the cure came on him.
He said that to people sometimes, before the cure came on me or before I was cured, and sometimes people thought he meant the shit with the alchemy and the kaldorei tree, but sometimes people seemed to know what he meant even if they didn’t get why he meant it. The ‘s’ is silent, he’d say sometimes, and some of them thought he was joking.
Before he was cured, he smoked and drank and did both too long and too late of an evening so that he’d wake the next morning feeling wrong-shaped and half-savage, all the lights too bright and the sounds too loud. Before he was cured he would finish a day’s heavy work at the shipyards and feel sanded and splintered himself, would need that smoke or that bottle to smooth the edges off the day, until they were ground down to nothing at all and he would wake the next morning feral and formless and have to pull himself back together.
And then the cure came.
He couldn’t stand the smoke now, the oblivion stink of it and the way it cauterized other senses. Liquor was a noxious astringent, hollowing his veins so he felt weak and woozy. At the end of a long day, when he was feeling bruised and raw and too old for this shit, he could slip his skin instead, stretch into something stronger and faster and freer, stalk the sharp-edged night and the hundreds of scents and sounds it carried, each one vivid and distinct. There was abandon in the change, but there was a vicious, visceral clarity too.
And here in this jungle, well away from sleepy villages and civilized streets, there was the hot, rust-rich rush of blood for the hunting.
So when he’d mopped the last rice and broth from his bowl and brought the empty dish back to the cook-tent, and Sansome and Bircher and Wei Jin waved him over to the fire with the companionable offer of cigarettes and a bottle, he shook his head and waved back at them and ambled up the sand toward the darkness of the treeline.
The jungle breathed like a living creature, black and full of teeth. The air was thick, a dozen tangled scents and a dozen woven sounds even before he shifted, even his shabby human senses honed and heightened over what they’d been.
Then he shifted, and the night exploded into kaleidoscope.
He loped west, because west was away from people, west was tigers and saurok and mogu. He stopped at the river to drink, the water cool and green and alive, and then swung his head to assess the scents: north were moss-grown ruins and the stale tomb-reek of mogu, south was the sea and the thin, sour smell of saurok.
And something else. He lifted his head to find the elusive scent, a wrong note in the whole. South and west along the beach, farther than the saurok.
What was that?
He went south.
There were the saurok: a raiding party of them massed in the shadows of the trees just off the beach not a half-mile from the sleepy pandaren fishing huts. He distracted them from their intentions by dragging two of them thrashing into the underbrush, but then he used his claws and left them bleeding out on the jungle floor. Saurok blood was murky and bitter and left him sweating and nauseous the first time he’d killed one.
He turned west and kept following the strange scent along the sand. He could tease apart the threads of it now: scorched metal; the tarry black stink of oil; burnt garlic; cigar smoke; sweat. Each was unpleasant alone; together they were a stew of stench. There was a sound now that went with them, an alien whir-and-tick.
An object stood on the beach ahead. It was a small metal scaffold supporting a rod sunk deep into the ground. An orange light blinked fretfully atop it. The sound of metal grinding through sand rose faintly from beneath the machine.
A pair of shadows moved farther down the beach from the machine. They were small, bat-eared and long-armed, and one of them waved a clipboard as they moved. … survey the whole coast, he said, the clipboard-waver argued, his voice an abrasive shrill.
Yeah, well, then he can do his own surveys, snapped the other goblin. Too far east and we stroll right into that Alliance fort. Doesn’t matter anyway. All the oil’s west of here. We’ll be drilling by end of next week.
Yeah, but if we’re gonna keep the Alliance off our backs….
I don’t see any Alliance. You see any Alliance? They’re all snugged up on the other side of this place, feeling cozy. Let’s get these drill markers down so we can get back to the sub. Jungle gives me the willies.
The growl rumbled like an oncoming storm in his chest. They couldn’t hear him over the sea, their machinery, their own bilious bickering. He stalked the pair of them from just within the velvet shadow-margin of the treeline.
The goblin without the clipboard carried what looked like an umbrella propped against his shoulder. It wasn’t an umbrella. When the clipboard-goblin — Clippy, he’d decided, and the other was Snippy — pointed at a place on the sand, Snippy took the umbrella-thing from his shoulder and dropped it.
It collapsed outward as it dropped, transforming from a folded umbrella into a splay-legged scaffold like the other. When Snippy took a hammer from his belt and clanged the thing viciously a couple of times, a central rod dropped down into the sand like a mosquito’s proboscis. With a tick and a whir, the faint sound of metal grinding through sand spooled into the air.
Okay, said Snippy. He clanged the scaffold with his hammer one more time and the orange light at its top sputtered to life. That’s our survey. Let’s go.
Lemme mark these figures down, Clippy said.
Hurry it up, Snippy whined. We gotta get to the sub and report back.
Report back meant they were expected by someone. Report back meant someone was expecting information from them.
The jungle breathed like a living creature, black and full of teeth.
Some of those teeth were his.
Afterward he crouched by the edge of the sea and swept handfuls of saltwater over himself to scrub matted blood from his fur. He didn’t bother hiding the bodies, though he scuffed his own tracks ambiguously in the sand. Who knew what kind of predator might have stepped out of a nighttime jungle to stain the sand with a couple of goblins who’d wandered into no place they should be?
He left the goblins lying in their own gore. He knocked over the two scaffold-machines, uprooted them and smashed one, dragged the other partway into the water.
He took the clipboard with him.
When he stepped human-shaped out of the jungle back at the edge of Lion’s Landing, only a couple of people were still up by the fireside. Bircher squinted blearily in his direction and waved a bottle. “Oi. Castell,” he called. “Change your mind?”
The mason’s expression changed as Rhys got close. He sat up, whey-faced. “Bloody hell, Castell. Are ye — what do ye — what happened to ye?”
Rhys didn’t answer him. He took the bottle from Bircher’s nerveless fingers, rinsed his mouth with liquor to scald the taste of goblin from his back teeth, and spat it on the sand. He offered the bottle back. “Where’s Captain Bray?”
13 May 30
Lion’s Landing
Grand Admiral -
There are goblins on the coast to our west. They appear to be surveying for oil; I am enclosing the reports one of our workmen retrieved from a site north of the Nayeli Lagoon, close to the Temple of the Red Crane. The tauren Sunwalkers have an encampment nearby, on the other side of the Temple, and so I am obliged to assume that their pretenses of cooperation heretofore were in ill faith. The Horde is clearly planning a full-scale invasion of the coast and establishment of a stronghold of their own.
Lion’s Landing is nearing completion; the lighthouse tower on the hill has been established, and now we need only to finish the harbor wall and an inn on the inland side of the keep. We await additional stone from the Explorers’ quarry to our north. Marshal Troteman remains confident that his people can hold the beach for now. If the Horde appears in force, however, we are going to require a great many more people and artillery.
Captain Tyrrell’s 7th Legion EU has moved west to assess the Horde situation there directly. Meanwhile, we are in substantial suspense here regarding the Alliance fleet’s arrival.
Respectfully,
Yr. obdt. svt.,
Admiral S. Fallon
cc: Adm. Taylor
15 May 30
Stormwind Keep
Admirals Fallon and Taylor -
I cannot make the fleet travel any faster than they are doing at present. I assure you they are underway and making all due haste.
Yrs.,
Jes-Tereth