Traveler Read online

  To my second-grade teacher, Sandy Voyne, who started all

  this with a handful of spelling words …

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PART ONE: ABOARD WAVESTRIDER

  CHAPTER ONE: A DREAM OF LIGHT AND MOTION

  CHAPTER TWO: FOR WHOM THE BELL GNOLLS

  CHAPTER THREE: COMMON BIRDS OF AZEROTH

  CHAPTER FOUR: A STUDY IN CRIMSON

  CHAPTER FIVE: FLAYERS’ POINT

  CHAPTER SIX: THE WHISPER–MAN

  CHAPTER SEVEN: SPIRAL

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE TAR-SHIP

  CHAPTER NINE: THE WEIGHT OF THE INEVITABLE

  CHAPTER TEN: THE LAST SMILE

  PART TWO: ACROSS FERALAS

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: GRIM INVENTORIES

  CHAPTER TWELVE: PAINFUL JABS

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: BETWEEN A ROCK AND A WET PLACE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THERE IT WAS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE FEAST OF LORD BLOODHORN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE HIDDEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: MURKY DEPTHS

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: URUM’S TALE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: POINTS

  CHAPTER TWENTY: FRUNDS AROUND THE CAMPFIRE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: MAGICSS OF DRUIDZZ

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE WEB TIGHTENS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: DIVERSIONS IN THE FLOW

  PART THREE: ABOVE SKYPEAK

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: FEARS OF A BURLAP SACK

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: CHILDREN OF THE THORNE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: DIRE MAUL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: GOOD MAGIC

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: WHERE THERE’S A FLINTWILL, THERE’S A WAY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: THE ARENA

  CHAPTER THIRTY: OLD ONE-EYE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: HIGH STAKES

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: THE CHALLENGE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: FINAL NESTING PLACE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: THE LAST MILE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Aramar Thorne turned away from the Light.

  It had called to him, and he had followed, sailing toward it across the sea—without benefit of ship, boat, or raft—until the surf and spray vanished from beneath his feet and he found himself ashore. And still the Light called to him. This strange Light came not from the sun nor the moons nor the stars, whose constellations his mother used to point out to him when he was six, after his father had vanished, and under which she had promised Greydon Thorne could be found. No, this was a new Light, a moving target with no fixed progression through the heavens—quite impossible to reliably track, let alone pin down. Still, without ever making a conscious decision to continue, Aram found himself walking toward it. He walked and walked through dusty desert, broken forest, swampy bog, and dense jungle, stopping only when a great wall of a mountain seemed to rise up out of the ground to block his path. But the Voice of the Light still called his name, “Aram, Aram,” all without ever making any actual sound that reached his ears. The Voice grabbed him like a fist around his heart and pulled him painfully into the air, and soon Aram Thorne was soaring, soaring through sunshine and cloud, through rain and thunder—until lightning struck so close, he could feel the hairs on his arm stand at attention and singe. But even this lightning paled before the bright, bright Light.

  He had traveled so far to find it, find it so that the Light could save him, could return his father, bring Aram home to his mother, reunite him with Robb and Robertson and Selya and even Soot. Yet when finally he achieved it, the Light blinded, and Aramar Thorne turned away. It called to him: “Aram, Aram, it is you who must save me …” But he turned away. One last time, it called his name …

  “Aramar Thorne, get your sorry bones out of that bunk!”

  Aram woke with a start, sitting up abruptly and smacking his forehead painfully against the underside of the upper berth, only eight or nine inches above where he laid his head. It had been six months aboard ship, and he figured he must have a permanent bruise, given the number of times he had done the exact same thing, never learning from the experience. The strange dream of motion and Light began to fade instantly, and he struggled to hold on to even a fragment of it, but she was of another mind.

  Ship’s second mate Makasa Flintwill had evolved beyond any amusement she once enjoyed from seeing Aram bash in his own skull. The fact that the kid never woke up on his own, and rarely without her shouting at him for two solid minutes, was yet more proof he didn’t belong aboard the Wavestrider. She was sick of the sight of him, but the captain—without ever actually giving the order—had all but made Aram her responsibility. Still, there was never any suggestion she had to treat the young fool gently. Tired of yelling at him, she grabbed his bare right foot and yanked him bodily off his bunk.

  Landing hard on his behind, Aram winced sharply and glared up at his nemesis. Makasa was seventeen, only five years older than he was, but had he been standing at attention she’d still tower over him by a good half a foot. Right now, she positively loomed. He blinked twice, trying to focus. Backlit by the open hatch behind her, Makasa’s sable skin blended with the belowdeck shadows and gloom and his own hazy consciousness, rendering her as little more than a silhouette. But there was no denying her solidity, her presence. She was five foot ten, lean and muscular, with kinky hair, cut extremely short to match the shape of her skull. Flintwill was the irresistible force, and unfortunately for Aram, he was no immovable object. She grabbed the front of his tunic and dragged him to his feet.

  “Landfall in five minutes,” she growled. “Pull on your boots and meet me in the hold in two.”

  He had to go up to go down. Having donned stockings and boots and splashed his face with water, Aram climbed into the open air. He glanced ashore—at the first land he’d seen in a week—then trotted across the deck to the hold, passing sailors about the business of making landfall, knowing that no matter how fast he moved, it would never be fast enough for Wavestrider’s second mate.

  Swinging his body into the hold, he grabbed the outside edges of the ladder and slid down it smoothly. He’d learned that trick at least. His boots hit bottom. There was minimal light here, too, and it smelled of mildew and fish.

  Makasa, of course, was waiting. She had her back to him but began barking out orders before he had even touched down: “That barrel and those four crates are going ashore. Help me with the barrel, then come back for the crates. And make sure you send up the right ones.”

  He didn’t answer, which suited both of them fine. In his first few weeks aboard ship, he had tried out, “Yes, Miss!” and “Yes, Ma’am!” and “Yes, Sir!” They all made her grimace. Later, “Yes, Second Mate!” and even “Yes, Flintwill!” and “Yes, Makasa!” But none of them seemed to suit. So he had stopped addressing her by name or title. He had tried very hard to stop addressing her at all.

  They tilted the heavy barrel to roll it across the hold, and he could feel and hear its contents sloshing about within. The question came out of his mouth before he could censor it: “What’s in this thing?”

  “Hardboiled chicken eggs pickled in brine,” she said darkly, as if challenging him to deny it.

  He screwed up his face in disgust. “Who would ever want hardboiled chicken eggs pickled in brine?!”

  “Wait and see,” she said, smiling for the first time all morning. Maybe for the first time all month.

  He shook his head, something he had taught himself to do, because rolling his eyes seemed to particularly aggravate Second Mate Flintwill, and he didn’t need to give her any more reasons to dislike him. They maneuvered the barrel onto the cargo net, which immediately formed a hammock around it, as the
deckhands above used ropes and pulleys to raise it topside. Without another word, she climbed up the ladder, leaving him below.

  He crossed back to the crates she had indicated. They weren’t sealed, and he wrenched off a lid to satisfy his curiosity. Inside were old, scarred axe blades affixed to splintered or shattered wooden hafts, broken knives and sword tips, even rusty nails. He glanced about the hold of his father’s ship. It was full of random stuff like this, useless junk that no sane man or woman could ever want. And yet it was exactly this useless junk that was Greydon Thorne’s stock-in-trade. Wavestrider traversed Azeroth, landing in both Alliance ports and Horde—and everything in between. Captain Thorne trafficked in the obscure. A small trade here, a small deal there. If there was profit in any of it, Aram could hardly see how. He shook his head again.

  He made four trips across the hold, placing each crate in the net, watching each one get raised into the light. This reminded him of … something. But he couldn’t summon up a notion of what that something might be. He shook the dormant memory off and followed the crates into the air.

  Achieving the deck, he was rewarded by a massive slap on the back that took the wind out of his sails, followed by a hardy “Mornin’, Greydon-son!”

  “Please, don’t call me that,” Aram said, catching his breath. He turned, unsurprised to see the robust smile of Wavestrider’s first mate, the burly red-bearded dwarf, Durgan One-God, who stood just a smidge over five feet tall and weighed easily thirteen stone. Just as Aram had rarely seen Makasa smile, it was even more rare to see One-God’s expression form anything else.

  “Aye, Aramar,” One-God said with mock contrition. “Ye’re yer own man, o’ course. Bit of a puny man, but still …”

  The five-foot-four Aram grinned down at the dwarf. Aram knew he was tall for his age, with every reason to believe he’d grow taller still. But it amused the first mate to call his young friend puny, and Aram didn’t begrudge the dwarf his amusements—mostly because One-God was his favorite person on the ship, bar none. And that included Aram’s own father, the ship’s captain, Greydon Thorne.

  “Ye got that little book o’ yours?” One-God said cheerfully.

  Aram patted the back pocket of his breeches. “Always,” he said.

  “Good. Might see somethin’ worthy of its pages today. We’ve weighed anchor. Yer old man said tae go ashore.”

  For a split second, Aram felt that urge. The urge to throw his father’s orders right back into the high-and-mighty Captain Greydon Thorne’s teeth. Aram’s relationship with his father was, well … complicated. But truthfully, Aram was dying to put his feet on solid ground again, so there wasn’t much point in rebelling now. Besides, he could hear the voice of his mother, Ceya, in his head: “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, child.” He suffered through another friendly but painful whap on the back from One-God and headed for the gangway.

  Descending to within a few feet of the end of the gangway, Aram jumped sideways to land on the steep, sloping beach. This was no port, but a small natural harbor on the coast of Desolace that allowed the Wavestrider to sail virtually up to the shore. The barrel and crates were already on the sand, flanked by Makasa Flintwill and Aramar’s father, Captain Greydon Thorne.

  Greydon stood a hair short of six feet tall. He was slim but well muscled with thick dark hair and a thick dark beard, both just beginning to gray to match the tint of his light gray eyes. The bridge of his nose zigged and zagged from being broken multiple times. But the gray eyes smiled, and the corners of his mouth curved up in concert upon Greydon seeing his son come into view.

  “You ready?” he asked Aram with a grin in his voice.

  “For what?” Aram responded, scowling. As usual, the more his father smiled, the less inclined Aram was to reciprocate.

  But for now the captain didn’t seem to notice. He smiled in earnest, turned his head, and nodded up at One-God, who was watching from aboard ship. The first mate rang the ship’s iron bell three times. Then all eyes but Aram’s turned to stare toward the forest trees that crept up to the very edge of the shore.

  Aram’s own eyes flicked back and forth between his father and Makasa and the woods. Aram noted that Makasa was well armed. Her shield—an iron circle covered with layers of impact-absorbing rawhide—was strapped to her back; a length of iron chain crisscrossed over her chest; her cutlass was at her side, and a long iron harpoon was held loosely in her left hand, its blunt end at rest in the sand. In contrast, his father’s ubiquitous cutlass was conspicuously absent from his belt, but he leaned on a fairly impressive war club of star wood and iron that easily came up to his navel. Suddenly, Aram felt unprepared to the point of nakedness. Yes, he had his sketchbook, but he longed for his cutlass instead.

  Just then, Aram felt—more than he heard—a stirring of the leaves. Something melted out of the forest onto the rocks that separated wood from sand. And not one something but many somethings. They looked like massive dogs, brown fur with yellow accents and black spots, standing not quite erect on two feet, wearing ragged clothing of rough wool accented with bits of iron armor. And they were holding weapons. Lots and lots of weapons. Clubs and spears and axes and bolos and more clubs, all “decorated” with sharp iron spikes and barbs.

  “What are you seeing?” Greydon asked.

  “Gnolls,” Aram answered breathlessly. He normally hated being quizzed by his father, but in this instant Aram was too riveted to remember to be resentful. He’d heard rumors of the monsters since he was a child in Lakeshire, but Aram had never actually seen a gnoll before. These matched Greydon’s description of the species exactly—though the good captain had neglected to mention the kind of fear they’d inspire.

  Greydon removed his worn leather coat and let it fall to the sand. He slipped the compass that hung on a gold chain around his neck down behind his white shirt. Then he took a step forward and with a lurch swung his own heavy club up onto his shoulder. In response, the gnolls … laughed. Or at least it sounded like laughter to Aram. It rose to a loud, chilling cackle, then reaching its crescendo, devolved into scattered chuckles and then into heavy panting, like the family dog, Soot, after a run along Lake Everstill back home.

  The largest gnoll, a female, padded forward. Though in height she had only a few inches’ advantage over Aram, she was solid as an oak, with massive shoulders, a short snout, and a grin of sharp, spiky teeth. She had pointed ears, one pierced by a feather, the other with a small gold ring. And she had her own massive war club similar to Greydon’s—moontouched wood reinforced with iron—though unlike the clubs of her fellow gnolls, hers was free of pointy metal protrusions.

  “Cackle here is matriarch of the Grimtail clan,” Greydon whispered. “She and I have faced each other before.”

  “And lived to tell about it?” Aram asked dubiously, catching Greydon’s sly smile and Makasa’s angry scowl.

  Cackle circled to the left. Greydon stepped forward and circled to the right. Aram spotted Makasa lift her harpoon half an inch off the ground, but the captain spotted this, too, and shook his head slightly, causing Makasa to lower the barbed iron javelin back to its resting position.

  Aram tried to swallow but his mouth was dry as dirt. He tried to breathe but felt like he had forgotten how. He didn’t much care for his father, but he didn’t want Greydon Thorne to die fighting this monster. The anticipation of the clash made his heart pump rapidly in his chest—and still he was unprepared when both combatants suddenly rushed each other, war clubs swinging.

  The two clubs smashed together with bone-crushing force, the iron reinforcement of the weapons ringing out louder than Wavestrider’s bell. Greydon pivoted and swung again, but Cackle leapt, her powerful hind legs propelling her above the horizontal arc of his attack. She brought her club down with her descent, but Captain Thorne tucked and rolled forward, leaving her weapon to strike empty ground with enough force to send sand flying in all directions—including into Aram’s slack-jawed mouth and staring eyes. The boy choked, coughed,
and spat. His eyes watered, and as he squeezed them shut and wiped the back of his arm across his face, he briefly lost track of the fighting.

  He blinked several times, listening for the dull sound of wood impacting flesh or for a sharp cry of anguish, but all he heard was another bell-like striking of club on club. Finally, his vision cleared, and he saw his father swing up with his war club, missing Cackle’s jaw by fractions of an inch. She stumbled back a step but recovered quickly, sweeping her own club across in an attempt to cave in Greydon’s chest before he could bring his club down and block. But Captain Thorne was too fast for the gnoll, and his falling club didn’t simply check hers—it shattered the matriarch’s weapon into splinters, and snapped itself in half.

  The two warriors stood a few feet apart, still grasping the hafts of their broken and useless weapons, breathing hard and glaring at each other. Aram tried to whisper, “What now?” to Makasa, but his sand-dry mouth only managed to croak out something unintelligible.

  Makasa, nevertheless, shushed him angrily.

  Then Captain Greydon Thorne threw his head back and laughed. The laugh seemed to echo behind him, and Aram whipped his head around to see Durgan One-God guffawing from aboard ship. Aram whipped his head back to study Cackle. Her lips parted to emit a low growl … which quickly built into the high-pitched sound that had clearly given the matriarch her name. Soon every gnoll on the beach was laughing and hooting along with Greydon and Cackle and the entire crew of the Wavestrider. In fact, only the stunned Aram and the grim Makasa seemed not to be in on the joke.

  Cackle slapped Greydon on the back—hard but friendly and not at all unlike the slaps Aram had received from One-God—and pointed what remained of her club at Aram. Captain Thorne whispered something in her ear, and Cackle nodded while redoubling her hysterics. Aram felt the heat rise in his face, and seeing his boy’s angry blush, Aramar Thorne’s father swallowed what remained of his own laughter. His expression saddened for a moment, before he covered up a pain unknown to Aram and regained a mirthful mien. “Shall we trade?!” he called out boisterously.