Traveler Read online

  “Yes, man!” answered the gnoll at full volume, between continued cackles and the occasional amused glance Aram’s way. She waved toward her clan, who brought forth thick packets wrapped in giant gunnera leaves. A dangerous-looking male with multiple ear, eyelid, nostril, and lip piercings placed one of the packets atop the barrel and carefully unfolded the thick but supple leaf, revealing long strips of dried smoked meats.

  “Boar jerky,” said Cackle. “Finest the Grimtail make. Sixteen packets. And twelve of rockscale cod.”

  Captain Thorne stroked his beard, as Cackle rapped a paw-like fist against the barrel and listened to the sloshing of the brine within. Aram watched her mouth water, drool literally dripping into the sand. “This what I think?” she asked hungrily.

  Greydon nodded. “It is.” Then he pried open the top crate and picked up a battered axe blade. “And here are four crates filled with ready spurs.”

  Cackle smiled with all her teeth. “Thorns of Thorne,” she said and laughed. But her eyes betrayed something else, a sudden nervousness that Aram noticed but failed to comprehend.

  His father had a firmer grip on the situation. “So you see I bring much treasure to trade. But sixteen and twelve. You know that’s not enough, Matriarch.”

  She growled again, and Aram saw Makasa adjust her grip on the harpoon. But Cackle’s growl ended with a grunt and a wave, and soon more packets materialized from the jungle. “Twenty and twenty,” Cackle barked. “No more. Final.”

  “Agreed!” said the captain, and everyone—on both sides of the trade—cheered. Even Makasa cheered, and even Aram found himself caught up in the moment—belatedly. His cheer arrived a second or two after the rest, causing more embarrassment when Cackle pointed at him, laughed, and asked, “Your boy a little slow?”

  Greydon looked at Aramar and said, “Not slow. Just new.”

  Aram crossed his arms over his chest and scowled, as his father said, “What? New’s not bad.”

  His son resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the old man and shook his head instead.

  The barrel was pried open, and the stench from the pickled eggs almost made Aram retch—and even had the stoic Makasa looking a little green. But Cackle and the Grimtail howled with joy. The matriarch slapped away the paw of the large, pierced male and reached into the brine. Her talons emerged, gently clutching the first egg. She held it up as if it were a diamond to be admired. Then she dropped it whole into her maw. Her head rolled with joy at the taste. Aram forgot his nausea and stared in wonder.

  “To the gnolls those eggs are quite the delicacy,” Greydon said. Aram flinched. He hadn’t noticed his father slip behind him. (For a big man, Greydon Thorne was surprisingly light on his feet.)

  “So I can see,” Aram said, trying to make his voice sound cold and uninterested. But his desire to distance himself from his father was fighting a losing battle against the boy’s own curiosity. Aram watched the gnolls break open the four crates, watched them ooh and ahh over the broken blades and old horseshoe nails, and, before he could stop himself, was shooting Greydon a questioning look.

  “The Grimtail have no ironworks,” Greydon said as he slid his arms into the sleeves of his leather coat, shrugging it up until the shoulders fell correctly. “No forges like your friend Glade.” Aram didn’t care for Greydon Thorne referring to Robb Glade as his “friend,” but he let it pass this once as his father continued: “But they can hammer a nail or an axe blade or a knife tip into a war club and triple the damage they can do to their enemies. To these gnolls, those bits of iron are worth their weight in gold.”

  Aram raised an eyebrow. “So you’re cheating them. Tricking them into taking worthless refuse in exchange for …” Here, he paused, confused. In exchange for what? For boar jerky? For codfish jerky? It seemed to Aram that those forty packets were hardly worth more than the barrel of disgusting eggs.

  “No one’s cheating anyone,” Greydon said, with more patience than Aram probably deserved. Absently, Wavestrider’s captain pulled the compass and chain out from under his shirt and let it fall against his chest. He said, “This is what I’ve been trying to teach you. It’s what you trade to whom. One man’s junk is another gnoll’s treasure.”

  “And one gnoll’s smoked meat?”

  “Is treasure of a kind to the centaur, tauren, and quilboar of Flayers’ Point.”

  “Quilboar eat boar jerky?”

  “Some do, actually. But mostly they take the codfish.”

  Aram shook his head with something like admiration. “You’ll make a fortune on these trades, won’t you?”

  Admiration not being one of Aramar’s typical reactions to his father, Greydon grinned happily—soaking up every stingy morsel his son offered up. “A small fortune,” the captain said with a shrug.

  “So if all of this was so friendly and honest, why did you and Cackle have to fight?”

  “Gnolls don’t like humans. Probably because most humans don’t like gnolls. Cackle couldn’t trade with me in front of her clan until I demonstrated I was worthy of her respect.”

  “Then … it was all for show?”

  “Yes and no. You have to see folks for who they are, Aram, not for who the old men of Lakeshire have taught you to think they are. Gnolls are a warrior race. A cantankerous warrior race, at that. Even the pups know the difference between a pantomime and a real battle. So we went at it. For real. But you’ll notice there were no spurs, no barbs, no ‘thorns’ in either war club.”

  “Yeah, but they were still war clubs! You still could’ve been killed!”

  “Don’t tell me you care,” Greydon said, still smiling.

  Aram merely looked annoyed. “I don’t want you dead, Greydon.” Aram knew his father hated it when his son called him Greydon. “I just wanna go home.”

  Greydon sighed. “I know, son. But here is where you need to be right now.” He patted his boy gently on the shoulder and moved to join the cackling Cackle.

  Only then did Aram notice that Makasa was nearby, had seen—and probably heard—the whole exchange. Aram met her glare. Then she turned away, but just for a second, Aramar thought she almost looked sad.

  They remained on the beach, celebrating with the gnolls all through the night. One-God and the rest of the crew descended with a keg of Thunder Ale and joined the party. Captain Thorne allowed one packet of boar jerky to be opened and shared with the crew and the gnolls—though with a curt nod to Mose Canton, the ship’s quartermaster, Greydon made sure the other thirty-nine packets were safely stowed aboard ship.

  Curious now to try this “treasure,” Aram tracked the progress of Jonas Cobb, the ship’s cook, who walked among the crew and gnolls, passing out samples. Old Cobb was certainly taking his time—and an oddly circuitous route among the crowd—offering up strips of jerky to the gnolls lurking at the treeline. Then Aram watched Cobb disappear into the forest. He was gone for a minute or three—while the party at large was focused on One-God’s fairly rollicking distribution of ale—and Aram was just rising to express concern for the ancient cook, when Cobb’s white head reappeared a dozen yards from where he had entered the woods. He continued his distributions, eventually reaching Aram.

  Aram tried a strip of the jerky. It was so tough he thought he’d rip his jaw out trying to bite off a chunk. But once it was in his mouth, he had to admit it was spicy and flavorful, and the smallest bite—no matter how determinedly he chewed—lasted in his mouth for nearly half an hour. He could see its value now. Or taste and understand it, anyway.

  While he chewed, he took out his sketchbook—a small leather-bound volume of formerly blank pages of parchment, which he kept wrapped in oilskin cloth in his back pocket. It had been a gift from his stepfather, Robb Glade, and it had cost the blacksmith a pretty penny. Easily two days’ work, if not a full week’s. It was Aram’s most prized possession, in part because he loved drawing, loved it more than almost anything. But also because the gift was tangible proof that Robb believed in his stepson’s talent. Sure, both
his mother and stepfather had insisted Aram learn the blacksmith trade. A man needed to earn a living, after all. But Robb also saw the value in Aram having a way to express himself, and no one was more delighted than the smith when Aram filled the first page of the book with his sketch of the burly, smiling Master of the Forge.

  Aram flipped through the pages. The early ones were all of Lakeshire, his home. There were a few sketches of the town, a few landscapes of the shores of Lake Everstill, and one of Robb’s forge. There were a handful of pictures of animals, but animals were less inclined to sit still. Nevertheless, there were a couple horses, a mule, and a one-eyed tomcat, whose picture was, from necessity, finished from memory. And, of course, two or three sketches of Soot. But mostly the book was filled with people. His family featured heavily. In addition to his stepfather, there were three sketches of his mother and two each of his younger half-siblings, Robertson and Selya—plus a sketch of all of them together. There was even a self-portrait of Aram, done with the aid of a looking glass and hours of obsessive sketching and rubbing out and resketching until the parchment of that page was thinner than an eyelash—and even so, it was Aram’s least favorite sketch in the book. To everyone who saw it, it was a mighty good likeness. But Aram never felt he caught his own true self.

  About a third of the way through the book, the subjects of the sketches shifted from Lakeshire to the Wavestrider, starting with one lengthwise portrait of the ship itself. She was a fine, solid trading vessel, a converted small frigate, old but yare—and meticulously maintained. Patched, yes, in multiple places, but the work was excellently done. She was a hundred feet long, had three masts, a crew of thirty, and no cannon—for, according to her captain, his trading partners must always feel assured that Greydon Thorne and his ship came in peace.

  Her most unique feature, which merited a sketch of its own, was the strange mahogany figurehead affixed to the bow: a winged creature of unknown origin—neither male nor female—carved and polished into smooth, dark facets, depicting few curves, mostly angles. To be honest, Aram thought the figurehead ungainly and crude when compared to some of the beautifully honed elves and human women he had seen on other ships in Stormwind Harbor. Wavestrider’s figurehead was not original to the boat and had been carved four years ago by ship’s carpenter Anselm Yewtree, who once told Aram it had been made to Captain Thorne’s extremely precise specifications. But if any member of the crew knew the figurehead’s significance, none admitted to it. And Aram refused to ask his father, at times convinced it would give the man too much satisfaction, and, at other times, fearing he would deny his son an answer.

  Aram’s book also contained multiple sketches of One-God and more than a few of Duan Phen and at least one of nearly every other member of the crew. Even an unfinished sketch of the captain himself, which Aram had been feeling pretty good about until his father noticed his son drawing him and offered to hold still and pose. Aramar Thorne had slapped the book shut immediately and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  The only person aboard ship Aram hadn’t sketched was—no surprise—ship’s second mate Makasa Flintwill. Even now, as she saw him slip the coal pencil from his shirt pocket, she growled at him once again. “You better not be putting me in that blasted book.”

  He repeated what he always told her, every time she made this same implied threat. “I promise I won’t sketch you unless you ask me to.” This satisfied them both, as both knew she’d never ask, and Aram had no more interest in preserving the bane of his onboard existence for posterity than she had in being preserved.

  Besides, Aram was much more interested in sketching the matriarch. And then the pierced male, whom the other gnolls called a brute. And then a small gnoll pup. For the young artist, sketching them meant understanding them. Getting inside their skin, experiencing their musculature, feeling the structure of their bones in his mind’s eye, in his hand, and on the page. On first impression, Aram had thought Cackle a monster. But now, he knew she was just another animal. Like Soot or the one-eyed tomcat. Like Durgan One-God. Like Aramar Thorne.

  Cackle noticed him sketching the pup. She approached and leaned in over the sketchbook. He was distracted by the dank musty scent of her fur—until she barked out a laugh and barked out at Greydon, “Your boy so useless!” Aram started to color—though whether with anger or embarrassment, he wasn’t quite sure.

  But still snickering, Cackle was soon drawn back to the page. She stared at the upside-down picture of the pup in Aram’s book. She stared at the actual pup crouching at their feet. She stared at the sketch again.

  Then she grunted once and came around behind Aram, leaning so far over the boy’s shoulder, he could feel her hot breath on his cheek and smell each and every one of the twenty-eight eggs she had consumed from the barrel. Her sharp, sharp teeth could easily and at any second tear his ear off—at the very least—but he didn’t flinch. He knew her better now. He held still, and she stared again at the drawing of the pup. The matriarch’s breathing slowed noticeably. “Flip leaf,” she whispered hoarsely.

  Aram turned the page, revealing a pristine piece of parchment. But Cackle growled at him. “No, not new leaf. Old leaf.” Aram nodded and turned the pages back.

  Makasa watched all this with one hand on her cutlass. One-God started to make a joke, but Greydon—recognizing that something special was happening—put a hand on his first mate’s shoulder, and the dwarf fell silent, though he was still smiling. Greydon nodded in much the same way Aram just had. Even the giggling gnolls had fallen silent, focused on the matriarch and the boy.

  Aram turned to the sketch of the brute. She glanced up at the actual brute briefly but then coughed out a laugh that seemed to say the gnoll was a poor copy of Aram’s picture. “Flip leaf,” she said again. “Old leaf.”

  Aram turned the page back, and Cackle saw herself in charcoal. She sucked in air and held her breath for a silent minute.

  Then she exhaled and straightened. She looked up at Aram’s father.

  “Good magic,” was all she said to him, and Greydon nodded once more.

  Again she leaned back over Aram’s shoulder, and again she said, “Flip leaf.”

  Aram turned back a page to the unfinished picture of Greydon. Cackle’s brow furrowed. “You not finish.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You finish. You finish your father.”

  “I—”

  “No. You finish, boy.” She moved away, shaking her head and muttering. “Boy must finish. Boy must finish. Or else bad magic.”

  “Blast your hide, Aramar Thorne, wake up!”

  Whap! Groan. Yank. Thud. Wince.

  For the second morning in a row, Aramar started his day on the floor, rubbing his bruised forehead with one hand and his bruised behind with the other.

  Makasa glared down at him. “Your father says it’s time for your lesson. Get up and get on deck.”

  Most mornings, this was Aram’s standing order, so—in spite of the second mate’s aggressive sense of urgency—he felt slightly less of a need to rush than he had the morning before. He didn’t dawdle, but he took the time to dress, wash his face, and brush his teeth. Still, minutes later, he was topside, his cutlass on his belt. He spotted the captain at the helm, one hand gently resting on the wheel. The other hand lifted up the compass on the chain around his neck. Greydon glanced down at it and looked … disappointed? He let the device drop against his chest and stared out across the Veiled Sea.

  The Wavestrider was sailing south, skirting the western shore of Kalimdor. This was pretty much all Aram understood of their current location, beyond the salient fact that wherever they were, it was impossibly far from his family’s Lakeshire cottage in the Eastern Kingdoms on the complete opposite side of the world.

  Aram turned away from his father. There was a forest on shore off the port bow. The trees reminded him of home, and Aram wondered wistfully if the forest had a name.

  As if reading the boy’s mind, Durgan One-God said, “Locals call it the
Last Forest. The Last Forest o’ Desolace. An’ maybe it was, once upon a time. It’s home, as ye know, tae the Grimtail gnolls, but also tae the tauren of Ol’ Ironhoof, some scattered orcs, trolls, and goblins, an’ a handful o’ nomadic quilboar tribes. Not tae mention a few other random beasties.”

  “Children of the One True God?” Aram teased.

  One-God laughed, slapped Aram on the back, and said, “No one ever accused Eonar the Life-Binder o’ lackin’ imagination.”

  Just of lacking compassion, Aram thought, or sanity. How, he wondered, could a single “god” make such a hash of the world—with Horde fighting Alliance and with undead corpses like the Forsaken walking the earth, among other nightmares lurking along the edges of his rather tranquil Lakeshire upbringing? No, Robb Glade was right when he used to say, “Azeroth was clearly shaped by a whole mess of titans and spirits, each with his or her own agenda, desires, and ass-backery.” But Aram spoke none of this now. He liked One-God, despite the dwarf’s odd faith in a single deity—a faith even One-God admitted no one else had ever shared. Why Durgan had chosen Eonar, while disavowing the rest of the titans, was a complete mystery to Aram—just as the idea of a seagoing dwarf who could barely swim was a mystery to Aram. But there was something about the dwarf’s odd quirks that made him more endearing, and Aram had no desire to seriously challenge the first mate’s beliefs and risk driving a wedge between them.

  One-God wrapped a beefy arm around Aram’s shoulder and spoke to him in a low—almost conspiratorial—tone. “See, the Life-Binder loves variety. Must be why She made me stout and strong … and you so blasted puny.” He shook with laughter that built to a roar.

  Aram rolled his eyes—then quickly glanced around in case Makasa might have seen him do it. And there she was, glaring, boiling. By the gods, Flintwill was exhausting. And everywhere. She was everywhere. Ubiquitous. Omnipresent. Probably omniscient and omnipotent, too. Maybe Makasa Flintwill was the One God. She certainly behaved as if she were. “Omni-annoying,” Aram muttered under his breath, too softly for anyone else to hear. But Makasa’s expression darkened further, and Aram swallowed hard.