For Deliah

Sunday 4 October, 22:23. The Sepulcher

I came back to the Sepulcher at the end of Sunday with a boat on my mind.

It is a graveyard that has been given a purpose, which is more than most of us can say. A crypt, a ring of old stones, a forge, stables where the bats are kept, an inn where the Forsaken sit and do not drink. A gibbet stands over the path. I feel at home here in the way a coffin might.

The Sepulcher began as a graveyard beside the road that crosses Silverpine Forest. After the Third War the Forsaken took the old crypt and made it their keep in the region, and it is still one of the few places in the zone where a Horde traveller can rest without a hand on a weapon. It has an inn, stables, a forge, a bat handler and trainers. Apothecary Renferrel works here for the Royal Apothecary Society, and so do a shadow priest, a guard of the Deathguard, and a mage who once held a high seat in the Kirin Tor.

High Executor Hadrec stands in the middle of it and gives the impression that the place was built around him. He is the first of the Forsaken to speak to me as though I were already a soldier. I do not mind, since I am not sure what else I am. He says Silverpine is saturated with our enemies the way other men say good morning, and I have noticed that he never says what happens once they have been driven back. I do not dislike him. I do not think he would notice if I did.

He had sent me to the Decrepit Ferry that evening. A boat was tied up there, low in the water, and the boat was full of the dead. They lay in rows. Someone had been patient with them. I have stood among the dead before. I am one. This was different, because nobody had asked them anything.

One was a woman with a ring on her hand, and inside the band someone had cut For Deliah. I took it. I looked at my own hand afterwards, to see whether I had worn one. It told me nothing.

Hadrec turned the ring over and said where he thought the dead had come from, and that the Rot Hide were carrying them across the water to Fenris Isle. He said very probably in the voice the Forsaken keep for certainly, and please do not ask. Then he sent me to Brill with the ring, to Magistrate Sevren, who keeps the records of the recently dead and may be able to say who she was. His instructions suggested that whoever gave her the ring was probably dead as well, and that if not, he probably no longer cared.

Hadrec’s guess was that the dead had come from the mass graves in Tirisfal. The Rot Hide are undead gnolls, and a banshee called Nightlash had been feeding them with her magic until Percy ended her. Fenris Isle lies in the middle of Lordamere Lake. Before the Third War a Lordaeron outpost, Fenris Keep, stood on it. After the Scourge came the keep was abandoned, and the Rot Hide took it, under a necromancer named Thule Ravenclaw who also held the Decrepit Ferry.

The ring is in my bag, beside two catfish. I have not gone to Brill. If I take it there the ring gets a name, and then the name has a life, and then somebody has to be told what happened to the body. I have a ring.

Sunday 4 October, 22:25. Dalar

Dalar Dawnweaver was at the wall of the Sepulcher with the look of a man who has been right too often to be liked. He wears the robes of a mage and the face of a man who has been dead a long time and resents the delay.

He says he was named for the tower. Or rather, that the tower was named for him. I did not argue. Mages have a way of saying things that makes arguing feel like a mistake. What he does not hide is his temper about Arugal, who was accepted into the Kirin Tor, and whose casting, Dalar says, was as transparent as a blown glass bauble. The Kirin Tor did not heed my warnings, he told me. Arugal is a wreckless fool.

So the tower I want, the thin spire of Dalaran that I keep seeing between the pines, is a place that made Dalar, and made Arugal, and Dalar will not discuss which was the mistake.

Dalar Dawnweaver was an archmage of the Kirin Tor. He was killed when the Scourge fell on Dalaran, rose in the Lich King’s service, and was freed when Sylvanas gathered the free undead. He holds that the Kirin Tor ignored him, and he serves the Dark Lady in the hope of seeing Arugal’s magic turned against Arugal.

Monday 5 October, 12:14. Fenris Isle

On Monday Apothecary Renferrel wanted ichor, the black stuff that runs in the Rot Hide, by the vial. Eight of them. The brutes give it up one at a time, which is the only way the brutes do anything.

They put me down at fourteen minutes past twelve. I do not feel pain as I am told I once did. It is a dimming, the way a lamp goes down, and then I am standing on the wrong side of my own body with the water of Lordamere Lake cold around my knees. The cold I feel. I am not sure what that says about me.

The water was the only thing that morning I could feel. [Picture description: A pale ghost wades through grey water toward a wooden jetty, with pines and the stone shape of a keep fading into mist beyond.]

those rothides got me on fenris isle

At 12:21 something spoke to me from the undergrowth. It was a head. It said, You don’t look like a rot hide. Good. I had lost hope. Its name was Alaric. It asked me to take it to its grave, which it believes the gnolls dug by the stable at the keep, and which it says was hastily done. I put it in my bag with the ring and the fish. It has not spoken since. I find I listen for it.

Alaric was Thule Ravenclaw’s head servant and bodyguard. Thule used a spell to protect him from the Plague of Undeath, and the spell left him in an unlife he could not leave. When Thule made the Rot Hide, he beheaded Alaric and gave the head to the gnolls as a toy. The Rot Hide buried the body in an unmarked grave near the stable of Fenris Keep.

They got me again at 12:28. After that I had my eighth vial, and at 12:37 I took the lot to Renferrel at the Sepulcher. He is a pale and careful member of the Royal Apothecary Society who says Now it is up to the Society to develop a new plague the way other men say grace. He tipped the ichor into something and studied it for a long while. His findings were not conclusive, he said, which in an apothecary means the opposite. He thought it had been made with warlock work and necromancy. He said warlock twice and did not look at me either time. I have learned what a pause is for.

The Royal Apothecary Society was founded by Sylvanas Windrunner to turn the Plague of Undeath against the Scourge. Its head is the Grand Apothecary, Putress, and its alchemists keep their laboratories in the Apothecarium in the Undercity. The Forsaken are feared by the living for it, and watched by their own allies.

Monday 5 October, 12:49. The Temple of the Damned

Renferrel is no mage, so he sent a sample to the Undercity, to the Temple of the Damned in the Magic Quarter, where my own trainer, Richard Kerwin, teaches me what I am allowed to cast. Bethor Iceshard is said to rule the mages and warlocks here. I had passed him twice and never spoken to him.

This“This is where the mages are,are,” said Mezzlos. He kept a pillar between himself and the whole temple. I will wait here.“I will wait here.”

Bethor Iceshard held the vial to the light and said some of the spells in it he had not seen for a long, long time. Then he cast something over it, and a name came out: Thule Ravenclaw. A man who had once worked beside Bethor, gone over to the Scourge, made the ichor, and made the gnolls with it. Bethor said colleague with no heat in it at all. The Forsaken are good at that. I practised it on the way up, Thule Ravenclaw, and it came out sounding like a man ordering bread.

He gave me a scroll to carry back, so Renferrel could brew something against Thule’s stronger spells. At 12:54 I handed it over, and at 12:56over. At 12:56 I went to Hadrec, who had agreed that Thule must be stopped, and he fitted me from the arsenal and sent me to bring back Thule’s head. The potion is in my bag too. So is the head of Alaric. The head of Thule is the only line in the book I cannot yet cross out.

Bethor Iceshard, Thule Ravenclaw and a man named Gunther Arcanus were apprentices together in Dalaran. They bound their wands into one wand to mark their friendship. When the Scourge came, Thule chose to give his soul to the Lich King, stole the wand, and hid it in Fenris Keep. Bethor does not speak of this. He speaks of freedom as a constant struggle, and says that survival depends on shrewd politics, research and the brutal exploitation of an enemy’s weaknesses.

Monday 5 October, 13:20. The Skittering Dark

That afternoon I finished the spiders. Six samples of Skittering Blood, for a recipe I had been carrying for three days. I took Moss Stalkers and Mist Creepers in the Skittering Dark one after another, and at 13:21 a Son of Arugal came out of the dark and held me at a fifth of my health for forty-seven seconds. I counted. A body should not mind losing a fifth of itself when it cannot feel the other four. I minded. I took that as news.

The Skittering Dark is the spider country at the edge of the Lordamere shore, and the bears of the forest and the spiders of the dark were the two ingredients that Faranell had asked for. The Sons of Arugal are the cursed men of Pyrewood Village, turned into worgen by Arugal’s magic, who roam the forest at night.

Wednesday 7 October, 17:36. The Royal Quarter

On Wednesday I went to see the queen. I told the little stone so: off to meet the queen

The man on the left had work for me. [Picture description: Percy, Mezzlos and the Banshee Queen stand in a dim green-lit chamber of the Undercity; a man called Morbin Lightbane waits at the left with a quest mark above his head.]

I had expected to feel something. The Dark Lady, who gathered us when the Lich King let go, stood three paces away, and I felt what I feel for most things, which is a small, courteous distance. I noticed that, and I noticed that I had expected to.

At 17:38 Morbin Lightbane asked me for twenty-five limbs, and he was particular that they be intact. I am to find them in the Ruins of Lordaeron, among the fallen. He did not say whose. I looked at my own hands again. They were intact. I thought about that for longer than I meant to.

Morbin Lightbane’s errand has a plain reason in his own words: decaying flesh cannot be reknit, not without replacements. The limbs are replacements, to be sewn onto the wounded. The Forsaken do not heal as the living do. A risen body is a thing to be maintained, and when a part fails, the only remedy is another part.

Wednesday 7 October, 17:41. The Apothecarium

Then I went down to the Apothecarium. gruesome part of undercity, my favourite place

It is not quite a joke. It is the one room in the city where nobody looks away from what we are.

Zinge, at the bench, working. Nobody else looked up. [Picture description: Chains and hooks hang from a high ceiling in a dim vaulted hall, with bodies hung from some of them; Percy in a purple robe stands below beside the blue shape of Mezzlos, an apothecary at work behind them.]

I“I do not like the hooks, said Mezzlos. Therehooks,” said Mezzlos. “There are more hooks than bodies.bodies.”

Master Apothecary Faranell took six bear hearts and six samples of spider blood from me at 17:41, which is what he had been waiting on, and paid me five silver and a good deal of conversation. He receives you like a man interrupted at a very good dinner, and he has a taste for the long word. The recipe, he said, was for a plague that would take the Scourge and the living alike, and the paper said it in the tone of a man proposing a picnic. Then he gave me the second half, the journal of an apothecary named Berard, who was cursed by Arugal’s magic and is now a mindless servant in the inn at Pyrewood Village, guarding the study where he left his notes.

At 17:42 I met Theodore Griffs at the end of the bench, by a bookshelf, in the inner room. He wants a sample of something called a Highly Toxic Strain, from a beast named Witherfang in the Ruins of Lordaeron, because its toxins are said to eat through even undead flesh. I wish, he said, to validate these claims. I have been sent to fetch a poison for a man who wants to know what it does to the likes of me.

Griffs, by his bookshelf, wanting to know what the poison does to us. [Picture description: Percy at the foot of a stair in a workshop of hanging weights and shelves; at the far right a man called Theodore Griffs stands with a quest mark above him.]

The Apothecarium stands in the south-west corner of the Undercity. It is where the Society brews plagues and poisons, builds stronger abominations for the armies, trains its alchemists and teaches the science of tissue and organ transplants. Faranell, who leads it, studied in Dalaran among the wizards before he died, and has been called eccentric and sardonic, with a preference for taking his subjects alive. The records say what the Apothecarium is for. They do not mention hooks.

Wednesday 7 October, 19:27. The book

A boat of the dead goes to an isle where a man makes ichor out of them. A hall of hooks hangs under a city where a man mixes bear heart with spider blood. I have a theory that this is one business with two ends. I wrote it in the book, underlined it, and have so far found nothing to stop me believing it.

Nobody has told Percy that his two businesses are one. Nobody has told him that they are not. He has not noticed what else is common to them. Bethor, Thule, Dalar, Faranell and Arugal all studied at Dalaran, in the tower he wants to see. It stands in the Hillsbrad foothills, and it is still there.

I notice, reading the page back, that I have ruled the columns. I do not remember learning to. Somebody kept a ledger once, and he had a very steady hand. I should like to know what he was counting.

The ring is in the bag. The head is in the bag, and the potion. Thule’s head is on the list. Eight vials, one recipe handed in, and a head still owed. I underlined the head. Below it, smaller, I wrote Deliah, and did not underline that.

Set down in the Undercity, Wednesday 7 October 2026, 19:27.