Cold Valley, Clear Skies

Furlough is damned fine even when you know it’ll be over before you know it. After a hard month of haggling at knifepoint for the use of some pretty filthy and questionable real estate, a sight of white stone and clean streets in Stormwind was like a sweet kiss in springtime. ’Course a hot bath and a couple tankards of Barleybrew’s Finest never hurt none either. I’m not such a complicated woman when it come right down to it: Liquor, soap, and maybe a bit of a tumble will fix me up just right.

Paymaster cashed us out with a little bonus after we finally kicked the Horde’s smelly asses out of the Arathi basin, hard fought and hardly won. Between that and the spare change I’d got rollin’ dead blood elves between skirmishes, I was feeling pretty flush. After me and some of the boys got done drinking off that kinda stunned-bunny after-battle vibe, I let a little room over a barber’s shop pretty cheap and had the biggest, hottest bath I could afford. Then I took my gear down the Old Town for some work.

Some folks leave off repairin’ til the end, and wind up havin’ no time or payin’ too much or having drunk and whored up all their coin. Don’t seem too smart to fight in broken armor, though, so I like to get things started while time and cash are still in hand. Tanner, Jr. give me a ration of lip about the knife-holes, frost burns, broken straps, and other minor consequences of my work. I told him better them than me, and he quieted down once he saw the color of my coins. He’s a good kid, Simon; not as handsome as his old man, but he does good work and fast. When he saw my gloves, though, he shook his head.

“Kiv,” he said, “I can’t do anything more with these. I’ve already reworked the fingers three times, the stitching is all shot to hell, the rivets are crushed, and the cuffs…well, they look as if they were…bitten off…by…some kind of wild animal. As crazy as that sounds.”

“You ain’t far wrong,” I said. “They get some pretty nasty cats up there in the Basin.”

I was smiling when I said it, but my heart sank a little, though, ’cause I knew it was gonna cost me a fair penny to replace them, and that’d probably put the kibosh on any additional celebratin’ I might of done. I guess I can bat my eyes at Reese Langston and get him to run me a tab for the bar, and then what I got now should prob’ly be enough to last a few. Now you see why I do this part first, though, even if it does kinda kill the mood.

I trolled around town looking for a deal, but the shops there mostly sells civilian togs. When I asked ’em for something in leather, what they trotted out was a couple pair of nice soft things suitable for a lady, which I most surely ain’t by a long shot. Imagine that, little me all dolled up in a big poofy dress and long hair and my face all painted up? Ha! Now that’d be theater. Where’s a girl supposed to keep her knives in a getup like that? Anyway, there wasn’t much worth a second look around the Auction House neither, which left only one real choice.

Cap’n Dirgehammer give me kind of a hairy eyeball when I come in to the Hall of Heroes, and he passed me off to one Sergeant-Major Clate, an old sour-puss of a Dwarf in charge of armor. I guess you gotta win more’n a few ground-skirmishes to talk with the likes of Dirgey. Bare-Pate Clate, now, he had a pretty nice pair of armored gloves for me—but he wasn’t gonna let me have ’em quite so easy as all that. See, it turns out they’re havin’ a pretty hard go of it up there in Alterac, and so it ain’t just a question of what they got so much as what they want for it.

In my case, that meant I’d got a choice to make: Enlist for the Alterac campaign, and get a nice perky discount off them military mittens, or go around with leather scraps tied over my hands. Bonus or none, I can’t afford to stick around a fancy place like Stormwind too long without work, and I kind of like my hands. I’d of signed on with SI:7 if they’d take me, but they are kind of particular about their folk bein’ able to read, and that is one bit of learning I never did properly master. I got the skills for thieving, but not much inclination to it—so I guess that don’t leave me too many choices. I signed up that afternoon.

Two days later, they paddled a whole bally bunch of us up to Alterac in a troop-scow, one of them Gnomish steam-wheel jobs they used to use for shippin’ soldiers up to Northrend back when I was a little girl. They’d cleaned it up a bit since then, but you could still see some big-ass harpoon gouges in the woodwork, and what I could only assume were scorch-marks on the upper decks. Engines seemed to work just fine, though, and we got up there in a couple of days of pretty fine weather. The Alterac Mountains are a pretty rugged bunch, and though them Stormpike boys had cut some roads down into the valley here and there, it’s all above the snow-line and colder’n a witch’s tit.

Vanndar Stormpike and his boys been fightin’ for control of that valley for a good long spell. Even when Stormwind was scrapin’ the barrel for troops to send to Icecrown, Vann—stubborn as only a Dwarf can ever be—never left ’cept maybe to piss. Him and Drek’thar, the crafty old Orc as runs the Horde’s business up there, been going at each other like an old married couple as long as anybody can remember, and between the two of ’em, they’ve built up a whole heap of towers, bunkers, bastions, and other strong points spanning the whole length of the Alterac range.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I ain’t got much head for strategy; I’m a tactics kind of girl—nimble on my feet and quick with a blade, but I ain’t the one you want plannin’ your invasion. So it maybe ain’t no surprise that I was mighty confused by the battle plan they set out for us that morning.

“More than anything else,” said Captain Stonehearth sternly, “we’d like you to kill Drek’thar. That should be seen as your ultimate goal, even if you are delayed by other things.” A good Captain, her, but a bit long on talk. “Unfortunately, in order to accomplish that objective, you must first achieve several lesser objectives, to wit, the control of the Horde strong-points within the Valley. The Horde’s outer defense are commanded by the Frostwolf Captain Galvangar, as cunning an Orc as ever spit teeth. You can bypass his stronghold here,” she pointed at a big cloth map, “but if you do so, you run the risk of a bitter struggle on two fronts when you reach Drek’thar’s bunker here.“

I sat with my chin propped on my hands and my elbows on my knees, trying not to fall asleep while the Captain droned on and on about towers and spirit healers and reinforcements and mines and other strategic niceties that don’t really make me no nevermind. To look at that map,  any fool can see the whole damned valley is a couple long chutes with bunkers at either end and some guard towers in between. A girl can’t be too fretted about advance planning in a battlefield that big; anything more specific than “kill ’em all and let the Titans sort ’em out” is gonna change as soon as you get down in it. Still, it’s poor form to fall asleep during the Captain’s lecture, so I gave myself a pinch to keep awake, and acted rapt.

Just when I figured I’d about die of boredom, she polished off her lecture and asked the non-coms if they had any questions in that tone of voice officers always use to suggest that anybody who does have questions ought to be given a court martial for not paying attention. So of course there weren’t no questions, and they lined us all up in ranks to march us out.

Compared to some of the fightin’ I been doing lately, this whole affair was startin’ out pretty calm. We mounted up and rode out of Dun Baldar in a loose kind of formation, following the worn stone roadway the Dwarves cut for a supply line to Captain Stonehearth’s forward bunker. As we crested the ridge backing up on that ugly old pile of stone, you could see the wide-open steep-walled no-man’s land surrounding the mostly frozen lake at the bottom. Away across on the other side, you could see bright flashes of red banners and glinting steel portending the Horde’s response to our action, and I started gettin’ that kind of nervous twisty feeling I get when I’m about to head into a fight. It weren’t like a skirmish in the Basin, though—all sudden thunder and fury. You could see right off this’d be a slow-burner.

We busted out a couple of units to guard the Captain, and the rest of us formed up a tight column, ridin’ hard down the west side of the lake toward the Iceblood Tower. Nobody had much to say, as we was all gettin’ pretty keyed up about what was coming. It’s worse, in a way, when it comes on slow like that—you get too much time to think about what you’re doin’ out there, and what’s about to go down. We drove in swift and hard on Galvangar’s bunker; there was a couple defenders, but they went down in a tangle of limbs afore I could even put hand to steel. About fifteen of us piled into Galvangar’s hall; he weren’t much surprised, and he fought like a demon, but even demons don’t do so good with odds like that. He killed a couple of unwary Hunters before we left his body in a smoldering heap and lit out for our next objective.

This is about the point where most battles get ugly. To judge from the screamin’ and tooth gnashing we heard from over the lake, there was a pretty mighty set-to going on in Cap’n Stonehearth’s bunker, but by us it was just another crisp winter’s day. They split us up into a couple of groups and packed us off to secure the Horde’s watchtowers. What followed was a long and kind of dull series of minor skirmishes around the Tower Point, the Coldtooth Mine, and the outer Frostwolf defensive towers. Long story short, we burnt the lot to the ground, but t’wasn’t much else to it; the only excitin’ moment from my perspective was a bit of a set-to I had with a huge-ass Troll shaman.

I surprised him tryin’ to put out the incendiaries we’d set up on the western Frostwolf Tower. I slipped in behind him, quiet as a ghost, and got my garrote all the way round his neck before I caught m’damn arm on one of his tusks and lost my grip. He staggered around, clutching his bleeding throat and flailing away with a nasty-looking black axe. I skated around him for a better view of his back, just as he got his balance again and cut loose with a huge blast of thunder and lightning. The sound about deafened me, and the shock blew me clean off’n the tower.

I twisted around in midair, lookin’ for a safe place to land. I never got that far, though: When I was’ bout ten feet off the ground, still fallin’, I felt an ice-cold crackling surround my body from stem to stern, and I got yanked through the air toward a giant, raging Death Knight bull-face with murder in his eyes. My heart about stopped at that point, and I could barely tell which way was up. He roared and raised up a sword that prob’ly weighs more’n I do after a week of good eats, raised it up over his head, and I figured it was about curtains for me.

Just then, though, I felt that bitter heart-stopping crackle again, and this time I got hauled ass first across thirty yards of perfectly good snowdrift. Cow-boy’s claymore blew a breeze past my heels, so I got saved there, but shortly thereafter I tumbled kinda ungracefully onto the ground in reverse, in front of his Orcish buddy. The Orc laughed, and gabbled something at me through a mouthful of rotten fangs as he raised up a pair of lethal icy axes to finish the job. Half-stunned, defenseless, and supine, I did the only thing I could—I reached into the shadow void and tumbled into the silence of the Dark World.

That don’t last too long, but it was enough to spare me the axe. I skedaddled away from there as quick as I could, and hid inside the base of the tower while the two of them raged and shouted imprecations (I can only assume) and looked around for me outside. My heart was going like a triphammer. Still, I was as safe as I’d get for a little while, so I scampered up the tower after the Shaman, who was still up there tryin’ to defuse the firebomb. This time I was more careful; I sidled up behind him and gauged my balance real careful like, and then I let him have it hard with both my pretty babies right in the back.

Trolls are pretty tough, so he didn’t go down right away, but before he could do much I spun around and put a hard elbow in above his kidneys, leaving him stunned. I let him sit a spell while I kicked over his little totems—can’t nothing good come of them things, I figure—and let his bleedin’ wounds and the poisons off my knives work their magic on him. By the time he come back out of it, there weren’t no chance for him—I gave him one in the back and then opened up his belly like a wineskin, and that was it. His pals down below must of heard somethin’, ’cause I heard them stompin’ around up the tower steps, but I didn’t wait around to find out for sure; I took a quick preparatory breath, pulled the igniter on that firebomb, vanished into the shadow world, and leapt off the edge.

I don’t much like the smoke, but I gotta admit, the fire is kinda pretty.

Around about that time, a whole bunch of horns went off, and I heard some shouting and battle sounds from the direction of Drek’thar’s bunker. I ran hard up the hill, through a strewn wreckage of our people and fallen Horde. The main body of our force was fighting a hard action against Drek’thar’s lieutenants against the back wall of the place, and it was going pretty hard on our side. A couple Horde Druids were making life sticky for our healin’ types, so I took it on myself to return the favour; I sand-blinded the Moonkin and went toe-to-toe with the feral Cat. He tore me up pretty bad, but when I felt the warm, soothin’ glow of the Light burst out around me like a shield, I knew it was gonna be okay. My sweeties and me sent that Cat down the Long Corridor, and by the time the Moonkin got the sand out’n her eyes, our sturdy boys’d dropped Drek’thar.

After that, it was mostly just a mopping-up kind of scene; when Drek went down, most of the Horde either lay down arms or fled into the mountains. Good riddance, I say. I don’t remember too much after that; I come over kind of dizzy all of a sudden, and then I was bein’ hauled back up the hill to Dun Baldar on a wagon with our other wounded. I guess that Cat must’ve done me worse than I realized. Still, I lived, and that’s something.

They made us stick around a couple days to help patch up the damage the Horde had done to our defenses, but then they cashed us out and sent us back home. All in a good day’s work. I gotta admit, I might not take much stock in strategic plannin’, most of the time, but Stonehearth’s plan definitely worked.

Even so, I’m thinkin’ I might have to learn how to read one of these days.