Beside her hurried Master Apothecary Faranell, head of the Royal Apothecary Society, who was talking animatedly and simpering. “I am most grateful you agreed to come, my lady,” he said, trying to bow and walk and speak at the same time. “You did say you wished to be informed when the experiments were successful, and you wanted to see them yourself once we—”
“I am well aware of my own orders, Doctor,” Sylvanas snapped as they began to descend a winding corridor into the bowels of the Undercity.
“Of course, of course. Here we are.” They emerged into a room that to one with weaker sensibilities would seem like a house of horrors. On a large table, a stooped undead was busily sewing together pieces of different corpses, humming a little under his breath. Sylvanas smiled slightly.
“It is good to see someone who enjoys his work so,” she replied a trifle archly. The apprentice started slightly, and then bowed deeply.
There was a low buzz of some kind of energy crackling. Other alchemists bustled about, mixing potions, weighing ingredients, jotting notes. The smell was a combination of putrefaction, chemicals, and, incongruously, the clean sweet smell of certain herbs. Sylvanas was startled by her reaction. The scent of the herbs made her oddly…homesick. Fortunately, the softer emotion did not last long. Such emotions never did.
“Show me,” she demanded. Faranell bowed and ushered her through the main area, past pieces of bodies hanging on hooks, into a side room.
The faint sound of sobbing reached her ears. As she entered, Sylvanas saw several cages on the floor or swinging slowly from chains, all of them filled with test subjects. Some were human. Some were Forsaken. All were dull-eyed with fear that had pierced so deep and had gone on so long that they were almost numb.
They would not be so for much longer.
“As you can imagine, my lady,” Faranell was saying, “it is difficult to transport Scourge as test subjects. Of course for experimental purposes, Forsaken are identical to Scourge. But I am delighted to report that our tests in the field have been well documented and quite successful.”
Excitement began to stir in Sylvanas, and she graced the apothecary with a rare and still beautiful smile. “That pleases me greatly,” she said. The undead doctor fairly quivered in delight. He beckoned to his assistant Keever, a Forsaken whose brain had obviously been damaged by his first death and who muttered to himself in the third person as he removed two test subjects. One was a human woman, who was apparently not so lost in fear and despair as not to start weeping silently when Keever dragged her from her cage. The Forsaken male, however, was utterly impassive and stood quietly. Sylvanas eyed him.
“Criminal?”
“Of course, my lady.” She wondered if it were true. But in the end, it didn’t matter. He would serve the Forsaken, even so. The human girl was on her knees. Keever stooped down, yanked her head up by her hair, and when she opened her mouth to cry out in pain, he poured a cup of something down her throat and covered her mouth, forcing her to swallow.
Sylvanas watched while she struggled. Beside her, the Forsaken male accepted the cup that Faranell offered without protest, draining it dry.
It happened quickly. The human girl soon stopped struggling, her body tensing, and then going into paroxysms. Keever let her go, watching almost curiously as blood began to stream from her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. Sylvanas turned her gaze to the Forsaken. He still regarded her steadily, silently. She began to frown.
“Perhaps this is not as effective as your—”
The Forsaken shuddered. He struggled to stand erect for a moment longer, but his rapidly weakening body betrayed him and he stumbled, falling hard. Everyone stepped back. Sylvanas watched raptly, her lips parted in excitement.
“The same strain?” she asked Faranell. The human female whimpered once and then was still, her eyes open. The alchemist nodded happily.
“Indeed it is,” he said. “As you can imagine, we are quite—”
The undead spasmed, his skin breaking open in spots and weeping black ichor, and then he, too, was still.
“—pleased with the results.”
“Indeed,” Sylvanas said. She was hard put to conceal her own elation; “pleased” was a pale word indeed. “A plague that kills both humans and Scourge. And, obviously, affects my own people as well, as they, too, are undead.”
She gave him a look from glowing silver eyes. “We must take care that this never falls into the wrong hands. The results could be…devastating.”
He gulped. “Indeed, my lady, indeed they could.”
She forced a neutral expression as she returned to the royal quarters. Her mind was racing with a thousand things, but foremost among them, burning as brightly and wildly as the wicker man she lit every Hallow’s End, was a single thought:
At last, Arthas, you will pay for what you have done. The humans who spawned such as you shall be slaughtered. Your Scourge shall be stopped in their tracks. You will no longer be able to hide behind your armies of mindless undead puppets. And we will grace you with the same mercy and compassion you showed us.
Despite her great control, she found herself smiling.
It was, Arthas mused as he rode upon the back of the skeletal, faithful Invincible toward Andorhal, a truly great irony that he who had slain the necromancer Kel’Thuzad was now charged with resurrecting him.
Frostmourne whispered to him, although he did not need the voice of the sword—the voice of the Lich King, as he desired to be known—to reassure him. There was no going back. Nor did he wish to.
After the fall of Capital City, Arthas had retreated into a dark version of a paladin’s pilgrimage. He had ridden the length and breadth of his land, bringing his new subjects to town after town and unleashing them upon the populace. He thought the Scourge, which Kel’Thuzad had called them, a fitting name. The instrument of self-flagellation of the same name, sometimes used by some of the more fringe elements of the priesthood, was meant to cleanse impurities. His Scourge would cleanse the land of the living. He stood straddling the worlds; he was alive after a fashion, but the Lich King’s soft whispers were calling him death knight, and the leeching of color from his hair and skin and eyes seemed to indicate that it was more than a title. He did not know; he did not care. He was the Lich King’s favored, and the Scourge was his to command, and in a strange, twisted way, he found that he cared for them.
Arthas now served the Lich King through one of his sergeants, a dreadlord, almost identical in form to Mal’Ganis. This, too, was irony; this, too, did not distress him.
“Like Mal’Ganis, I am a dreadlord. But I am not your enemy,” Tichondrius had reassured him. The lips twisted in a smile that was more of a sneer. “In truth, I’ve come to congratulate you. By killing your own father and delivering this land to the Scourge, you have passed your first test. The Lich King is pleased with your…enthusiasm.”
Arthas felt buffeted by twin emotions—pain and exultation.
“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice steady in front of the demon, “I’ve damned everyone and everything I’ve ever loved in his name, and I still feel no remorse. No pity. No shame.”
And in his heart of hearts, there came another whisper, but not from Frostmourne: Liar.
He forced the sentiment down. That voice would be silenced, somehow. He could not afford to permit the softness to grow. It was like gangrene; it would eat him, if he let it.
Tichondrius seemed not to notice. He pointed to Frostmourne. “The runeblade you carry was forged by my kind, long ago. The Lich King has empowered it to steal souls. Yours was the first one it claimed.”