Restalaan fell to his knees, his useless arm still held fast by Nightstalker’s teeth. The white wolf bit down harder, growling, and started worrying the draenei’s arm as if it were a small animal. Within moments, the wolf would rip it off. Blood gushed from the wound in Restalaan’s side. He made no sound despite the agony he must be enduring.
Durotan got to his feet and struck again, this time a killing blow—a mercy blow. Restalaan sagged and Nightstalker immediately let go of the arm. The captain of the guards of Telmor was dead.
Durotan did not permit himself regret. He mounted Nightstalker quickly and sought out his next target. There was no lack of them. The city was certainly not the size of Shattrath, their capital, but it was big enough. There were draenei aplenty to slaughter. The air was filled with cries of bloodlust, of pain and fear, of the clanging of sword on shield and the crackle of spells being cast. Odors assaulted his nostrils, of blood and feces and urine and the unmistakable, unique reck of terror.
The rage boiling inside him felt good. His senses had never been higher, and he seemed to move without thinking. Over there—another one of the guards, fighting Orgrim. Durotan tensed, thinking to rush to his friend’s aid, but the Doomhammer swung through the air and crushed the attacker’s skull even through his helm. Durotan grinned fiercely. Orgrim needed no aid.
He sensed the presence at his side before he heard or smelled it, and turned, bellowing his clan’s war cry. He hoisted the gore-covered axe and prepared to bring it down. The child was barely out of puberty, but she screamed in fury as she tore with bare hands at his armored leg. Tears streamed down her pale blue face and her teeth were bared. Blue blood, too much of it to be her own, saturated her dress so that it clung to her body. She pounded futilely at him, her tear-filled eyes burning with pain and righteous fury.
For a horrible second she seemed to be the same girl that Durotan and Orgrim had encountered years ago. That could not be—surely that girl was a woman grown now. Or was she? But it did not matter. It was a female child who, both bravely and stupidly, was attempting to attack a mounted orc warrior with her bare hands.
It was with an enormous effort that Durotan halted the axe in mid-swing. He would not harm a child—that was not the code, that was not the way of the orcs—
Suddenly the girl froze. Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth and blood gushed forth, Durotan’s gaze dropped from her face to her chest, and he could see the spear point tenting the blood-soaked fabric. Before Durotan could react, the Shattered Hand orc who had slain the girl shoved the spear to the side, forcing the body to the earth. He put one booted foot on her shoulder. Grunting, he pulled loose his spear and grinned up at Durotan.
“You owe me one, Frostwolf,” the orc said, then vanished into the close-pressing crowd of slayers and victims.
Durotan threw back his head and cried his agony to the ancestors.
On surged the orcs, leaving corpses in their wake. The vast majority of the dead were draenei, but here and there a brown body of a fallen orc could be seen. Some of the orcs who fell yet lived, crying out for aid, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Shaman could have healed them with spells, but apparently, warlock magics did not embrace the healing arts. So they lay where they had fallen, some wheezing out their last breaths next to the draenei they had slain, while the unstoppable tide poured forward.
They followed the road through the foothills, entering each building as they went and slaughtering anyone they found. No doubt some draenei had hidden, Durotan thought, and prayed they would not be found. He did not think that prayer would be answered. Once the first round of slaughter had been completed, there would be the looting and the search for those who had escaped the first assault. He knew. It had been planned thus.
They had reached the largest building yet, the one that sat highest on the mountain, and Durotan recognized it immediately. It was the magister’s seat, where he and Orgrim had had dinner with the Prophet. Bitterly he thought that Velen was not much of a prophet if he had not foreseen this black moment. Nightstalker raced up the steps, and Durotan could not help himself. He craned his neck and looked over his shoulder, back down toward the city as he had done the first time he had climbed these steps on his own two feet.
Then, the draenei city had been spread out like jewels on a meadow. Now, it looked exactly like what it was—a broken, taken city, spattered with blood and gore and the death not just of its citizens, but of any hope of peace or truce or negotiation. Durotan closed his eyes briefly in pain.
I am proud of my people and our city, Restalaan had said to Durotan. Restalaan, who lay dead and stiffening on the white street along with countless other draenei. We have worked hard here. We love Draenor. And I never thought to have the chance to share it with an orc. The ways of destiny are strange indeed.
Stranger than either orc youth or draenei guard could have imagined.
The rooms that had made two orc youths feel slightly penned in years ago now seemed utterly claustrophobic when crammed with adult orc warriors by the dozens. Most were empty; there had been time for an evacuation of all but those who had sworn to die in service to their city. And die they did, the guards who attacked them now. The beautiful, ornate furniture was used as weapons, brought crashing down upon draenei heads, the breakage adding to the thrill of the fight. Ores punched holes in the smooth, curving walls for the sheer pleasure of it. Beds were hacked with swords, bowls of fruit and delicately wrought statuettes swept off furniture that was in turn smashed by axe or hammer.
Durotan had had enough. “Hold!” he cried, but no one listened. The creatures controlled by the warlocks seemed well pleased with this behavior, almost smug. But the time for destruction had passed, and the ruthless savagery would not serve the orcs now that all the inhabitants of Telmor were either slain or had fled.
“Hold!” Durotan yelled again. This time Orgrim heard him and took up the cry. The Warsong representative also shook his head, as if to clear it of something hazy and obscuring, then he, too, tried to calm his warriors. Drek’Thar, back with the other warlocks, had not become as lost in bloodlust as the others, and he was able to stop the others from casting spells.
“Listen to me!” Durotan roared. Most of them had reached the room where Velen had hosted them at his table. The room was empty, die chairs and tables overturned, the wall hangings shredded and cast to the floor.
“We have taken the city, it is now time to take what we need from it!”
They were listening now, their breaths coming in pants that filled the room with raspy sound. But at least they had stopped swinging their weapons at anything that moved … or even anything that didn’t.
“First we attend to the injured,” Durotan ordered. “We will not leave our brethren to suffer in the streets.”
Some of them started guiltily at that. Durotan realized with disgust that many of these warriors had completely forgotten that some of their number still lay writhing in pain outside while they enjoyed die wanton destruction of the magister’s estate. He pushed his feelings down and nodded to Drek’Thar. The warlocks might no longer have healing spells, but they had once been shaman, and knew how to tend battle wounds in a more mundane fashion. Drek’Thar motioned to several warlocks, and they hurried back the way they had come.
“Next, this city has supplies the likes of which we have never seen. There are foodstuffs aplenty, and weapons, and armor, and other things we know not of. Things that will serve the Horde in its quest to—”