That afternoon, Jess and Gred met at a newly opened tavern near Stormwind's gates and sorted through their travel supplies. Gred had brought quite a few things for the trip.
“My logging axe and buckler, the Stromgarde sword I won from that prince or whoever he was, cheese, a flask of strong liquor, and a bear trap. There. That's about everything.”
“A bear trap?” Jess looked up at the black iron trap on the table beside Gred.
“You want Evil Claws,” Gred said. “We can lay traps where the wolves roam in Duskwood and lure them in with meat. Isn't that a lot safer than fighting those beasts head-on?”
“That makes sense,” Jess said. “But it might take a long time.”
Gred tied the trap securely and slung it over his back. “Should be fine. I'm an old hunter from the Hinterlands, after all. What about you? What'd you bring?”
“Just the usual things. Markings and drawings to help us find herbs—that's the most important part. Dry bread and bits of jerky... And the jerky is for us to eat, of course.”
Gred hooked his buckler's strap onto his belt and nodded. “I know. In Duskwood we can use what's there.”
Jess gave a stiff smile. “That doesn't seem right. The Raven Hill cemetery is full of heroes from the wars.”
Gred turned his head. “What's bait got to do with a cemetery?”
Then something struck him as odd.
“You want to dig up human corpses to bait the animals? Brother, is there something wrong with your head? I meant catching small animals...”
“Oh!” Jess said quickly. “Maybe I've heard too many horror stories from the patrol guards. They all say the animals there like eating human corpses. And we were just talking about Raven Hill's cemetery when you said we'd use whatever was there...”
Gred's expression changed. “Really? If that's true... It wouldn't be the worst idea.”
“Let's forget that.” Jess rummaged through his bag. “I also brought an extra jacket. If we have to go deep into the tombs, we'll change clothes as soon as we get out. The great cemetery at Raven Hill is badly contaminated with corpse poison. Some people who go in carelessly come out with lasting problems. Maybe it's because they keep wearing dirty clothes too long.”
“Did the patrol guards tell you that too?”
“Some of it came from immigrants from Raven Hill and Grand Hamlet.” Jess picked up his bag. “If we're packed, let's go. Much later and I don't know if we'll reach Westbrook tonight.”
Stormwind had expanded its districts and built large numbers of new houses, taking in thousands upon thousands of new residents. But many refugees still lived in tents in and around the Valley of Heroes.
Among them were disabled people who had little means of supporting themselves, as well as older people and children whose homes had been destroyed and whose sources of income were gone.
Priests from the Cathedral of Light distributed food and cared for the sick among the shabby tents. Some workers helped the poor repair torn tent cloth and other tools they needed.
The young king wanted to take in as many refugees as possible, especially since so many had fled Duskwood or Redridge. They were citizens of the Kingdom of Stormwind.
Before, some could be sent on to Goldshire. Now Goldshire had refugee camps too. Perhaps new arrivals would have to be sent to more distant towns like Moonbrook.
At the gates, Jess watched children sitting in front of the tents, staring blankly toward Stormwind. He remembered arriving here himself, seeing the ruined districts, and wondering whether he'd ever have a place to live in this city.
He had managed to find somewhere, barely. But nobody could say what the future held.
They paid ten copper coins for a ride on a caravan transporting liquor to a station near Westbrook Garrison. After a night's rest, they caught another wagon early the next morning and continued toward Sentinel Hill.
At this time, Westfall hardly deserved to be called a wasteland. In Common, its name was closer to “a broad, flat stretch of land in the west.”
The harvest festival was coming around again. Fields stretched as far as the eye could see, the summer wheat showing golden heads. Green stands of trees divided the fields in the distance, creating a sharp contrast.
Scarecrows rose here and there from the gently rolling land, staring at travelers on every passing wagon.
It was already dark when they reached Sentinel Hill. In the game, you could run here on foot in a few minutes. Here, even traveling by wagon had taken a full day and a half. With frequent, well-guarded stations along the road, the main roads of Westfall were fairly safe.
From the wagon, they could see the torches burning atop the tall watchtower on the hill.
The place was still bustling at night. Miners stood around chatting and drinking, watching wagons carrying locals and travelers enter the station from time to time.
People called it a station, but Sentinel Hill was already nearly the size of a small town.
Moonbrook, the important royal town to the southwest, was the richest place in the kingdom outside the capital. It had grown around a huge mine.
This region was the kingdom's most important grain-producing area, so Moonbrook, at its center, had naturally become a major hub for collecting and distributing grain.
Demand for stone and minerals had shot up with the kingdom's reconstruction over the past two years, and Moonbrook had quickly regained its prosperity from before the orc war.
Sentinel Hill, once merely a transfer station between Moonbrook and Elwynn, benefited from the boom as well.
A new mining area had recently been discovered northwest of Sentinel Hill. Quite a few miners from Moonbrook had moved here in search of new opportunities, making Sentinel Hill look increasingly like a new town in Westfall.
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The place was much larger in reality than in the game. It resembled a dusty frontier town built beside a railroad in an American Western, except its “railroad” was a network of watchtowers, barracks, and grain roads.
The damage from the orc war was more obvious than it had been in the game. Some houses on the outer edge had burned down and still hadn't been repaired.
A small church by the logging yard had been badly damaged in the war. Construction workers were now sleeping beside the stone and timber at the scaffolding-covered main building. Passing miners and townspeople didn't disturb their sound sleep.
Jess could tell the new settlement needed workers badly. Help-wanted notices were everywhere—miners, builders, and farmhands—and the pay wasn't much different from Stormwind's.
No wonder Edan Marin had been worried Jess might come here looking for work. If he got used to life here or in Moonbrook, he might not want to return to Stormwind.
“See that slaughterhouse?” Gred pointed at a small building around the corner, about thirty feet away. “Tomorrow we could buy scraps of bone and things like that for bait. Then nobody has to dig up corpses.”
“Even bone scraps aren't cheap, especially with food in short supply,” Jess said. “Could we try hunting wild boars for meat by the western riverbank?”
Jess had no hunting experience. He was only speaking casually from what he knew of the game.
“The Goretusk boars around here are famous for their bad tempers,” Gred said. “Even gnolls don't count on hunting them for a steady meat supply. Know why pork-liver pies cost so much? Only a Goretusk liver gives them that flavor... It takes a professional boar hunter to bring one down.”
“You're from the Hinterlands. How do you know so much about boars down south?” Jess asked.
“Live another fifty years, Jess, and you'll pick up some useless odds and ends too. Still, those boars may be fierce, but they're easier to deal with than the monstrous wolves of Duskwood. We'll have to be careful. I don't want a pack of sharp-toothed beasts surrounding us.”
“At least it'd be a quick death,” Jess said.
“Not necessarily.” Gred shook his head. “Bears in the Hinterlands don't like killing their prey. They catch you alive and start eating the parts you need least. They keep eating until you can't feel pain anymore and you've accepted your fate. Once you die, they just throw you aside. They don't like dead meat.”
Jess shifted his legs uncomfortably as Gred gave such a vivid description of dwarves being eaten alive.
“Wolves around here would tear your throat out first, right?”
“I'd think so,” Gred said. “Nice to hear some good news for once.”
Still talking, the two entered an inn and were surrounded by a strong smell of rust.
Jess couldn't tell whether it came from miners' bodies or the smell of blood left by butchers who'd chopped too many organs. Either way, it was unpleasant.
Gred ordered two mugs of ale. They sat down, took out the food they'd packed, and began eating.
The tavern was loud. At the next table sat several men and women in various kinds of travel gear. They were speaking at high volume.
Every one of them carried a weapon, though, so the other customers deliberately kept their distance, even if they found the noise annoying.
“Some cowards see something they've never encountered and deliberately exaggerate what happened,” said a burly, black-bearded man with a long-handled warhammer resting across his knees. “I say there's no such thing as a gnoll twice a man's height. Those guards just haven't dealt with gnolls in too long. They saw one, scared themselves half to death, and dreamed the rest.”
“So you're saying there isn't a gnoll chief at all?” asked a woman with a hunting bow on her back, her voice cold.
Her voice was so deep that it was hard to tell her sex from it. Her barely visible blond hair had been cut extremely short, making her easy to mistake for a man at first glance.
If she hadn't been so strongly built and heavyset, with her chest sticking out against a leather jacket tightly crossed by her bowstring, Jess might have had trouble realizing she was a woman at first.
Everyone in the group was very pale, almost glaringly so. Their veins were clearly visible through the skin. Perhaps they'd come from somewhere far to the north.
A man in a thin white shirt sitting beside the woman spoke. “If a gnoll tribe loses its chief, it'll quickly choose another. But if the new one isn't as capable a leader, the tribe will spend a while fighting among itself and lose momentum. I'm not denying the gnolls have become much bolder recently, perhaps because a strong new chief has appeared... But twice a man's height? That's ridiculous.”
“Exactly,” the black-bearded man said. “We'll probably end up unable to find this giant gnoll chief. No matter how many gnolls we kill, it'll be for nothing... The wanted notice asks for a gnoll head twice the normal size.”
He went on, “Maybe little Wrynn wants us to work for nothing. Set a bounty condition nobody can satisfy, then send fools like us all over the place hunting gnolls and searching for some giant leader. In the end there's nothing to find. They get fewer gnolls in the region without spending a copper, and nobody can collect the reward!”
The man in white said, “I don't think anyone carrying the Wrynn name would do something so low. Their royal family's reputation is what's at stake.”
“I checked beforehand,” the woman said. “Some miners and farmers really have seen a huge gnoll. But I don't know... whether it's the same one mentioned on the wanted notice.”
The black-bearded man gave a scornful laugh. “You can't trust mercenaries, much less those cowardly miners and farmers!”
“What did you say?” A solidly built man nearby slapped the table and stood. The black-bearded man gave him a sideways look and took another calm sip of his drink.
“You dare spew that crap in here? Got a death wish, hairy bastard?” another miner said coldly.
Jess slowly raised his mug and took a careful sip, using it to hide his face. A nasty fight seemed unavoidable.
“By the Light!” The man in white stood up and addressed the room. “In the name of our shared faith, please calm down. My friend had trouble with some miners before, but they were dwarven miners who provoked us. He wasn't talking about you...”
Gred choked several times on his ale and turned to glare at the man. Only then did a few nearby customers realize that the short, thickly built fellow sitting there was actually a tall dwarf!
Jess whispered to Gred, “The dwarves from Aerie Peak haven't opened any mines around here, have they? He must mean Dark Iron dwarves or Bronzebeards from Loch Modan...”
Gred turned back with a look that said Jess had made an excellent point.
“We've seen a giant gnoll chief,” Jess said loudly enough for the mercenaries to hear. “Near Westbrook Garrison. If you search along the riverbank, I'm sure you'll find clues.”
“I'm not trying to insult you, kid,” the black-bearded man said, looking over, “but I don't believe someone like you could meet a gnoll like that and live.”
“By my rough estimate, his balls were at least twenty times the size of yours,” Gred said coldly. “Say one more word of that crap, and I'll shove this damned mug up your ass.”
With that, Gred waved the mug in his left hand. It was almost as big as his head. His right hand rested on the table, tightly gripping the hilt of the sword sticking out of his sack.
Jess had been worried a fight would delay their plans. Now he couldn't get the image of balls twenty times as big out of his head.
An angry dwarf in a tavern was frightening enough in human society that even the arrogant black-bearded man looked nervous.
Meanwhile, the woman had been staring at Gred's sword. She leaned toward the black-bearded man and whispered something in his ear. Judging from her lips, Jess could tell she'd said “Stromgarde.”
“I only wanted to help, everyone,” Jess said, clearing his throat. “If you kill that giant gnoll, it'll benefit the entire Kingdom of Stormwind. I sincerely hope you collect the reward. But if you keep being unfriendly, I think everyone here would be happy to help my friend put his mug... up your... well, you know where.”
The black-bearded man looked around and realized he'd angered a large group of middle-aged and elderly laborers who'd just come out of the mines.
The man in white sighed. “Cliff, you need to control your temper. Stop causing trouble. This isn't Northrend.”
Northrend? So these people were from the continent on the northern shore of the northern sea. No wonder they had accents Jess had never heard before.
The tension in the tavern gradually eased. The black-bearded man and his two companions seemed to sense the hostility around them. After whispering among themselves, all three left together.
After all, if they stayed the night, someone might decide to slip into their room and crack their skulls while they slept. Miners who'd spent half their lives here knew plenty of ways to make someone die without anyone being able to say how.