The Orc's Orders

Jess spent the entire evening copying the writing on the orc scroll.

There were fifty-one orcish symbols in all. He had to make sure he copied every one correctly: the bend of each angled line, the position of every dot, even the thickness of each stroke. He used quite a lot of ink and paper doing it. Fortunately, he could put those expenses on Eiden Marin's account.

He was being so careful because he didn't know whether details like the thickness of a stroke could change the meaning or pronunciation.

It took him four or five hours. Only when he was sure his copy was almost identical did he finally go to bed.

There was no way he could bring the actual scroll into the Wizard's Sanctum. He didn't know what magic it might contain. If some mage in the Sanctum sensed something he couldn't, he'd be asking for trouble.

The next day, as soon as he finished work, Jess hurried to the library with his copy. He followed Marin's directions and found the section devoted to the study of the orcish language.

The books here were all thin and clearly quite new. Many were copies that had only recently been made with magic.

There was nobody else reading nearby, so he pulled several books off the shelves and spread them on the floor: An Introduction to Orcish Runes, Basic Patterns of Orcish Rune Combinations, A Short Orcish Rune–Common Translation Guide, Getting Started with Orcish, Orcish for Dummies, and others.

Then he started working on the scroll—and got stuck on the very first symbol.

Normally, the beginning of a passage would have common words, maybe some kind of connecting word. Why was this one so hard to find?

He spent an hour going through all sorts of comparison charts without getting anywhere.

Then another possibility occurred to him: it might be a person's name.

If the scroll was a letter, it might begin with a form of address or a name. Even when a name had a specific meaning, that meaning often came from a much older language. Naturally, it would be hard to find in a dictionary of the modern language.

So he changed his approach. He would give himself a fixed amount of time for each word, skip anything he couldn't identify, and make a rough pass through the whole thing. Once he had some idea of the overall meaning, he could come back and work through it carefully in context.

He soon worked out the third word: servant, or follower. That made sense. The writer might be the recipient's superior or leader, which would make this a letter containing orders.

The fourth word was harder to explain: staff.

What was that supposed to mean?

If the letter had something to do with Gul'dan, then the staff might be the legendary Scepter of Sargeras.

The thought sent a shiver through him. Could that shabby thing sitting in his room actually be the Scepter of Sargeras?

Of course not.

Even if he had all the luck and special powers a hero from a story about waking up in another world was supposed to have—which he didn't—and somehow managed to get his hands on that staff, how could that orc have carried the Scepter of Sargeras through Duskwood in the first place?

And the orc had died, too.

Was the person who gave it to him out of his mind? Ner'zhul, the Horde's current warchief, would gladly send an entire army to escort an artifact like that.

Ner'zhul knew the Horde could no longer conquer Azeroth. Draenor had already been ravaged by dark energies and demonic power, leaving huge stretches of wasteland. So when he learned that Alliance forces were preparing to invade Draenor, he decided to lead what remained of the Horde to another world and find a new home.

To open a portal large enough for the surviving Horde to pass through, the Scepter of Sargeras was one of the artifacts he needed.

It had originally been created so the Dark Titan Sargeras could send his avatar into Azeroth. That attempt hadn't gone very well, and over the following centuries the scepter had passed from hand to hand until it finally reached Ner'zhul.

Jess kept translating. When he reached the last phrase—"For the Horde"—he was quite sure this was a letter.

As far as he could make out, the message said something like this: a master was telling a servant about three important objects... the direction of the Dark Portal... someone had died, someone else was the chieftain, from one world to another, for the Horde.

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Jess knew this part of history well. Even with so much important information missing, he could make a fairly good guess at what the whole letter was about.

The three important objects would be the Scepter of Sargeras, the Eye of Dalaran, and the Book of Medivh. Those were the artifacts Ner'zhul needed to find a new world.

Before the Dark Portal was completely destroyed, Ner'zhul had asked Teron Gorefiend—one of Gul'dan's most trusted members of the Shadow Council, and the world's first death knight—to cross the portal into Azeroth and find the three artifacts to save the Horde.

Centuries earlier, after Sargeras's avatar had been defeated, Medivh's mother Aegwynn, who was already the Guardian of Tirisfal, had buried its remains and the fallen Scepter of Sargeras in the Tomb of Sargeras.

Gul'dan had tried to take the artifact and the power of Sargeras's avatar for himself, only to be killed by the demonic forces inside the tomb.

The Eye of Dalaran was kept in Dalaran's vaults, while the Book of Medivh was controlled by the Perenolde royal family of Alterac. Alterac had betrayed the Alliance during the Orc Wars. Its king was imprisoned, and the Alliance took over the kingdom. So Gorefiend simply led black dragons and orcs in an attack on Alterac and stole the Book of Medivh.

With the help of the black dragonflight, Gorefiend eventually obtained all three artifacts and returned to Draenor to give them to Ner'zhul. Ner'zhul then used them to open the portals. That explained the part about going from one world to another.

The reference to one man dying and another becoming chieftain probably meant that Gul'dan, who had effectively controlled the Horde during the Orc Wars, had died in the Tomb of Sargeras, and that Ner'zhul would become the chieftain.

The Horde forces on the Azeroth side hadn't heard this news yet. In other words, the letter was probably from someone who knew what was happening on the other side of the Dark Portal. It was informing someone here of the situation and ordering them back to the portal to travel to a new world with the Horde.

By the time Jess had worked all that out, it was dark outside. Still, he was pleased with himself. He hadn't expected the letter to be so easy to piece together.

There was one problem left: what did the first line mean? And which staff was it talking about?

As he learned more about orcish, he noticed that the writer had used an honorific symbol when referring to the three artifacts, marking them as exceptionally important and sacred.

But the rune for the staff didn't have that symbol. That meant the staff in question really wasn't the Scepter of Sargeras.

Did it have to be the stick Jess owned, then? Not necessarily. That stick could simply have belonged to the messenger, while the symbol referred to something else.

This time, Jess found two more books on the shelf: A Study of Orcish Symbol Pronunciation Rules and Teaching Orcish Pronunciation. He decided to try reading the letter aloud.

If he could pronounce it, maybe one of the names would sound like somebody famous he remembered.

Orcish pronunciation wasn't very regular. Perhaps the many loanwords from Ogre and Eredun had disrupted its original patterns. Even so, by sounding the words out roughly, Jess managed to identify what seemed to be the names Gul'dan and Ner'zhul.

Gul'dan was dead. Ner'zhul had become chieftain.

Ah... figuring out a letter like this was just as satisfying as solving a math problem.

It was already night, but Jess wasn't sleepy at all. He still couldn't connect the first word to anyone famous.

"Angor."

He repeated the sound and searched his memory, but couldn't think of a name that matched.

Wait. If Gul'dan was dead and Ner'zhul had become chieftain, then who had written the letter?

The answer was almost staring him in the face. The writer might have been Teron Gorefiend himself. Only he would know the latest progress in collecting the three artifacts. And the recipient was probably a servant he'd left behind in Azeroth—another servant of the Shadow Council, or, more precisely, another death knight.

There was already a hint of dawn outside, yet Jess felt even more awake than he had the previous night.

He peeked behind the shelves. Plenty of hardworking apprentices and trainee mages were still studying, and the arcane lamps in the Wizard's Sanctum were still burning for them. He wasn't the only one making a night of it.

Jess decided to work out the phrases after Angor and after staff. Those should make up the opening paragraph of the letter.

Using the rules of orcish he'd learned and the grammar he'd picked up while translating the letter, he went through the reference books again. This time, he found a phrase that fit very well after staff. The runes looked remarkably close to the ones in the letter.

It came from a letter written by Blackhand, the Horde's warchief at the time, to his son. Blackhand had used a banner bearing the Blackrock clan's emblem as a symbol of his authority. Seeing that banner was to be treated as seeing Blackhand himself.

That expression—treating the sight of a banner as the presence of its owner—looked very much like the runes following staff. It was a construction placed after the noun. In other words, the sentence meant: seeing the staff was the same as seeing its owner.

If this really was a letter written by Teron Gorefiend, didn't that mean the staff was a symbol of Gorefiend's authority?

But Jess clearly remembered Gorefiend's weapon in the game. It looked like a long-handled, hollow flanged mace, with a dark magic stone set between the flanges to empower it.

The stick hidden in Jess's room was long and thin. No matter how he looked at it, it didn't resemble a fighting scepter meant for a warrior with incredible strength. It would make a decent carrying pole, though.

Hold on.

Teron Gorefiend had originally been an orc warlock. After he died, Gul'dan had guided his soul into the corpse of a human knight. That was how he'd taken on the form of a death knight.

Could the stick have been the staff he'd used as an orc warlock, back when he'd lived on Draenor under the name Teron'gor? Maybe he'd left it behind after becoming a death knight, to serve as a token of command or something like that.

At this point Jess realized he had no solid evidence left. He'd gone from making connections to simply guessing wildly.

And it was already the early hours of the morning. He was still excited, but he could tell his mind was slowing down. The injuries he was carrying still hurt, after all.

There was plenty of time before Marin would come to his study. Jess returned the books he'd taken from the shelves to their proper sections, put away his copy of the letter, and left the library.

On his way to Marin's study, he noticed the staff shop beside the road.