Rise of the Horde

Chapter 859 - 858

Khao’khen received Rakh’ash’tha’s full briefing letter on the evening of the sixth day and read it twice at the desk in the administrative hall while the city finished its day around him.

Then he called for Sakh’arran.

"Sit," he said, and slid the letter across the desk.

Sakh’arran read it. He read it at his usual speed, which was faster than most people read, and he did not read it twice because he had read it completely the first time. He set it down on the desk.

"Three Archs showing coordinated deviation," he said. "Possible network-level probing. The Abyss’s creatures working in coordination against multiple Keystones. And a fourth Arch not responding." A pause. "If the Ferrath Arch has been breached..."

"I’m going north," Khao’khen said.

Sakh’arran was quiet for a moment. "The city is in the middle of the cold production cycle. The law’s finalization requires your seal within the next two weeks. The Ironbeard caravan arrives in twelve days." He paused again. "I’m not arguing against it. I’m listing what will need managing while you’re gone."

"Which you will manage."

"Which I will manage." Sakh’arran picked up his planning notes from the corner of the desk and began writing. "How long?"

"Fifteen days to the Arch and back, if I don’t stop. Longer if the situation requires it." Khao’khen stood. "I need Arka’garr and a Yurakk warband. Not a full warband. Two units, the ones that have done the most building-clearance work. Warriors who can operate in confined spaces and who can follow orders that don’t match anything in the training doctrine."

Sakh’arran looked up from the notes. "You’re expecting a fight at the Arch."

"I’m preparing for the possibility of one." Khao’khen moved to the wall map. The Tekarr Arch was marked in the mountain range’s notation, in the orcish territory that the treaty had established north of the old Lag’ranna frontier. "I need warriors who can do exactly what I tell them when I tell them, in an environment they have never trained for, against something that none of the training doctrine covers." He looked at the map. "That description fits Arka’garr’s best units on their worst day and it fits our general force on its best day."

"Two units," Sakh’arran said. "Forty-four warriors plus Arka’garr. And Grukk."

Khao’khen looked at him.

"Grukk is the only member of the Horde who has demonstrated that he can punch through anything that needs punching through without being distracted by what it looks like," Sakh’arran said, with the specific flatness that Sakh’arran used for statements that were logically sound and also slightly absurd. "If the Arch’s physical structure needs breaching or reinforcing, Grukk is the correct resource."

"Grukk," Khao’khen confirmed.

* * * * *

They reached the Arch seven days later.

The mountain approach through the Narrow Pass’s western branch deposited the column onto the highland plateau at midday, and the Tekarr Arch became visible from three miles out: a stone structure on a ridge, larger than Khao’khen had pictured from the descriptions, its silhouette against the grey sky carrying the weight of something that had been built to last rather than built to impress.

The orcish security contingent’s commander, a Fourth Realm warrior named Oshrak, met the column at the perimeter and gave Khao’khen the brief that Oshrak had clearly been preparing: current deviation at sixty-two percent, stable rate of increase, no physical anomalies at the perimeter, security rotation unchanged.

Khao’khen listened to the brief, acknowledged it, and walked to the Arch.

Aliyah met him at the entrance. She was thinner than the diplomatic meetings had suggested, the weeks of monitoring having the effect that sustained vigilance had on bodies that were not getting enough sleep. She extended her hand in the Threian manner.

"Chieftain," she said.

"Warden," he said, and took the hand.

The research chamber was warm from the braziers. Darak was at the table with the charts. Rakh’ash’tha was at the Keystone chamber’s entrance.

Khao’khen looked at the seven stones.

He was not a practitioner. He had no dimensional perception, no training in reading the energy that the Keystones managed. But he had spent his life reading terrain, and the Keystone chamber had a terrain quality that he recognized immediately: one part of it was working harder than the rest. The third Keystone was not visually different from the others. But the space around it felt different in the way that the space around a structural weakness in a wall felt different to a hand placed against it, even if the eyes saw nothing wrong.

He stood at the chamber entrance for a long time.

"Tell me what I am looking at," he said.

Aliyah told him. She told him about the Abyss: what it was, what the Order understood of its nature, what happened when an Arch’s binding failed. She told him about the Keystones’ function. She told him about the cycling pressure and the two-rhythm pattern and the coordination it implied.

She told him clearly, without minimizing, in the way that professionals told things to other professionals when the stakes were too high for the comfort of understatement.

Khao’khen asked four questions. Each one was the question that identified a gap in the briefing. By the fourth question, Aliyah had a specific look on her face that Rakh’ash’tha recognized from the moments when Khao’khen had done this to other people: the look of someone realizing that the person across from them had found the structural weaknesses in their argument the way a trained eye found them in a wall.

"The binding’s capacity scales with the number of Keystones," Khao’khen said. "If we lose one Keystone, the remaining six cover more of the seal’s load. What is the redundancy threshold?"

"Four Keystones," Aliyah said. "Below four, the binding’s coverage has gaps. Above four, the seal holds at reduced capacity."

"So, three Keystones failing simultaneously produces a breach."

"Three Keystones failing simultaneously produces an uncontrolled breach, yes."

He looked at the third Keystone. "The Abyss is pressing on one. If it has learned the binding’s properties as thoroughly as the cycling pattern suggests, it already knows the redundancy threshold." He turned to Rakh’ash’tha. "Did your examination of the other six Keystones find anything?"

"Two showing the earliest-stage deviation," the healer said. "The same pattern the third showed before the plateau broke. I didn’t want to report it until I was certain." A breath. "I am certain."

"Three Keystones," Khao’khen said. "All at different stages. The third is the furthest along. The Abyss is not pressing on one Keystone while the others wait their turn." He looked at Aliyah. "It is pressing on three simultaneously and staggering the stages so that all three do not reach the crisis point at the same time. It is managing the timing."