Rise of the Horde

Vor'gath tried first the only way he knew how, which was the way that worked at the third Keystone: a disruption aimed at a point, timed to a rhythm.

There was no point here. There was no rhythm he could find, not at first, the pressure broad and even, like leaning on a door rather than picking a lock.

His first attempt produced nothing measurable. The sixth Keystone's reading kept climbing at the same rate, unaffected, as if Vor'gath were not there.

"It is not responding to me," he said. "Not resisting, not adjusting. It does not know I am here, because there is nothing here for it to know about."

"It is a pressure, applied from somewhere I cannot locate, distributed across a surface I cannot narrow, which is a description and not yet a plan."

Rakh'ash'tha, at the housing's far side, had her hands flat against the stone.

"I can feel something," she said. "Not a point. You are right that there is no point."

"But it is not perfectly even either. There is a texture to it, faint, like a surface that looks smooth until your hand is on it."

"What kind of texture."

"I do not have words for it. It is small, and it repeats."

Aliyah, at the main station, was running the numbers Norrak had handed her, the climbing line, the rate, the time until the reading reached a number she did not have good data for.

"This Keystone has no reinforcement history," she said, half to herself. "The third Keystone's threshold was eighty-five percent, after years of active maintenance."

"I would not assume this one matches that. Without data, I assume less."

"How much time," Darak said.

"At the current rate, three hours before we are past the third Keystone's threshold, on a Keystone I have no reason to believe is as resilient." Aliyah did not look up. "I am not saying three hours is when something fails. I am saying three hours is when I stop having any basis for saying it will not."

Norrak, at his station, had not stopped watching the readings, taking them every two minutes as instructed, the same careful uneven hand.

He noticed it on the eleventh reading.

The line was not perfectly straight. It climbed steadily, but if he looked at the small differences between consecutive readings rather than the readings themselves, the differences were not all the same.

They went slightly larger, then slightly smaller, then larger again, a small rhythm riding on top of the larger climb, the kind of thing invisible if you were only watching the climb itself.

He had learned to notice exactly this kind of thing eighteen days ago, the first time, in his own legs, a single small contraction in a limb that had produced nothing for eleven days.

"The rate is not constant," he said. "It is climbing, but the climbing itself speeds up and slows down, on a cycle. I think it is about ninety seconds, but I have only seen it through one full cycle so far."

Vor'gath turned toward him. "Say that again."

"The overall line goes up steadily. But inside that, there is a smaller wave, faster and slower, about every ninety seconds. I almost did not write it down, because it did not look like anything by itself."

"Rakh'ash'tha's texture," Vor'gath said. "Small, and it repeats. Ninety seconds."

He placed his hands back on the housing, differently this time, not searching for a point but listening for a rhythm, the way he listened for the patient entity's adjustments, except here the rhythm was not one thing adjusting.

It was many small things, each pushing for a moment and easing for a moment, out of step with each other just enough that together they looked, from a distance, like one smooth pressure.

"I cannot disrupt all of them," he said. "But I can disrupt the moments when more of them are pushing than easing."

"Ninety seconds. I will need to be told when, every time, because I will not be able to watch the count and listen for the rhythm at the same moment."

Norrak did not hesitate. "I will count it."

For the next two hours, Norrak counted, calling the rhythm in a low steady voice, and Vor'gath applied short disruptions timed to the count.

Not at a point, but broadly, across the whole housing, each disruption landing in the brief window when the many small pressures were, for a moment, more aligned than usual.

Rakh'ash'tha held the locus division throughout, absorbing what got through.

The climbing line did not stop. But its rate, the steady increase Norrak had first measured, began to decrease, slowly, each reading a little closer to the one before it than the rate alone would have predicted.

At the end of the second hour, Aliyah ran the numbers again.

"At the new rate," she said, "the threshold I do not have data for is now nine hours away, not three."

"That is not the same as stopping," Vor'gath said. He sounded as tired as Rakh'ash'tha had ever heard him. "I cannot keep this up for nine hours."

"You do not have to keep it up for nine hours," Aliyah said. "You have to keep it up long enough for whatever is doing this to decide that this front is no longer the easy one either."

Darak wrote through all of it, a continuous record of readings and actions and the reasoning behind each one.

Partway through the second hour, he wrote one line he did not show anyone at the time.

Every person in this room is doing something today they have not done before, using something they learned doing something else, at a moment when the thing they learned it for was not the thing in front of them. That is not luck. That is what the last several weeks were for.

He kept writing, because the third hour was starting, and the rate was still falling, slowly, and slowly was not nothing.