Rise of the Horde

Dhug'mhar's patrol left Yohan's northern gate two days after the arc's completion notice, one day ahead of his own interval.

He had moved the schedule up without explanation, and Sakh'arran, who had read both the completion notice and the boundary conclusion within the same week, had not asked.

The Rhakaddon rode at cavalry pace, Denn ahead as always, and reached the previous survey's easternmost stakes by midmorning.

The stakes were gone.

Not knocked over, not absorbed into darkened stone the way a single stake had been before. Gone, the ground around them showing the full darkening, extending in the directions the stakes had marked the edge of eleven days ago.

The boundary had reached the wall-mount arc's outermost section.

Denn dismounted at the edge of the darkening and looked along the wall, at the line of completed installations running toward the gate towers, and then up, at the slope above the wall.

"It is here," he said. "Now, not in seven days. Now."

Dhug'mhar looked at the wall, then the slope, then the darkened ground between them.

"Then we are not early," he said. "We are exactly on time, and the timing was never ours to choose."

He sent a single rider back to Yohan, at full speed, with four words: the boundary has arrived.

Denn stayed at the edge of the darkening while the rider went, watching the wall and the slope above it with the same careful attention he gave everything.

"This is different," he said, to no one in particular. "Every other time, it has been us against it. This time, the wall is between us and it before we even move."

Dhug'mhar said nothing, because there was nothing to add, and because Denn seemed to be working something out for himself that did not need an answer from anyone else.

It took eleven minutes for the first entity to appear.

It came down the slope above the wall, smaller than anything Dhug'mhar's cavalry had fought before, probe-sized, the same scale as the very first incursion through the Arch's stone months ago.

It moved toward the wall without hesitation, the way water moved toward a low point, and made contact with position nineteen's surface.

Nothing happened that anyone could see for the first three seconds.

Then the entity's leading edge frayed, the compressed darkness losing cohesion at the point of contact, the way an entity's form frayed under a weapon's impact, except no weapon had touched it.

The wall itself had touched it.

The entity pulled back, reoriented, and tried again, lower on the wall face, and frayed faster this time, the disruption beginning before full contact rather than after.

By the third attempt, it had lost enough coherence that two warriors finished it with a single combined strike that would, against a fresh entity, have barely registered.

"It was already failing," one of them said, when Arka'garr arrived. "We did not do much."

"You did exactly enough," Arka'garr said. "That is the design."

Seven more entities came down the slope over the following two hours, in clusters of two and three, never more than three at once, spaced along roughly four hundred yards of the arc's western section.

Each made contact with the wall before the garrison reached it. Each frayed on contact, the way the first had.

Five of the eight dissolved from wall contact alone, before any warrior reached them. The remaining three required finishing strikes, almost incidental against entities the wall had already weakened.

No warrior was seriously hurt. Two took minor contact injuries, the thermal-displacement type Rakh'ash'tha's protocol now had a name for, both already responding to warming by evening.

Of the eight contact points, one was position thirteen.

Gorrak found this when he walked the four hundred yards, and stood at it for a moment before writing anything down.

Position thirteen's reading, taken at six hours during the manganese trial, had been at the very bottom of the acceptable range, no margin above the minimum at all.

It had frayed an entity on contact, the same as every standard position around it. The contact had been brief, a single small entity, nowhere near the sustained precise pressure the patient entity applied to the third Keystone over weeks.

Against that kind of load, a bond at the bottom of the range was simply a bond. The margin that mattered for one threat did not matter for another.

He sent a note to Zul'jinn: position thirteen held under contact, same as the standard positions either side of it. No degradation visible. The manganese bond's margin appears adequate for projection-scale contact, though we have one data point, not a pattern yet.

Zul'jinn read this in the forge district workshop, with the secondary bracing's first materials laid out on the table.

He had spent five days worrying about whether the manganese positions would hold against the threat he had been planning for, a sustained structural load.

He had not been planning for this kind of threat, eight small things in two hours, here and gone before anyone needed to think hard about them.

Both kinds of threat were real, apparently. The arc had been built for the first kind and had just been tested, unexpectedly, by the second.

He wrote back a single line: log it as a second data point. We did not know to look for it, and now we know to look for it.

Gorrak walked the rest of the four hundred yards that afternoon and found three positions, including thirteen, showing visible surface degradation, a dulling of the compound's sheen across the contact points, the kind of change a tool showed after heavy use.

"These need re-treatment," he said, marking them. "Not urgently. But they have done their work for now."

Arka'garr's report that evening was four lines.

The eastern edge of the breach boundary reached the wall-mount arc's western section this morning, eleven days ahead of Dhug'mhar's previous estimate. Eight projection-scale entities made contact with the installations over two hours.

Five dissolved from installation contact alone, three required minimal finishing action. Two minor injuries, both responding to standard treatment, three positions flagged for re-treatment, none urgent.

He read it over once and sent it. It was the kind of report that did not need anything added to it.