Rise of the Horde

Chapter 882: Chapter 881

The sixth Keystone’s deviation reading was one percent. Aliyah confirmed it against the previous three days of logs. The previous three days showed zero across the sixth station. Before that, the baseline records from the Arch’s founding showed zero. The sixth Keystone had been stable for one hundred and ninety years.

"One percent is not structural failure," Darak said, with the tone of a man trying to maintain analytical clarity while the analytical ground shifted beneath him.

"No," Aliyah said. "One percent is an introduction. It is the third entity establishing contact with the Keystone. Not applying pressure. Touching it." She looked at the log. "If the patient entity at the third Keystone has been doing what I now believe it has been doing, which is not primarily trying to break through but primarily trying to understand the seal’s structure, then the third entity is doing the same at the sixth Keystone. Probing. Learning."

Kael put down his pen. "Three entities. One probing under force. One probing with patience from the front. One beginning patient study from the side. Coordinated approach to multiple Keystone points simultaneously."

"With a fourth communication-capable enough to describe the arrangement to us through instrument readings," Aliyah said.

"Is the communicating entity separate from the three attacking?" Khao’khen said.

Vor’gath answered before Aliyah could. "Yes. What communicated through the third Keystone’s deviation is not the entity applying rhythmic pressure. I felt the difference. The pressure entity is attending to the Keystone with focused intent. The communication was a different quality entirely, a wider attention, observing the whole of the exchange rather than pressing on a single point." He paused. "It is overseeing. The three I feel at the Keystones are directed. The fourth is directing."

The word sat in the room.

"A director," Arka’garr said from the door. It was not a question. He was a military man placing a concept into a framework he understood.

"Something with strategic awareness," Vor’gath said. "Yes."

Khao’khen looked at Aliyah. "Tell me the worst version of what this is," he said. It was the same thing he had asked her weeks ago about a breach. He asked it the same way: plainly, without softening, expecting a plain answer.

Aliyah had been a Warden long enough to know the value of plain answers.

"The Abyss is not a collection of individual creatures with individual motivations," she said. "Every living thing within the Abyss is an extension of a single consciousness. The consciousness is the Abyss itself. The entities I deal with at this Arch are not independent agents who happen to serve a common purpose. They are the purpose, expressed in separate forms." She let that settle. "What we have been calling the patient entity and the impatient entity and the third entity are not three separate minds. They are three applications of one mind. They have different functions because the mind that directs them is sophisticated enough to deploy different approaches simultaneously to the same problem."

"The mind is the Abyss," Kael said.

"The Abyss is a world and a consciousness. They are the same thing." She looked at the instrument readings. "The documents of the Order of the Seal from the Covenant describe the Abyss as follows: it seeks to incorporate everything outside itself. Not to simply destroy for destruction’s sake. To expand, to absorb, to make the outside part of the inside. Everything that is not the Abyss is, from the Abyss’s perspective, material waiting to be incorporated." She paused. "The Archs are the points where the boundary between this world and the Abyss is thinnest. The ancesotrs work for hundreds of years has been maintaining those points as boundaries rather than doorways."

"When the Ferrath Arch was destroyed," Khao’khen said, "the boundary there became a doorway."

"Yes. Whatever came through that doorway is now in the Iron Hills and has been for six to eight weeks."

"The Ironbeard dwarves have been thirty miles from it for six to eight weeks without knowing what they are thirty miles from," Kael said.

"Yes."

Vor’gath had been listening. "The Abyss that has come through the Ferrath site," he said, "is it the same Abyss consciousness directing the entities at this Arch?"

"All expressions of the Abyss are connected to the same consciousness," Aliyah said. "What came through Ferrath and what is pressing against Tekarr are the same mind in different manifestations."

"Then the Ferrath breach did not weaken the attack on Tekarr. It amplified it."

"Yes. A successful breach event is a territory gain. The Abyss does not stop. It does not rest. It incorporates the new territory and immediately extends from it."

Khao’khen stood. He had been sitting for over two hours. He moved to the instrument room’s window, the one that looked at the Gate, and stood there for a moment.

"The reinforcement you are doing," he said. "Does it work?"

"Yes," Aliyah said.

"Then we continue it. At what rate can you train Oshrak’s people and the highland warriors on the monitoring protocol?"

"Two weeks for basic competence. Four for reliable independent monitoring."

"Begin tomorrow. All four of my people and eight highland warriors. I want eyes on every instrument station every hour, day and night, for the next month." He turned from the window. "Kael, your garrison rotation: I want a warrior with Aliyah’s training protocol experience in every rotation. Build it into the selection criteria."

Kael nodded.

"Darak," Khao’khen said. "The signals we exchanged. Document them completely. Everything we sent. Everything it responded with. The third Keystone’s instrument readings through the entire communication sequence." He looked at the Gate through the window. "We will send the document to the capital. If the watchers at other Archs have seen similar contact attempts, I want to know."

Aliyah looked at him with the expression of a woman who had been doing this work alone for a long time and had not expected to be surrounded by competent people who moved at the speed he moved at.

"I will write the accompanying summary," she said.

"Good." He picked up his travel coat from the wall hook. "I am going to walk the perimeter with Arka’garr. Then I am going to eat. We will resume in the morning." He paused at the door. "The entity that communicated. It told us three were here and pointed us to the sixth Keystone. Why?"

Vor’gath said: "Because it wants us to understand what we are dealing with. It is not trying to hide."

"Something that is not hiding," Khao’khen said quietly, "is something that does not think hiding is necessary."

He went out to walk the perimeter.