Rise of the Horde

Chapter 883: Chapter 882

The Ironbeard archive had been sitting in Sakh’arran’s office for eleven days when he finally opened the second chest. The first chest had contained the commercial records: trade route surveys, ore deposit assessments, geological notes from the Ironbeard mapping expeditions that had covered the southern territories three centuries ago. He had reviewed those for trade relevance and set them aside.

The second chest contained the settlement documentation.

Sakh’arran was alone in his office. Khao’khen was at the Arch. The city’s administrative day was underway outside his window. He could hear the market district from two buildings away: the specific quality of noise that a functional market made, the combination of transaction and argument and the particular human sound of people who needed things finding people who had things.

He opened the second chest.

The documents were organized by the Ironbeard archival method: stone-bound folios with compressed paper leaves, each folio labeled on its spine in the dwarven script that Sakh’arran had learned to read during the preliminary trade negotiations. He pulled the folios in sequence.

Period One: Southern Survey, Geological. He set it aside.

Period Two: Southern Survey, Settlement Census. He opened this one.

The Period Two survey had been conducted two hundred and eighty years ago, before the Threian Kingdom’s first southern campaign. The Ironbeard surveyors had been mapping expansion possibilities and had documented what they found with the thoroughness that characterized the Ironbeard approach to any undertaking they considered worth undertaking. What they found in the southern territories, including the valley where the river bends at the point that Yohan now occupied, were established settlements.

Orcish settlements. Eleven of them, varying in size from clusters of fifty to a census estimate of four thousand. The settlement in the river bend was the largest. The surveyors had recorded its population at approximately four thousand, its extent at two hundred and forty measured lengths, and its structures in general categories: residential, storage, forge, communal, religious.

The settlement had a name. The surveyors had recorded it phonetically in dwarven script from the orcish pronunciation: Var’kha.

Sakh’arran looked at that word for a long moment.

Then he looked at the settlement map that was folded into the folio’s back cover. He unfolded it. The map was accurate by the surveyors’ standards, which were considerable. He oriented it against the window, against the view of Yohan’s streets below.

The river bend matched. The land’s topography matched. The settlement’s extent, two hundred and forty measured lengths, covered a part the ground that Yohan currently occupied. The forge district in the Period Two survey was in the eastern section. Yohan’s forge district was in the eastern section. The communal structures were in the center of Var’kha’s map. Yohan’s central hall was in the center.

He sat back.

He pulled Period Three: Southern Survey, Settlement Reassessment. This was conducted sixty years after Period Two, two hundred and twenty years ago. He found the entry for the -river bend settlement.

The entry read: site unoccupied. Structures partially intact. Evidence of rapid departure. No indication of conflict. Population disposition unknown.

Period Four, conducted thirty years after Period Three: site empty, structures deteriorated. We did not stay the night.

The first Threian southern campaign had occurred approximately ten years after the Period Four survey. The Threian historians described it as the conquest of the southern territories, uninhabited at the time of arrival.

The Threian campaign had not emptied the southern territories. The territories had been empty for forty years before the Threian soldiers arrived.

Sakh’arran looked at Period Three again. Rapid departure. No indication of conflict.

Four thousand people did not leave a place they had built over generations rapidly and without conflict unless what they were departing from was not something that could be fought.

He looked at the map of Var’kha again. He looked at Yohan outside his window.

He looked at the Tekarr Arch’s general direction, north and east, visible from any elevated point in the city as a line of dark mountain peaks against the sky.

The Arch had been built hundreds of years ago, fifty years after the Period Three survey found Var’kha empty. The Covenant’s documents described its location as a known historical breach point, a place where the boundary between the world and the Abyss had failed in the past and where a permanent sealing mechanism was required.

But the Arch’s location was thirty miles north of where Var’kha had stood.

Sakh’arran stood up. He went to the wall where the regional maps were hung and found the detailed survey of the Tekarr range’s southern approaches. He measured the distance from the Arch’s position to Yohan’s position. Thirty-one miles.

He sat back down.

Thirty-one miles was not within the radius of a breach event’s primary impact. But it was within the radius of a breach event’s secondary effects: the disruption, the wrongness that radiated outward from an active Abyss incursion, the sense of presence that practitioners like Vor’gath could feel. Not the entity itself but the awareness of the entity, spreading outward from its breach point.

Four thousand people, most of them not practitioners, had felt enough of that spreading wrongness to leave rapidly without conflict. They had not been killed. They had simply left.

And never came back.

Sakh’arran wrote a message to Khao’khen at the Arch. He wrote it carefully, in the compact language he used for intelligence summaries, without speculation or emotional weight. He stated the archive findings, the settlement name, the population, the match between Var’kha’s map and Yohan’s layout, the Period Three’s rapid departure notation, and the correlation with the Arch’s founding history.

He closed with one line: the city we are building is the second city on this ground. The first was evacuated because of something that came from the north. The Arch was built to ensure it did not happen again.

He sent the message north with the next courier.

Then he went to find Tharuk’s most recent message from the highlands, because Tharuk needed to know to look for foundation stones.

He looked at the map one final time before he rolled it and returned it to the folio. The surveyors who had made it were three centuries dead. They had walked this valley with their measuring cords and their notation books and they had recorded what was here. What was here had been a city. A people who had built something in this valley and given it a name about memory and rivers and meeting.

The rivers had not moved. The valley had not changed. The foundation stones were still in the ground.

He sent for Tharuk’s most recent message from the highlands, because Tharuk needed to know to look for more foundation stones wherever he dug, and because the instruction was also a message about why the build mattered. Not just for the people who were here now. For the city that had been here before them, and the people who might come after.