Chapter 887: |
The highland warriors arrived at the Tekarr Arch at the end of the first day of travel from the highland boundary, moving faster than Kael had projected because the unit’s commander had pushed the pace on the descent and the warriors had not objected to being pushed. Forty warriors, with their own supply contingent, a healer, and two people who had completed Aliyah’s monitoring training at the Arch during an earlier visit.
Oshrak watched them arrive from the facility’s eastern wall.
They were not the largest warriors. The highland clans ran to a size that was substantial but not orcish, and the Yurakk that Oshrak commanded were uniformly larger. The highland warriors moved differently than orcs moved: a ground-level economy of motion that came from growing up in terrain where every footstep had to be placed precisely or you fell. They arrived at the facility’s gate with the organized quietness of people who had learned that noise in mountain terrain was an operational liability.
Their commander was a woman named Ishara. She was approximately thirty, with the specific quality of authority that did not announce itself. She had three weapons visible and almost certainly more that were not. She stood at the facility gate and looked at Oshrak and waited.
"Commander Oshrak," he said.
"Commander Ishara. Forty warriors, two monitoring-trained. Assigned for ninety-day rotation at the Tekarr Arch under joint command structure as agreed." She produced a document from her travel pack. Kael’s seal at the bottom. "The commander’s authorization."
Oshrak took the document, read it, folded it. "Welcome to the Arch. I’ll show you the positions."
The positions he showed her had been prepared the previous day by his Yurakk. The highland garrison occupied the facility’s northern and eastern approaches, which were the directions the terrain favored for any ground-level approach to the facility. The Yurakk held the western and southern approaches and the facility’s internal positions. The arrangement was not divided along tribal lines as a matter of principle; it was divided because the highland warriors’ mountain movement skills made them more effective on the terrain approaches while the Yurakk’s mass was more useful in the facility’s narrower interior spaces.
Ishara walked the northern approach positions in the failing light without commenting. She asked one question: where were the instrument room’s windows oriented.
She looked at the instrument room’s windows from the northern approach position. She looked at the angles. She said: "If anything comes from the Gate itself rather than from outside the facility, the approach to the instrument room is exposed on the northern side while someone inside is working the instruments. There should be a standing position in the instrument room’s external wall corridor."
Oshrak looked at the corridor. She was right. He had not identified the gap himself. "Done," he said.
Among the highland forty was a warrior named Urrak, who had spent two weeks with Tharuk in the highlands before Tharuk moved further north to the main build site. Urrak had learned three things from Tharuk: how to assess stone quality, how to mix compound, and how to look at a wall and identify where the load was traveling incorrectly. He had not intended to learn any of these things. He had been assigned to the patrol that walked Tharuk’s work site perimeter and had found himself watching instead of walking. By the end of the first week he was asking questions.
He reported to Aliyah Winters the morning after arrival and said he had been told by Commander Kael to make himself available for whatever the Warden needed that was not combat-specific.
Aliyah looked at him for a moment. Then she said: "Can you read numbers?"
"Yes."
"Come with me," she said, and took him to the instrument room.
The first hour she spent explaining the instrument stations and what each reading meant. She used the same method Sakh’arran had observed in his best people: she asked him to read the instrument, tell her what he saw, and she corrected or confirmed without volunteering the right answer first. By the end of the hour he was reading all six stations and distinguishing between normal variation and deviation.
"You learn quickly," she said.
"I had a good teacher recently," Urrak said. "He showed me that a stone reads what is happening to it if you know what to look for. These instruments are the same. They read what is happening to the Keystones if you know what to look for."
Aliyah said nothing for a moment. Then she said: "You are going to be very useful, Urrak."
He stood the first instrument watch that evening, alone, with Darak two rooms away and a bell cord in his hand to ring if any reading moved more than five percent in either direction. He stood it for three hours without pulling the cord. The readings moved in their established patterns. He noted each movement in the log in the precise notation Aliyah had shown him.
When Darak came to relieve him at midnight, he looked at the log and read Urrak’s entries and his expression was the expression of a researcher who had found an unexpectedly precise assistant.
Outside, the highland warriors and the Yurakk overlapped on a perimeter rotation that neither group had needed to argue about because Ishara and Oshrak had divided it by competence and geography rather than origin, and neither commander was interested in anything other than the result.
The facility was, for the first time since its founding, operating at something approaching the staffing level it had been designed for.
Aliyah Winters, eating alone in the eastern room that served as the facility’s kitchen, wrote a message to the Order’s Threian Chapter that began: I have additional capacity. Tell me which Arch is next.
The third day of the highland garrison’s residence at the Arch produced the first unexpected harmony in the facility’s operational rhythm. Urrak had finished his foundation perimeter survey by midday and reported to Aliyah with a marked diagram showing six additional sections of elevated stone temperature. None were as warm as the section the probe had come through, but three of them were warmer than ambient by a measurable degree.
Aliyah applied compound to all six sections before the evening watch.
Ishara, watching from the outer perimeter, asked Oshrak how long the Warden worked each day.
"Until the work is done," Oshrak said.
"That is not a number," Ishara said.
"No," Oshrak said. "It is not." He paused. "Sixteen hours on a good day. Eighteen when the readings are active."
Ishara considered this. She went to find Urrak, who had the instrument watch, and told him that when the Warden needed to sleep, he was to come to her instead of to Oshrak. She had eight highland warriors who could be trained to the instrument monitoring protocol in the same time Aliyah had trained Urrak, and she did not see why one person should be carrying what eight could divide.
Urrak said he would tell the Warden.
Aliyah, when told, said nothing for a moment. Then she said: "Yes. Start tomorrow morning. Six hours of training. Tell Commander Ishara to send eight and to keep the other two on perimeter."
The facility’s staffing problem, which had been Aliyah’s problem alone for twenty-two years, had begun to resolve itself through the simple mechanism of people who saw what was needed and offered what they had.