Rise of the Horde

Chapter 848 - 847

Drakk arrived at Yohan’s northern gate on a morning when the forge district was running all six furnaces and the city’s permanent smell of hot iron and fresh bread had thickened in the windless early air.

He came with four riders and no advance notice. He had been raised by Brokk, and Brokk’s view of formal arrivals was that a warrior who needed ceremony to command an entrance was a warrior compensating for a deficit. Drakk had no Verakh escort, no letter of introduction, only the direction south and the memory of Vor’gath’s voice at the clan gathering describing a city that should not exist.

The gate guards were two Fourth Realm orcs and a tauren named Vess who managed the northern gate’s visitor log with the intensity that taurens brought to any task involving organized documentation. Vess had a quill ready before the riders had fully stopped.

The senior orc guard assessed the highland riding gear, the mountain ponies, the axe on Drakk’s back that was slightly too large for the frame carrying it. He looked at Drakk the way trained soldiers looked at strangers: taking in height, weapon type, posture, number of companions, the specific quality of alertness in the eyes.

"Highland clans," the guard said.

"Drakk, of the Gorath Highlands," Drakk said. "I want to see the city."

Vess wrote this down with great precision, including the spelling of the name, which he asked Drakk to confirm twice.

They were let through within minutes, which was the first thing that surprised Drakk. He had expected more difficulty. He had expected the wariness that armies showed toward strangers at gates, the hard questioning, the requirement to state purpose in formal terms and have it evaluated by someone senior. There had been questioning, but it was the questioning of someone filling in a log rather than someone deciding whether to sound the alarm.

The street beyond the gate was not what he had pictured.

He had heard Vor’gath’s account at the clan gathering: the walls, the forges, the pipes carrying water beneath the streets, the school. He had heard Kael’s operational assessment of Yohan’s military capability, delivered with dry precision as a list of tactical obstacles. He had heard the survivors of the capital battle describing the orcish formations with the particular detail that men accumulated when explaining the worst night of their lives. All of that had prepared him for a warrior’s city, a military installation at scale.

What the gate opened onto was noise and movement and the smell of something being cooked with river herbs, and three children sprinting across the street ahead of his pony without looking.

His pony sidestepped. The children vanished around a corner, still at full speed, entirely unconcerned with the mounted highland warrior they had narrowly avoided.

Two trolls were fitting stone blocks along the street’s eastern edge, working with the absolute patience and precision that troll craftworkers brought to alignment tasks, each block tested three times before the mortar was applied. A goblin with a measuring board stood nearby making notations. Down the connecting street, a kobold crew was running supply carts toward the forge district’s secondary entrance, moving in single file through the gap between the buildings with the organized efficiency of workers who had performed this specific run enough times to make it automatic.

Further along, a voice was teaching. A child’s voice, clear and deliberate: "Six. Then seven. What comes after seven?" A younger voice answered incorrectly. The teacher said the correct answer without impatience and asked again.

Drakk’s four riders had gone quiet. He could feel them looking at things the way soldiers looked at things when they were cataloguing them, trying to match what they saw to the categories they had prepared.

He had expected a garrison. He had gotten something he did not have a word for yet.

He was still trying to find the word when a girl appeared at his pony’s shoulder.

She was perhaps eight or nine years old, orcish, with large dark eyes and the particular quality of a child who had decided that her curiosity outweighed any other consideration in the moment. She looked up at him with the directness that children in safe places had: no wariness, no performance, just the frank assessment of someone evaluating a new thing.

"You’re from the highlands," she said. It was not a question. She had read the fur-edged riding gear and the mountain pony and possibly the quality of the frost-chapping on his hands.

"I am," Drakk said.

"Vor’gath taught me two words in the highland tongue before he went back." She said them: the highland words for shaman and elder, with pronunciation that was better than Drakk had expected from an orcish child in a city a week’s ride from the mountains. "Is that right?"

"Very close," he said, genuinely surprised. "You changed the tone on the second word slightly. The elder word goes up at the end, not level."

She repeated it, adjusting. "Better?"

"Better."

She studied him for another moment. "My name is Skarra. Are you going to see the whole city or just the gate?"

Drakk looked at his riders. They were not going to be any help here. He looked back at the girl.

"I want to see what Vor’gath described," he said. "The water system. The school. The forges."

"The learning hall is what it’s called," Skarra said, with the mild correction of someone whose precision about names was a professional matter. "The water pipes I know very well. Do you want to see those first? They’re more interesting than they sound."

One of Drakk’s riders made a sound that was almost a laugh, suppressed into a cough.

"Yes," Drakk said. "Show me the water pipes."

* * * * *

Skarra knew the water system the way she knew everything she had decided to learn: completely, with sources. She knew the diameter of the main distribution line because she had asked Zul’jinn when he was reviewing the installation plans in the eastern market and Zul’jinn had told her, apparently seeing no reason not to. She knew the depth of the underground channels because she had watched Droktagar’s crews excavating and had asked the trench supervisor. She knew the name of every distribution valve operator in the southern quarter because she had introduced herself to all of them.

She led Drakk and his riders on foot through the market district, past the residential quarter’s new construction, and down to the distribution point at the city’s center where the main line split into the eighteen secondary channels. She explained each element as they reached it with the economy of someone who had taught this information before and knew which details the explanation required.

Drakk said almost nothing. He watched and listened and built a picture.

He had grown up understanding stone. The highlands were stone. You read stone for what it would bear, what it would resist, where it would split. His clan’s territory had water everywhere, snowmelt running off every ridge, springs coming up through limestone in the lower valleys. His people had always carried water, always managed it with buckets and channels cut into rock faces, always lived with the fact that water was present but acquiring it required work.

Nobody had thought to put it inside the city.

"It runs all the time?" he asked.

"Unless a section is closed for maintenance," Skarra said, "but the maintenance is scheduled in sections so at least most of the system is always running. Droktagar’s foreman planned it that way from the beginning. You close one section, the others compensate." She showed him the manual bypass valve that allowed flow to be redirected during maintenance periods. "This part Zul’jinn designed. The valve mechanism is the same one used in the Roarers’ pressure release, just larger and made of fired clay instead of iron so the water doesn’t corrode it."

Drakk crouched beside the valve housing and looked at the design. The engineering was not complicated. It was simple in the specific way that solutions were simple once someone had understood the problem correctly.

"In the highlands," he said, "we carry water."

Skarra considered this without any judgment in her expression. "That works when there are not many people. When there are many people, carrying water gets slow and the people farthest from the source get the least." She tilted her head. "How many people are in your clan?"

"Perhaps five thousand now. Before the war there were more."

She accepted this with the directness that children applied to facts they did not know how to contextualize emotionally and therefore simply noted. "Sakh’arran’s count here is forty thousand. The plan is for a hundred thousand. The pipes were built for a hundred thousand from the start, so they don’t need to be replaced when more people come." She stood up. "Do you want to see the learning hall now?"