Rise of the Horde

Chapter 871 - 870

Vor’gath arrived at the learning hall on the second morning, alone, without announcing to anyone that he intended to go.

This was deliberate. He had said to Kael the previous evening that he wanted to see the hall before it knew he was coming, and he meant it in the specific way that a practitioner meant things that sounded like preferences but were actually diagnostic: he wanted to see the hall in its ordinary state, not the state it produced for important visitors.

The ordinary state, at the second hour of the morning session, was organized chaos conducted with enthusiasm.

Twenty-two children of varying ages occupied the main study room. Three of them were teaching other children, which was the learning hall’s methodology: the advanced students instructed the intermediate ones, and the intermediate instructed the beginners. The noise level was significant. The noise level was, Vor’gath observed, productive: it was not the noise of distraction but the noise of simultaneous conversations all conducting the same essential transaction of one person knowing something and another person not yet knowing it.

Skarra was at the far end of the room, sitting across a table from two children who were younger than she was and working through a numerals exercise with the patient repetition that the exercise required. She had a piece of chalk and a small board and she was writing a number, erasing it, writing it again differently, showing both variations and asking the children which was correct.

One child pointed to the right one.

The other pointed to the wrong one.

Skarra said, to the one who had pointed to the wrong one: "Look at where the curve goes. Left or right?" The child looked. "Left," the child said. "And this one?" Skarra wrote it again. "Right," the child said. "Which is the one we are looking for?" A pause. The child pointed to the correct one.

"Good," Skarra said, and moved to the next number.

She had noticed Vor’gath’s entrance without looking directly at him. This was visible in the specific quality of her peripheral attention: the slight adjustment of angle that a practiced observer made when noting something they were not ready to acknowledge yet.

Vor’gath sat at the back of the room and watched.

He watched for forty minutes. Long enough to see Skarra finish with the two younger children and move to a different student who had been working alone on a logistics form, the kind used in the eastern supply depot. Long enough to see her read the student’s work, identify a specific error, and explain the error in the terms that the student’s current level of understanding provided access to rather than in the terms that would have been more efficient but would have required understanding the student did not yet have.

She was, Vor’gath thought, a teacher in the way that a very few people were teachers: not by method but by instinct for the gap between what a person knew and what they needed to reach next.

When the session broke for midday, Skarra came to him.

"Vor’gath," she said. She used the highland pronunciation correctly, tone adjusted since Drakk’s visit.

"Skarra," he said.

She sat across from him at the back table with the directness of a child who had decided that ceremony between people who were simply interested in each other was a waste of time. "Are you going to ask me questions or are you going to teach me something?"

"What would you prefer?" Vor’gath asked.

"Both, if possible. But teaching first." She folded her hands on the table. "You are a near-Seventh Circle practitioner. The numbers I teach these children are symbols that represent something real. What symbols do you use?"

He looked at her for a moment. The question was not what he had expected from a nine-year-old, which was the experience that Skarra produced in most adults who attempted to predict what she would say next.

"The Circle is not a symbol," he said. "It is a state. The state produces perception, and perception produces access to the things that the Circle’s level makes accessible." He paused. "The numerals you teach represent counts. Numbers of things. What I perceive does not have counts because what I perceive is not organized in countable units."

Skarra absorbed this. "Then how do you teach it?"

"The same way you teach these children," he said. "I find what the student already knows and I build from there. The highland shaman tradition transmits through demonstration and experience, not through notation. The student watches and practices until the practice produces the perception, and then the student understands in a way that notation would not have conveyed." He looked at the chalk marks on her board. "You do the same thing. The numerals on the board are not the knowledge. The knowledge is what happens in the child’s mind when they stop seeing the numeral as a shape and start seeing it as a quantity. The notation is the door. You are teaching them to open it."

Skarra was quiet for a moment.

"Sakh’arran said something like that once," she said. "About the law. He said the words in the law are not the law. The law is what happens when people apply the words to a situation. The words are the door." She looked at the board. "Everything is a door to something that isn’t the door."

Vor’gath was silent for a full minute.

He had spent sixty years as a shaman in the highland tradition, which was a tradition that valued perception above expression and that was skeptical of people who were too articulate too quickly. In his experience, the people who put the right words to a true thing at nine years old were the people who spent the next forty years deepening their understanding of the thing they had accidentally said correctly.

"Yes," he said. "Everything is a door to something that is not the door." He paused. "Skarra. What do you want to do when you are older?"

She did not hesitate. "I want to understand how things work," she said. "All things. The numerals and the water pipes and the law and..." she gestured toward the window, toward the world outside. "All of it. I want to understand how it all fits together." She looked at him. "Is there a word for that?"

Vor’gath thought about it.

"In the highland tongue," he said, "the word would translate as something like: the one who asks until the asking becomes seeing." He paused. "We have traditionally applied it to shamans. But the shamanic tradition has no reason to hold the monopoly." He looked at the girl across the table. "When you are older, come to the highlands. I will teach you what the Circle teaches. You will teach me what the numbers teach. We will compare notes." A pause. "I suspect the comparison will be useful for both of us."