Harsk found Gorvahn's command post at the fifth hour of his deployment.
The discovery came the way discoveries always came to the Ghost — not as a moment but as an accumulation. Three hours of absolute stillness, pressed against tree bark, watching patterns resolve from chaos the way a hunter watched animal trails emerge from undergrowth. Then two hours of careful, incremental movement. Each advance measured in body-lengths, each body-length earned through the total absence of error.
The six distributed clusters of Gorvahn's camp were connected by runner routes. Standard military communications. But the pattern had a center of gravity — every route terminated at the third cluster, the one positioned on a slight rise where the tree canopy was thickest. That was the hub.
Harsk approached it the way a surgeon approached a patient's chest: with the knowledge that the thing inside needed to be reached and that reaching it wrongly would kill the operation.
