Rise of the Horde - Chapter 649 - 648

Haguk caught the Threian cavalry at the fork where the eastern road split between the river route and the highland track that led back toward the southeastern corridor.

Four hundred and sixty warg riders against eight hundred Threian horsemen. The arithmetic was not favorable, and Haguk was not a commander who ignored arithmetic. But arithmetic was not the only variable in mounted warfare, and the variables that Haguk understood better than any Threian cavalry officer, terrain, speed, and the particular psychology of warg-mounted combat, shifted the calculation in ways that numbers alone could not express.

The Threian cavalry was moving fast, their column strung out along the road in the traveling formation that maximized speed at the cost of tactical readiness. They were not expecting contact. Their mission was logistics, not combat, and the riders at the column’s head were focused on the road ahead rather than the terrain to either side. Their horses, bred for endurance and trained for the disciplined charges that Threian cavalry doctrine demanded, moved at the steady canter that ate miles without exhausting the mounts.

The wargs were faster. Not in a sustained gallop, where the horses’ longer legs and more efficient gait gave them an advantage over distance, but in the explosive burst of speed that covered the ground between concealment and contact before the target could react. Wargs were predators. Their acceleration was the acceleration of creatures that had evolved to close the distance between themselves and prey in the space between heartbeats.

Haguk had positioned his riders in three groups along a two-mile stretch of the road, using the terrain features that the Verakh scouts had identified during their months of surveillance. The first group, one hundred and fifty riders under his direct command, held a wooded ridge that overlooked the road at a point where a bend forced the column to slow. The second group, one hundred and sixty riders under a Warghen sub-chief named Grukk, waited in a dry streambed half a mile south. The third group, one hundred and fifty Skallser riders led by Pelko, held the highland track itself, blocking the route that the Threian cavalry needed to reach the southeastern corridor.

* * * * *

The attack began without horns or war cries. Haguk’s group hit the column’s center from the ridge, the wargs launching themselves downslope with the silent, focused intensity of pack hunters executing a coordinated strike. The leading wargs struck the Threian horses before the riders understood what was happening, the predators’ jaws finding the legs and flanks of mounts that reared and screamed and threw their riders in the chaos of an ambush that came from above and moved faster than anything the cavalry’s training had prepared them for.

Haguk himself drove his warg into the space between two Threian officers whose horses collided as they tried to turn, his axe catching the nearer rider across the shoulder with the economical precision of a mounted warrior who understood that one clean strike was worth more than three wild swings. The rider fell. Haguk’s warg lunged over the falling body and was already past the second horse before its rider could bring his sword to bear.

The column shattered at the point of impact, the Threian horses’ natural fear of predators overriding the training that their riders had spent months instilling. Wargs were not horses. They did not charge in lines. They struck, bit, clawed, and withdrew, flowing through the gaps in the column like water through a broken dam, each rider operating independently within the framework of the ambush pattern that Haguk had designed.

Grukk’s group hit the column’s rear thirty seconds later, emerging from the streambed in a wave that caught the trailing squadrons between the ambush ahead and the attack behind. The Threian cavalry, trained for open-field engagements where formation and discipline determined outcomes, found itself in a running melee where the rules they understood did not apply. The wargs were too fast to charge, too agile to pin, and too aggressive to ignore.

The engagement lasted forty minutes. The Threian cavalry commander, a colonel whose name the Horde would learn from captured dispatches, rallied his forward squadrons and broke north, abandoning the road to the southeastern corridor and the mission that Snowe had assigned. The rearward squadrons, cut off by Grukk’s attack, scattered into the farmland to the east, their formation dissolved, their horses blown, their mission compromised beyond recovery.

Pelko’s Skallser riders, holding the highland track, did not need to fight. The Threian cavalry never reached them. The blocking position that had been their assignment became an observation post from which Pelko watched the scattered remnants of Snowe’s flanking force disperse across the countryside in the disordered retreat of cavalry that had lost its cohesion and its purpose simultaneously.

* * * * *

The Threian colonel attempted to rally his forward squadrons twice, his voice carrying above the chaos with the authority of a commander who had led cavalry charges across open fields and who understood that the mounted arm’s strength lay in formation and momentum. But the wargs denied him both. Every time the Threian riders attempted to form a line, the warg packs struck the flanks, their speed making it impossible to present a unified front against an enemy that refused to commit to a single direction of attack. The horses, trained for the disciplined charges that Threian cavalry doctrine demanded, could not overcome the primal terror that the wargs’ predatory presence instilled. Their riders fought their mounts as much as they fought the enemy, the dual struggle consuming the attention and the energy that effective cavalry combat required.

Haguk’s losses were twenty-three riders killed and forty-one wounded, with nineteen wargs lost. The Threian losses were heavier: approximately one hundred and thirty killed, two hundred wounded or unhorsed, and the remainder scattered in groups too disorganized to pose a threat to the supply line they had been sent to sever.

The supply road to the southeastern corridor remained open.

Haguk dispatched a runner to Khao’khen with a report that was characteristically brief. Three words, written in the angular script that the Horde’s communication system used for field messages: “Road held. Continuing.”

The three words carried everything that mattered. The supply line was intact. The flanking maneuver had failed. And Snowe’s plan, the careful, patient strategy of a general who had intended to starve the orcish army rather than fight it, had been answered by four hundred and sixty riders who understood that speed and ferocity applied with precision were worth more than numbers applied with convention.

The wargs loped south along the road they had been sent to defend, their riders checking equipment and tending wounds with the unhurried efficiency of cavalry that had completed its mission and was preparing for whatever came next. Behind them, the scattered Threian horsemen regrouped in twos and threes, their horses limping, their column destroyed, their mission failed.

The supply wagons would reach Thornfield. The Horde would not starve. And the war that Snowe had hoped to win with maneuver would have to be won with something else.