Rise of the Horde - Chapter 652 - 651

The upstream crossing began at the second hour past midnight.

Arka’garr led the 1st Warband into the water personally, because that was what warband masters did when the operation required warriors to do something that every instinct told them was wrong. Walking into a river in darkness, in armor, carrying weapons, with the current pulling at their legs and the cold reaching through every gap in their equipment, was the kind of action that required the visible presence of a leader whose willingness to share the risk eliminated the option of hesitation.

The ford was chest-deep at its shallowest point, the water dark and fast, the riverbed a treacherous surface of smooth stones that shifted under the weight of armored warriors. The Verakhs had marked the crossing route with ropes stretched between stakes driven into the riverbed, and the warriors moved along these guidelines with the careful, deliberate steps of soldiers who understood that a misstep meant being swept downstream into water deep enough to drown in.

The crossing took two hours. Two hours of cold and darkness and the constant, grinding effort of pushing through water that fought every step. Warriors emerged on the northern bank soaked, exhausted, and shivering, their armor dripping, their weapons slick with river water that the night air was already turning to frost on the iron surfaces.

Arka’garr allowed no rest. The force formed up on the northern bank in the combat formations that their training had made instinctive, the shield wall assembling in the darkness with the quiet efficiency of warriors who had drilled the process so many times that their bodies could execute it while their minds focused on the terrain ahead. Two thousand warriors, the elite 1st and 2nd Warbands, stood on the northern bank of the river seven miles east of the Threian defensive position, wet and cold and ready.

* * * * *

Three miles downstream, the 3rd and 4th Warbands were crossing the marshes.

The terrain was different here, the water shallow but spread across a broad, muddy expanse that sucked at boots and made every step an effort that the legs felt long before the mind acknowledged. The Verakh stakes guided the warriors through the darkness, each one placed at intervals that a man could reach with an extended arm, creating a chain of reference points that kept the formations from fragmenting in the featureless dark of the wetland.

The crossing was quieter than the upstream ford, the shallow water making less noise than the deeper current, but the marshes presented their own challenges. The mud was treacherous, its surface deceptively solid until a warrior’s weight broke through to the softer ground beneath and the leg sank to the knee or deeper. Warriors who stumbled were pulled free by their shield-mates, the process repeated dozens of times across the crossing, each rescue performed in silence because sound carried across water with a clarity that the darkness could not match.

The worst moment came when a section of the riverbed gave way beneath the weight of forty warriors moving in close formation. The mud, saturated by the river’s proximity, collapsed into a sinkhole that swallowed warriors to their waists, their armor pulling them deeper as they struggled against the suction.

The Verakh guides, lighter and more agile, redirected the following warriors around the hazard while the shield-mates of the trapped soldiers hauled them free one by one, the process consuming twenty minutes that felt like hours in the darkness.

No one drowned. No one was lost. But the delay compressed the timeline that Sakh’arran’s plan had allocated for the downstream crossing, and the warriors who emerged on the northern bank were muddied to their shoulders, their equipment fouled, their bodies carrying the exhaustion of an effort that had tested their endurance as thoroughly as any combat engagement.

The warband masters reorganized their formations on the bank with the quiet, urgent efficiency of officers who understood that the crossing was only half the operation. The other half was what happened when dawn revealed their presence to the Threian defenders who did not yet know they were there.

By the fourth hour, one thousand warriors of the 3rd and 4th Warbands had established a position on the northern bank downstream of the Threian defenses. They were muddied, exhausted, and deployed in the loose formation that the marshy ground permitted rather than the tight shield walls that open terrain would have allowed. But they were across. And their presence on the northern bank, three miles west of the bridge position, meant that the Threian defensive line now had a threat on its flank that it had not been built to address.

* * * * *

At the bridge, the demonstration force maintained the illusion of an impending assault with the theatrical discipline that Sakh’arran’s operational planning demanded.

Fires burned along the southern bank, their light deliberately positioned to be visible from the Threian positions on the bluff. Warriors moved among the fires in patterns designed to suggest preparation rather than deception, formations assembling and dispersing, equipment being arranged and rearranged, the visible activity of an army making ready for a dawn assault that the defenders needed to believe was coming.

The Roarers fired occasional shots at the northern bank, their balls striking the stone of the bluff with sharp cracks that served no tactical purpose but that forced the Threian defenders to remain in their positions, alert and watchful, unable to detach forces to investigate the flanks that the night crossing was compromising.

On the northern bluff, Snowe stood at his command post and watched the orcish fires burn on the southern bank. The activity was consistent with assault preparation. The Roarer fire was consistent with suppression preceding a crossing attempt. Everything the orcish force was doing was consistent with a commander who intended to force the bridge at dawn.

But Snowe had not survived the Lag’ranna campaign and built the Frontier Force by accepting what the enemy showed him at face value.

“Scouts upstream and downstream,” he ordered. “I want reports every hour. If they are not at the bridge at dawn, they are somewhere else. And I want to know where before they tell me themselves.”

The scouts departed into the darkness. But the darkness was large, the river was long, and two thousand orcish warriors were already on the northern bank upstream, forming for an advance that would begin at first light.

The night continued. The river flowed. And the pieces of Khao’khen’s plan moved through the darkness toward positions that would, when dawn revealed them, change the geometry of the battle in ways that the stone bridge and the fortified bluff could not compensate for.