Rise of the Horde - Chapter 654 - 653

The pursuit north consumed the rest of the day, and Sakh’arran did not approve of it.

The commander’s objection was not personal. It was arithmetic. An army that pursued beyond its own supply line was an army that had traded one problem for another, and the Horde’s logistics train, however well-organized, however carefully stocked before the march, could not sustain a running advance indefinitely.

The supply wagons were crossing the North Bridge as fast as the stone span’s width permitted, the drivers pushing their teams hard to close the gap between the main body and the forward warbands. But there was a physics to supply that no amount of discipline could fully overcome, and Sakh’arran had spent enough years studying operational logistics to understand exactly where the edges of that physics lay.

Khao’khen agreed with the logic and pushed anyway.

Not recklessly. Not with the wild, consuming aggression that had historically characterized orcish warfare and that had historically resulted in orcish defeats when the immediate enemy was replaced by the subtler enemies of hunger and exhaustion. The advance was measured, formation-maintaining, the kind of controlled pressure that prevented Snowe from stopping and turning without giving up ground.

The Threian general was retreating north along the provincial road, his force cohesive but compressed by the speed of the withdrawal, the intervals between units reduced in ways that diminished the mutual support that his doctrine required. A force retreating faster than its planning allowed was a force making improvisations, and improvisations created gaps that a pursuing enemy could exploit if it maintained the discipline to recognize them.

The Warg Cavalry screened ahead and on both flanks, Haguk’s riders filling the countryside around the column’s passage with the mobile presence that denied Snowe the ability to detach units without Khao’khen knowing about it within the hour. Every road junction, every farmstead that might conceal an ambush force, every piece of elevated terrain that could anchor a rearguard position was identified and reported before the main body reached it. The Verakhs moved in the spaces between, their surveillance network extending the Horde’s operational awareness far beyond what mounted scouts alone could provide.

Three miles north of the river, the Threian rearguard made its first stand.

A company of infantry, approximately three hundred soldiers, had occupied a farmstead whose stone outbuildings formed a natural defensive perimeter across the road. They had chosen the position well. The main farmhouse presented a wall twenty feet high along the road’s eastern edge, its narrow windows converted into crossbow positions by the soldiers who had smashed out the wooden shutters and stacked the furniture into firing platforms in the time available to them.

The granary on the western side created a second fortified point that forced any assault on the farmhouse to expose its flank. Between the two structures, a livestock gate had been reinforced with timber from the outbuildings, creating a barrier that would slow mounted approach to a crawl.

They were not there to win. They were there to cost, and the distinction was understood by every professional soldier in both armies. Three hundred soldiers buying twenty minutes of time for eight thousand soldiers to increase their lead was a reasonable investment, and the men who had taken those positions were doing exactly what their training and their orders demanded.

Arka’garr read the position in the time it took him to survey it from five hundred paces. He did not halt the advance to deliberate. He sent the 1st Warband’s right wing around the eastern flank of the farmstead, moving through the fields to the east with the quick, ground-eating pace that the veterans maintained without instruction.

Meanwhile the Roarer crews opened fire on the farmhouse’s western face, their volleys suppressing the crossbow positions in the narrow windows and preventing the defenders from monitoring the flanking movement taking place outside their line of sight. The fire spheres followed, two of them arcing over the granary wall and igniting among the timber barriers in bursts of orange fire that produced smoke sufficient to further obscure the flanking force’s approach.

The 1st Warband’s right wing reached the farmstead’s eastern side before the defenders had redirected their attention from the western fire to the threat materializing at their rear. The collision was brief, violent, and wholly decisive. Orcish shields struck Threian crossbowmen who had been oriented westward, the surprise of contact from an unexpected direction collapsing the position’s coherence within minutes.

The men who had set up their firing positions with professional care found themselves fighting hand-to-hand in the farmyard, the tactical advantage of their fortified windows suddenly irrelevant to an enemy who was already inside with them.

The survivors of the rearguard broke north, running to rejoin the main body with the particular speed that soldiers developed when they understood that remaining in position meant dying in it. Some made it. Some did not. The farmstead’s outbuildings burned behind them, the fire spheres having done their work thoroughly enough that the structure would provide no useful shelter to any subsequent rearguard force.

Khao’khen did not slow.

Above the advancing column, the Snarling Wolf banner caught the afternoon wind and filled it with the motion that the warriors beneath it had come to read as a kind of language, the beast straining forward against its pole, its fanged outline rippling in the cloth with the suggestion of contained energy that battle flags acquired when they had been carried through enough genuine violence that the symbol and the substance began to feel like the same thing. The wolf that never retreated. The wolf that snarled at whatever stood ahead of it, regardless of what that thing was.

Soldiers who had carried it from Yohan through the highland corridor, through the bypass of Valdenmarch, through the river crossing at North Bridge, through the assault on Greywater’s breach, and now through the pursuit across the Threian heartland drew something from the sight of it that they could not have named precisely but that shaped every step they took beneath it.

The army made camp five miles north of the river as darkness came. Their fires burned in a landscape that had never expected to host them, their encampment covering the farmland with the organized efficiency of a force that had made camp under worse conditions on worse ground more times than any warrior cared to count. The perimeter sentries were posted with the discipline that Arka’garr’s system demanded. The supply wagons were positioned with the geometric precision that Sakh’arran’s logistics doctrine required. The chieftains and warband masters took their nightly reports and delivered their own.

The war was inside the Threian heartland.

And somewhere ahead in the darkness, General Aelric Snowe was doing what he had done after every engagement since the Lag’ranna campaign: he was learning, adjusting, and preparing to make the next encounter cost more than the last one.

Khao’khen sat with the map after the council dispersed, the torchlight drawing shadows across the terrain markings that Sakh’arran’s team updated with every Verakh report. The provincial capital of Irenmere was three days’ march ahead along the direct route. Between here and there, at least two more defensive positions. Behind them, a fortress they had bypassed and an army they had defeated and a general who was not finished.

He rolled the map and looked north through the tent’s open flap at the darkness that held whatever came next.

The wolf snarled. The march would continue at dawn.