Rise of the Horde - Chapter 658 - 657

The southwest tower fell on the second night, and its falling was nothing like what the militia levies on the adjacent wall sections had imagined.

They had imagined drama. Towers fell in stories with the sudden, spectacular collapse that cleared the way for heroes to charge through the dust.

What actually happened was a process so measured and so incremental that the first sign of it was a vibration in the wall-walk stone beneath their boots, subtle enough that a soldier who was not paying close attention might have attributed it to the catapult strikes continuing outside, but unmistakable to anyone who had been paying attention to the tower’s condition since the crack appeared in the foundation.

The vibration was the tower settling. Not catastrophically, not all at once, but with the terrible patience of stone that had reached the limit of what its compromised foundation could support.

Four inches. That was the first settlement, felt as a lurch through the wall-walk that caused every soldier within thirty paces to grab for something solid. Then the settling produced additional cracking, and the additional cracking produced more settling, and within twenty minutes of the first movement the corner section of the tower that had withstood three centuries of weather, siege, and provincial rebellion descended into the town’s interior in a controlled collapse that left a rubble-filled gap in the wall eight paces wide and the height of a man and a half at its lowest point.

Arka’garr had the 1st Warband at the breach before the dust settled.

The assault was not the chaotic charge that the militia levies on the surviving wall sections anticipated when they heard the collapse.

The 1st Warband moved through the rubble gap in the organized, continuous flow that years of training had developed for prepared breach assaults, where the gap in the wall was the first obstacle rather than the last, and the actual fighting began when the advancing warriors reached the streets beyond it and traded the relatively simple calculus of moving forward for the complex, three-dimensional problem of close urban combat.

The front rank stepped over broken stone with shields raised at the angle that maximized protection against fire from the wall-walks above and from the building windows ahead simultaneously. The second rank covered the gaps in the first, their overlapping shields creating the mobile protection that kept the assault coherent as it moved through terrain that wanted to break it into individual struggles.

The militia on the wall-walk above the breach fired down into the advancing formation. Crossbow bolts struck shields at angles that the shields’ construction deflected, struck gaps in armor at angles that the armor’s construction resisted, and found the narrow margins between both often enough that warriors fell and the formation closed around the fallen with the practiced automaticity of soldiers who had rehearsed this scenario until the response was reflex rather than decision. The casualties were real. The formation held.

The provincial garrison responded with the organized speed that professional soldiers produced under the extreme pressure of a breach assault on their own walls. Infantry companies converged on the collapse from the barracks district two hundred yards to the north, their movement through the town’s streets rapid but formation-maintaining, the discipline of professional soldiers distinguishing their response from the scattered, individual urgency that militia produced in the same circumstances.

They met the 1st Warband on a street wide enough for five-abreast combat and narrow enough that the numerical advantage the Horde possessed in the open field meant nothing here, the breadth of the engagement was determined by the breadth of the street, and the breadth of the street was equal for both sides.

The fighting in Greywater’s streets was the kind the Horde had not fought before. Every advantage of the combined-arms approach that had broken the Threian formations at Thornfield and North Bridge and the Eastern Road was absent in these confined passages.

The Roarers could not fire in streets where the warriors of both sides were intermingled across distances shorter than the weapon’s minimum safe separation. The fire spheres were forbidden by Khao’khen’s explicit order, burning the town served no purpose, and burning the town’s civilians served the opposite of every purpose that the campaign’s restraint doctrine had been built around.

The Rhakaddons could not navigate alleyways that their shoulders would not fit through. What remained was the oldest form of warfare: trained warriors with edged weapons, moving through confined space, fighting for every yard.

It was bloody in the particular, unsparing way that urban combat was always bloody. Both sides paid for every yard.

The provincial soldiers were genuine professionals, not the frontier garrison of Valdenmarch, not the advance guard troops who had been caught mid-maneuver at Thornfield, but the interior garrison of a provincial capital, trained by commanders who had studied the Lag’ranna campaign and understood that the orcish army they would eventually face was nothing like the disorganized warbands that previous generations of garrison troops had repelled.

They fought with that knowledge driving them, and it made them dangerous in the specific way that prepared, motivated professionals were always dangerous.

The 2nd Warband entered through the breach behind the 1st and fanned immediately into the side streets east and west of the main assault axis.

This was Arka’garr’s design: the 1st Warband absorbed the garrison’s primary response while the 2nd worked the flanking streets, appearing at intersections and in alleys where the garrison’s attention was directed elsewhere, turning the defense’s advantage of interior movement against itself by multiplying the directions from which pressure arrived.

Colonel Cedric was forced to commit his reserves earlier than his defensive plan had scheduled, pulling companies from the bridge positions that were not yet under assault to reinforce sectors that were. Each reserve commitment was correct in isolation and collectively damaging, the sequential depletion of the flexible force that a defending garrison needed to respond to the assault’s next development.

Khao’khen had entered the breach himself, because there were moments when a commander’s presence communicated something that no order could convey with equal force, and this was one of them.

He fought in the compact style that close quarters demanded, economical, efficient, creating space for the warriors around him rather than attempting to cover ground himself, his height and the authority of his bearing providing a point of orientation for the formation that moved with him through the smoke and the screaming.

The Snarling Wolf banner could not follow through the rubble gap, but the warriors who had marched beneath it for the length of the campaign carried its meaning in the understanding of why they were here and what they were doing, and that understanding shaped every decision they made in the fighting streets of a Threian town that had chosen resistance when it might have chosen otherwise.

Colonel Cedric made his decision at the third hour of fighting, when his reserve was committed and the formation coherence that professional infantry maintained even under extreme pressure was beginning to show the particular fragmentation that indicated a defense approaching its structural limit.

He was a stubborn man and a professional soldier, and both qualities argued for continuing a resistance that was costing the attackers as much as the defenders. But he was also a pragmatist, which was the quality that his profession ultimately required, and pragmatism told him that the next hour would cost him the force he was trying to preserve without altering the outcome the current hour was already determining.

He surrendered the town. The fighting stopped with the abruptness that surrenders always produced, violence resolving into silence in the time it took an order to travel from its source to the soldiers who were executing the fighting it countermanded.

The garrison laid down its weapons in the central market square, their formation still intact, their bearing still carrying the discipline that had defined their resistance. Colonel Cedric delivered his sword to Khao’khen with the ceremony that Threian military tradition required, his expression controlled with the composure of a professional who had done what his orders and his honor demanded and was prepared to accept the consequence.

Khao’khen accepted the sword and returned it.

The gesture was deliberate in both its dimensions, the tactical message that the campaign’s restraint doctrine had been sending since the first bypassed farmstead, and the personal message that the returning of a defeated commander’s sword delivered between soldiers regardless of species or language.

Aldric understood both. The expression on his face shifted by precisely the amount that a man’s expression shifted when reality failed to match his expectation in a direction he had not anticipated.

Greywater was in orcish hands. The road to the provincial capital lay open ahead, and the Snarling Wolf banner moved through the market square where the garrison stood at their surrender, its passage above the stone buildings carrying the arc’s central image, the wolf, unchecked, moving north through territory that the Threian military had built to stop it.