Rise of the Horde - Chapter 679 - 678

The dispatches from Millbridge reached the kingdom’s capital three days later, carried by riders who had pushed their horses along the western road that was now the only route available for communications between the eastern province and the central kingdom.

The council received them in session, which was already in session because the council had been in session for most of the past three weeks, its members drawn from their estates and their offices by the accumulated weight of a campaign that had begun as a frontier incursion and had become something that the council’s existing frameworks did not have a category for.

The Lord Marshal, a silver-haired career soldier named Harren who had commanded three campaigns in his decades of service and who had the particular quality of men whose experience had taught them that the most dangerous thing in warfare was the assumption that the enemy was less capable than the evidence suggested, read the Millbridge dispatch aloud to the assembled council with the flat precision that the content required.

The council’s response divided along the lines that the campaign had been widening since the first Verakh crossed the frontier.

The voices that had supported the initial refusal of the Horde’s proposal, noble administrators whose primary concern was the integrity of the frontier zone and the precedent that any negotiation with an invading force would set, argued that the appropriate response to Millbridge was accelerated mobilization, the fastest possible deployment of the reserve forces to the eastern province, and the continuation of military pressure until the Horde was either destroyed or forced back through the corridor on terms the kingdom dictated.

The voices that had been less certain about the refusal argued that the Millbridge engagement had demonstrated something that the campaign’s full record, taken together, was making increasingly difficult to ignore.

The orcish army had been in the eastern province for six weeks. It had occupied the provincial capital, the main market town of the Meren valley, and the corridor that connected the province to the southern highlands.

It had fought four major engagements, two river crossings, two assault operations, and a cavalry ambush.

In all of this, it had not burned a single civilian structure that was not a military position, had not harmed a non-combatant who had not taken up arms, and had not damaged a single piece of economic infrastructure beyond the disruption created by its presence.

The Horde was not behaving like an invader. It was behaving like a power that expected to leave a relationship behind when the fighting stopped and was managing its conduct to ensure that relationship was negotiable.

“Which,” the Lord Marshal said, after reading the two positions into the record, “is precisely what the orcish commander’s proposal stated. He wants acknowledgment of orcish self-determination in the southern territories. He is willing to demonstrate both that he can make the province costly to hold and that he will not make it impossible to rebuild afterward. He is, in the terminology that the diplomatic office uses for this category of adversary, a rational actor pursuing a defined political objective through military means.”

“He is an orc who invaded our province,” the Baron of Lettra said, his voice carrying the edge of a man who had personal experience of the invasion’s immediate effects.

“Yes,” the Lord Marshal said. “And his proposal was to stop doing that in exchange for a formal acknowledgment. We said no. He continued. The question before the council is not whether we said no correctly. The question is what we do next.”

* * * * *

What the council did next was vote, and the vote was close enough that the result surprised several of its participants.

The motion that passed, by a margin of eleven to nine, instructed the Lord Marshal’s office to maintain military pressure in the eastern province while simultaneously authorizing the dispatch of a diplomatic representative to meet with orcish representatives at a location to be agreed, for the purpose of exploring whether the conditions for a formal cessation of hostilities existed, without any precondition of territorial withdrawal by either party.

Without the precondition.

It was not the peace that Khao’khen had proposed. It was not even the conversation that his proposal had requested.

It was the beginning of the possibility of the beginning of a conversation, hedged with the qualifications that eleven votes against nine produced when the eleven were not entirely certain and the nine were not entirely wrong.

But it was not no.

The Lord Marshal dispatched a rider to Snowe with the council’s instruction and a second rider, under a different kind of flag, toward the southeastern highland corridor and the orcish command position at Millbridge.

The rider toward the corridor carried a letter that the Lord Marshal had written himself, in the formal Threian that diplomatic correspondence used, addressed to the commander of the Yohan First Horde.

The letter acknowledged receipt of the Horde’s proposal. It noted that the council’s initial response had not closed the matter permanently. It requested, as a gesture of good faith, a temporary cessation of offensive operations in the Meren valley while a diplomatic representative could be identified and dispatched.

It asked, essentially, for the Horde to pause.

Khao’khen read the letter when it reached him on the fourth day after the vote, Sakh’arran translating with the same flat precision he applied to all communications regardless of their importance.

He was quiet for a long time after the translation finished.

Then he said: “They are not negotiating. They are asking us to stop being inconvenient while they decide whether to negotiate.”

“Yes,” Sakh’arran said.

“They rejected the proposal because we held ground. Now they want us to release the ground before they will consider the proposal again.”

“The phrasing avoids the word precondition. But the structure is the same.”

Khao’khen set the letter on the map table beside the dispatches that reported the Lord Marshal’s mobilization of the Reserve Corps, the dispatches that described the western road’s newly fortified relay stations, the dispatches that detailed the preparation of a second blocking force for the corridor entrance on a scale that exceeded the first attempt. The letter and the dispatches together formed a picture that required no additional analysis.

“They want us to pause while they build the force that removes the need to negotiate at all,” he said.

“Yes.”

He picked up the letter and looked at it one more time with the attention of a man making certain that he had read what was actually written rather than what he expected to find.

“Send our response,” he said. “We will meet their diplomatic representative. We will meet them in the Meren valley, at Millbridge, under conditions that both sides find acceptable. We will not pause operations as a precondition of the meeting. If the kingdom is serious about the meeting, it comes to us where we are.”

He set the letter down.

“If they refuse that, we know the meeting was never the point.”