Rise of the Horde - Chapter 686 - 685

The Reserve Corps arrived on the fifth day, Lord-Commander Aldrath at its head.

He was a tall man, broad in the chest in the way of soldiers who had maintained physical training through decades of command, his armor decorated with the campaign ribbons that his service entitled him to in quantities that made clear he had been to difficult places and had come back from them.

He rode into Snowe’s camp with the settled authority of a senior officer arriving to take command of a situation he had been fully briefed on and that he intended to have resolved efficiently.

Snowe briefed him in person for three hours. He used the operational maps, the casualty records, the action reports from every engagement of the campaign, and the two dispatches that he had sent to the Lord Marshal’s office describing the orcish army’s capabilities in terms that were now confirmed by the engagement record rather than predicted from intelligence assessments.

By the end of the third hour, Aldrath’s settled authority had acquired a quality that was more cautious and more focused than it had been at the beginning of the first hour.

The briefing described a force that had done things that the briefing he had received before departure from the northern provinces had not adequately prepared him for.

He had been told he was joining a campaign against an unusually disciplined orcish raiding force. What Snowe’s campaign record described was something different in category.

“You are telling me,” Aldrath said, in the way of a man confirming that he has understood something that contradicts his expectations, “that the force I have come to help you defeat has outmaneuvered, outpaced, and on multiple occasions outfought the Threian military’s best frontier general across seven weeks of continuous operations.”

“Yes,” Snowe said. “With the additional observation that my characterization of their capabilities in the early weeks of the campaign understated them, and the capabilities I can describe now are the capabilities of the force as it was until four days ago, when the diplomatic sessions ended.”

“What happened four days ago?”

“The diplomatic arbiter left. The orcish commander made a statement to his formation. My surveillance network did not capture the content but captured the effect: eight thousand orcish warriors making a sound that my pickets described as the loudest thing they had heard in their service.” Snowe paused.

“The next morning’s Verakh surveillance showed the formation repositioning. Not toward the corridor. North.”

“Toward us.”

“Toward the ground of their choosing. Which is a different thing.”

Aldrath absorbed this. Then he asked the question that the briefing had been building toward. “What can they do that we have not yet seen?”

Snowe was quiet for a moment that Aldrath later described as the most informative silence of the campaign. “I do not know,” Snowe said.

“And that is the most honest answer I can give you. I know what they have done. I do not know what they have not done yet. And this commander has consistently demonstrated that the capability he reveals in each engagement is not the full extent of what he has available.”

* * * * *

They moved at dawn the following morning, the combined weight of twenty-five thousand soldiers on a broad front that Snowe had designed with the lessons of seven weeks written into every deployment decision.

Six thousand on the road in the center, four thousand infantry on each ridgeline, the cavalry in the spaces between where they could respond to the developments that the engagement’s pattern would produce.

The formation was thorough, built on every lesson the campaign had provided. What it was not built on was what the Horde had decided to become in the four days since Westyn left.

Snowe rode at the force’s center and watched the depression approach across the provincial farmland, the two low ridgelines defining the sides of the engagement space that the orcish position had selected.

He had fought this ground in his mind for three days since the Verakh reports confirmed the Horde’s position. He knew the depression’s properties, the road’s compression of the center, the ridgelines’ gentle enough slope that they did not block movement, the sight lines from the position south across the approach ground.

He also knew, with the professional certainty of a general who had been paying close attention, that the orcish commander had chosen this ground for reasons that would be apparent when the engagement began rather than before it. The reason would be something that the ground enabled and that he had not fully anticipated. This was the pattern.

The advance guard’s report reached him at the third hour of the march: orcish formation leaving the depression position. Moving north. Toward the advance guard. Moving at the double-pace.

“They are attacking,” Aldrath said, beside him.

“They are meeting us,” Snowe said. “On the ground between the depression and our current position. Ground that neither side has prepared.”

“Why would they leave their prepared position?”

“Because a prepared position is where a defending army waits. They are not defending.”

Snowe sent the signal to increase pace before the words were finished, because the three minutes between the advance guard’s contact and the main body’s arrival at the engagement point was three minutes that the Horde’s commander was counting on having and that Snowe intended to deny if the main body could close the gap before the orcish force set the terms of contact.

The main body increased pace. The advance guard’s follow-up report arrived simultaneously: the orcish formation was not screening and not probing. It was the full 1st Warband, one thousand warriors in the assault formation, moving at the assault pace directly at the advance guard’s position.

“They are attacking six hundred of our advance guard with their premier formation,” the cavalry commander said.

“They are not attacking the advance guard,” Snowe said. “They are using the advance guard to set the contact point. The road column behind the advance guard is the target and they are choosing the contact point before we can choose it.”

He was correct, and knowing he was correct and being able to act on that knowledge in the forty seconds available were two different things.

The 1st Warband hit the advance guard.

What followed in the next four minutes rewrote the parameters of every Threian officer who saw it. The advance guard broke. Not over minutes. In the way that a structure failed when the force applied to it exceeded its design limits instantly rather than incrementally, the advance guard’s coherence disappeared at the moment of contact with a formation moving at the assault pace with the full physical output of a thousand orcish warriors who were no longer controlling their output for strategic reasons.

The sound of the contact was audible to the main body two hundred paces back. Not the clash of engagement. The impact of it.

The main body closed the gap at the increased pace and met the 1st Warband already moving through the space the advance guard had occupied, already at the contact it had chosen at the moment it had chosen, already operating in the conditions that Khao’khen had designed it to operate in.

Aldrath heard the engagement erupt ahead of him and gave the commands that his rank required him to give, and the commands were correct in every professional detail, and they were commands being given in response to an engagement that was already fully in the Horde’s control.