Rise of the Horde - Chapter 728 - 727

Varen proposed the night assault because the daylight engagements had produced results that the daylight could not sustain.

The combined force’s effective strength had been reduced to thirty-four thousand from the original forty-seven, the cumulative losses of the new phase’s engagements eroding the numerical advantage that the Second Reserve Corps’ arrival had been meant to provide. The arrow supply had been destroyed twice. The mage corps’ capability remained at the degraded level that the Golden Wolf’s shimmer imposed. The siege equipment remained operational and untouchable behind the ogre guard force.

Varen’s logic was the logic of a commander who had not yet found a formation or timing or terrain that neutralized the Horde’s advantages and who believed that darkness might provide what daylight had not.

The assault began at the second hour past midnight. Twenty thousand soldiers advancing in columns along three approach routes, moving under the strict light discipline that night assault doctrine required, their approach guided by the signal fires that the forward scouts had placed at the navigation points.

The Horde had been waiting since the first hour.

The Verakh network had detected the assault preparations before the combined force’s soldiers had finished eating their evening meal. The preparation signs were specific: the cooking fires extinguished earlier than the normal schedule, the camp’s noise level dropping to the particular quality that twenty thousand men trying to be quiet produced, the cavalry’s horses being moved to the rear positions that night assault doctrine prescribed to prevent hoofbeat noise from alerting the target.

Khao’khen had prepared the eastern plain for night engagement two days before Varen proposed it at the council that the Verakhs had been monitoring.

The fire sphere caches were buried along the three approach routes at the intervals that maximum coverage required. The Roarer positions were established on the ridgelines that flanked the approaches. The spear wall was positioned at the convergence point where the three routes merged into the single avenue of approach that the plain’s terrain funneled the columns toward.

The first column hit the fire sphere line at the three-mile mark.

Forty spheres erupting simultaneously in the darkness, the Bufas extract igniting on contact with the air, the incendiary compound spreading across the column’s front in a wall of chemical fire that turned the darkness into a specific kind of brightness, the brightness that fire produced when it was designed to illuminate rather than destroy, the fire spheres’ primary effect not the casualties they produced but the light they provided for the Roarer crews on the ridgelines who could now see their targets clearly.

The Roarers opened.

The balls hit the illuminated soldiers at the ranges that the ridgeline positions established, each ball a lead sphere traveling at the velocity that the Roarer’s powder charge produced, the projectiles striking armor and flesh and shield with the impacts that the weapon’s ballistic characteristics dictated. A soldier in the first column’s third rank took a ball through his shoulder plate, the lead punching through the iron and flattening against the bone beneath, the shoulder’s joint shattered by the impact’s transferred energy. He dropped his spear. The spear’s fall was invisible in the darkness. The soldier’s scream was not.

Another ball found a gap between two shields where the formation’s integrity had loosened during the fire sphere’s disruption. The ball passed through the gap and struck the soldier behind the gap in the chest, the impact folding the soldier’s body around the ball’s entry point, the force sufficient to send the soldier backward into the man behind him, both men falling in the compressed space that the column’s formation allowed.

* * * * *

The sound of fourteen hundred Roarers firing simultaneously in the dark was the sound of the world ending in a specific, localized area.

The balls struck the illuminated columns at the angles that the ridgeline positions provided, the enfilade fire tearing through formations whose night-adapted eyes had been blinded by the fire spheres’ sudden light and whose formation discipline was degraded by the darkness that the light had interrupted.

Soldiers fell. The soldiers behind them pushed forward because the rear of the column did not know what the front had encountered and the column’s momentum was the column’s design, forward pressure sustained regardless of what the forward pressure met.

The forward pressure met the spear wall.

The Rakshas at the convergence point received the first column’s forward elements in the darkness that existed beyond the fire spheres’ illumination range. The soldiers running from the fire ran into the spears. The soldiers running from the Roarer fire ran into the spears. The soldiers pushed forward by the column’s rear elements ran into the spears.

“DRAK’UL VOSH!” The defiance cry erupted from the spear wall in the darkness, the voices invisible, the source of the killing invisible, the spears invisible until they found flesh and the flesh discovered the spears’ existence through the specific education that iron points provided.

A soldier stumbled into the spear wall’s front rank and a point found his stomach before his hands found the shield that the point was extending past. He folded around the spear with a sound that was not a scream but a gasp, the air driven from his lungs by the point’s entry and his body’s involuntary attempt to curl around the wound. The Rakshas warrior pulled the spear free and the soldier fell and the warrior reset the spear at the angle that the next contact would arrive at.

“Duum,” the warrior said. No retreat. The word was spoken to himself, in the darkness, for the purpose of confirming to himself that the thing he was doing was the thing he had committed to doing and that the commitment had not changed because the thing was happening in darkness rather than light.

The second column hit the fire sphere line ninety seconds after the first. The third column hit it two minutes later. The convergence of three columns at the same point produced the compression that the terrain’s funnel created, thirty thousand soldiers pushed into the space that the plain’s geography allowed, each column adding its mass to the compression that the fire sphere line and the Roarer positions and the spear wall were converting into casualties.

The night assault lasted two hours. The combined force’s withdrawal began at the fourth hour, the three columns pulling back along the routes they had advanced on, the retreat accompanied by the sound of the Horde’s warriors singing in the darkness, the same singing that the Meren valley night engagement had produced and that Aldrath had described in his memoir as unreasonable enthusiasm for the circumstances.

The night’s casualties were twenty-one hundred Threian dead. The Horde’s losses were eighty-nine.

Varen’s night assault had confirmed what every previous engagement of the new phase had confirmed: the Horde fought at night as effectively as it fought in daylight, and the darkness that was supposed to be the equalizer was the Horde’s native element.

“Morg,” Khao’khen said, at the fifth hour, as the dawn began to lighten the eastern horizon and the battlefield’s toll became visible. “Grombash krul. Mok grombash krul.”

The strong have earned this. The ancestors witnessed it all.

The wolf waited for the dawn. The wolf had been waiting in the dark all night, its snarl invisible but present, its direction unchanged, its patience unchanged.

The dawn came. The wolf was there. The wolf was always there.