Rise of the Horde - Chapter 733 - 732

Khao’khen addressed the Horde at dawn on the day after Westyn’s departure.

Thousands of warriors in formation on the eastern plain, the chieftains at the front rank, the Snarling Wolf at the center, the morning’s light falling across the formation with the clarity that open terrain provided. The warriors stood in the arrangement that full formation required, warband by warband, the 1st Warband’s Rakshas at the center with their long spears vertical and their great round shields at rest, the Yurakk warbands flanking them with rectangular shields and stabbing swords, the Rumbling Clan’s Rhakaddons behind the formation with Dhug’mhar’s mount at the center of the beast line.

Khao’khen stood before the formation and spoke.

“The pinkskin nobles have refused our terms. They sit in their capital and write words on paper and send those words to us and expect us to accept them because the words came from a council chamber and not from a battlefield. They want us to leave their land. They refuse to leave ours. They want the ice queen to stay in the Tekarr Mountains, one day from Yohan, one day from your families, one day from the city you built with your hands and defended with your blood. They believe their armies can still stop us because they have never seen us. They have read dispatches. They have received reports. They have counted numbers. But they have never stood on a field where the Rakshas held and watched their soldiers die on the spears. They have never heard the chant.”

He paused.

“We will give them the opportunity.”

The formation was still. The stillness was the stillness of thousands of warriors listening to words that were reshaping the campaign’s direction and whose attention was absolute because the words’ speaker was the one who had led them from Yohan to this plain and who had not been wrong yet.

“The Horde marches on the Threian capital. Not to burn it. Not to sack it. To conquer it if we have to, to stand in front of the nobles who refused our terms see, with their own eyes and hear, with their own ears, what their dispatches have been describing. To let them feel the ground shake under the Rhakaddons and hear the Roarers and watch the Snarling Wolf approach their walls until the wolf is close enough that the nobles can read its expression from their windows.”

He raised his voice.

“The pinkskin nobles are very disagreeable with our terms. They sit in their stone halls and they say no, from a distance where saying no costs them nothing. We will bring our terms within an earshot of them. We will stand where they can hear us. And when they hear us, when they see the Horde that their armies could not stop and their mages could not break and their arrows could not pierce, when they see it with their own eyes, perhaps then they will listen. Perhaps then they will agree. Perhaps then they will understand that the Snarling Wolf does not stop because a council voted and that the wolf will stand in front of whatever it needs to stand in front of until the thing it came for is given.”

He drew his sword and raised it.

“Grak’ul mok, thrak vol duum!”

Blood of the strong, earth of the fallen, no surrender.

“GRAK’UL MOK! THRAK VOL DUUM!”

Thousands of voices. The sound rolled across the eastern plain and carried north with the wind that would carry the Horde’s column on the march that the sound announced. The sound was the sound of an army that had been told its next destination and whose response was not hesitation or doubt but the oath that said they would march wherever the chief pointed them and they would stand wherever the chief told them to stand and they would not leave until the thing they came for was given.

“Vor’kash drak, lok’nar grombash!” Reverberated through the land, spoken by the warriors who recognized that the march on the capital was the march that committed everything, the march from which retreat was not a tactical option but a strategic catastrophe. We fight as one, we die as legends. The roar was done simultaneously by all warriors, fists struck against chestplates on the word drak, the collective act of saying it together the point itself: one voice, one intention, one fate.

“Mok’sharag, vol duum krul!” Dhug’mhar added from the Rumbling Clan’s position, the words carrying across the formation with the volume that the Rumbling Clan’s chieftain applied to everything. “Ancestors watch, now we take what is ours! And what is ours is the pinkskin nobles’ attention! And we will take it by standing on their doorstep! VRAAK DUUM!”

“VRAAK DUUM!” The formation answered.

The Snarling Wolf caught the morning wind. The banner stretched north, toward the capital, toward the march that would carry the wolf across four hundred miles of Threian territory and through whatever the combined force placed between the wolf and its destination. The wolf’s snarl was unchanged. The wolf’s direction was new. North. Toward the nobles. Toward the earshot.

The march began at the ninth hour.

The column formed on the eastern plain in the march order that four months of movement had refined, the 1st Warband at the head, the Rumbling Clan behind, the Yurakk warbands in sequence, the supply train at the center, the warg cavalry screening the flanks, the 1st Kani’karr Corps and the ogre guard force at the rear with the siege equipment. The formation covered a mile of road when fully extended, the column’s length the visual measure of the army’s size and the army’s organization.

The first day’s march covered eighteen miles. The second day covered twenty. The column moved with the sustained pace that the campaign’s marching discipline allowed, each day consuming the distance between Millbridge and the capital in the measured increments that a marching army produced, each mile a mile closer to the nobles who had said no and who were about to discover what no sounded like when the army it was said to was standing close enough to hear the word and to answer it.

The Snarling Wolf at the column’s head caught the wind and stretched north. The wolf’s snarl was the snarl it had always been. The wolf’s direction was the direction the campaign had always been heading, even when the direction looked like it was toward peace. The direction was toward the thing the campaign existed to obtain, and the thing was not peace itself but the recognition that made peace possible. The nobles had the recognition in their power. The wolf was going to stand in front of them until they used it.