Rise of the Horde - Chapter 743 - 742

The Battle of Brennan’s Ford was the kingdom’s attempt to hold the line, and the line did not hold.

The king positioned his reduced force of twenty-two thousand soldiers at the ford where the Brennan River crossed the provincial road, the natural choke point that defensive doctrine identified as optimal for a force that needed terrain’s assistance to offset an enemy’s advantages.

The barbarians did not use the ford.

They brought their thundermakers to the ridgeline above the ford and fired into the defensive positions from elevation. The dwarven-forged balls struck the earthworks, each impact pulverizing the packed earth, the earthen walls disintegrating under sustained bombardment that the barbarians’ unlimited ammunition supply allowed them to maintain for hours without the reload-rate anxiety that the Threian crews experienced with every ball they fired from a diminishing stockpile.

A thundermaker crew on the western ridgeline fired three rounds in sixty seconds, each ball striking the same section of earthwork until the section collapsed in a spray of dirt and timber fragments that buried two soldiers behind it. Threian soldiers who had been sheltering behind the collapsed section found themselves exposed to the boomstick fire that twenty thousand barbarian infantry delivered from the slopes.

The balls descended into the exposed positions at the ranges where the dwarven weapons’ accuracy was reliable, tearing through the soldiers’ aging armor, armor that had been manufactured by the same dwarven forges years ago and that the kingdom could no longer replace because the forges had stopped selling.

A Threian thundermaker crew returned fire from the defensive line’s left flank. Their ball struck a barbarian crew’s position and scattered it. The Threian crew chief looked at his remaining ammunition: forty-three balls. Forty-three balls for a weapon that fired one ball per shot and required three minutes to reload. Forty-three shots remaining for the rest of the campaign, however long the campaign lasted.

The barbarian crew that had been scattered reformed within four minutes and resumed firing. Their ammunition was the fresh stock that the dwarven supply wagon had delivered that morning.

The arithmetic of the Brennan’s Ford engagement was the arithmetic that every engagement of the northeastern campaign produced: the kingdom expended irreplaceable ammunition and lost irreplaceable soldiers while the barbarians expended replaceable ammunition and lost replaceable warriors. The specific numbers varied with each engagement’s intensity and duration, but the pattern was consistent. The kingdom’s resources declined. The barbarians’ resources were maintained.

Fairfax documented the expenditure after each engagement with the meticulous precision that his analytical approach required. The documentation was not for the campaign’s operational planning, which Fairfax influenced but did not control. The documentation was for the historical record that Fairfax believed the kingdom would need after the campaign concluded, the record that would show, in the precise language of numbers, how the kingdom’s commercial alliance with the elves had cost the kingdom its weapons supplier and how the supplier’s absence had cost the kingdom the war.

* * * * *

The shamans struck at the third hour.

Three shamans on the eastern ridgeline began the chanting that the Threian battlemages had learned to dread. The chanting’s frequency resonated with the river itself, the water’s surface rippling in patterns that natural current did not produce, the ripples growing into waves that pushed upstream.

The river rose. Three feet in four minutes. The knee-deep crossing became a chest-deep barrier. The Threian defenders at the ford’s edge found their positions inundated by water that was supposed to be behind them, the water rising around their legs and then their waists, armor dragging them downward, boomstick powder soaking into uselessness.

“Counter the river magic!” The battlemage commander’s order sent six practitioners to the riverbank. They began the incantations that were supposed to reverse the shamanic manipulation.

The shamans absorbed the counter-magic and redirected it into the river. The battlemages’ power fed the flood. The water climbed another foot. Then two. A battlemage screamed as the magical backlash struck her concentration, the feedback dropping her convulsing into the rising water. The soldier beside her grabbed her collar and dragged her backward, his boots sliding on the riverbed that the shamanic vibration had loosened into silt.

A second battlemage attempted a different approach, targeting the shamans directly with a frost bolt that arced across the river. The frost bolt curved mid-flight, its trajectory bent by the shamanic field, and struck the Threian thundermaker battery’s ammunition wagon. The wagon’s powder stores detonated. The explosion killed eleven soldiers and destroyed three of the remaining thundermakers.

The ammunition that detonated was irreplaceable.

The barbarian infantry crossed the river at the points the shamans had prepared, emerging in their dwarven armor, boomsticks held above their heads. They formed assault lines on the southern bank and advanced into the Threian positions that the flood had disrupted and the explosion had devastated.

A Threian thundermaker crew chief checked his remaining ammunition. Twenty-seven balls. Twenty-seven shots remaining for the rest of the campaign. The barbarian crew across the river had been firing for four hours without reduction because their supply arrived fresh each morning on the dwarven wagons. The crew chief fired his twenty-sixth ball and watched the barbarian crew scatter and reform with fresh ammunition from the stack the supply team maintained.

The battlemage whose frost spell had been redirected into the ammunition wagon was carried from the field on a stretcher, her face pale with magical exhaustion. She had been one of the kingdom’s better practitioners. The magical advantage was eroding the same way the weapons advantage was eroding, not because the mages were less skilled but because the shamans’ redirection technique converted the kingdom’s magical skill into the barbarians’ magical ammunition.

The king ordered withdrawal at the fifth hour. Eighteen hundred dead. Three thundermakers destroyed. Eleven percent of the remaining ammunition stockpile gone, partly fired and partly detonated.

“Every engagement costs us ammunition we cannot replace,” Fairfax said. “The dwarves have cut us off. The barbarians’ dwarven supply continues. We are fighting with the weapons of yesterday against an enemy supplied with the weapons of tomorrow, and yesterday’s weapons are running out.”

The king’s expression carried the weight of a monarch discovering that the commercial alliance with the elves, which had seemed diplomatically advantageous, had cost the kingdom its weapons supplier, and the cost was being paid in soldiers’ lives and irreplaceable ammunition.

“How far to the Snowe dominion?”

“Fourteen days.”

The distance closed. The ammunition counted down. And the kingdom’s military superiority, which had been built on dwarven weapons that the kingdom could no longer buy, eroded with every engagement that consumed the finite stockpile that was all that remained of three generations of dwarven trade.

The ford’s loss was the loss of the last natural defensive position between the barbarian advance and the Snowe dominion. The terrain between the ford and the dominion’s northern border was open countryside, agricultural land that provided no natural choke points and no terrain advantages that a defending force could exploit against an enemy with thundermakers. The king’s army would have to fight in the open or withdraw behind the Snowe dominion’s prepared defenses, and fighting in the open with finite ammunition against an enemy with infinite ammunition was the specific engagement that the ammunition arithmetic said the kingdom could not afford.